Waging Peace in Africa

It was a career diplomat's dream come true. When I took charge of the State Department's Bureau of African Affairs in March 1989, the Cold War was winding down. The shackles of the East-West conflict no longer bound our hands in Africa. The team of Foreign Service officers I had assembled to help manage the bureau were all veterans of the days when we helped sleazy African dictators principally because they were "pro-West." Now, at long last, we had a great opportunity to formulate new policies unencumbered by the "communist menace."

To help matters along, President George Bush, Secretary of State James A. Baker III, and their top advisers were encouraging us to be creative--to make the administration look good and work with the Soviets to find solutions to regional problems. Whocould ask for better policy guidance than that? Needless to say, we began enthusiastically to lay the groundwork for a new and productive relationship between the United States and Africa.

We all remembered the ideals of the 1960s, when the newly independent African states assigned high priority to economic development. For 30 years, both Democratic and Republican administrations had consistently tried to make development the keystone of their Africa policies. Unfortunately, policy imperatives external to Africa, especially the Cold War and the endless Middle East crisis, impeded U.S. concentration on economics. Within Africa, the issue of apartheid in South Africa also complicated the development agenda, especially in the southern third of the continent.

Nevertheless, at the beginning of the Bush administration, the prospects for a return to our "development roots" looked fairly bright. The Soviets were asking us for advice about their situation in Africa, and in South Africa we sensed the first stirrings of political change as a new generation of more enlightened Afrikaner leaders was coming to power. Although the Middle East problem was still out there, we saw far less pressure for involvement of the countries of the Horn of Africa in our defense posture than had been the case 10 years earlier.

Few African countries could be considered development success stories in 1989. Three decades of misguided policies that emphasized state ownership of the major enterprises, highly centralized economic command structures, and mistreatment of the main wealth-producing farming sector had caused most African economies to regress from their preindependence levels. In addition, the African "one-party state," which African elites had greeted with enthusiasm in the 1960s, had become repressive and corrupt in many countries, causing deep political conflict and, in some cases, civil wars.

Against this backdrop, we considered how the new administrations's foreign policy could help African countries achieve economic growth. It helped that considerable work on economic policy reform in Africa was already being done by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the United States Agency for International Development. James Baker, as secretary of the treasury in the Reagan administration, had been one of the architects of those economic reform policies and continued to promote that approach in Africa as secretary of State.

Four Wars Raging

Where we in the Africa Bureau might be able to support these economic efforts, we believed, was in the area of conflict resolution and political reform. At the beginning of 1989, four major civil wars were raging in Africa -- in Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique and Sudan. All of these wars had caused massive economic regression as well as humanitarian disasters, not only in the countries themselves but in the surrounding subregions, which also suffered from substantial refugee flows, arms proliferation, and lost trading opportunities. Civil war was clearly the great impediment to economic development.

Political reform, too, was vital to development, because repressive, corrupt states lacking effective governance and the rule of law could not possibly hope to attract the private investments that are the engines of economic growth. We decided, therefore, to make conflict resolution and "democratization" the centerpieces of our African policy.

We had no problems achieving consensus on this policy within the State Department Bureau of African Affairs. The question remained, however, as to how we could sell this to the department's seniorpolitical levels, as well as to the other agencies in the national security community. In our favor was the major diplomatic success achieved by my predecessor, Chester A. Crocker, who mediated the negotiations involving South Africa, Angola, and Cuba that led to the New York agreements of December 1988. Those agreements brought about the independence of Namibia and the withdrawal of South African and Cuban military forces from Angola. The U.S. role in that settlement became an important precedent.

Crocker's success during the Reagan administration gave solid momentum at the start of the Bush administration to the idea of the United States as a third party intervenor in African conflict. Nevertheless, because we were talking about intervening diplomatically in conflict situations in which the United States had no "vital" interests, we knew we had to proceed with caution.

Two Global Priorities

In my first policy conversation with Secretary Baker in April 1989, he emphasized two "global" priorities for the Bush administration: to demonstrate active cooperation with the Soviet Union in solving "regional problems" and to improve relations with the Congress on foreign policy issues. He said President Bush felt strongly that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev merited U.S. support. Consequently, Bush wanted every assistant secretary to maintain close contact with his or her Soviet counterpart to determine how the two superpowers could collaborate. As to Congress, the Reagan administration had left some bad feelings on the Hill, especially on the Contra affair in Nicaragua and the question of apartheid in South Africa. Baker wanted me to do whatever I could to diminish congressional ill will on the South Africa question.

