Egypt: leadership for peace in the Middle East
No great surprise that those in power eventually found a way to react violently to Egypt’s velvet revolution. It was great – invigorating, even – to sense via TV news reports the slightly bemused vibe being given off by the demonstrators in the first few days of the anti-Mubarak demonstrations in different towns across Egypt. It was as if they couldn’t quite believe their government was letting them get away with it. Watching the news from Egypt, I was also struck by the relaxed body language of the BBC’s Middle East reporters, who had all dashed there from wherever they happened to be, to cover this extraordinary story. They are so used to reporting on situations of tension, repression, inequity and violence that they seemed not to have the right language available to them, to describe what was happening around them. It was all too good to be true!
And indeed, the reaction did come: violence, repression, vested interests, the status quo reasserting itself. So how should the international community respond to this situation? There is a real opportunity to be seized here.
One of the reasons there are never any real breakthroughs in the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians and other neighbours is that the status quo suits so many of those who could make a breakthrough happen. That there are factions within Israel and in Gaza and the West Bank who find it impossible to accept a compromise is obvious. But one of the disabling factors for peace which doesn’t seem to be written and spoken about enough in the mainstream western media is how having a long-term and apparently intractable structural conflict in the neighbourhood serves the purpose of those who fear change, and who therefore block the possibility of peace.
All the undemocratic regimes of the region use the presence of the conflict to justify their own unwillingness to change and become more open. As long as the Israeli conflict remains unresolved, it serves as a welcome distraction from internal calls for change. And western governments have long been happy to go along with idea that they want peace between Israel and its neighbours, when in fact what they really want above all is stability, and especially during their own time in office. Surely that’s one of the reasons the USA has supported Mubarak’s regime to the tune of a billion dollars a year or more since Camp David. Predictable stability is easier to deal with than the uncertainties of democratic elections or a democratisation process, especially in a region which supplies so much of the world’s oil.
In the USA every president comes to power with a declaration he’ll do something to bring peace in the Middle East. But bringing peace in the Middle East is not something that can be achieved over a 4-year US election cycle. Indeed, the first steps towards peace which could be achieved within a mere four years are probably so minimal when viewed from Washington that they’d be virtually invisible, and would quite wrongly be seen as a failure by the media, Congress and the voters there. So the incentives for US presidents – and other democratically elected leaders – aren’t aligned with the needs of peacebuilding.
What’s needed from Washington, and in the international community more broadly now, is leadership. One of the main components of leadership is risk-taking. Obama has an election in less than two years, so choosing to support the unpredictable path of change in the Middle East, with all the accompanying risks, is a tough political call.
But the US can’t put the Egyptian genie back in the bottle even if it wants to. It can probably watch and wait to see if Mubarak is able to do so. But given there’s a pretty good chance he’ll smash the bottle in the process, the political risk for Obama may well be that he’s damned if he does, and damned if he doesn’t. What this means is that this is probably one of the few times in recent history that the US president really has a political choice vis-à-vis the Middle East, and can take a political gamble by supporting – or at least not blocking – an unpredictable process of political change.
Sustainable peace in the Middle East is not the same as stability. Nor is it possible unless something happens to shift the status quo. The popular uprising in Egypt is a potential shift in the status quo. What it will lead to is unclear and uncertain, but in that uncertain future, there may be an opportunity no-one has previously seen to build a successful peace process.
North African unrest: will it spread south as well as east?
In response to an earlier blog of mine, Sir Edward Clay commented on my decision to limit my series of Ten Things to Know about Africa, to Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). His comment was that at least one of the factors I ascribed to SSA was also relevant to the countries along the southern Mediterranean shore. He made a good point.
But looking at recent events in Tunisa, Egypt, Algeria and now Yemen: the unrest seems to spreading eastwards and westwards, and has jumped across the Red Sea, but so far at least is failing to spread southwards across the Sahara.
I wonder why not. Is it because the regimes in SSA are less repressive, or repressive in a different, less centralised way, with a less tightly-fitting lid to the pressure cooker? Or perhaps it’s that young people there are less proactive or courageous (or foolhardy, their mothers might say?) than their counterparts further north? Is it something to do with culture or religion? Is that the countries in the north are wealthier?
Or is it that there are perceived similarities and connections between and among people across the Arab belt, who are therefore quicker to see the need or opportunity to act as their “brothers and sisters” have done; whereas young people in SSA feel less of a connection, don’t see the rioters in Tunisia as their brothers and sisters, and therefore don’t relate their own situation to that of the people in the Maghreb and Egypt, and don’t engage in copy-cat demonstrations.
