The Specter of Anarchy: African States Verging on Dissolution
Zolberg, Aristide R.
African States Verging on Dissolution Beset by a horrendous economic predicament, Africa is today also haunted by a dreadful political nightmare: now that the winds of democracy are sweeping the...
...its two main kingdoms, Tigre in the north and Amharaspeaking Shoa in the south, contended for supremacy but were themselves subject to recurrent disintegration...
...Besides ethnic heterogeneity, what the countries under consideration have in common is that they can all be described as weak predatory states...
...The United States early on planted itself in Zaire, Ethiopia, and Liberia, while leaving French-speaking territories to be managed by Paris, and the southern part of the continent by Portugal and South Africa...
...By 1976 the PMAC had managed to transform itself into a tightly structured body dominated by Amharas, under the leadership of Major Mengistu Haile Mariam...
...Although the conference did produce some democratic guarantees and a timetable for political reconstruction, Ethiopia continues to implode...
...To begin with, the cases considered highlight the key role and heavy responsibility of foreign sponsors in sustaining the ethnocrats...
...A Muslim pastoral people, in the pre-European period the Somalis were organized into loosely associated clans sharing many cultural elements but without an overarching political organization...
...moreover, they constitute a mere 10 percent of the Ethiopian population...
...After an attempted coup in 1986, the last American-Liberian in the government, Charles Taylor, was dismissed, and fled into exile...
...the Soviet Union established itself in ex-French Guinea as well as Somalia, and invested in futures by sponsoring insurgent movements in the Horn, Portuguese Africa, and Namibia...
...Although in mid-September the antagonists agreed to stop fighting and turn in their arms to ECOWAS, it is unlikely that this will prove to be a permanent settlement...
...The PMAC clashed simultaneously with defenders of the ancien regime and more revolutionary organizations, as well as subjected peripheral groups taking advantage of the empire's collapse to increase their autonomy...
...In 1982 the various groups united as the National Somali Movement and began staging raids from Ethiopian bases...
...The weakest of states may persist if that environment is supportive, as Robert Jackson and Carl Rosberg have suggested with regard to the international political community's stance toward the new African states...
...help...
...As in any empire, the Ethiopian armed forces constituted a double-edged sword...
...outside powers are no longer interested, UN agencies fear for the safety of their personnel, and the Organization of African Unity is reluctant to take on a desperate case in a problematic region...
...Eritrea is a relatively well-developed territory, whose population, according to the British census of 1950—the last to date—consists about equally of Copts, closely related to Ethiopia's Tigreans, and Arabic-speaking Muslims...
...But because extortion is their only way of making a living, rulers in turn have to engage in violent repression of such challenges...
...A large stock of weapons will be used as currency...
...The cities were taken over by workers and students, the landed estates of the nobility and the church by peasants...
...The process fosters the emergence of a warlord system, as in seventeenth-century Germany or China at the beginning of the twentieth, verging on a murderous Hobbesian war of all against all...
...Africans should help one another, but cannot shoulder this additional burden entirely with their own resources...
...Hitherto opposed to Eritrean independence, Washington now accepted the battlefield outcome and acquiesced to a referendum, to be held within two years...
...Whereas it is true that established colonial territories were generally taken for granted as the relevant political unit, and that a number of organizations sought to encompass its entire population, democratization also sparked ethnic solidarities...
...A number of countries also experienced a crisis of subsistence, occasioned not only by catastrophic climate, but also the degradation of marginal agricultural environments as the result of overgrazing and overcultivation, as well as the expanding production of commodities for export at the cost of subsistence farming...
...Since most African states have kept going, it is taken for granted that they meet "system-maintenance requirements...
...He had backing from a combination of strange bedfellows: mischief-making Muammar Qaddafi and Burkina Faso's radical leader Blaise Compaore, but also COte d'Ivoire's conservative President Houphouet-Boigny, who worried about Doe's irredentism...
...Weak predatory states with a large supply of firepower, which they tend to misuse but cannot monopolize, are subject to two distinct kinds of deterioration...
