Central African Conflicts

[smartarse]

Long, long ago in the pre-industrial age when I was just a young and impressionable undergrad, a politics lecturer once offered a prize to the entire class; he would add 5 points to your final score for the subject if you could explain the conflict in the Congo - who was involved, who was on which side, how it started and what they were fighting about now.

It shouldn't be that hard. I mean I would hope that all of you could answer that questions quite well in regards to World War II, which involved many more nations and has complex origins. Equally you could probably answer well enough about various other wars. But the conflict in the Congo is a bit of a black hole. even though its the bloodiest conflict since WWII it is rarely reported in the mainstream media and poorly understood even by people who take a greater interest in politics that the average soul.

With that in mind I read with interst this article in the current edition of the New York Times Review of Books:
www.nybooks.com/articles/23054 Not only does it suscintly summarise the history and current dimensions of the conflict, but it offers some fairly novel interpretations of the facts.

Bascially its reviews like this that are the reason why I think book reviews are a great short cut for time poor debaters. In a perfect world you would read one of these books. But few of you would even consider doing that for various reasons, so in lieu of that reading this review is about the single best thing I can suggest for those of you interested in learning more about this issue.

And in case you think its esoteric, think about how often in debates you need examples about peacekeeping and military intervention, or how often you need good examples of where sanctions might work or where Western support for a dodgy regime has extended its term in office. The Congo has all that and more, and has the added benefit that very few of your opponants will have the guts to dispute a word you say about it!

Anyway, I highly recommend you read the link. And just for the record, no one ever claimed the 5 bonus marks. not in my year or any other.

[McGreevy]

Hey Tim, I had a read through that review, it was an excellently written piece. I am going to keep an eye on the NY Review for more important information.

As for the article itself, would it be fair to say that a strong, third party mediator would have been effective in bringing about some semblence of peace in the region? It mentioned it offhandedly but it got me wondering whether there is a specific country within Africa that could serve as a decent mediator, who has enough leverage with both sides and is neutral enough to take the job. Or would it need to be outsourced to the West or another dominant international country?

[smartarse]

Hey,

mediation is a really good question. no clear answer but some considerations...

there are two models for mediation, the neutral party as mediator or the interested party, and there is good theory behind both.

obviously the benefits of a neutral mediator is that they will be viewed as unbiased by the parties, who will be more likely to trust them and have some faith in the deal.

the risk is that because the mediator is distanced from the issue they may not have enough influence to knock heads together and get a deal. Norway's efforts to mediate in Sri Lanka might be a good example of this issue.

alternatively you can use an interested party to negotiate - what William Ury calls 'three sided conflicts', where you purposefully use a party who has a direct interest in the conflict as a mediator. its counter-intuitive but only someone who has a direct interest in resolving the conflict (and not simply an altruistic desire to resolve it) will invest the resources and effort in getting a deal.

The conflict in the middle east is often used as a case study, where you have interested (US), largely disinterested (Russia - who was an interested party as the USSR, but is now much less involved in the politics of the region) and semi interested (EU) parties all trying to work together as the so called "Quartet".

There are lots of arguments about who has been responsible for the breakthroughs (such as they have been - like the peace treaties between Israel and Egypt, or the Oslo Accords) and why haven't there been more breakthroughs (eg Camp David II - why did it fail?).

You'll notice that I haven't answered your question. Would mediatation have worked in the case of the Congo? Very probably if the right mix of interested and disinterested parties had gotten involved at the right time.

Cop out? You bet

[McGreevy]

Haha not so much a cop out as leaving an open ended answer (which is the only actual answer I can see in this case)

I wonder though, with the UN presence in the region, is the UN as weak and ineffective as everyone seems to make it out to be? I know it wields some power in terms of peacekeeping that is almost negligable relative to national armies, but it seems as if UN denouncement of an issue alone is quite effective at laying the ground work for, if not in and of itself, changing the situations in some countries.

This conflict will be one of the issues I look into further these holidays in my quest to develop knowledge about many different areas for next years debating season. For now I dont really have an in depth grip on it (hence all the questions!)

[smartarse]

I think asking "is the UN mission weak" is slightly the wrong question, but i'll start from that.

It is weak for two reasons. Firstly its a peaceKEEPING mission, not a peaceMAKING mission and that means that it has very restricted rules of engagement. Thats ok when you're genuinely in a post-conflict phase, but many parts of the Congo are still in the midst of what is effectively war - although now its mostly against militant groups not foreign armies.

So it may be that the UN forces there have the capability to exert more influence, but are unable to do that under the present rules. Of course there is no compelling reason why those rules couldn't change.

Secondly its weak because many of the countries that contributed troops do not exactly have professional militaries themselves - or at the very least did not send their best troops on the mission. So there have be many allegations of crimes permitted or committed by the peacekeeping forces such as allegations of sexual abuse in refugee camps - www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2009/04/mil-090401-unnews04.htm to claims of selling arms to rebels and smuggling resources out of the country - news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7365283.stm

Not only does this sort of behaviour mean that the troops are not focused on their mission, it reduces the trust and support of the local population which hurts those forces that are trying to do the right thing.

But interestingly, some of the big military gains in Congo of recent times has been because the government of the DRC and Rwanda have worked together to crush militant groups. The DRC's military is pretty average, and Rwanda is no superpower, even in the African context. So you don't necessarily need massive numbers of troops or high tech militaries, you just need disciplined and focused efforts, that have the appropriate political component as well (such as Rwanda ending support for the Nkunda rebels).

I'd encourage you to read some more about the Congo. I ordered the Prunier book from the review I posted at the start of this thread so you're welcome to borrow that if you like. But pretty quickly you'll realise that from a debating context if you want to run cases about the Congo you'll need to know much more about UN interventions in general, and have some examples of what has worked and what hasn't. There's a shit load of books and journal articles on that exact topic. I've got a few that i'd recommend, starting with this one - www.amazon.com/Peacekeeping-American-Policy-Uncivil-Stimson/dp/0312160755 which you're also welcome to, but as I say there are many, many books out there on the subject.

Its really worth investing the time in though because you'll do lots of debates about military intervention, either in the Congo or you'll be able to use it as an example. So if you prep a model on the Congo and some key arguments and examples you'll be able to use that matter in a lot of other debates.