I am responding to your two posts, about activism and the review of John Young’s book The Fate of Sudan.

Defining activism, you believe one of the main tasks of activists is to challenge [...]]]>

I am responding to your two posts, about activism and the review of John Young’s book The Fate of Sudan.

Defining activism, you believe one of the main tasks of activists is to challenge U.S. power, I think here is a major mistake, for many reasons:

(1) l think the better strategy for activists—that is, democracy activists—is to define their role in a positive way. For example, as democrats in the global south our principal role is to struggle with our people to achieve a national political system that fully secures internationally-recognized human rights—including civil and political rights, socio-economic and cultural rights—and then to decide according to concrete analysis of the specific situation who is our ally and who is our enemy.

(2) If the priority is as you suggest, to challenge U.S. power, many crucial questions arise, for example, is U.S. power the only power? What about our local regimes? And what about the power of international Islamic fundamentalism? Should any rational democrat side with Al-Qaida against U.S. power? And what kind of a globe we will have if for any hypothetical reason Al-Qaida    triumphs over U.S. power and its allies? And what about Chinese power: is this better for the global South than U.S. power?

Those who define their role in such a negative way end up supporting the dictators of the South, like Saddam, Gaddafi and Bashir, who are more backward and brutal than U.S. power.  And I think this is one of the fatal mistakes of the so called post-colonial theorists. In this respect I hope you think about the fact that Prof Mahmood Mamdani has been invited and highly welcomed by the regime in Khartoum, is in itself is sufficient signal of significance of his challenge to U.S. power in the Sudanese context!

(3) I can see clearly that you are very angry with Enough, to the extent that you have deviated from your recognized objectivity. An example is your critique of Hollywood actors. Is this a problem?  Isn’t it a commonly-accepted practice by all civic organizations, based on psycho-sociological findings that celebrities can influence more effectively public opinion? You know all that better than me but I believe you are excessively angry.

The Hollywood actor whom you are talking about—George Clooney—visited the camps of Sudanese displaced before us as Sudanese democrats, and highlighted the tragedy much better than we did. Yes he focused on the ethnic dimension describing the conflict as between Arabs and non-Arabs, while the conflict is in reality multidimensional: it has political, socio-economic, and religious dimensions, but the simplification of Clooney’s definition is justified by two reasons. First, there is the fact that the ethnic dimension is one of the main aspects to the conflict, whether we like it or not. Second is the reality that victims, who are mainly non-Arabs, actually attribute more importance to the ethnic dimension than to the others. For sure, this analysis needs fine-tuning, but is it the role of Clooney to do that?

And me as a Sudanese democrat, I believe that Enough represents me much better than any other western organization. It is not fair to argue that Enough is not challenging U.S. power. The Obama Administration is, I believe, confused and confusing in its policy on Sudan. Thanks to the American open democratic system with its lobbies and actors such as Enough, there is a hope for challenging the policies and changing them for the better.

(4) I still remember our first discussion in London years ago, and as a result I still embrace the conviction in your deep knowledge and humbleness. But I also remember your rejection of my argument that if the Abuja  Agreement for Darfur was going to achieve anything it must break the majority of NCP at least in the legislative. You rejected that on the basis that the ceiling of representation was enshrined in the CPA, although it was clear at that time that the problem of CPA was exactly that it gave the NCP a majority and that this continued to block democratization. Also I still remember the workshop organized by UN before the referendum in which you played a key role. At that meeting, I and many other Sudanese democrats kept saying that the western policy of trying to avoid democracy in Khartoum will not lead to a soft separation, but you along with all other western scholars were not ready to listen to us . And I still remember our discussion in the office of Yasir Arman in Khartoum, when you were trying to convince him not to boycott the elections of 2010, in a situation where there was no freedom of expression, no independent judiciary and no independent electoral commission. In fact your position at that time was typical to all western actors who want to avoid democracy so as to facilitate the so called soft separation! All that proved to me that the thesis of John Young is more correct than yours.

We all–Sudanese and internationals—committed mistakes. I personally admit that I supported the CPA for many years in a naive and mechanical way. But unfortunately most of the western scholars and actors are still suffering from the syndrome of continuing along the same path even when it is demonstrably mistaken, for fear of going back. After the outbreak of war in Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile and between North and South still the majority of western actors are not ready to conclude that democracy is the only way to stability in a huge multiethnic and religious country like Sudan. They are not ready to conclude that fascist regimes are aggressive by nature.

(5)  As a Sudanese democrat I have the feeling that the West is still trying to consolidate the NCP in power, within a wrong

policy based on a mechanical and unthinking approach, for example the assumption that the choice is between either collaboration in counter-terrorism or supporting democracy! If we believe NCP is genuinely collaborating in counter-terrorism, which is doubtful, in the long run you cannot combat terrorism without democracy. The west should learn from recent developments in the region, including the experience of Egypt and Tunisia: did avoiding democracy result in stability or combating terrorism? And in Sudan actually the situation is less complicated, because terrorists are in power, and the country is in a position where it must choose between democracy or disintegration and chaos.