...Then, with Zaire subject to the geopolitical devaluation occasioned by the end of the cold war, Mobutu was dropped by his American and European patrons as overly embarrassing and enjoined to sanitize his economy...
...Although the African state looms large in relation to other organizations, it has a limited capacity for managing society and directing change—a paradox captured by Thomas Callaghy's apt characterization of that state as a "lame Leviathan...
...But they neglected to point out that the international environment can also make things worse, either by way of destructive intervention, as in southern Africa, or indirectly, by making it possible for tyrants to expand their power well beyond what they might do on their own...
...In the postwar period nationalists in the British and Italian possessions advocated reunion of all Somalis...
...but more commonly, they could squeeze income only by fostering a shift from subsistence to export agriculture, while stepping up exactions from primary producers...
...The term is used here in its literal sense, to denote a nearly total absence of constituted authority that leaves a country's contentious elements to fend for themselves...
...hence they tended to be even more parochial than the civilians they replaced and, with no experience of statecraft, quicker to fall back on brute force...
...Bane escaped in January 1991, leaving seven well-armed groups jockeying for power...
...As of early 1991, half of the population was uprooted, with over seven hundred thousand abroad...
...but this entails a confusion between two types of power, which Michael Mann has termed "despotic" and "infrastructural...
...Kinshasa was pacified by French and Belgian troops sent in to evacuate their citizens...
...Seasoned observers asserted the situation was much worse than anything they had seen in Lebanon, and Liberia's ubiquitous Lebanese traders were themselves fleeing back to Beirut...
...Liberia's ancien regime lasted until 1980...
...Their first challenge to Haile Selassie's authority, in 1960, was defeated with U.S...
...In the face of demands occasioned by broader mobilization and rising expectations, resources had to be expanded and demands managed...
...With less access to education than in any European colony, they were mobilized by the chiefs for plantation and mine labor, and as with many other "backward" peoples, also provided rank and file for the constabulary...
...In reality, however, the ex-slaves were mostly duped and intimidated into going back, and Liberia evolved into a quasi-colonial client state, founded on racial inequality...
...Then, once the tyrant was no longer able to properly reward his henchmen for their services, they went into business for themselves...
...whether or not they go over the edge depends on circumstances, especially the emergence of a sinister syndrome found in all the cases considered: a coincidence of tyranny with external military patronage...
...The purpose of this analysis is not to demonstrate that the tragic fate experienced by a handful of sub-Saharan countries is ineluctable...
...But this is clearly not the case among the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, which are extremely poor to start with, and have deteriorated further as the result of a fatal combination of inauspicious world realities and political misdeeds...
...Waiting for the government to disintegrate of its own accord, the armed forces finally deposed Haile Selassie and proclaimed a Provisional Military Administrative Council (PMAC...
...12): "Somalia Self-Destructs, and the World Looks On...
...There is no doubt the tyrant will soon be gone...
...The sudden influx of military goods and the launching of major construction projects raised the level of corruption to unprecedented heights...
...Its roots in the legendary Abyssinian Empire notwithstanding, the Ethiopia we know is a relatively recent and fragile amalgam...
...During the drought that swept the continent in the early 1970s, Ethiopians were deprived of aid because the emperor insistently denied there was any famine...
...The stresses of the unending Eritrean war undermined discipline among the armed forces...
...1981...
...Despite historic ties to the AmericanLiberians, the Reagan administration cynically accepted the fait accompli and Doe's perfunctory promise of democratization...
...but it was clearly the beginning of the end...
...The Mengistu regime ended where it began, in Eritrea...
...But this triggered growing resentment among the groups he excluded...
...but the ruthless strategies he deployed over the next 306 • DISSENT The Specter of Anarchy decade exacted a heavy cost in human suffering, and probably aggravated the population's economic predicament...
...In effect launching their existence as an independent state without awaiting the referendum, the Eritreans have turned their back on Ethiopian affairs, while nevertheless retaining control over its lifelines...
...With Eritrea gone, the main challenge comes from the Oromos, some 40 percent of the Ethiopian population, a majority being Muslim...
...Amplifying the effects of these factors was Africa's runaway demography...