In response, I told Baker about my plan to concentrate on conflict resolution and democratization. On democratization, Baker did not hesitate. The promotion of democracy worldwide was something he said Bush was thinking about to replace anticommunism, and he had no hesitation in approving that aspect of my proposal. On conflict resolution, however, he hesitated but did not reject it. He suggested I look for ways to dovetail conflict resolution with the president's priorities and in any event to keep in close touch with Under Secretary for Political Affairs Robert Kimmitt on a case-by-case basis. Kimmitt would be the Africa Bureau's direct line to Baker.

Baker's reaction to my conflict resolution idea led me to conclude that I should not seek to run the subject through the laborious, formal national security policy process. Rather, I decided we should proceed cautiously, one country at a time, keeping in touch with higher authority as we advanced. Baker's emphasis on collaboration with the Soviets to solve regional problems led me to seek an early meeting with my Soviet counterpart, Anatoly Adamishin, vice minister of foreign affairs for Africa and human rights. I had gotten to know Adamishin during 1987-88 when he and Chester Crocker were consulting on the Namibian independence negotiations. (I was senior director for Africa on the National Security Council staff at the time.) The Soviets had been helpful in nudging both the Angolans and the Cubans toward flexibility. I found that he was quite anxious to meet with me, and a meeting took place in Rome in May 1989.

Adamishin was quite frank about the Soviet view of "collaboration to solve regional problems." When Gorbachev came to power and reviewed Soviet foreign policy around the globe, he was horrified to see the costly Soviet commitments in Angola and Ethiopia. Both governments were Marxist, and both were Soviet client states.

Ethiopia had been fighting an unwinnable civil war for 30 years on two fronts -- against Eritrean secessionists and Tigrean "freedom fighters." Angola's regime had been fighting a war against the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) since 1975, when chaos ensued after Portugal gave Angola its independence without any preparation. That same year, Cuban troops had come to install the communist Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in power. In response, the neighboring South African regime began arming UNITA, which embarked on a guerrilla war that was still raging 14 years later.

In each country, the Soviets were spending the equivalent of $1 billion per year for arms deliveries and in-country military technical assistance. Adamishin said the Soviets could no longer afford these costly burdens in Africa and did not believe either conflict could be resolved through military means. They wanted to bow out but did not want to withdraw in a way that would cause their clients to be defeated or humiliated. They were hoping that U.S.-Soviet collaboration could promote negotiated settlements.

I told Adamishin that our collaboration on Angola should be feasible because we were both involved. The Soviets and the Cubans were arming and advising their clients in the Angolan government. We had been engaged since 1986 in a "covert action" program in support of the UNITA rebels, who were popular with U.S. conservatives. Our assistance to UNITA was part of the "Reagan Doctrine," designed to counter the spread of Soviet military power throughout the world.

I proposed to Adamishin that we work together to push our respective Angolan clients to the negotiating table. He agreed, although he could not resist chiding me. The Soviets, he said, were supporting the legitimate regime in power in Angola, while the United States was assisting the "illegitimate" rebel group UNITA.

On Ethiopia, I told Adamishin I was less sanguine about our ability to be helpful. U.S. relations with the harsh Stalinist regime in Ethiopia under dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam were at rock bottom. We had not had an ambassador there since 1981, and during the Reagan administration Ethiopia had remained on the list of pariah Marxist states publicly condemned by the president and other senior officials. No high-level us officials had visited Ethiopia since the regime took over in a 1974 coup against Emperor Haile Selassie, a friendly recipient of U.S. military aid. The Mengistu regime had turned to the Soviet Union for arms and strategic support. When I explained all this to Adamishin, he smiled and said, "Mengistu wants to make friends with you. Will you accept an invitation to make an official visit to Ethiopia?"

I could not immediately agree to go to Ethiopia, however, because of political sensitivities in Washington. I told Adamishin that I would first need to consult with the "political levels."