Finally the African Union is able to acknowledge the massacre of Abu Salim prison as one of the major human rights violations in Africa like the Apartheid racial system in South Africa, and the genocide in Rwanda, and the slave trade in Africa, etc. The African Union human rights memorial, itself on [...]]]>

Finally the African Union is able to acknowledge the massacre of Abu Salim prison as one of the major human rights violations in Africa like the Apartheid racial system in South Africa, and the genocide in Rwanda, and the slave trade in Africa, etc. The African Union human rights memorial, itself on the site of a notorious prison, will formally recognize the victims of the Abu Salim prison massacre and other victims of the crimes of the regime of Muammar Gaddafi.

I have now an official letter from the African Union to the Libyan government and civil society organizations in Libya and abroad, requesting that what remains of the Abu Salim prison be preserved to become a place of pilgrimage and memorial of the unprecedented human right abuses that were perpetrated in this place.

More importantly, we shall strive to find answers for the families of the 1270 martyrs who were killed in less than three hours by Qaddafi’s thugs on 29th of June 1996. To this day, we do not know the whereabouts of the bodies of those innocent murdered ones.

I express my thanks to colleagues from Ethiopia and the United States, Britain, Tunisia and South Africa for the support they gave me in this regard.

]]> http://sites.tufts.edu/reinventingpeace/2013/05/17/abu-salim-prison-massacre-au/feed/ 0 http://sites.tufts.edu/reinventingpeace/2013/05/14/democratization-and-the-failure-of-the-sudan-peace-process/ http://sites.tufts.edu/reinventingpeace/2013/05/14/democratization-and-the-failure-of-the-sudan-peace-process/#comments Tue, 14 May 2013 12:57:29 +0000 John Young http://sites.tufts.edu/reinventingpeace/?p=1156

Alex has summarized my book quite well, but with one major exception:  the central theme is the failure of the peace process to oversee the democratic transformation called for in the CPA’s Machakos Protocol, which I contend was the only hope for sustainable peace, both between the two states and [...]]]>

Alex has summarized my book quite well, but with one major exception:  the central theme is the failure of the peace process to oversee the democratic transformation called for in the CPA’s Machakos Protocol, which I contend was the only hope for sustainable peace, both between the two states and within them.  Although The Fate of Sudan is not a theoretical study, it proceeds from a critique of liberal peace-making, the starting point of all peace efforts in Sudan.  As Alejandro Bendana and other critics have found – and the Sudan experience backs them up – liberal peace making is a top-down approach designed to stop violence, but not address its underlying causes, integrate the warring parties into a Western dominated world order, and while it rhetorically supports democratic transformation, it is invariably traded off. 

The official sponsor of the Sudan peace process was IGAD, an outfit created, paid for, and directed by a handful of Western states.  IGAD (read the U.S.) then sub-contracted the process to its regional ally Daniel arap Moi who assigned his protector, General Lazarus Sumbeiywo, who long had close relations with the American security services to oversee the process, and thus could be trusted.  Under Sumbeiywo the NCP, SPLM, and the Western participants locked out civil society, other military groups and political parties, imposed a regime of secrecy, and then contradictorily called for democratic transformation.  It was not believable and what followed proved that.

The NCP and SPLM used the CPA to isolate their challengers, while the flawed 2010 elections served to undermine their joint commitment to Sudan’s unity by effectively dividing the country before the referendum – all with the support of the U.S. and its allies who feared that confronting the parties would undermine the peace process.  The needs of peace and democracy were thus held to be at odds and the former prevailed over the latter – which is usually the case with liberal peace making.  However, conflict continued directly or through proxies and allies of the NCP and SPLM in spite of this compromise which also led to the consolidation of authoritarian regimes in Khartoum and Juba. 

It is my contention that unless internationals can oversee peace processes that genuinely support democratization they should withdraw, that in spite of their weaknesses local actors not operating at the behest of big powers should lead these processes, and if the belligerents are not ready to come to the peace table then we should ‘give war a chance’.  No one relishes sitting on the sidelines watching people die, but there is no conclusive evidence that wars which end as a result of peace agreements have fewer casualties or are more likely to lead to sustainable peace than wars decided on the battlefield.  Moreover, all too often wars that end with peace agreements that do not involve empowering local people leave them as bad or worse off than when the conflict began.  That was clearly the case with the peace agreement that ended the war in eastern Sudan and it could also be argued that was true for the people of Sudan and South Sudan post-CPA.  Meanwhile, many of those killed in what was billed as a north-south war – indeed, maybe the majority – in fact died as a result intra-south conflicts.  In the final years of the war fighting was largely between the South Sudan Defense Force (SSDF) and the SPLA, and that conflict ended as a result of the Juba Declaration in which the role of the internationals was negligible.  Finally it must be noted that unlike the SPLA, insurgents in neighbouring Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Uganda built powerful mass based organizations able to militarily defeat their foes and were thus able – thankfully –   to keep out liberal saviors from the West.        

As I read Professor Alex de Waal’s perceptive piece on “Reclaiming Activism,” I thought I should not miss this opportunity to, for once, disagree with one of the few “experts on Africa” I have always had genuine [...]]]> Patrick Karuretwa is the Defense and Security Advisor to the President of Rwanda and a Fletcher alumnus.

As I read Professor Alex de Waal’s perceptive piece on “Reclaiming Activism,” I thought I should not miss this opportunity to, for once, disagree with one of the few “experts on Africa” I have always had genuine esteem and admiration for.