Perhaps the countries in SSA share a number of characteristics with those north of the Sahara from an objective outsider’s perspective. For example they are ex-colonies of one kind or another, they have made limited progress towards democracy, they have patronage-based political economies, and they have massive youth bulge. But there’s also something other than the desert itself which divides the northern countries from those further south. Whatever it is, perhaps it is protecting some Sub-saharan regimes from the kind of pressures the governments further north are experiencing right now.
Meddling to promote peace in Africa
The “International Community” is a fuzzy concept covering a multitude of sins and virtues. Put simply, it’s when states operate together to promote international public good outcomes which transcend the narrow national interest of each. The Responsibility to Protect principle, adopted by the UN general Assembly in 2005 adds the powerful idea that the international community must intervene to protect and promote the rights of citizens in countries where the state is unable or unwilling to do so. In other words, meddling. This is a big ask, and one which we still lack the tools and political will to put into practice.
You have to feel sorry for the International Community in its attempts to meddle in parts of Africa. At times every step forward seems to be followed by a step backward of equal length or longer. The unrest in Côte d’Ivoire after recent elections there is just one more glaring example of how difficult it is for outsiders to foster a judicious mixture of stability and development progress in places where both are undermined by conflict and which lack the institutions to manage these conflicts without violence. (And by “outsiders”, I don’t just mean non-Africans: surely Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga is as much an outsider in Côte d’Ivoire as French President Nicolas Sarkozy would be.) In Sudan, after the referendum in the south, which will certainly result in a vote for independence, commentators are predicting turbulent times ahead for what will presumably become the newest African state later this year. Southern Sudan’s unresolved internal conflicts, its over-reliance on oil, its deep poverty and still-nascent governance institutions – along with the potential for interstate war with Khartoum and/or conflicts between people living on either side of the new border – are seen by many as a recipe for disaster. Doomsayers are even calling it a “pre-failed state”.
Many other situations in Africa are resisting the attempts of meddling outsiders with good intentions. The International Criminal Court’s intervention in Kenya is being resisted by the political elite’s apparent decision to close ranks and protect those of its members that the ICC wants to indict for their alleged role in inciting violence after the 2007 elections. Zimbabwe resists outside attempts to help it emerge from political and humanitarian disaster with long-practised ease. Peace in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) still seems a distant prospect. The deadly combination there of lucrative mining opportunities, well-armed military and paramilitary groups changing allegiance according to opportunity and need, patronage-based governance linked to impunity, the meddling of neighbouring states, and the sheer geographic scale and remoteness, represent a range of forces far too powerful for the puny UN to defeat. The list of violence-prone countries goes on and on.
But this is not to say the international community should not keep trying. The problems in the Republic of Guinea are far from over, but carefully targeted international assistance has been critical in helping Guineans meet difficult challenges since the death of President Conté two years ago: military coups, election violence, a political rhetoric highly charged with ethnic rivalry and tension, and all against a backdrop of growing public dissatisfaction and poverty, in a region where young men have shown they are all-too-ready to answer the call to arms over the past two decades. Some of the international help for Guinea has so far been provided in a usefully ad hoc way: a combination of well-placed individuals, and of international organisations, intervening in a joined-up way, with minimal publicity. The good offices of the AU, ECOWAS, Burkina Faso and the USA among others combined in a coherent and coordinated way to help negotiate a practical way forward on several occasions. But we should be honest: so far this has been crisis management, which while difficult is far easier than the more complex challenge of building peaceful, developmental and citizen-responsive polities and states.
Côte d’Ivoire is clearly a country in crisis, and it will surprise no-one if Southern Sudan runs into crises once the honeymoon of independence is over: the history books tell us that state formation and violent conflict often go hand in hand. It’s really important as the international community in all its permutations tries to help countries like these emerge peaceful and prosperous from their current travails, that they look beyond crisis management.
When countries and international organisations get together to help places in difficulty, they need to step back from crisis management and play the longer game. The international approach to ending the civil war between southern Sudan and Khartoum was successful in getting both parties to agree to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement – CPA. This was no small achievement. But it’s well documented that the international focus on north-south peace meant that Darfur was ignored at a crucial time. Arguably, the very success of the process that led to the CPA also stimulated an increase in violence in Darfur. The CPA carried within it the seeds of a genuine comprehensive agreement applicable to the entire country. But the opportunity to leverage its content to build a sustainable peace throughout Sudan was lost. Crisis management is the default setting for the international community: it responds to urgent humanitarian needs as expressed by NGO lobbyists, and it fits the skillset of international statesmen-turned-peacemakers. But it is not enough, which is why so many peace settlements brokered by outsiders don’t last.
