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CAUSES OF CIVIL WARS AND THEIR TERMINATION
Introduction
It was noted in the preceding chapters that civil wars or internal wars (intra-state wars) have become the most predominant form of warfare globally. Africa has had a bigger share of these wars than any other continent. These wars have not only been longer in duration, but have also been recurrent. It has become important therefore to have a much broader understanding of their causes and how they can be effectively terminated. These are discussed in detail below.
Causes of civil wars
Brown et. al. (1996) argue that one cannot practically delink the causes of territorial (inter-state) wars from those of intra-state (internal/civil) wars, as, even civil wars have the potential of degenerating into inter-state wars. Brown et. al. further classify the causes of internal conflict into two main categories: (i) underlying (or core/root) causes and (ii) Proximate causes. Moller (2003: 10) examined these two categories of causes of civil war to reach the conclusion that conflicts bear both structural (core/root) causes as well as proximate (trigger) causes. The former refers to underlying problems while the latter refers to exogenous factors that transform the core issues into active conflict. According to Moller, conflicts do not reach a full- fledged level without the combination of core and proximate causes. In other words, a single event cannot lead to an open conflict unless there are underlying structural reasons. In the same measure, structural reasons alone cannot lead to an open conflict in the absence of a triggering factor.
This broad distinction helps to accommodate the reality that the effect of instability in one country or society can spread contagiously across the border and catalyse events in the neighbourhood into an active conflict. In this context, the effect that spreads across the border becomes a proximate cause of the conflict in the neighbouring country (Homer-Dixon, 1991: 76-116).
Core or root causes of a war are those that have a direct bearing in the triggering of the conflict such ethnicity, natural resource factors and regime-type. They may manifest themselves through poverty, political repression and (ethnic) marginalisation, prolonged failure of state functions and unequal distribution of resource benefits. A combination of these factors, according to the UN Secretary General’s Millennium Report, provides the seedbed of internal conflict (United Nations Millennium Report, 2000: 44-45). The report also underscores that the majority of wars today are wars among the poor, especially where the condition of poverty is coupled with sharp ethnic or religious cleavages leading to insufficient respect for the rights of subordinate (minority) groups. The situation is further worsened by insufficient inclusiveness of government institutions and where the allocation of society’s resources favours a dominant faction over others.
The 2001 report of the UN Secretary General on the Prevention of armed conflict provided further clarification on the “root and proximate” causes of conflict and why it is important to mitigate these two in prevention of conflicts. The report states that,
“…The proximate cause of conflict may be an outbreak of public disorder or a protest over a particular incident, but the root cause may be, for example, socio-economic inequities and inequalities, systematic ethnic discrimination, denial of human rights, disputes over political participation or long-standing grievances over land and other resource allocation.” (UN Security Council Report, A /55/985–S /2001/574).
Most internal conflicts contain at least more than one of the above causative factors mentioned in the UN Security Council Report, confirming the fact that the outbreak of a conflict is often due to a combination of core and proximate causes. For instance poverty on its own is unlikely to generate grievances unless it is compounded with the drivers of inequality such as entitlements and income building that consolidate and expand elite privileges over the rest of the population (Alley, 2004: 17). Berdal (1996:5) and Atlas and Licklider (1999: 51) warn that failure to tackle the drivers of inequality especially in post-conflict societies contribute to the resurfacing of conflict as former allies fall out, especially in cases where there are no parallel efforts towards political and economic reconstruction of a comprehensive nature. Such conflicts become cyclic.
The basic understanding is therefore that proximate causes emerge mainly from the impact of root causes (for instance changes in strategic environment, refugee movements and ideology). Similarly, proximate causes of civil wars, like in all conflicts, are catalysts that fasten upon breakdowns of root causes (Brown, 1996: 12- 33). These are factors that trigger rapid degeneration of root causes into conflict.