As always, Alex de Waal makes very compelling comments on a real and significant problem: the activism many of us in Africa have come to know –“simplified, simplistic and pernicious”.

De Waal appropriately urges activists to be honest to the facts, and open to inquiry into the facts. But, in this well-written piece, he sometimes fails to do just that.

First–putting on my Rwandan civil servant hat for a moment–de Waal refers to the state of Rwanda as “too militaristic.” Yet, to be “honest to the facts,” he should mention that Rwandan government is the only one in Africa to spend five times less on Defense (slightly more than 3% of the national budget) than Health (15%  – and highest in Africa), and six times less than Education (20%).

Unless Rwanda’s “militarism” would consist in its deliberate efforts to maintain a relatively small but well trained and notably efficient professional army in a neighborhood where more than 30 armed groups operate, including the Front Democratic pour la Liberation du Rwanda led by the same extremists that came close in 1994 to achieving their target in Rwanda: the annihilation of all Tutsi and their Hutu sympathizers. But if, in this context, Rwandans failed to equip themselves with the means to address the very real and immediate challenges they face as a nation, wouldn’t they be “surrender[ing] their own leadership to their supposed foreign friends” to use de Waal’s own words?

Alex de Waal is among the prominent thinkers who participated to the second Tana High Level Forum on Security in Africa in April 2013. There, he heard several speakers express their appreciation for Rwanda leaders’ ability to do precisely what he wishes activists did more: challenge power and the way it is exercised in this unequal world we live in. He heard  ‘African experts’ and ‘Experts on Africa’ praise Rwandans for being honest, not dishonest, in insisting that they should define their problems for themselves and claim the driver’s seat in addressing them, even as they welcome external support.

The policy activists’ narrative on Rwanda and the Great Lakes Region is, I believe, one of the perfect examples of what de Waal describes as “uncomfortable truths that policy activists sacrifice for the sake of simple messages that foreign audiences can understand and to which they can relate easily.” And their lobbying tactics in Washington, New York and London have had far reaching consequences. In the D.R. Congo, Kenya or Sudan they have effectively diverted the world’s attention away from sensible analyses of the problems on the ground, and they have stood in a way of workable solutions.

But beyond the not-so-judicious Rwanda example, de Waal’s larger points are unquestionably valid. His eloquent criticism of contemporary activism is much welcome. So are his calls for real activists that “seek and speaks the truth” and accepts to partner with–and be led by–the affected populations.

This is an accurate but incomplete picture.

The biggest problem with activists like the Enough Project and Human Rights Watch may not be that they are essentially Washington lobbyists, or that they are more focused on their generous funders’ agendas than the problems they claim to help fix. Or it is only part of it.

The other, and more pernicious part of the problem, might be the way public opinion perceives and treats them. Not as what they often are: self-interested actors with hidden biases and prejudices, strategic allies and enemies, as well as opportunistic tactics to achieve their goals. The uncomfortable reality is that many of them care much less about peace or “truth” anywhere in Africa than their institutional agendas. Some are genuine and well meaning, but they rarely acknowledge that their actions sometimes have significant counter-productive impacts. Yet, their neutrality, objectivity and expertise are typically taken for granted.  Any criticism on Human Rights Watch or the International Crisis Group is typically dismissed as defensive tactics from the bad guys. The “designers activists” know this well, and they invest significant resources to maintain this situation.

De Waal has argued elsewhere that “humanitarian international” can have a destructive impact; they weaken recipient governments, erode their accountability and undermine their legitimacy.

But his description of the “honorable vocation and practice of activism” in its ideal form, appears disturbingly similar to the humanitarian claim of political neutrality he, very eloquently, questioned in the past.

Both are delusional. Just like humanitarian aid, much of today’s activism is deeply politicized; it has far-reaching political consequences and harmful side effects. Whether in favor or against Washington, the politicization of international activism is not an accident; it is part of the very nature of the enterprise. This reality should be acknowledged and confronted, not glossed over.

Just like the political powers they criticize, activists need to be subjected to clear-headed skepticism and scrutiny. To be truly “honorable”, they should be ready to challenge power. But they should also be prepared to challenge themselves and accept to be challenged by others. They should welcome critical analysis and accept accountability.

One of the truisms about Sudan is that the more you know about the country, the harder it is to write anything that makes sense. Those who have hardly been there have no [...]]]> Review of: John Young, The Fate of Sudan: The Origins and Consequences of a Flawed Peace Process, London, Zed Books, 2012.

One of the truisms about Sudan is that the more you know about the country, the harder it is to write anything that makes sense. Those who have hardly been there have no difficulty in writing reams of text, those who have spent half their lifetimes working in the country find it a painful process to try to organize their material into a cogent story. John Young has spent 25 years working on Sudan and its neighbors and the result is a book rich in detail, but also an account that struggles to achieve narrative and analytical coherence.

The strengths of this book lie in its frank account of the political actors in Sudan. Young has no illusions about the government in Khartoum and the northern Sudanese political establishment. Neither has he any illusions about the SPLA. He grapples with and punctures the Garang myth—the notion that John Garang was a democrat with a clear vision for the future of Sudan.

