Key Notes Address: Essential Building Blocks for Consolidating peace and Development in Post-Conflict Countries
By Prof. Peter Anyang' Nyongo', Member of Parliament, Kenya

In October 2000, about 300 people from all parts of Somalia attended a peace conference in Arta, Djibouti under the initiative of the Djibouti President and his Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) colleagues. The participants were drawn from professionals, politicians, businessmen, and workers. The criterion for choice was "tribal lineage"; in other words, special attempt was made to ensure that all clans and the ethnic mosaic of Somalia were represented. The six major political parties, in balanced working groups, made the core of the delegates in the conference with the mandate to handle all the pertinent issues. It was from this conference that a Parliament was finally chosen and a government crafted out that was eventually to be set up in Mogadishu. The mandate of this government was to institutionalize peace and kick start development in Somalia.

It is still very early to tell whether or not the Somali peace initiative will work, and whether the government will stabilize and bring back political order in Somalia. There are, however, a few lessons to be learnt from the Somali peace and reconciliation initiative, especially with regard to the role of civil society in such processes, and the essential building blocks for consolidating peace and development in a post-conflict situation.

The first lesson is that internal conflicts in African countries cannot be settled purely from within; they need external intervention. But the external intervention that comes in purely military form, whether by multilateral arrangement or otherwise, is less likely to succeed unless accompanied by other forms of civilian initiative.

The second lesson is that civilian or civil society initiatives, by themselves, are unlikely to go far unless supported by governments that have some direct interest in an internal conflict.

Third, when such governments join forces with civil society actors, they are unlikely to go far unless they involve all the forces engaged in conflict, including their representatives and surrogates.

Fourth, the choice of such representatives and surrogates can itself lead to failure or success of a reconciliation and peace building process. In the case of Somalia, the basic point of reference was the "tribal lineage". Within this category, all social forces had to seek representation. It emerged in the end, however, that many people complained in retrospect that they were not represented because they were not in Djibouti.

Fifth, a wide consensus of international actors is necessary for the success of a peace building and reconciliation process. Quite often, internal actors have their external support systems that may even be more entrenched against any peace process being institutionalized. In the case of Somalia, the total collapse of the state and extreme fragmentation of the internal forces reduced the stakes that external interests may have had in supporting any particular faction in using force to maintain supremacy. Moreover, Somalia is not the DRC where control of territory coincides with control of certain resources that are of vital interest to external actors. On the contrary, the European Union, USA and the United Nations Organization have all been interested in the peaceful settlement of the Somali crisis after so many years of conflict and instability.

The military is a force that is driven by the state; civil society, in a situation of conflict, has very little control over the military. The military acts through direction; it is not easily amenable to discussion and debate after orders have been given. That, perhaps, is why the UN forces failed so miserably in Somalia. They did not envisage that, with the situation on the ground being very different from what they had assumed when orders were given to move in, they needed to change tactics and not go full blast against what they perceived as the stumbling blocks to peace in Somalia.

Peace keeping forces, for that matter, can only be successful in their endeavours if, among the forces in conflict, there are shared interests to creating or restoring a political community. During the early days of the conflict in Somalia, there were no such shared interests among the warlords and their followers. Each fighting force believed in its right to exist and to impose its will over the others. Thus any attack by one faction on the UN peace keeping forces would actually be met with approval from the other factions, albeit they were also sworn enemies among themselves.

Quite often multilateral peace keeping forces do not realize the extent to which the primacy given to peace may be very low in situations where a sense of a shared political community has long been lost. To recover it takes time. In the case of Somalia, this recovery process has involved a time frame during which factions realized that they had fought themselves to a stalemate. Moreover, the followers of factional leaders also realized that, once the rule by factional warlords was stabilized, they had less to gain from it than they had in the "lost political community" that was the Republic of Somalia.

Further, as the conflicts continue over time, it is not always easy to sustain them. Except in situations like DRC, Angola and Southern Sudan where access to resources may be exploited as a source of sustaining conflict, elsewhere the absence of such resources may actually aid the disenchantment with conflict and a tendency to search for a negotiated settlement. This, perhaps, may explain why Dhlakama and Renamo moved faster towards reconciliation with Chisano and Frelimo while Savimbi's UNITA has been reluctant to conclude lasting peace with the Luanda regime in Angola.

Where forces in conflict are reluctant to come to the negotiation table because substantial benefits accrue to individual leaders of parties to the conflict, the strength of civilian organization can be the saving grace for peace building if the civilians themselves are for peace. External intervention needs to establish bridges with the civilians ahead of any initiative to propose peace negotiations to the leaders. Civil society organizations and leaders will be critical in this regard.

In the case of the Somalia peace initiative, Abdi Mohamed¹ notes that a delegation from the mediation committee visited Puntland to resolve a dispute with the local administration over participation in the planned conference. Through the intervention of the traditional elders, the Puntland president agreed to send a delegation to the elders meeting in Djibouti. The population in Mogadishu, where factional leaders had vehemently attacked the Djibouti initiative, hugely welcomed the visiting mediation delegation. Another controversial region where the delegation was acclaimed was Bay. Here the factional leader had rejected the offer to attend the conference in Djibouti. The most difficult spot for the delegation was Somaliland whose authorities refused the delegation to disembark from the aircraft.