This means getting the purpose right. In seeking to help the people of Côte d’Ivoire, the international community has got to look beyond simplistic aims such as “remove Gbagbo from power and install Ouattara as the rightful winner of the election”. It has to work on the understanding that whatever the election numbers say, and whatever international definitions of “electoral legitimacy” might imply, for a very large number of Ivorians, with limited experience of democratic elections and no experience of living in a mature democracy, Outtara has no legitimacy at all as president. Indeed, anyone who sees Côte d’Ivoire’s future as democratic and peaceful might reasonably question whether a new president indelibly associated with the dictatorship of Houphouet-Boigny and a prime minister who led an armed rebel movement with an ethno-geographic constituency are best placed to lead the way forward. Thus while figuring out what to do next, it’s incumbent on internationals to consider what outcome they think is desirable and feasible fifteen or twenty years from now, and work back from that to figure out what they should do next. In the end, the people of Côte d’Ivoire will decide their future, as the cliché goes, and like everyone else they will do so by muddling through rather than following a clear and predictable pathway. But outsiders do have an influence: after all, the election itself was very much outsider-enabled. If people are proposing and threatening a military intervention to remove Gbagbo from power without a clear, realistic and resourced multi-year plan fostering the emergence of better governance, smacks a little of Iraq.
Once the purpose is more or less clear, the tools and architecture have to be adapted to it. So often, the international community’s starting point is “what can we do with these tools?” rather than “what should we do, and whayt tools do we need?” While pragmatic, the former approach is self-limiting. The UN Security Council’s interventions in the DRC have made a difference there. Fighting is much reduced (though not yet enough), protection has been improved (though not yet enough), elections held, etc. But faced with the issues which undermine peace and development in the DRC, it is not at all clear that the UN’s state-focused approach is always the best one. The state is, after all, a major part of the problem there, given the involvement of members of the government and government forces in armed violence and associated economic activities such as mining.
Indeed, to speak of the “Congolese state” at all verges on tautology at times. I doubt Max Weber would recognise his concept of the state in the way government behaves in the DRC. He would recognise the labels – parliament, ministry, presidency, elections, etc. – but would find it hard to reconcile how they behave with his normative concept of the state exercising the monopoly of violence in the public good. The last UN Group of Experts report on DRC illustrates the problem well. It gave chapter and verse on how and why the situation in eastern DRC was not improving, citing the role of armed groups, government officials, politicians, companies and neighbouring governments in preventing peace. It explicitly showed how the UN had failed to overcome these factors. But its recommendations to the Security Council can be summarised as “can do better”, rather than recommending a change of approach.
There are times when the UN should be able to disentangle itself from the tortured logic that it is intervening in a particular country on behalf of that country’s government (a “UN Member State”), and instead base its intervention on the Responsibility to Protect. In the DRC this would for example require it to treat the depradations of all armed actors as illegitimate, whether committed by government forces or non-government forces; and have a mandate allowing it to intervene on behalf of those whose lives are threatened and whose rights are undermined by any armed group, in whatever uniform. The so-called brassage programme for merging government and other armed forces in the DRC – which has provided the cover for ex-rebel warlords to behave as before, but in government uniform – needs to be completely rethought. But it needs to be rethought by the UN and the AU in their roles first and foremost as outside entities determined to improve the prospects for peace in the DRC; not by the UN and the AU first and foremost as partners to a failing government.
Getting the intenational architecture right in Sudan post-referendum will be critical. There is a danger that the international community will breathe a huge sigh of relief when southern Sudan becomes independent, and focus most of its effort on helping southerners create a viable new nation. Meanwhile it will pay far less attention to the rest of Sudan. The international architecture will no doubt include some kind of UN or AU entity to keep an eye on north-south border issues, but it will probably lose sight pretty quickly of the need to focus, for at least the next decade, on a whole-Sudan approach – i.e. on both north and south of what is now one country, Sudan.
This is a pity, as the resolution of many of the obstacles to peace within and between Khartoum and Juba will require an analytical and operational capacity to regard the two entities as part of a larger, sub-regional peacebuilding challenge. By focusing its efforts separately on Juba and Khartoum, the international community may well reinforce the natural tendency in both to convert separation into conflict; instead of building on and reinforcing the factors which could enable a peaceful co-existence and partnership between the two states and their peoples.