Young describes the twists and turns of the negotiations that led to the formulation and signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), including the stratagems, short-cuts and deceptions used by both the negotiators and the mediators. There are many fascinating details here, notably the dynamics surrounding the signing of the Machakos Protocol in 2002, the foundational text of the CPA, and the beginning of the direct talks between Vice President Ali Osman Taha and Garang a year later. Young plausibly argues that Machakos represented a significant narrowing of the terms of the Declaration of Principles (DoP) adopted by the InterGovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD, the grouping of north-east African countries) in 1994, and a successful maneuver by Salva Kiir to simplify the Sudanese crisis to a north-south crisis with the secession option as the implicit but inescapable end-point. Garang surely knew this would hobble his political aspirations, not least because of his weak power base inside southern Sudan. Garang’s visit to the Nuba Mountains and escalation of the Darfur war in the months following Machakos must be seen in that light.

One of Young’s key points is that when they signed the key agreements in 2002 and 2003, neither the government nor the SPLA expected them to be honored. The negotiators on both sides were playing a complicated game of position, each expecting the worst of the other. As the core documents expanded to become the protocols that ultimately constituted the CPA, detailed legalistic provisions filled in for the lack of trust or even a common understanding of the basic intention of the CPA. Indeed the CPA merely translated the political struggle between the protagonists to a new dimension.

The ambiguity of the CPA is captured in its title: itifaag al salaam al shamil. To English speakers, “comprehensive” implies that the agreement has covered all issues and refers to an intention to become inclusive of all. To Arabic speakers, shamil has a very different resonance. Shumuliya is totalitarianism, and al itifaag al shamil implies a closed, exclusive deal. This was the root of the undoing of the Darfur negotiations: while the mediators envisaged the Abuja agreement as a mechanism for bringing the Darfurians into an inclusive democratic transformation of Sudan, the Darfurian rebel leaders were focused exclusively on what share of posts and cash they would be allocated in the transitional carve-up.

Young is correct to conclude that the NCP, the SPLM and the U.S. colluded to restrict participation in the peace talks. They kept out the northern civilian parties in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), the emergent Darfurian opposition and the South Sudan Defence Force (SSDF) and other non-SPLM southerners, and marginalized the Nuba and Blue Nile members of the SPLM. Between 1999 and 2003, Justice Africa campaigned hard to bring these groups into the peace process, but without success. I coordinated this project, and we believed that Sudan’s best chance was an all-inclusive peace process, and I can attest to the obstacles we faced. Young overlooks the irony that certain Clinton administration officials were instrumental in this blockage, and then went on to lead the international outrage over the Darfur war that resulted.

Elections are the centerpiece of democratization, and voting in elections or referenda has become the “graduation ceremony” for most internationally-sponsored peace processes. Given Young’s central thesis that democratization was Sudan’s central challenge, he gives considerable attention to the conduct of the April 2010 elections, the January 2011 referendum on self-determination in southern Sudan and the May 2011 elections in Southern Kordofan. He provides a deeply cynical account of the general elections, and the depth of manipulation by the National Congress Party. It is all eminently credible, including the disorganization and unpreparedness of the opposition and the take-no-chances approach of the NCP, which was on course for a win under any scenario, but ultimately managed a wholly non-credible landslide. Against this background, Young’s account of the Southern Kordofan elections a year later, and his conclusion that the SPLM failed to win, needs to be considered very seriously.

Over the years, Young has developed a particular expertise on the southern Sudanese militia that in the early 2000s comprised the SSDF. The reader is in danger of becoming lost in the details of the gyrations of enmities and alliances among the numerous factions during the war, the negotiations and the post-secession rebellions. Young is surely right to observe that the exclusion of the SSDF from the CPA was a potentially fatal flaw, which risked an internal civil war in southern Sudan. The SSDF was more numerous and better armed than the SPLA, and the legacy of internecine strife among the southerners provided plentiful reason for fearing the worst. Garang’s predilection during the war years of striking first and hardest against internal competitors in southern Sudan, meant that when the war ended he had more enemies in the south than in the north. The enormous and enthusiastic crowd that welcomed Garang on his return to Khartoum in July 2005 dwarfed any comparable reception in Juba.

Garang’s death and Salva Kiir’s commitment to an inclusive government created the conditions for averting this imminent intra-southern conflict. The January 2006 Juba Agreement between Salva Kiir and Gen. Paulino Matiep (a short and simple document, the product of a genuine relationship of trust between the principals) was, for southerners, just as important as the CPA itself. It was Salva’s finest hour. But the deal proved to be a buy-off, funded by oil monies, and the SPLM’s failure to develop governing institutions, let alone democratic institutions, mean that the danger of internal armed conflict remains.

These are all compelling descriptions and the inadequacies of the CPA are exposed. But does Young’s central hypothesis, that the peace process itself is significantly to blame for Sudan’s enduring crisis, hold up? Would the inclusive approach championed by Justice Africa, and myself, more than a decade ago, have resolved Sudan’s conflicts and engineered a democratic transformation? I like to think it might have done so, but the counter-arguments are also persuasive.