Anderson builds on Brown’s argument by observing that wars today are rarely started by poor and marginalised people united in battle as an expression of their deep-seated strive for a just society, but by proximate factors such as widening of disparities in income and wealth, and weakening of state capacity to provide public goods (Anderson, 1999: 9). These situations polarise further the people affected, who in many cases are young, unskilled and available as potential combatants. Proximate factors can also be referred to as peripheral causes because they are as a result of the effect of core causes. In the context of civil wars, they include the nature of the strategic environment in which the rebels find themselves; ideology; population growth and the ability for groups to govern themselves. A detailed analysis of these factors with regard to civil wars is presented below.
Core causes
The three core causes relevant to civil wars are ethnicity, economic deprivation (conditions resulting from poverty and exclusion) and regime weaknesses.
i) Ethnic and religious divisions
The ethnic and religious composition of a country has a strong influence on occurrence of civil war. Collier (2000a: 7) argues that if there is one dominant ethnic group that constitutes between 45% and 90% of the population, then there is an elevated risk of conflict. Such a trend gives the majority ethnic group enough power to control as well as discriminate the minority at will. Collier adds that such is the situation prevailing in Rwanda where the Tutsi, a strong minority ethnic group, are between 10% and 15% of the country’s population. The contrary is however true in the case of Sri Lanka where the Tamils are a minority of less than 12%, making them a weak minority. A similar situation applies to religious diversity. Collier concludes in his assessment that whereas ethnic dominance is a problem, ethnic and religious diversity (where there is no particular dominant ethnic or religious group) make a society less vulnerable to conflict. This is because ethnic cleavages tend to be less pronounced in multi-ethnic/multi-religious societies as opposed to societies with just two ethnic/religious factions. As of 1995, the country with the highest risk of civil conflict, according to Collier, was Zaire, with a three-in-four chance of conflict within the ensuing five years.
Kaufmann (1996: 138) contends that identity-based groups are cohesive, determined and unified, and that the key difference between ethnic civil wars and those based upon political ideology is the flexibility of individual loyalties, which are quite fluid in ideological conflicts, but almost completely rigid in ethnic wars. Similarly, Saideman (2001: 23) maintains that ethnic identity, by its nature, creates feelings of loyalty, interest and fears of extinction that distinguish ethnic identities and conflicts from those based on other identities. He adds that identities are neither fixed nor fundamental, varying instead over time by circumstance, and even within a given individual. The authors conclude that class, religion, culture, language, geography or other sources of identity, typically divide even homogeneous ethnic groups, while multiplicity of identities contributes to the patchwork effect.
Korostelina (2007, 145-180) in a discussion on social identity and conflict, posits that once a society becomes divided into antagonistic groups, social identities become a cause of confrontation among groups competing not just for material advantage, but also for the defense of their security, beliefs, values and worldviews that serve as the basis of intra-group identity, leading to power relations between contesting groups and their readiness to fight in a bid to protect their identity. Similarly, Turton (1997:11) views ethnicity as an effective way of mobilising groups around common material interests, an aspect he considers as making ethnicity more salient than class because of its ability to mobilise, sometimes beyond a country’s borders. He advises that an analysis of causes of ethnic conflicts should therefore take account of both its “instrumental” or material aspects and its “primordial” or cultural aspects, since the effectiveness of ethnicity as a means of advancing group interests depends on it being seen as “primordial” by those who make claims in its name.
Both George Bush and Bill Clinton, the two former presidents of the United States, posit that the core driving forces behind violent conflicts are the ancient hatreds that many ethnic and religious groups have for each other. For instance Bush maintains that the war in Bosnia between Serbs, Croats and Muslims grew out of age-old animosities (Snyder, 1993: 79), while Clinton argues that the end of the Cold-War lifted the lid from a cauldron of long-simmering hatreds, thereby littering the entire global terrain with bloody conflicts (Devroy, 1994: 31). Economic imbalances resulting from exploitation of the poor is another core cause of conflict. The second set of causes is economic in nature.