So, instead of feeling sorry for the international community, we should probably advise it to become more effective by taking a longer term approach instead of crisis management, by turning this into a clearly expressed long-term vision and goals relevant to each context, and by ensuring it makes its institutions and organisations more fit for purpose.
How African politicians learned about economic governance from France
This is a story I have heard in West and East Africa. In francophone countries it is linked to France, and in anglophone countries, to Britain. I recount it using the francophone version of the story (though the smart reader will have noticed I do so in English).
In the early years after indendence, a finance conference was held in Paris. Finance ministers from all the newly independent French speaking countries in Africa attended, hosted by the Finance Minister of France.
The conference took place over three working days, Thursday to Monday, with the weekend off. On the Friday afternoon, the French minister asked his counterpart from one of the new nations if he’d like to visit his chateau for the weekend, and his colleague accepted.
On Friday evening they were taken to the airport in a fleet of limousines; they flew in a helicopter to a beautiful chateau, in its own immaculate grounds, and surrounded by woodland and lakes. They spent the most incredible weekend feasting, drinking and dancing at night, and hunting in the forest during the day. Early on Sunday evening, sated, they returned to Paris in the helicopter. The African finance minister was visibly perturbed about something, and his host asked him what was the matter?
“Monsieur,” answered his guest, “I am troubled. I have spent the most incredible weekend of my life as your guest, and I hesitate to bother you with questions…”
“Go ahead my friend,” replied his host kindly. “If I know the answer to your question, I will gladly provide it.”
“Well,” his guest began, “I have seen your chateau, and can only imagine the cost of such a place – to say nothing of the costs of the magnificent party to which you invited me over the weekend. And I know that France is a wealthy country, much richer than mine. Nevertheless, I struggle to comprehend how you can afford such things, on the salary of a finance minister.”
The French thought for a moment. He looked out of the window of the helicopter at the landscape beneath, apparently searching for something. Afer a couple of minutes he smiled and gestured to his colleague to look out at the landscape below.
“I am not at all offended, my friend,” he said. “On the contrary, it gives me great pleasure to be able to give you some guidance in carrying out the important role of finance minister. Do you see that new road down there, and the newly built bridge which crosses the river?”
His counterpart looked down through the gathering dusk, and indicated that yes, he could see the road and the bridge in question.
“Yes, I see the road and the bridge, but what of it?”
“Well”, said his host, “everything that is built by the state here in France comes across my desk, so I simply take a small cut of 2% to help finance the lifestyle appropriate to my role as a minister. You see?”
“Ah!” said his new friend, happy to have got the answer to his question. “Yes, I see now. Thank you.”
They returned to Paris, and the rest of the conference went well.
Three years later, it was the turn of the African minister’s government to host the finance conference. Again, it was held Thursday to Monday, with a weekend break. On Friday, he approached his old friend the French finance minister with an invitation.
“My friend,” he began, “you were so kind to me three years ago, and I would like to repay your hospitality. Please be my guest for the weekend at my country estate.”
The Frenchman agreed, and at the end of the afternoon they were whisked off to the airport in a fleet of limousines, flown in a private jet to an airfield up-country, and from there in another fleet of limousines along a brand new four-lane tarmac road to a vast and luxurious compound complete with swimming pools and fountains. Again, they had a fabulous weekend, which surpassed the level of luxury and entertainment they had experienced in France three years earlier. It was a weekend of excess, and as they were flying back to the capital on Sunday, the Frenchman dozed for a while, before raising himself up in his seat a little to address his host.
“My very good friend. You have provided me with a weekend the like of which I could only have dreamed. You have more than repaid my hospitality of three years ago, and I thank you. But I do have one small question, if I may?”
“By all means, my friend. Fire away.”
“Well… Three years ago, you seemed very ignorant of how to makes ends meet as a finance minister, and I gave you a small piece of advice. Now, a mere three years later, I see that you have done very, very well for yourself. But I struggle to comprehend how you have managed to secure such riches, especially since your country’s budget is so much smaller than mine….?”
“Ah yes. I see what you mean. But it’s easy to explain. Look out of the window.”
The Frenchman did as he was bid.
“Now, do you see that six-lane autoroute down there, and the bridge, and the power station?” He gestured expansively with his right hand towards the ground, hundreds of metres below.
The Frenchman searched everywhere, but could see only fields, trees and the occasional small village of round grass houses.
“I am sorry my friend, but try as I might, I cannot see them,” he replied. “In fact, I am pretty sure they do not exist.”
“Exactly, mon frère,” said his host with a proud, wide grin. “One hundred percent!”
Phil Vernon 