International mediators and their supporters were not uninterested in addressing the deep problems of the Sudanese state. The 1994 IGAD DoP, drafted by the Ethiopian Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin and his advisers, addressed this issue square on. But the Sudanese Government rejected the DoP for three years, accepting only under serious military and political pressure, and making clear its reservations. It was quite capable of stalling, if need be indefinitely. By 1998 Sudan was on the brink of becoming an oil exporter and anticipated, correctly, that it could expand the national budget tenfold. This bonanza would deliver a decisive military and political advantage over the SPLA, and both sides knew it. For the Sudanese government, the principal reason for taking the IGAD negotiations seriously was that success promised normalization of relations with the U.S., which would bring a major oil company with technology capable of increasing the extraction capacity from Sudan’s oilfields substantially.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of the SPLM fastened onto the right of self-determination as their promissory note, and framed all other negotiating positions around that. Garang pursued the IGAD negotiating forum as the least preferred of his three parallel options, the other two being nationwide insurrections that would bring down the regime and regime change through the joint efforts of a popular uprising by the northern parties alongside the SPLA’s military advance.

The “troika” of the U.S., Britain and Norway went along with the joint NCP-SPLM insistence on exclusive bilateral talks because at least it promised something other than a continuation of the war. As Young acknowledges, it was the internationals who insisted on multi-party elections during the transitional period, against the preferences of both parties. During the first part of the transitional period, the internationals took the elections more seriously than the parties themselves—and more seriously than the northern opposition parties, which stood to gain most from even a modicum of pluralism.

When the African Union took over the Darfur mediation, it envisaged a Darfur peace agreement as a pillar to the CPA, a means of bringing the Darfurians into the national democratic process. Neither the NCP nor the Darfurians saw it that way: their focus was on dividing the spoils of office. In 2009, the African Union High-Level Panel on Darfur (AUPD) defined the Darfur crisis as “the Sudanese conflict in Darfur,” and identified inclusive democratization as the priority. The AU Peace and Security Council, when it adopted the AUPD report and set up the AU High Level Implementation Panel (AUHIP), specified that the Panel’s new mandate was “to assist in the implementation of all aspects of the AUPD recommendations, as well as to assist the Sudanese parties in the implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) and other related processes, as part of the democratic transformation of the Sudan.” For six months, the AUHIP concentrated on rescuing the electoral process. It didn’t succeed. None of the political parties was committed: the NCP and SPLM wanted only an imprimatur of legitimacy on their respective commanding majorities, and the northern opposition parties wanted the elections cancelled or delegitimized as soon as they realized they would lose. Only the southern civilian parties were serious about democratization, because they saw it as a means of restraining the militarism and authoritarianism of the SPLM.

Young is aware of all of this (though Darfur is largely neglected in his account). His response: “if the combatants will not accept a commitment to democratic transformation, then the mediators should withdraw.” (p. 359)

I am not ready to accept this course of action.

First, the Sudanese parties would, as soon as they sense that their mediator demands a commitment to democratic transformation, make that commitment, and then find a hundred ways to delay or derail it. In fact this is precisely what they did over the CPA and during the Darfur peace talks.

Second, when the IGAD countries walked away from the mediation in 1994, they did not walk away from engagement. On the contrary, three of the four governments (Eritrea, Ethiopia and Uganda) sent their troops into Sudan and actively supported the opposition, forcing the Sudanese government back to the table. Unless any would-be mediator has comparable pressure to exert, walking away is not an option. The U.S. had no such option over Darfur: the kinds of threats it made were puny compared to the Ethiopian brigades that crossed into Sudan in 1995-97, defeated the Sudanese on the battlefield, and withdrew without advertising their actions. There were no such options for anyone when Sudan and South Sudan fought in Heglig in April 2012 and stood at the brink of all-out war.

Third, and related to this, what should a mediator do when walking away entails standing by while Sudan (and South Sudan) plunge into a crisis with potentially disastrous regional repercussions? This is precisely what was threatened in 2011-12. The AUHIP mediators were well aware that the crisis between Sudan and South Sudan was not ripe for resolution: there were plenty of influential people on both sides who wanted war rather than peace. But the AU also knew that if the conflict were not managed it risked a far worse outcome, including dragging in the entire region, from Egypt to Uganda. Mediators do not usually have the privilege of choosing their parties or their circumstances: they must take them as they find them.

Young is certainly right that the Sudanese peace processes of the last fifteen years have been riddled with mistakes. But Sudan belonged to the Sudanese (and today the two Sudans belong to the Sudanese and South Sudanese), and the main crimes and blunders have been by the Sudanese leaderships. The international mediators undoubtedly made their own mistakes, as well as achieving some unanticipated successes. As I mentioned above, I would like to believe that an inclusive peace process was possible. And I believe that, had the mediators and the Troika listened to the Darfurians in 2001 and 2002, as Justice Africa demanded at that time, the chances of the disaster in Darfur would have been reduced. But I am not confident that, even if IGAD and the Troika had insisted on bringing in the diverse northern and southern political parties, armed groups and civil society organizations, that the outcomes would necessarily have been better. Both parties had the option of fighting and were ready to carry on doing so. Would another decade of war have brought a better peace? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t like to have been part of the experiment.

