Posted on 21-8-2002

Africa Giving Peace A Chance

Four sets of peace negotiations are going on or about to start in Africa,
raising cautious hopes that there could be breakthroughs in some of the
continent's longest and most intractable conflicts.

The climate of negotiations is markedly different than it was just four
years ago. Then the conflicts in Sudan, Burundi, Congo and Somalia — now
all at or heading for the negotiating table — were in full swing.
Additional wars were raging in Angola and Sierra Leone and between Ethiopia
and Eritrea, all of which have recently been settled. Talks are going on in
Machakos, Kenya, aiming to end Sudan's civil war, modern Africa's longest.
Negotiations in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, are trying to resolve Burundi's
civil strife. There also have been positive signs for the Congo conflict at
the negotiating table, and next month factional leaders in Somalia, a
country in outright anarchy, will talk to, instead of shoot at, their
rivals. "We seem to be in the midst of one of the ebbs of conflicts and one
of the flows of peacemaking," said John Prendergast, director of the Africa
program at the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based research
organization.

One hopeful sign is the leading role that African leaders are playing in
resolving the wars. The flurry of peace talks has coincided with the
formation last month of the African Union, which made clear that it plans
to police the transgressions of member countries. South Africa has led the
negotiations in Congo and Burundi, and Kenya has played a leading role in
the Sudan and Somalia talks.

African governments clearly see an economic motive for peace. The New
Partnership for Africa's Development, the economic blueprint endorsed by
the African Union, calls on governments to cease their wars and human
rights violations with the prospect of gaining a multibillion-dollar
infusion of assistance from the West.

Still, the complexities at play are evident in Burundi, still enduring a
civil war. Earlier this month, cease-fire negotiations quickly began and
ended. Three separate rebel groups are fighting the forces of President
Pierre Buyoya. Representatives of the main rebel movement, the Forces for
the Defense of Democracy, led by Pierre Nkurunzizasat, sat across from
government negotiators in the peace talks in Tanzania. "We were at war for
almost 10 years and created a great deal of hostility, so it is not easy to
reverse all that in only four days," said Salvator Ntacobamaze, a
representative of the rebels.

Burundi's current civil war began in 1993, when power shifted briefly from
the Tutsi ethnic minority to the Hutu majority. Tutsi paratroopers
assassinated the first Hutu president, setting off widespread killings of
Tutsi. With Nelson Mandela acting as the broker, a peace accord was finally
reached in 2000. It created a power-sharing government to be led first by
Mr. Buyoya, a Tutsi, and later by a Hutu. But rebels have continue to wage
war in the countryside, turning the capital, Bujumbura, into a bunker of
sorts. Last Thursday, after four days of talks, the South African deputy
president, Jacob Zuma, called a temporary halt to the negotiations to
"resolve a few outstanding technical issues," which he declined to state.

Even if the talks revive, Burundi's government must contend with other
rebel movements. Separate talks are scheduled in the coming weeks with one
of them, a faction of the Forces for the Defense of Democracy led by Jean
Bosco Ndayikengurukiye. Then there is the smaller National Liberation
Forces, which is set to enter into its own negotiations with the
government. That group has its own rival factions. Unless a cease-fire is
signed with all of the parties, "the war will continue, if not escalate,"
predicted Jan van Eck of the Center for Conflict Resolution in South
Africa, who has worked with Burundi's factions since 1995.

The conflicts in Congo and Sudan are just as complex. In Congo, the
government of President Joseph Kabila struck an agreement with Rwanda last
month that could prompt the disarming of the main rebel faction in eastern
Congo. Then, last week, Congo and Uganda agreed to resolve their
differences. But fighting continues to rage in Congo among combatants who
have stayed away from peace talks. In recent weeks, rebels representing the
Congolese Rally for Democracy - Liberation Movement have clashed in the
town of Bunia in northeastern Congo with Hema tribal fighters and Ugandan
soldiers. More than 100 civilians have been killed in that fighting.

The war in Sudan, which began in the early 1980's, involves two main
parties, the government and the Sudan People's Liberation Army. But a
tentative agreement last month has done little to quell hostilities on the
battlefield, and the International Crisis Group has called the talks "a
shaky chance for peace." The rebel group has been seeking to topple the
government since 1983, in a conflict that has killed two million people and
displaced millions more. The most recent round of fighting has taken place
in the Western Upper Nile region of southern Sudan, where the government
has carried out attacks aimed at moving the local people, and the rebels
who live among them, away from oil installations.

Next month, still another round of peace negotiations are to begin, to try
to end the decade of anarchy in Somalia. That may be the conflict with the
dimmest chances of a quick resolution. The talks, scheduled for Eldoret in
western Kenya, represent the latest of more than 15 attempts to bring peace
to Somalia since its dictator, Mohammed Siad Barre, was overthrown in
January 1991. "If you were handicapping them at the racetrack you'd give
Somalia 30 to 1 odds," said one Western diplomat who is involved in pushing
the parties together.