Back in Washington, I raised the issue with Under Secretary Kimmitt, who said I should accept an invitation to go to Ethiopia. He would tell Baker that the visit fell under the U.S.- Soviet worldwide collaboration policy and that I should be protected from the "hard-line" folks in some parts of the White House and the Heritage Foundation. In effect, Kimmitt agreed that we could begin to engage in conflict resolution work in Ethiopia.

Even before I could get together with my Soviet counterpart to discuss collaborating on Ethiopia and Angola, I received a call from Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who spent a large percentage of his time stroking key members of the Congress involved with national security and foreign policy. In April 1989, Eagleburger told me he was being besieged by the congressional "Hunger Caucus" about starvation and malnutrition in the Sudan, caused by the never-ending civil war. Beyond the absolute horrors of the guerrilla war and repression in southern Sudan was the added factor that the victims were mainly African Christians and Animists, while those in the Sudanese government repressing them were mainly Arabic -- speaking Muslims.

By the middle of 1989, the door had been opened for us to become third party intervenors in three of the four major African conflicts then in progress: Angola, Ethiopia and Sudan.

That left Mozambique, where the civil war between the government and the RENAMO rebel movement was having an impact similar to the one in the Sudan. Over a million refugees had fled Mozambique and an equal number were internally displaced. The humanitarian situation, which was always in crisis, was receiving U.S. assistance worth $100 million per year. No compelling policy reason argued for us to intervene in the Mozambique conflict, because the country had never really been an element in U.S.- Soviet competition, despite its earlier Marxist regime and considerable Soviet military assistance. Nevertheless, the government there had been helpful to us with South Africa, serving as an important communications channel during the Namibian independence negotiations. We therefore wanted to be of help to them.

During 1987 and 1988, conservatives in the Reagan administration had sought to stimulate support for the RENAMO rebels in Mozambique as anticommunist "freedom fighters" but were unable to make much progress against Chester Crocker's and my resistance. Moreover, Reagan had developed friendly relations with Mozambican President Samora Machel, as well as with Foreign Minister Joaquim Chissano, who became president after Machel's death in an airplane crash in 1986. We were therefore pleased when conflict resolution efforts in Mozambique began in 1989 under Italian leadership. In 1991, we moved from a position of interested bystander to one of deep involvement after the Portuguese government prevailed upon Secretary Baker to back Lisbon's participation in the Mozambican peace process.

Juggling Conflicts

Since each conflict had its own "personality," we could not employ any single approach to all. In Angola, for one, the government saw the United States as part of the problem and sincerely believed that the war could be ended on their terms if the United States would stop helping the UNITA rebels. Since domestic U.S. politics prevented us from stopping our assistance to UNITA, had we even wanted to, our approach in Angola, therefore, was to work indirectly through the neighboring heads of state to stimulate a peace process.

In Ethiopia, we were able to exercise leverage directly on the regime because of their desire to replace declining Soviet interest and assistance with something else. That "something else" turned out to be a scheme to reach out to the Israelis for arms and technical assistance, working through the United States. We were able to take advantage of this strategy to exercise considerable influence on the protagonists.

In the Sudan, we were working with a democratically elected regime that lacked the competence to deal simultaneously with a major famine and a civil war. The regime was anxious to have a dialogue with the United States in the search for solutions. Normally, in African civil wars, the regime insists on its own legitimacy, as opposed to the "illegitimacy" of the insurgent forces. The regime's first approach to the problem is usually to ask the international community to help suppress the "illegitimate" rebels or "bandits." In the Sudan, the situation was reversed. Our biggest problem was persuading the insurgents to get into a dialogue with the government, because they did not want to "legitimize" the regime despite its having been elected democratically. For its part, the regime was quite happy to recognize the "Sudanese character" of the rebels and would have been pleased to welcome them back to full participation in the "democratic process." When the democratic regime was replaced by an Islamic military dictatorship early in the game, the situation became more complicated, with the rebels being even less willing to enter into dialogue.

In Mozambique, the head of state fully understood the need for negotiations to end an unwinnable war, but his power structure bitterly opposed dialogue. They saw the rebels as creatures of the apartheid regime in South Africa. For them, a solution to the Mozambican war lay in the ending of minority rule in South Africa. With that formidable barrier to negotiations, our entry point in Mozambique was to encourage the head of state to use the power and prestige of the U.S. presidency to influence his own policy team. President Chissano twice brought his hard- line teams into the White House to listen to successive American presidents (Reagan and Bush) insist on the need for negotiations with the rebels.