ii) Economic causes
The presence of natural resources can have either a unifying or fragmenting effect on a country. These can therefore be either a boon or a curse for the possessor. Many wars in Africa have been linked to the exploitation of natural resources. Soysa (2000:114) argues that the resource endowment of a state can be linked directly to its propensity for causing armed conflict. His proposition is that criminal agendas are the primary driving force of civil conflict, where the availability of natural resources acts as a catalyst for violence. Those who support this view, according to Soysa, hold that rebellion is driven by the desire for loot; thus violence is motivated by rapacity. This position is also supported by Collier (2000b: 2) who argues that whereas the popular perception is that a rebellion is a protest motivated by genuine and extreme grievance, this is not the case – the goal of rebels is not a public fight against injustice and issues of social grievance such as inequality, a lack of democracy, ethnic and religious divisions. Rather, it is based on the fact that rebels would only survive through predatory tactics because the circumstances in which they operate cannot enable them to finance an army. This is why the slightest chance of survival for rebels would only be where they can sustain themselves financially through pillaging. This predatory character of rebels makes Grossman (1999: 268-269) define them not as protest movements, but rather as large-scale predators of productive economic activities, which distinguishes them from bandits or pirates.
Collier, in his research on civil wars in Africa in which he dwells more on microeconomic environmental factors, provides an empirical support for the proposition that natural resources motivate rapacious behaviour, thereby causing civil war. Collier supports this argument by the notion of what he calls an economic agenda, whose most important aspect is primary commodity exports. He contends that primary commodity exports are likely to be a good proxy for the availability of “lootable” resources because their production does not depend upon complex and delicate networks of information and transactions, as with manufacturing (Collier, 2000b: 93).
Soysa qualifies Collier’s point of view by stating that the thesis is based on the premise that the availability of natural resources (exported as primary commodities) spawns violent conflict because it provides incentives for rebel groups to form on the basis of capturing loot, which also sustains the activities of these groups. (Soysa, 2000: 115). Reno (1999: 15-20) adds that wars in Angola,Liberia, the DRC and Sierra Leone arise from the struggle for control of oil, diamond mines, timber and other resources.
At a national level, it has been argued that a country whose substantial share of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) comes from the extractive industry stands the highest risk of a civil war. Collier and Hoeffler (2000: 14-15) argue that a country is at the highest risk of conflict when its level of primary commodity dependence is 26% of the GDP. They add that by contrast, if a country had no primary commodity exports (but was otherwise the same in other aspects), its risk would fall to only one half percentage. They conclude that without primary commodity exports, ordinary countries are relatively safe from internal conflict, while when such exports are substantial the society is highly dangerous.
A number of other authors such as Le Billon (2001a), Ross (2004) and Ballentine and Nitzschke (2005) among others, in an attempt to draw close linkages between exploitation and trade in natural resources and civil wars, describe four modalities through which natural resources are linked to conflict, namely rent (profit) seeking; mal-distribution of natural resources; conflict financing; and competition over resources and markets. Below is a discussion of each of these.
– Rent (profit) seeking: This arises because natural resource wealth results into the availability of profits, commonly referred to in economic terms as rents (Khemani and Shapiro, 1993: 29). These rents can be easily monopolized by national elites, leading to three distinct types of conflict risks, according to Ballentine and Nitzschke (2005: 27). The first risk is that a high concentration of resource wealth could easily induce rebels to use violence to gain control over the state in order to capture the rents. Laitin and Fearon (2003: 75-91) provide examples of Sierra Leone, the Republic of Congo and Angola as cases where the availability of natural resource rents in the form of income from diamonds and oil worsened the risk of conflict by increasing the “prize” value of capturing the state. Similarly, the struggle to control oil revenue in Chad led to the assassination of President Tombalbaye in 1975, the rise of Hisene Habre in the 1980s and the coup d’état against him by President Deby in 1990 (Verschave, 2000).
Secondly, natural resource income is commonly associated with perceptions of corruption, hence providing the would-be rebels and plotters of coup d’états with the legitimacy required for undertaking actions against the state. According to Le Billon (2003: 413-426), even if the elites do not monopolise rents, their usage of natural resource wealth may be readily perceived as corrupt, since natural resource wealth is easily viewed as “unearned” and easy to embezzle.