...agriculture was totally disrupted, creating a danger of famine...
...Should these be dismissed as highly exceptional cases, or do they reflect in a more extreme form problems common to sub-Saharan Africa generally...
...As violence becomes the leading means of survival, it tends to feed on itself...
...In the past year the country has split in two, and is now•so torn by violence as to be inaccessible to even the most dauntless international humanitarian organizations...
...Some of the loot was redistributed to relieve pressures from the urban sector, to which rulers were most vulnerable, but much of it was appropriated...
...Negotiations among the warlords have so far led nowhere, largely because they hardly control their men...
...Although Britain at first advocated partition, as in India or Palestine, in 1950 bargaining among the great powers prompted the United Nations to entrust the country to Ethiopia, on condition that it be allowed to retain its own representative institutions and its distinct cultural identity...
...Although I have emphasized the infrastructural weakness of the state as a major problem, this is not to argue on behalf of the reinforcement of state power alone, since Africa's predicament arises also from the fact that societal institutions are insufficiently developed to hold potential tyrants in check...
...This in turn triggered retaliatory violence by Doe's army, propelling some two hundred thousand refugees into COte d'Ivoire and Guinea, and others south into Monrovia...
...These societies had a low ratio of population in relation to land and lived close to the level of subsistence...
...However, Humpty Dumpty was unexpectedly put together again when the United Nations intervened to reestablish the country's territorial integrity and the CIA, in one of its greatest feats, transformed an army clerk named Joseph-Desire Mobutu into a Hobbesian sovereign...
...It has been proudly displayed as Africa's only independent republic, a little black America constructed by voluntarily expatriated ex-slaves...
...rather, it seeks to establish how, despite their bad prospects, Africans might avoid such outcomes, and what obligations this entails for the rest of us...
...In addition to losing most of its military equipment, Somalia was faced with a heavy burden of refugees from the Ogaden, supplemented in the mid-1980s by new waves driven by hunger...
...Matters came to a head in September 1991, when the soldiers brought to the capital to repress demonstrations on behalf of a National Conference of Democratic Forces, belatedly convened by Mobutu to alleviate international criticism, devastated the city instead...
...The solution to the quandary is 308 • DISSENT The Specter of Anarchy that all such states hover on the brink of disaster...
...The consequences of this negative legacy were said to be compounded by an unusually divisive array of "tribes," exacerbated by cold war confrontations involving the United States, the Soviet Union, and China...
...What distinguishes these unfortunate countries from the rest of the continent...
...While international restraints would limit the tyrants' destructive capacity, they would not prevent their emergence in the first place, which is attributable to deep-seated, historically determined flaws in the political configuration of contemporary Africa...
...The resulting debt burden is enough to swamp Africa's fledgling democratic forces...
...the death toll rose to some twenty thousand, mostly civilians...
...These developments again fostered massive flight as well as renewed uprisings...
...With the treasury empty and a critical shortage of fuel, in early 1991 the army disintegrated and Mengistu prepared to leave...
...Beyond this, it is especially urgent to bring about general disarmament, and to establish a tight embargo on the further supply of automatic weapons, which constitute an even deadlier plague in Mogadishu, Monrovia, or Moroto than in the Bronx or Dallas...
...But the strategy proved self-defeating, for the agents of repression quickly learned where true power lay...
...Navy by a tiny minority of American-Liberian families, organized as a one-party machine, fueled by rake-offs from concessionary companies, among which Firestone Rubber was paramount, until the discovery of rich iron and bauxite deposits brought in a number of others...
...Thanks to this patronage, which brought him unstinting military assistance, and to the world's continuing interest in the country's mineral resources, the CIA's SUMMER • 1992 • 303 The Specter of Anarchy creature emerged as one of Africa's cruelest tyrants, and certainly the richest...
...With his survival and Ethiopia's integrity assured thanks to the Soviet commitment, Mengistu undertook to transform the ancient empire into a People's Republic...
...Fortunately, this is quite rare...
...For two decades, stability prevailed...
