SOME people thought the end of the Cold War would make the world safer and more peaceful. The Cold War was underpinned by the ideological divide between capitalism on the one hand and socialism on the other. The two main contending powers in this ideological struggle were the USA and the former USSR.
But the international community is now dealing with a slightly different problem. This is the phenomenon of widespread intra-state as opposed to inter-state conflicts. This is especially true of Africa. From East Africa, North Africa to West Africa, societies are faced with vicious intra-state conflicts. Let us start this journey by looking at some of the disconcerting hot spots on the continent.
I start in East Africa; with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The DRC has been a theatre of war for many since its independence from Belgium. But the present war is perhaps an off-shoot of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 when a number of refugees fled into the DRC. The first round of the war that brought Laurent Kabila to power was ended with the DRC peace treaty signed in Lusaka, Zambia in 1999.
That war brought a number of countries into the picture. Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe from SADC were there supporting Kabila. Rwanda and Uganda were also involved. But despite the peace treaty, the country remained in political limbo. For example, Kabila was assassinated under mysterious circumstances.
Enter the M23 group, which consists mainly of Tutsi rebels, who were initially incorporated in the Congolese Army under a 2009 peace deal from which they later defected and started a war of terror in April 2012, fighting the Congolese army and the UN peace-keepers, consisting of Malawi, Tanzania and South Africa.
The fighting has been confined to eastern Congo mainly around the city of Goma. The combined forces of the Congolese army and the UN have been unable to repel the M23 movement and the local population is being killed and looted and women are raped.
The other hotspot that has bedevilled peace-makers in East Africa has been Somalia. Like the DRC, Somalia’s conflict brought in several countries in its long-running political and social conflict. The USA tried its hand there and later Ethiopia, which helped to topple the Union of Islamic Courts with the help of US political and military support, but this time indirectly unlike the first time when some of its marines were murdered by the warlords. Thus Somalia has been a nation without a state because different groups carved the country into ‘independent’ units run by different warlords, some really based on different sub-clans of the broader Somali nation. But the Ethiopian victory didn’t bring peace to Somalia because another force came to the political and military scene.
This was the birth of Al Shabaab, which took on the Ethiopian armed forces using guerrilla tactics, which led to their withdrawal from the country. Thus the carnage and killing continued. Then the AU, led by Uganda, Burundi and Kenya, entered the fray in an effort to arrest the conflict. But in the meantime the Al Shabaab had already regionalised the conflict and it is against this backdrop through which the recent Westgate Mall attacks in Nairobi must be understood. Thus like in the case of the DRC, the modicum of proper administration in Somalia is based around the area of the capital Mogadishu.
Another case in the history of African hotspots is the ongoing crisis that has beset a once-peaceful country, the land of the Pharaohs, Egypt, which is now embroiled in a political conflict with the Moslem Brotherhood whose leader, Mohamed Morsi, was ousted from power through a ‘velvet revolution’ by a more secular kind of Islam and the 10% of Coptic Christians. This incident, although it started only months ago, brought more violence, killings, destruction of property and, of course, sharp political divisions in Egyptian society.
In neighbouring Sudan the situation in the Darfur region remains as fragile as ever, as Khartoum-sponsored militias are battling the Darfur forces with the usual loss of human lives. Few months ago, for example, seven UN peacekeepers were ambushed and killed. And Libya, although there is no full-scale war like the one that ousted Muammar Gadaffi from power, the country is still struggling to put proper political structures in place, is still in post-conflict turmoil with rival militias and Islamists controlling parts of the country, each trying to put their hands on the country’s oil riches.
We cannot close this rendition of African flash points without briefly saying a word or two about the group that has eluded the mighty Nigerian military – Boko Haram. The Nigerian Army has so far failed to defeat Boko Haram. This case, like other flashpoints on the continent, involves the killing of innocent civilians caught in the cross-fire of contending forces.
Let me by way of conclusion say that, unlike during the heydays of the Cold War through which prism most of the conflicts were then explained; today’s intra-states conflicts are home-grown. Factors like religion, poverty, ethnic differences and land-grabbing have now come into play.