The civil wars in Angola, Ethiopia, the Sudan, and Mozambique had been going on for a long time when Bush assumed the presidency and could be considered "mature" wars. The approaches to conflict resolution in those countries necessarily differed from our approaches to the three new wars that erupted during the Bush administration -- in Liberia, Rwanda, and Somalia. In none of these countries could we invoke a broader "extra-African" policy umbrella that would give us political cover for playing a role as a third party intervenor. We nevertheless became involved in all three, based mainly on the momentum of our work in the first four. Acting as a third party intervenor in Africa had become a critical part of the U.S. policy environment fairly early in the administration.

Managing Three New Crises

The "mature" wars could be the subjects of slow reflection and deliberate step-by-step approaches over lengthy periods of time, but the new wars presented the challenge of "crisis management." When a new conflagration breaks out, even if it first appears only as a hundred guerrillas running around the forested border areas of Liberia, there is little time to think about strategy. One wants to help achieve a negotiated settlement before major damage is done.

In Liberia, we jumped in quickly on the basis of the close historic relationship between Liberia and the United States. We were the big brother who was expected to restore order in the family. We sought to be mediators and power brokers along the lines of President Reagan's actions a few years earlier in the Philippines, where we had a similar historical relationship. It was not to be.

At the working level in the Bureau of African Affairs, we formulated detailed plans to effect a peaceful regime change in Liberia and were ready to try implementing it in the spring of 1990. Unfortunately, these plans were vetoed at higher levels: Liberia was not considered sufficiently important for the United States to take charge.

In Rwanda and Somalia, others intervened before we did, and we were happy to play secondary roles. It was probably no coincidence, however, that here, where our interventions in the early stages were the least aggressive, the conflicts turned out to have the most tragic consequences of all. Our approaches were timid and tardy, leading to costly interventions later to deal with humanitarian catastrophes. There was also probable cause and effect between our refusal to intervene in Liberia and its total collapse as both a state and a society. Clearly, our interventions in the "mature" wars were more productive than those in the newborn wars.

Coopting the Bureaucracy

While we did not seek a formal interagency consensus for a presidential policy decision regarding conflict interventions in Africa, the Bureau of African Affairs considered it vital to bring the national security community into the process at virtually every step of the way. We did this through a combination of formal and informal procedures.

We were fortunate in being able to convene interagency meetings without seeking the approval of higher authority. Our main mechanism was the Policy Coordinating Committee for Africa, the formal multiagency body I chaired within the NSC system. We convened this body rather frequently on specific African conflict situations, including those where there was no civil war in process, such as in Zaire, South Africa, and Kenya. This practice had several objectives.

We wanted to identify potential impediments in the bureaucracy to our acting as intervenors--a big problem, as it turned out, in the case of Somalia. We also found the PCC a major source of information and insight. Intelligence briefings set thestage for the development of ideas on the conflict resolution role, if any, of U.S. intervention. The jump to actually taking an initiative from that point was both small and logical. Finally, these meetings gave each agency, including the National Security Council staff, a stake in the process and reinforced State Department leadership. Informal small group meetings, attended by experts from various agencies, dealt with specific problems as they arose.

Decentralizing the Bureau

Within the State Department Bureau of African Affairs, the main role in our conflict resolution effort was played by the subregional office directorates. It was there that we conceptualized specific country approaches and developed and carried out our day-to-day tactics. The office directorates were in direct touch with our embassies, both in the countries concerned and in interested neighboring countries. Deputy assistant secretaries with subregional oversight provided higher-level supervision.

My role as assistant secretary was to provide policy impetus to the entire process, keep the political levels informed, consult with appropriate congressional players, and deal with higher-level counterparts in other agencies to keep them interested and supportive. I also spent a significant amount of time stroking counterparts in other governments to keep them happy and supportive of our efforts or encourage them to take initiatives.

Above all, I was a deployable asset. The country directors frequently asked me to go to certain capitals, or appear at certain negotiations, in order to achieve specific short-term goals. To economize on both time and money, we would try to consolidate travel missions. I would always visit several countries and work to make their leaders stakeholders in building peace. In Washington I met with a steady stream of visitors from governments andthe private sector interested in the peace process of one or another African country.