...The situation at the end of 1991 was summed up by a headline in The New York Times (Dec...
...But withdrawal is not enough...
...It was during this very period that Africa moved to the fore as an international strategic arena...
...aside from white-settler countries, which indeed experienced violent decolonization, it was found also in Rwanda and Burundi (Tutsi-Hutu), as well as Zanzibar (Arabs-Africans), all of which have by now in fact blown up...
...In 1977 Bane successfully invaded the Ogaden, but was ultimately routed...
...Its downfall began when President William Tolbert's decision to increase the price of rice, the major staple of the "natives," triggered massive protest...
...But once international attention waned, Emperor Haile Selassie violated all these conditions and moved steadily toward annexation...
...the Mandingo aligned themselves with Doe, while the Gio and Mano split off from Taylor to form yet another movement, under Prince Johnson...
...Another path is internal withdrawal, where peasants concentrate on production for subsistence while 310 • DISSENT The Specter of Anarchy withholding from the state what it claims as its due...
...With tyranny going out of fashion everywhere, he also faced internal demands for political reform...
...policy for over a century...
...but Siad Bane, now receiving military assistance from the United States, survived through severe repression and relying increasingly on his own kin...
...convinced that the Tigreans have no choice but to share power with fellow Christians, they are seeking to exact the maximum price for their cooperation...
...One thing should be clear from the start: although Africa's troubles are commonly laid at the door of "tribalism," this is a gross oversimplification...
...But the crisis has now become so severe that we must abandon such niceties and stare reality in the face...
...hence within a few years a majority of the new states experienced military coups...
...Ethnic groups became "advanced" or "backward," rich or poor...
...While almost totally ignored in America, Liberia should be of special concern because of its relation to our own racial history, and its use as an instrument of U.S...
...Welcoming the invaders as liberators from Krahn rule, Nimba County's population swelled the ranks of Taylor's force...
...In the face of shrinking resources and an absence of institutional restraints, desperate authoritarian rulers degenerate into kleptocratic tyrants, which under African conditions takes the form of ethnic exclusiveness, as seen in Liberia and Somalia...
...Anarchy is no mere figment of the white racist imagination, but a realistic description of the conditions that have emerged among a disparate group of African countries...
...Ten days later, the foreign press was invited to witness the public execution of a dozen senior government officials...
...The coup then evolved into a social revolution, punctuated by a radically egalitarian land reform in March 1975...
...The Council of Representatives has decided to give each of the country's fourteen regions its own parliament and control over internal security...
...In a few instances the new elites had access to mineral royalties...
...Altogether, they constitute a highly disparate group, with very different pre-European cultures, dissimilar colonial experiences, and varying economic situations at the time the conflicts got under way...
...Now in effect an independent country, Northern Somalia is itself being torn asunder by clan-based bands of juvenile bush fighters...
...Without resources to fight back, oppressed urban and rural masses have little choice but to try to get out from under...
...Exploiting the resulting frustrations and the civilian regime's notorious corruption, in 1969 the army took over...
...Infrastructural power, as against despotism, is fostered by organic exchanges between state and society, and this in turn can take place only if the economic environment is relatively favorable...
...Although this radical junta controlled the capital and the major towns, it faced uprisings in nine out of fourteen provinces in addition to Eritrea...
...Most countries consist of a fairly large array of diverse groups, making for a very large number of possible confrontations...
...The postcolonial elite's project has been aptly characterized by Frederick Cooper as "self-aggrandizement combined with enough redistribution to maintain its tenuous and vital hold on the state" ("Africa and the World Economy," African Studies Bulletin, 24: 2-3 [June/Sep...
...this provoked an intervention by "prodemocracy" elements of the army, in turn put down by Mobutu loyalists...
...however, after the victory in the south, the Ethiopians were able to roll them back, again with direct Soviet assistance...
...The pursuit of this objective was initially constrained by the need to maintain a balance among the clans and by Ethiopia's military superiority...
...This in turn fostered a proliferation of opposition groups, including a secessionist movement in the north (former British Somaliland...
...Yet ethnicity does play a role...
...but this is a feature they share with many others...
