Lost in the Horn

The Transitional Federal Government created for Somalia by the Mbgathi peace process still exists and ‘enjoys’ international recognition and legitimacy, but has proved unable to establish its authority inside the country. And Ethiopia’s intervention to install its authority by force has simply provoked an insurgency in response, part anti-Ethiopian and part Islamist. The result, in Healey’s words, has been to create “conditions that are much worse than those that existed before the peace process began.”

By comparison therefore Sudan’s peace agreement shines out as a success. The South has succeeded in establishing its own government with its own autonomous army as well as participation in government in Khartoum, and the two sides rely on the agreement text to manage their relations. But border demarcation, especially in contested oil-rich regions, bode ill for the future.

Responses to the recently completed census will be vital, and could hinder progress to the crucial referendum on independence for the South due in 2011. Lack of trust, will and capacity all have caused slippage in the past, and may again, aggravated by the Darfur conflict.

But despite these differences, common themes emerge. One is what Healey identifies as “The prevalence of identity politics and processes of state formation and disintegration.” While this may seem obvious, it leads on to another more specific common thread; the ways in which “interactions between the states of the region support and sustain the conflicts within them in a systemic way.”

This interplay becomes especially complex if we factor in the global context of the ‘war on terrorism’ as an often distorting prism through which outside powers view conflicts which have other, more complex causes.

The regional institution which might be expected to take the lead in conflict resolution [IGAD] is hampered, to say the least, by being composed of the states whose rivalry or incapacity constitutes the problem. Healey concludes that “In the long term, economic change and growing economic interdependence...seem the most likely drivers of stability.” But economic change is unlikely to take off without the stability which is supposed to be its consequence.

Healey’s four main conclusions are stimulating, and of wider application. First, she argues, is the need to take account of “the long history of amity and enmity” in the region, appreciating that present conflicts are seen by participants as “part of a long continuum of warfare.”

Outsiders should therefore recognise that their influence is limited, and their goals should be modest.

But it is also important to recognise that the state itself is often the problem. Conventional analysis in terms of ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ states and the familiar ‘state-building’ approach can fail to capture key features of states such as Sudan or Ethiopia. Both these states are built around core power centres which are certainly not weak and which have historic roots, but which have been in a state of contestation and struggle, one way or another, for over a century with populations on the periphery; and in unstable border zones with a long history of resisting incorporation.

Hence the merits of the “Regional Security Complex” approach which stresses the way in which each country’s security problems interact with and often exacerbate its neighbours, in ways which make it difficult to seperate internal motives from ‘foreign’ policy.

The same two-way process can be seen at work in the influence of global agendas. As outside superpowers see the region’s problems through the tinted spectacles of their own concerns, so local actors are happy to oblige by presenting their own home-grown rivalries in terms likely to secure support from global actors.

The shifting relations of Ethiopia and Somalia to the rival Cold War superpowers in the 1970s is a case in point. More recently US insistence on seeing all conflicts in the region, however complex their causes and dynamics, through one reductionist prism of the ‘war on terror’ has arguably only made matters worse.

As Healey concludes: “It has polarised parties and reduced the space for mediation. Outsiders interested in mediation need to respond judiciously to the allegations of terrorism levied against various parties to conflict in the Horn and to seek to develop space for dialogue.”

Hence the conclusions - even-handedness to all rather than a double standard for the West’s presumed friends and presumed foes; and human security and priority for partners that respect it, rather than a military and state-based conception of security and legitimacy.

Fine conclusions - but to whom are they addressed? Here we run up against the same paradoxical circularity that Healey identifies in the Somali peace process. It may seem sensible to seek peace by bringing the various participants to the conflict together round a table, and labelling the resulting collective a ‘provisional government.’

However distasteful some or all of the participants, realpolitik must surely dictate their inclusion, as they are the actors with clout on the ground where it counts. But as they are also the problem, such externally imposed ‘solutions’ may turn out only to entrench the problem - less violently if you are lucky, but in Somalia, not even that.

But a human security and civil society based approach, however attractive, is hardly likely to commend itself to states and would-be state actors whose power derives from the rejection or perversion of such an approach.

There is no theoretical answer to this dilemma, and the practical answer can only emerge through civil society organisations and movements themselves fleshing out the idea of a truly human security-based approach and pushing it forward, with support from sympathetic elements within structures of state power. In this process, Healy’s report will be a useful resource.

Lost Opportunities in the Horn of Africa: How Conflicts Connect and Peace Agreements Unravel. A Horn of Africa Study Group Report by Sally Healy can be downloaded here.

The Horn of Africa Study Group comprises the Royal Institute of International Affairs [Chatham House], the University of London Centre of African Studies, the Royal African Society and the Rift Valley Institute.

*Stephen Marks is a research associate with Fahamu

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/