Thirdly, states that have large sources of income from external sources often have weak governance structures compared to states that largely depend on income and corporate taxation for their revenues. According to Ross (2004) this is because states that rely on income and corporate revenues are compelled to respond to the demands of their citizens, while those that depend on “unearned income” such as natural resources may fail to develop stronger institutional structures hence becoming more exposed to citizen alienation that could easily lead to violent protests.
– Grievance as a result of (mal) distribution of natural resources: This can also result in civil wars. Examples from across Africa demonstrate that the distribution of natural resources has often been perceived as unjust amongst inhabitants of the areas closest to the resource deposits and in many cases deadly conflicts have erupted. For instance the conflict between the Ogoni ethnic minority group in Nigeria’s Niger Delta and the government of Nigeria led the Nigerian military government of General Sani Abacha to execute eight Ogoni leaders including Ken Saro-Wiwa, president of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), in 1995. The execution provoked immediate suspension of Nigeria from the Commonwealth of Nations (Boyle, 2009: 1).
Bellantine and Nitzschke (2005: 31) posit that grievance may also ensue as a result of perceived inequity in the distribution of extraction and transport-related jobs as well as from the production process, for instance if it leads to forced migrations from a producing region, or new inflow of immigrants into the region. They further add that grievance may also be provoked by the ways that security is provided for on the ground. The authors state that in Sierra Leone, both extractive companies and the government used unaccountable security forces that were later implicated in human rights abuses that included assaults on civilians. Economies that are dependent on natural resources are also more vulnerable to fluctuation in levels of trade, and unless the citizens understand the source of such fluctuations when they occur, high levels of dissatisfaction within groups that suffer can lead to violent opposition to government.
Even in situations where conflicts are initiated due to other reasons, access to natural resources by either side of combatants helps to fund and sustain the conflict. Le Billon (2001a), when discussing the role that oil and diamond played in fanning the Angolan conflict, underscores that a conflict may turn severe when both sides benefit from resources. The Angolan conflict persisted because both the government and the rebels had enough natural resources to finance their combatants.
A similar case is that of Chad in which, in October 2005, President Idriss Deby initiated a process to draft a new law aimed at redistributing oil revenues in which he sought to change an agreement on revenue distribution from the Chad-Cameroon pipeline so that Chad could extract greater profit for itself and meet budgetary demands. The law was intended to abolish a provision on the amount of money reserved for future generations. Observers criticised Deby’s policies, noting that his government, being under rebel siege at the time, was more likely to use the money to buy arms in order to defend his floundering regime (Alusala, 2007: 57-67). According to Inter Press (2005), Deby was interested in the fresh source of cash as a way of ensuring the survival of his regime. At the time Deby was confronted with frequent strikes coupled with the defection of his closest and most loyal associates as well as the rebellion that was ongoing in the east of the country.