...But since this is again a characteristic they share with the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, it does not by itself provide an adequate explanation of their predicament...
...The extreme weakness of the African state was initially hidden from view because it displayed a considerable capacity for engaging in repressive action...
...Leaving aside the special situation of southern Africa, which accounts for about one-third of the internal and external refugees, these displaced populations are all victims of violent conflicts in sovereign African states...
...Overall, food production per capita decreased by nearly 20 percent from 1960 to 1986, with the prospect of continued decline...
...Although this appears to violate conventionally held notions of "sovereignty," in such cases sovereignty has in effect ceased to exist...
...Over the next five years, Liberia was turned into a bastion of the American security system, and thereby emerged as the leading African recipient of U.S...
...Seizing the opportunity provided by the Soviet withdrawal, the Bush administration then undertook to create an orderly succession, as well as to negotiate the evacuation of some 14,000 Ethiopian Jews who had fled to the encircled capital...
...The new lands provided coffee, gold, and slaves...
...their supporters included Sudan, but also Syria from 1964 onward, and, after 1969, Libya and Southern Yemen...
...The collapse of central authority has redounded once again to the benefit of the periphery, now in the hands of well-armed guerrilla forces...
...The defeat precipitated an attempted coup by disgruntled army officers from rival clans...
...However, states do not exist in a vacuum, and their fate depends substantially on the character of the international environment...
...Even after the countries of Portuguese Africa gained their independence, these probings and confrontations were accompanied by vast flows of weapons...
...With the officer class restricted to American-Liberians, the coup was staged by a band of noncommissioned officers under the leadership of Master-Sergeant Samuel K. Doe...
...Africa's difficulties were aggravated in the 1970s by the deterioration of its already extremely marginal position within the international economy, the energy crisis, the mounting burden of debt, the corruption of economic managers as well as of their foreign patrons, and the disenchantment of investors...
...and in the south disgruntled army commanders began to go into business for themselves...
...The Congo's problems were thought to be unique, attributable mainly to an especially exploitative colonial power that failed to prepare the country for self-rule and then responded to pressure by quickly getting out of the way...
...In October the peacekeeping forces established an interim government under political science professor Amos Sawyer...
...Even if its existence is externally assured, the state may be reduced to little more than an arena where groups vie for survival...
...The violence that produced international flows also occasioned massive internal displacements, with current estimates reaching over nine million...
...Almost totally dependent on the Soviet Union and East Germany, the regime was doomed from the moment the Gorbachev government decided to sharply reduce its involvement in the Third World...
...The question we must therefore ask is: under what conditions do normal attachments of human beings to their communities become pathological...
...Although in control of the capital, the Tigreans are isolated amid hostile Amhara territory, with their home base hundreds of miles to the north...
...African movements for self-determination are usually referred to as "nationalist...
...With the external struggle over, divisions between Muslims and Christians are ominously moving to the fore...
...The conflict then turned into a devastating war of attrition, causing recurrent waves of refugees...
...As increasingly emphasized by a new generation of African intellectuals, priority must be given to the development of "civil society...
...The hinterland's heterogeneous peoples, formally designated as "natives," were left under the rule of their traditional leaders, turned into clients of the American-Liberian machine...
...Party competition as well as the high value of office fostered a proliferation of political entrepreneurs, who cast their appeal in parochial terms...
...Until well after World War II, it was governed under the umbrella of the U.S...
...The Somalis invaded Ethiopia on July 23, 1977, and rapidly seized the coveted Ogaden territory, but were expelled the following March by Ethiopian forces under the leadership of Soviet officers, with the support of Cuban troops...
...Major General Siad Barre, a member of the Marahan clan, whose domain encompasses the Ogaden, then astutely exploited superpower rivalries to obtain Soviet aid for a vast military buildup...
...How can this be met...
...Invoking his corruption and violations of human rights, the United States in 1987 placed Liberia into receivership...
...After expelling the Italians, Britain assumed control over their colonies, Eritrea and Somalia, awaiting their disposition by the SUMMER • 1992 • 305 The Specter of Anarchy international community...