Sierra Leone’s decade-long civil war, a conflict marked by extreme acts of systematic violence on all sides, wound to a close in January 2002 with the signing of a peace agreement between the government and the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebel forces. Transitional justice mechanisms were an integral part of the post-conflict period, first [...]]]> Introduction

Sierra Leone’s decade-long civil war, a conflict marked by extreme acts of systematic violence on all sides, wound to a close in January 2002 with the signing of a peace agreement between the government and the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebel forces. Transitional justice mechanisms were an integral part of the post-conflict period, first with the adoption of blanket amnesty and the establishment of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and later the ad-hoc criminal tribunal, the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL). The following examines how the distinct characteristics of Sierra Leone’s civil war – including the protracted peace process, the lack of a post-conflict political transition, and the legacy of local coping practices – impacted, and at times contested, the TRC and the SCSL. The operation of these mechanisms clashed with Sierra Leone’s post-conflict political and social context, passing over the opportunity to instead build upon the country’s local realities; this disconnect ultimately undermined the capacity for the transitional justice process to provide its intended goals of truth, justice, and reconciliation.

The Lomé Accord: Amnesty Provision and Eventual Breakdown

The tenuous nature of Sierra Leone’s transition to peace significantly complicated the transitional justice process. The Lomé Peace Accord of July 7, 1999, an attempt to end the conflict between the government and the RUF, was also the document that provided for the establishment of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), mandating a procedure “to address impunity, break the cycle of violence, provide a forum for both the victims and perpetrators of human rights violations to tell their story, get a clear picture of the past in order to facilitate genuine healing and reconciliation.”[1] The TRC was the only accountability component of the Accord, which otherwise provided perpetrators unconditional blanket amnesty for all crimes committed since 1991.[2] The amnesty clause was based on the assumption that the RUF would not sign any agreement that left its members open to prosecution, but this choice was made on grounds of practicality and political expediency and certainly not magnanimity: President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah’s government had been significantly weakened by the rebel siege on Freetown in early 1999, an operation that also exhausted the RUF, leading to a military stalemate.[3] It was in this atmosphere that the two sides came to the negotiating table, with the government capitulating to rebel demands primarily out of fear of prolonged violence that would culminate in a coup. The use of the amnesty concession as a transitional justice mechanism thus reflected the intractability of the conflict and the government’s weak negotiating position.

In providing amnesties, Sierra Leone follows dominant trends. In Transitional Justice in Balance, Tricia D. Olsen, Leigh A. Payne and Andrew G. Reiter survey all internal armed conflicts between 1970-1999, a total of 164 cases in 92 countries, and find that the use of amnesty had a higher occurrence than any other mechanism. Amnesty for rebels occurred in 56 percent of cases of ongoing conflict, contrasted with a 3 percent occurrence of trials for either rebels or state agents. Conflicts in which negotiation took place, such as Sierra Leone, were more likely than not to include amnesty provisions.[4] This prevalence of amnesty in ongoing conflict is intuitively logical: there is little incentive to sign a peace agreement that will ensure one’s own criminal prosecution, particularly when the use of force is still available.

Sierra Leone soon proved to be in the category of ongoing conflict. The RUF continued their hostilities, showing little regard for the terms of the signed agreement even with the amnesty provision: deciding against prosecution was apparently an insufficient strategy for ending the conflict. In effect, the intractability of the conflict was the impetus for including the amnesty clause, yet was also the factor that led to its subsequent breakdown.

Simultaneous Operation of the Truth Commission and the Special Court

In the wake of continued instability and with the terms of Lomé already broken, the Sierra Leonean government wrote to the UN calling for the establishment of a tribunal in which to hold RUF leaders criminally responsible. The Security Council approved the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) as part of January 2002’s final peace agreement. Its mandate was the prosecution of “persons who bear the greatest responsibility for the commission of crimes against humanity, war crimes and other serious violations of international humanitarian law, as well as crimes under relevant Sierra Leonean law.”[5] The TRC was originally meant as the sole justice mechanism to ensure that atrocities were accounted for, and at this point the government might have opted to replace it entirely with the SCSL. They chose instead to move forward with both mechanisms, and so with protracted violence delaying the TRC and the spontaneous establishment of the SCSL, the two ended up operating simultaneously.

This unintended partnership drastically transformed Sierra Leone’s transitional justice landscape. The most significant issue at hand was the confusion many Sierra Leoneans felt regarding the mandate and hierarchies of the TRC and SCSL, particularly when it came to information sharing. Although the TRC’s legislation provided for confidentiality, the SCSL had a provision specifying its supremacy over all courts with domestic jurisdiction, including the TRC, thus making any TRC documentation or testimony potentially vulnerable to SCSL subpoena.[6] Ultimately the greatest consequence of this unclear hierarchy was how it was perceived by Sierra Leoneans. The belief that information disclosed through TRC testimony would be used for indictment or prosecution at the SCSL was pervasive. In a series of 2003 interviews, Tim Kelsall found that Sierra Leoneans “had difficulty distinguishing between the TRC and the court and feared that confessions to the TRC may lead to prosecution . . . Several of the people I spoke to mentioned the court as a deterrent to giving statements to the TRC. Perpetrators, in particular, were determined not to incriminate themselves.”[7] As likewise noted by Thelma Ekiyor, “For the Sierra Leonean public the side-by-side existence of a commission that urged them to ‘tell the truth’ and a court that possibly waited to prosecute was confusing. This confusion deterred many ex-combatants from testifying.”[8] These observations are supported by statistical data showing that less than one percent of TRC statements were given by self-defined perpetrators.[9]

The public’s suspicion of coordination between the two institutions was at best counterproductive and at worst detrimental to the TRC’s transitional justice goals. The resulting self-suppression of testimony posed an huge obstacle to the TRC’s mandate to get a clear picture of the past from both victims and perpetrators in order to facilitate reconciliation. Furthermore, the ideological differences between the TRC and the SCSL – reconciliation versus retribution – were at odds and created a great deal of confusion for the Sierra Leonean public as to what the spirit of the transitional process was meant to be.