– Competition over resources and markets: This has also been a source of conflict. Rotberg (2003) and Williams and Picarelli (2005) observe that in weak states, there is a strong relationship between the likelihood of occurrence of civil wars and competition for resources and markets. They argue that disputes over both legal and illegal resources and markets are sometimes an immediate cause of intra-state war, triggering historical hatreds, ethnic tensions and tribal rivalries (Williams and Picarelli, 2005: 124). The authors go on to elaborate that in the course of the conflict, transnational linkages, black market economic activities and organized crime help to fund belligerents and help them to sustain the conflict even in the face of international isolation and embargoes. Looting and plundering also often present the warring factions with opportunities they would not be able to undertake during peacetime because such activities would be illegal. The third set of causes relates to the type of regime and the use of proxies.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABSTRACT
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
1.Identifying the research theme
1.1 Termination of wars
1.2 Research problem and objectives of the study
1.2.1 Why the DRC case study
1.3 Research methodology
1.4 Structure of the study
CHAPTER TWO: CLASSICAL MILITARY THEORY OF WAR
2.Introduction
2.1 War and its primary objectives
2.1.1 The nature of war
2.1.2 The nature of civil wars
2.1.3 Formulation of political objectives and strategy
2.2 The concept of victory in war
2.2.1 Tactics
2.3 Conclusion
CHAPTER THREE: CAUSES OF CIVIL WARS AND THEIR TERMINATION
3. Introduction
3.1 Causes of civil wars
3.1.1 Core causes
i) Ethnic and religious divisions
ii) Economic causes
iii) Regime type
3.1.2 Proximate causes
i) The strategic environment
ii) Ideological issues
iii) The level of literacy
iv) Negative interaction and power imbalance
v) Contagion and diffusion
3.2 Approaches to ending of civil wars
3.2.1 The transformation of tactical victory into strategic peace
3.2.2 Dealing with the military and political interests of parties
3.2.3 External intervention
3.2.4 Negotiation and mediation
3.2.5 Co-opting or neutralising militants
3.2.6 Neutralising hatemongers
3.2.7 Small wars approach
3.3 Conclusion
CHAPTER FOUR: UNDERSTANDING THE CAUSES OF THE WAR IN THE DRC
4 Introduction
4.1 Defining the Great Lakes Region (GLR)
4.1.1 A Common colonial past
4.1.2 A Common ethnic identity
4.1.3 Internecine conflicts
4.1.4 Regime weakness and economic interests
4.1.5 Economic decay
4.2 Causes of the civil wars in the DRC
4.2.1 The core causes
i) The changes in the strategic global environment
ii) Global democratisation demands
iii) Ethnicity as a political tool
4.2.2 The proximate (external) causes of the DRC civil wars
i) The invasion of Zaire
4.3 Conclusion
CHAPTER FIVE: THE WARS IN THE DRC
5 Introduction
5.1 Rwanda’s political objectives and the first war (1996-1997)
5.1.1 Forceful return of refugees
5.1.2 Revenge against the ex-FAR and Interahamwe
5.1.3 Overthrow of the Mobutu regime
5.2 Tactics used by Rwanda and its alliance
5.2.1 Gaining support of regional neighbours
5.2.2 Diplomatic offensive
5.2.3 Creation of a proxy
5.3 Change of objectives and the new scenario
5.4 The second war (1998 – 2002)
5.4.1 New actors, new objectives
5.4.2 Fragmentation of the proxy and the division of the DRC
5.4.3 Natural resources as an economic motive
5.5 Conclusion
CHAPTER SIX: ENDING THE CIVIL WARS IN THE DRC
6.Introduction
6.1 The failure to transform tactical victory into strategic victory
6.2 The Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement (LCA) and the long march to peace (1999 – 2002)
6.2.1 Inter-twined interests of states and their proxies
6.2.2 Interveners and interests in the war
6.2.3 The Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement
6.2.4 Challenges to the ceasefire, and the stalemate
6.2.5 The end of the stalemate
6.2.6 The Pretoria and Luanda peace agreements
6.3 The Inter-Congolese National Dialogue (ICND)
6.3.1 Power-sharing
6.3.2 Military issues
6.4 Conclusion
CHAPTER SEVEN: CONCLUSION
7. Findings of the study
7.1 Classical theory and the termination of civil wars in Africa
7.2 Military issues and the ending of civil wars in the DRC
7.3 Issues arising from the study
7.3.1 The importance of proximate causes
7.3.2 The role of proxy armed groups in civil wars
i) The first war
ii) The second war
7.3.3 Multiplicity of armed groups with varying interests
7.4 Lessons for the termination of civil wars in Africa
7.5 Recommendation for further research
APPENDIXES
Appendix I: The Pretoria Agreement (Between Rwanda and the DRC), July 30 2002
Appendix II: Luanda Agreement (Between Uganda and the DRC), 6 September 2002
Appendix III: Chronology of the major discussions in the course of the ICND
Appendix IV: Map of the DRC showing the three zones of occupation during the second war
BIBLIOGRAPHY