...The turning point came in February 1990, when after nearly three decades of struggle, the Eritrean People's Liberation Front took Massawa, Ethiopia's major port, and the delivery point for relief food as well as military supplies, and laid siege to the regional capital...
...Negotiations dragged on, chaos set in...
...but its authority was limited to the capital, while Taylor controlled most of the country...
...although this was partly achieved in 1960, when the two territories merged into a single state, independent Somalia continued to voice irredentist claims, especially toward Ethiopia's SUMMER • 1992 • 307 The Specter of Anarchy Ogaden province...
...Bane's clannishness precipitated a rebellion in the central part of the country as well...
...and it was torn also by tensions between Amharas and other groups...
...While designed to foster a viable confederation, this framework may signal the beginning of the end...
...Consequently, precolonial political structures could offer relatively little resistance to the formation of a new system of domination, and the remnants of traditional societies appeared in the newly formed colonial territories mostly as "ethnic groups," which were sometimes newly constructed amalgams altogether...
...Mengistu flew off on May 24, and three days later representatives of the opposition forces as well as remnants of his government gathered in London to negotiate the transfer of power...
...Following the death, possibly at the hands of the CIA, of Patrice Lumumba, leader of the sole Congo-wide and multi-ethnic political organization, the country quickly fragmented into localized movements, headed by ethnic leaders backed by rudimentary militia, sporting either a vociferous Marxism or an equally strident "Westernism...
...existing differences were sharpened also by the uneven impact of social and economic change...
...In the following decade, the country underwent substantial economic growth, mostly by way of generous concessions to foreign investors, and education was expanded as well...
...but this brought few benefits to the urban masses, and none whatever to the peasantry, whose margin of survival was steadily reduced by demographic expansion and galloping erosion...
...After the multinational force landed, Doe was assassinated under mysterious circumstances...
...As with Mobutu, Doe's value dropped precipitously with the waning of the cold war...
...This occurred also in Uganda, Chad, the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, and Burundi...
...Where the prospect for Liberia is for a protracted, multisided civil war, Ethiopia faces a disintegration into a number of successor states...
...SUMMER • 1992 • 311...
...This abdication of responsibility destroyed the regime's last vestige of legitimacy among the educated of the new generation...
...Nor do these countries share a particular pattern of ethnic groups, beyond heterogeneity...
...The accumulated wherewithal of repression enabled him to fend off these demands, at least for a time, but only at the cost of escalating violence...
...but this should not be viewed as an alternative to state formation...
...They view themselves as an enslaved people, who can now legitimately exact bloody retribution from their defeated Amhara masters...
...Predictably, elections held in 1985 under American supervision produced a majority for Doe...
...In late 1989 Charles Taylor led a guerrilla force of about 250 into Nimba county, Liberia's primary agricultural, mining, and logging region...
...Even as the superpowers worked out ways of averting the dangers of thermonuclear proliferation, they poured out streams of firepower, mostly automatic and semi-automatic personal weapons, that fostered a rapid escalation of misery and dread among the world's least fortunate...
...Ethiopia was firmly backed by the United States, which assumed Britain's succession in the Red Sea region, as well as by Israel, concerned to prevent the emergence of a Muslim-dominated independent state...
...Beleaguered governments relied heavily on the instruments of despotic power, namely the police and military forces inherited from the colonial state...
...but severe clashes are in fact relatively rare...
...Since the dawn of independence bloody implosions have taken place also in Uganda, which appears to have somewhat recovered, and Chad, which is perennially on the brink of yet another catastrophic episode...
...Severely injured in an automobile accident and abandoned by the United States, the seventy-year old despot turned toward Libya, but to little avail...
...A further source of confusion is the assumption that the persistence of an organization can be attributed to its capacity to perform tasks required for survival...
...With the Carter administration unwilling to intervene actively on its behalf, the PMAC turned to the Soviets, who quickly decided that Ethiopia was more valuable...
...Chiefship tended to be over people rather than over land, and political dynamics focused on competition among clientelist factions...
...aid on a per capita basis...