Precisely because the factional leaders had established forms of social and political order in their various regions and allowed for the evolution of civilian life, they exposed civil society to a certain amount of autonomy from the political leadership. Access to this civil society by the initiators of peace becomes very important in isolating belligerent military and political leadership in establishing dialogue bridges. In the case of Somaliland the factional leadership denied any possibility of such bridges being established by simply stopping the plane carrying the negotiators from landing.

In the case of Eastern Congo, where factional leaderships have hardly established any stable political administration and civil society is in disarray, it may be more difficult to use the approach of the Djibouti peace initiative. As an intermediate step towards negotiations, it may be necessary to stabilize factional control of various areas of Congo in order to establish an enabling environment for negotiating peace. The only danger here is that such move towards stabilizing factional rule may also increase their desire to stay in power longer since they may, through stable rule, have stable access to valuable resources such as minerals. So each situation may require different approaches.

It is clear that, in the case of Somalia, civil society had been ready for peace negotiation well ahead of their factional leaders or factional governments in the various parts of Somalia. The missing link was how these factional governments could be brought together to begin the peace process. It is quite clear that, given the selfish interest of leadership in each factional government, none of the factions was ready to initiate peace dialogue. External intervention was necessary to bring them together using pressure from civil society in each situation.

Prior to the beginning of the peace initiative, a number of political leaders were invited to Djibouti to be briefed on the initiative. Here they found that Somali intellectuals, leaders of various organizations, within and outside Somalia, had been engaged in consultations, and a consensus was emerging for peace. Further, governments within the region from whence they received external support were also in the peace bandwagon. Thus the leaders felt sufficiently isolated not to be too belligerent.

But the process became even more portent when all interested parties were involved: the factional governments, clan elders, intellectuals, women organizations², businessmen and professional organizations. The fact that the Somalis living abroad have been well organized was important. They have more or less maintained a political community while living outside, however loose this has been.

When, on the other hand, governments have more control over their people in a situation of conflict, initiating peace from civil society can be difficult. Hassan Abdel Ati³ has shown how the peace initiative became more feasible the more the "governments" in both North and South Sudan became weakened through political strife and factionalism. While these governments were stable and strong, holding to their dogmatic views, from the 70s to the early 90s, there was very little prospect for serious dialogue. Various attempts failed.

" Last year, the split within the ruling National Islamic Front (NIF) party, resulted in one major positive development, that is the call for national reconciliation from all parties to the conflict and the difficulties faced. Almost all parties to the conflicts (Government, NDA, SPLA and other political parties out of government) have declared:

(Ati 2000) further concludes that the result of these splits and emergence of diverse factions does not only weaken the major controlling forces (SPLA and NIF), but also undermines their legitimacy as "the representatives of the people". He notes:

In the case of Sudan, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) have emerged to play a major role in civil society after the repression of various forms of civil society organizations in the 1980s. These NGOs are engaged in activities related to the basic needs of the people. They have good external contacts, they are wide spread in Sudan and they have power of leverage over the state since they perform functions which the state can no longer perform—even with regard to security in certain places. They have provided an environment for the emergence of civil rights groups, particularly as the "governments" have been weakened through factionalism within the ruling elite.

NGOs, argues Ati, represent the one party that is not seeking or competing for power, yet seeking a comprehensive solution that addresses the root causes of the problems. The emphases of most other parties are normally focussed on power sharing system that, in most cases, serves the interests of the conflicting parties which might not necessarily be in the interest of the masses and hence might not be sustainable."

In the final analysis, notes Ati, the involvement and active participation of civil society organizations in peace building in Sudan is important. It is not only critical because of the conflict fatigue suffered by the warring parties and the foreign sponsors of negotiation (IGAD, Egypt and Libya). It is critical because it guarantees a settlement on the basis of what the Sudanese people want rather than what the warring parties perceive as what they want.

According to Ati, civil society organizations also provide an example of the society people are looking for, e.g. one that is characterized by (Ati 2000):

Coexistence and cooperation of various ethnic and religious groups

Societies that have lived in unstable and unpredictable conditions for long finally force their members to look for certain very fundamental things in life: security, stability, predictability and order. Since the "governments" they have lived under have hardly guaranteed these for long, a peace initiative that promises to deliver these will most likely be fully embraced by various members of that society irrespective of the belligerence of the "governments" they live under. The Somali case is already demonstrating this; one wonders whether Sudan will soon follow. One wonders, too, whether Sierra Leone, the DRC, Angola and any other potentially explosive situation will avoid further conflict and seek to institutionalize peace.

¹ Abdi Mohamed, (2000) "Djibouti outcome: an optimum disagreement", paper delivered at the second regional conference on "Towards a Sustainable Peace-Civil Society Dialogue Forum for the Horn of Africa", Silver Springs Hotel, Nairobi, Kenya.

² Asha Hagi Elmi (2000), Report on Somalia Peace and Reconciliation Process, March-October 2000, Arta, Djibouti.

³ Hassan Abdel Ati (2000) "Prospects of Peace and National Unity in Sudan: Is there a role for civil society?-some thoughts for discussion", paper delivered at the second conference on Towards a sustainable Peace-Civil Society Dialogue Forum for the Horn of Africa, Nairobi, Silver Springs Hotel.