One of the principal advantages of keeping other agencies and State Department bureaus involved in our conflict resolution activities was the availability of the many talents in those organizations. The unsung heroes of several conflict negotiations, including those where the United States was not in charge, were the military experts and legal wordsmiths who came from within the U.S. bureaucracy to sit patiently with apprehensive African negotiators in the search for "win-win" compromises. In one notable example, military experts facilitated Angola's October 1992 elections by cleverly devising a way to have the Arizona Air National Guard conduct its annual exercises in Angola. In the process, while flying daily missions, the guardsmen transported election workers and redeployed troops.

Talking to Everybody

Early on, we adopted a tactical policy of avoiding fights over who was legitimate and who illegitimate among parties to African civil conflicts. We decided to talk to everyone and not worry about who might be offended, either in the country concerned or among the ideologues in Washington who closely followed events.

I made this policy somewhat inadvertently during my confirmation hearings in April 1989, when I was pressed by Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., to open a dialogue with the RENAMO insurgents in Mozambique. Until that moment, we had followed a policy of refusing to talk to RENAMO in view of their unsavory reputation for cruelty and human rights violations against civilians. I told Helms that it would be my policy to talk to anyone if it could contribute to peace. I was immediately slapped on the wrist for "making policy during confirmation hearings," but there it was, and we adhered to that policy throughout the Bush administration.

In addition to opening a dialogue with RENAMO, which offended both the Mozambican government and the American ideological left, we talked regularly to a wide range of actors in other conflicts: "Marxist" insurgents in Ethiopia, the leftist Angolan government, various Somali insurgent groups. We decided that, as a superpower, we did not have to worry too much about offending anybody. We kept our eye on the prize of conflict resolution, which took precedence over diplomatic niceties.

We tried to avoid routine formulas for negotiations. In particular, we were not fanatics about cease-fires. When there is a war going on, the side that wants a cease-fire is almost always the one that happens to be at a temporary disadvantage on the battlefield. Our experience was that the most fruitful negotiations are achieved in the absence of a cease-fire, callous as that may seem.

We were also not rigid about constitutional reform as part of the peace process, although it was clear that no rebel group could be expected to accept being integrated into a "status quo" power structure after having fought that power structure for a long period. If the UNITA rebels in Angola, for example, had accepted integration into the existing power structure in 1989, as proposed by the regional heads of state, we would not have been upset. Nevertheless, when UNITA said they preferred to keep fighting in order to force negotiations for "free and fair elections," we expressed understanding for that point of view as well.

Similarly, we did not condone the refusal by any side to a conflict to enter into dialogue, nor the setting of preconditions for talks by one or both sides. Like the question of legitimacy, we considered negotiating preconditions to talks another waste of time, as were lengthy negotiations about procedures.

In late 1992, toward the end of the Bush administration, we decided that it would be "untidy" to leave office without having established a formal policy covering what we had done and learned. Consequently, I initiated a process within the Policy Coordinating Committee for Africa to write a comprehensive U.S. policy toward Africa. In December 1992, we sent a cleared interagency policy document to the White House. That document formalized our key policy initiatives for the previous four years, emphasizing development based on economic reforms and free markets, democratization and good governance, and conflict management, including increased support for Organization of African Unity initiative.

President Bush signed the policy document in January 1993 as one of his last foreign policy acts before leaving office. We later learned, with much pride, that the Clinton administration reviewed the policy directive signed by President Bush and adopted it as its own.

In the end, our work as third party intervenors in these African conflicts taught us a great deal about what does and does not work in conflict management in Africa. Most notable was that the United States, as the sole remaining superpower, carries particular weight as well as special responsibilities. Its involvement conveys certain intangibles -- moral authority, a sense of security, confidence in the neutrality of U.S. proposals -- that tend to create a positive environment for negotiations. In effect, Washington's decisions to intervene or not to intervene diplomatically can greatly influence the prospects for peace and stability in Africa.

Career ambassador Herman J. "Hank" Cohen, an Africa specialist during his 38-year Foreign Service career, was assistant secretary of State for African affairs from 1989 to 1993. This article is adapted from his book, Intervening in Africa: Superpower Peacemaking in a Troubled Continent, to be published in June by St. Martin's Press and by Macmillan in Britain. It is the latest volume in the ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy Series.