...The absence of political centralization and the low population density left open the possibility of "exit," giving rise to a process of segmentation whereby new social clusters were constantly being established by emigrants on available land...
...In contrast with states in other parts of the developing world, which were often carved out of larger empires, most of them consist of small-scale societies that were bundled into entities designed by European colonial entrepreneurs in response to imperial rivalries of the late nineteenth century...
...As for the Eritreans, they gained access to money, weapons, training, and staging bases from a variety of Arab states...
...Major civil conflicts have erupted as well in Nigeria, Rwanda, Burundi, and Sudan...
...Takeover of the apparatus of the colonial state provided resources for organizing the initial array of clientelist networks by which the state was managed, and there was also aid from the former colonial power, and grants and loans SUMMER • 1992 • 309 The Specter of Anarchy from international actors seeking to establish a sphere of influence within the African arena...
...Those in the south were supported by neighboring Somalia, then a client state of the Soviet Union...
...With the military out of commission, protestors with long-accumulated grievances could act with impunity...
...But since weapons are widely available and warriors can secure their subsistence without engaging in production, warmaking gains the upper hand...
...The present diagnosis suggests that the greatest threat to the lives of contemporary Africans arises not from what is loosely called "tribalism," the deep attachment of ordinary people to their communities, but rather from the emergence of ethnically based predatory states...
...Pre-1980 Liberia, however, did have a configuration that is especially explosive, involving political and economic domination by an ethnic or racial minority...
...the wounds that murderous conflicts have inflicted on fragile societies are unlikely to mend of themselves, and Africa remains fair game for other international birds of prey—especially in the northeast, which is linked with the Middle East theater...
...Annexation triggered dissent among Christians as well, and in 1961 the movement launched an armed struggle...
...The Amharas, who make up some 25 percent, remain firmly committed to Ethiopian integrity but are themselves deeply divided by the conflicts of the past decade and a half...
...Serious consideration of these matters has been blocked by the self-censorship of wellmeaning observers, reluctant to furnish ammunition to those who proclaim that Africans are but one step removed from savagery...
...Soon the conflict was highly internationalized...
...but the expanded realm was more difficult to manage because Menelik's new subjects were culturally very different, Negro animists, or Oromo and Somali Muslims—the Christian empire's traditional enemies...
...African States Verging on Dissolution Beset by a horrendous economic predicament, Africa is today also haunted by a dreadful political nightmare: now that the winds of democracy are sweeping the continent, it looks as if tyranny might give way to anarchy...
...Thousands fled the ravaged countryside to the capital city, only to land amid bloody chaos...
...All these problems call for an enduring commitment from the international community to assist in the political reconstruction of destroyed countries, to provide protection against nefarious intruders in vulnerable regions, and even to intervene directly should the state take on a completely pathological character...
...Concurrently, the Tigrean People's Liberation Front advanced southward toward Addis Ababa...
...Hence this is not the time to impose on them harsh remedies, but rather to wipe the slate clean...
...The first instance of an African country falling apart, which evoked headlines in the springtime of African independence some thirty years ago, was the ex-Belgian Congo—today's Zaire...
...The African states' generally weak infrastructural power stems from the combination of distinctive precolonial and colonial structures...
...brought in to repress the populace, the army joined them instead...
...The government's war effort was fatally hampered by the Soviet Union's refusal to provide aircraft to transport troops to the besieged city...
...Meanwhile, with American blessing, the Tigreans entered the capital to restore order...
...at American insistence, the opposition coalition agreed to hold a conference by July 1 to form a broad-based provisional government...
...In the past two years, chaos has also engulfed the region's two oldest independent states, Liberia and Ethiopia, as well as Somalia...
...The Eritrean insurgents had taken advantage of the diversion of the Ethiopian army to the Ogaden in order to gain control of most of their province...
...Mobutu now agreed to an opposition leader as prime minister, but subsequently replaced him with a more amenable personage, who proceeded to suspend the National Conference...
...One suggestive indicator of Africa's predicament is that as of the end of 1990 it had over five million refugees, nearly one-third of the world's total...