Lack of a Political Transition Following the Civil War

Examining post-civil war Sierra Leone in a comparative perspective also challenges the very notion of the transition itself. Ruth Teitel’s original definition of ‘transitional justice’ described a scenario “associated with periods of political change” where a new government “confront[s] the wrongdoings of repressive predecessor regimes.”[10] This model is associated most commonly with the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was established in the aftermath of apartheid to facilitate resolution and illuminate the atrocities of the white-minority-rule era. In most respects, however, Sierra Leone’s post-war transition defied South Africa’s clear political shift.

This was partly due to Kabbah’s continued presidency. Kabbah had begun his first term in 1996, and in 2002 was elected to another five years. In the same election, his party, the Sierra Leone People’s Party, won an overwhelming majority of parliamentary seats.[11] This carry-over of political power raised concerns in a number of areas, especially when it came time for Kabbah to testify before the TRC. There was widespread unease amongst both Sierra Leoneans and international observers that TRC commissioners, in particular Chairman Bishop Humper, were inappropriately close to Kabbah’s government and that this relationship would undermine the TRC’s neutrality in addressing the state’s role in the conflict. This fear was confirmed by Kabbah’s testimony at the commission’s closing hearing where he refused to apologize for any abuses on the state’s behalf.[12] Humper joined him in insisting that an apology was unnecessary, and used the TRC as a forum in which to thank the pro-government Civil Defense Forces (CDF, also known as the Kamajors) for having “defended the country.”[13] Considering CDF founder Samuel Hinga Norman was currently on trial at the SCSL for war crimes and crimes against humanity, this statement contributed to understandable public anxiety about whether the commission’s report would establish genuine and equal accountability for all perpetrators.

Likewise, perception of the government’s lackluster commitment to the transitional justice process largely contributed to many Sierra Leoneans’ decision not to testify themselves before the TRC. Rosalind Shaw found in interviews in 2003 and 2004 that many victims refused to testify about ex-combatants for fear of retaliation, doubting that the government had either the resources or the will to protect them: Shaw was often told by victims who refused to testify, “It is better to suffer once than to suffer twice;”[14] this belief that cycles of violence from the war could be easily reproduced reinforces the frailty of the country’s transition. Generally speaking, there was a lack of confidence that politics in Sierra Leone’s new, post-conflict era would be substantially different from those of the past decade. This sentiment was expressed in the TRC’s final report, which reported that, “While the government changed hands from one to the other, many of the faces remained the same. The popular adage about government was that Sierra Leoneans would board ‘a different bus, but with the same driver.’ Deep-seated pessimism now prevails as to whether things can ever really get better.”[15] Human Rights Watch’s 2002 country report likewise found that “Deep-rooted issues that gave rise to the war—a culture of impunity, endemic corruption, weak rule of law, crushing poverty, and the inequitable distribution of the country’s vast natural resources— remain largely unaddressed” following Kabbah’s re-election.[16]

The lack of meaningful support from the country’s leadership or change in social, economic, and political factors deterred TRC testimony and impeded the aims of the transitional justice process.

Local Reconciliation Practices and the Legacy of Civil-War Era Norms

Finally, Sierra Leone’s transitional justice mechanisms were subject to the lingering cultural context of the civil war and a lack of popular support for practices of testimony, accountability, and retribution. Kelsall’s finding from attending TRC hearings was that fully honest testimony was rarely forthcoming, positing that this was because the practice of public truth telling lacks roots in Sierra Leone’s cultural history.[17] Shaw similarly found that most people favored a “‘forgive and forget’ approach”[18] over public remembering or criminal prosecution. She suggests that this preference stemmed from the traumas of the slave trade, colonialism, and other previous conflicts; by the time the TRC entered their lives, Sierra Leoneans already had a developed historical practice of reintegrating combatants, reworking relationships, and rebuilding the moral foundation of their communities.

The ‘forgive and forget’ mentality may have also been culturally reinforced by the nature of the war itself. Sierra Leone’s conflict was characterized by the ‘sobels’, government soldiers who became rebels at night in order to take advantage of looting opportunities.[19] The chameleonic nature of the conflict meant that soldiers and factions changed sides frequently, and at times combatants impersonated each other to exacerbate civilian terror and mistrust. The collective effect of this mutability was that civilians rarely knew which group was committing violations against them, and tended to abrogate allegiances with any of the armed groups for fear of retaliation by an opposing group.[20]

As Kelsall describes, this conflict-era survival strategy contributed to the cultural context in which a public declaration of ‘facts’ at the TRC was anathema.  Evasiveness was valorized during the war as a means for Sierra Leoneans to remain adaptable to whichever armed force or patron was in power. This imperative not to fix one’s allegiances was in direct conflict with the TRC’s request for a full, explicit and recorded confession.[21] Accordingly, the reluctance to participate in the TRC that Kelsall and Shaw observed drew its origins from both the long-term historical context of slavery and colonialism and the recent past of the civil war.