...In the late nineteenth century, following the scramble set off by the collapse of Egypt, the Shoan king Menelik astutely exploited European rivalries over the Horn, whose geopolitical value was enhanced by the Suez Canal, to more than double his holdings...
...but the term is somewhat misleading in that it evokes national identities...
...Under these conditions, life is reduced to two fundamental activities: food production and war...
...Ethnocracy can also trigger a violent implosion, a disaggregation of both rulers and ruled into primary solidarity groups vying with one another in a desperate search for security...
...but given that for the past quarter of a century government in Zaire has meant almost nothing but depredation, the country will be back at square one—with the added burdens of a much larger population, the plague of an HIV epidemic, a huge international debt, and a long list of accounts to be settled between ethnic groups and institutional factions that worked with Mobutu or suffered as his victims...
...If the international configuration allows, this may result in a massive exodus...
...Governing their possessions with traditional imperial techniques, the Europeans exploited tensions among these groups to enhance their own power...
...under conditions of slash-and-burn agriculture, their domain was not fixed...
...in early 1974, yet another string of mutinies culminated in a generalized uprising...
...Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, despite intermittent attempts at modernization from above, including those launched by the Italian occupiers from 1935 to 1941, Ethiopia's administration remained rudimentary, and there was little economic development...
...This reflected the evolving relations between the superpowers in the epoch of "Mutually Assured Destruction," with cautious stability at the center and confrontational probings throughout the periphery...
...Should the preservation of existing borders no longer be of concern to the international community, tenuously amalgamated countries may be allowed to disintegrate altogether into their component elements...
...In this light, despite the catastrophic present, Africa's prospects have improved somewhat since the United States and the former Soviet Union relinquished their callous adventurism...
...Exiled Krahn forces are continuing to stage attacks from Sierra Leone, and Taylor is receiving new military assistance from Burkina Faso and C6te d'Ivoire...
...Throughout its history, Africa's Coptic Christian realm stagnated at an extremely low level of organizational development, owing to material and technological constraints...
...At the beginning of 1992, the most extreme situation anywhere in Africa was to be found next door in Somalia...
...True, ethnic solidarities play a major role in its political life, but this does not always lead to violent conflicts...
...As Taylor pushed on toward the capital, all of Liberia's peoples were engulfed in the confrontation...
...The accelerating collapse of authority left a vacuum filled by young warriors with automatic guns...
...He proceeded to scavenge the state on behalf of his 304 • DISSENT The Specter of Anarchy own Krahn people, a small group located in the southeast alongside the COte d'Ivoire border, who dominated the army's enlisted ranks...
...The appropriate approach is multilateral, preferably under the umbrella of some regional organization, as in Liberia...
...During the colonial period, soldiers were frequently recruited from minority groups in hinterland regions, "unspoiled" by dawning political consciousness...
...Especially hard on Muslims, Ethiopian rule provoked the formation of an Eritrean liberation movement initially based in Cairo...
...With the various forces stalemated around Monrovia, where civilian deaths escalated, in August 1990 leaders of the Economic Organization of West African States (ECOWAS) decided on an unprecedented intervention, on the grounds that the war was no longer an internal conflict because thousands of their citizens were trapped in Liberia, while neighboring countries were swamped by Liberian refugees...
...Wherever these deadly supplies landed, conflicts between rulers and ruled, and between contending groups, increased...
...Far from inaugurating an era of stability, the advent of the military often exacerbated the very conflicts that had provided the pretext for intervention...
...Although foreign policy "realists" in the United States welcomed military rule as a harbinger of political stability, of anticommunism, and of development policies attuned to capitalist imperatives, this rested on a profound misunderstanding of African realities...
...In the late 1980s the northern insurgents gained control over most of their region...
...However, Africa's predatory rulers are severely constrained by extreme poverty, and the prevalent structural weakness makes it as difficult to increase extraction by way of state action as of capitalist exploitation...
...in the twentieth century they ended up under four colonial jurisdictions: Ethiopia, French Djibouti, British Somaliland, and Italian Somalia...
Vol. 39 • July 1992 • No. 3