Conclusion

It is evident that the nature of Sierra Leone’s conflict both shaped and compromised how the transitional justice mechanisms functioned. The inclusion of amnesty in the Lomé Accord was a product of the conflict’s intractability, and its breakdown inadvertently caused the TRC and SCSL to operate simultaneously. This unintended partnership diminished the potential for truth telling at the TRC, as did the lack of a post-conflict political transition and the lingering wartime survival mechanisms dissuading people from public truth telling. Lessons learned for future endeavors recommend more conscientious inter-mechanism management and the securing of productive participation by government representatives. Crucially, local reconciliation practices should be acknowledged and integrated to ensure that the transitional justice process is appropriately tailored to the constituency it means to reach.

Endnotes

For most of my adult life I introduced myself as an “activist” first and a writer, researcher, or practitioner of humanitarian action or peacemaking second. Then, about seven or eight years ago, I became rather uncomfortable with the word. Not because I had diluted my personal commitment to working in solidarity with suffering [...]]]> Reclaiming Activism

For most of my adult life I introduced myself as an “activist” first and a writer, researcher, or practitioner of humanitarian action or peacemaking second. Then, about seven or eight years ago, I became rather uncomfortable with the word. Not because I had diluted my personal commitment to working in solidarity with suffering and oppressed people, but because a group of people, in whose company I didn’t want to be, were claiming not only to be activists but to define “activism” itself. I am speaking of course about the policy lobbyists in Washington DC, also known as “designer activists,” who took on the role of promoting certain causes related to Africa, and who arrogated to themselves the privilege of defining these problems and identifying and pursuing ostensible solutions. It was no accident that those purported solutions placed the “activists” themselves at the center of the narrative, because many of them were Hollywood actors—or their hangers on—for whom the only possible role is as the protagonist-savior. The actions they promoted all had one thing in common: using more U.S. power around the world.

I was not the only one to find this arrogation of “activism” offensive, demeaning and counter-productive. One of the most refreshing aspects of our recent seminar at the World Peace Foundation was finding out just how much the consensus among national civil society activists from Uganda and Congo, as well as Sudan, has coalesced around the view that the basic narratives and policy prescriptions of the Enough Project and its ilk are not only simplified and simplistic, but actually pernicious. Theirs isn’t activism: it’s insider lobbying within the Washington establishment using celebrity hype as leverage. They are not just a benign variant of advocacy, perhaps somewhat simplified: they are wrong.

It’s time to reclaim activism. It’s time to reassert some of the fundamental principles that made activism an honorable vocation and practice.

Some of the principles are contained in blog posts relating to our February-March seminar, easily findable under the tag “advocacy.” Let me outline three such principles.

First, activism should be undertaken in partnership with affected people, under their leadership. It should facilitate those people defining the problem for themselves—it is only by defining their problem that they can ever be master of it, rather than it becoming master of them. It should be sensitive to their leadership. Activists should be alert to the possibility that local people will be dazzled by the illusory prospect of outside salvation and surrender their own leadership to their supposed foreign friends. And so activists should approach the people with whom they hope to act, in a spirit of humility and self-effacement. That is the practice of solidarity.

Second, activism should seek truth and speak truth. That means being honest to the facts, and doing the hard work of finding out realities, and when required, changing one’s mind accordingly. There should be no sacrifice of uncomfortable and complicated truths for the sake of simple messages that foreign audiences can understand and to which they can relate easily. A central part of activism is the hard intellectual work of understanding.

Third, activism should challenge power. That doesn’t mean abandoning the pragmatics of calculating effort and impact, of calibrating intermediate and strategic goals. But it does require being honest about where the greatest concentrations of power lie, and how that power is utilized, and making that power uncomfortable, at least. Lobbying that merely adjusts the trajectory of super-power policies, in directions that are not uncomfortable for that superpower to shift, is not challenging power, but giving power an alibi. The U.S. government didn’t need the Enough Project to know that bad things were happening in Darfur, that Joseph Kony is a villain, and that the war in eastern Congo is causing desperate suffering. But maybe it needs principled and brave people to tell it that the interventions in Somalia, Libya and Mali are deeply problematic, that its friends in power in Juba, Kampala and Kigali need to be more honest and less militaristic. “Activists” who pick only on the already-identified bad guys are at best activists-lite, whose inconvenience to policymakers is that handling them takes up precious time. If these policy lobbyists did mount such challenges, they might lose some of their insider access and glamour, but they might gain our respect.

So: three clear principles to guide an individual or organization aspiring to the honorable term “activist.” One: act in solidarity and support of the affected people, and don’t impose on them. Two: be honest to the facts, and open to inquiry into the facts. And when the facts change, change your mind. Three: be ready to challenge the biggest powers: the U.S. government and its allies.