Weaving Peace: Essays on Peace, Governance and Conflict Transformation in the Great Lakes Region of Africa
Weaving Peace: Essays on Peace, Governance and Conflict Transformation in the Great Lakes Region of Africa
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| ISBN-13: | 9781466954175 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Trafford Publishing |
| Publication date: | 08/30/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 487 KB |
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WEAVING PEACE
Essays on Peace, Governance and Conflict Transformation in the Great Lakes Region of AfricaTrafford Publishing
Copyright © 2012 Samuel Kale EwusiAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4669-5419-9
Chapter One
Achieving Peace, Promoting Good Governance, and Transforming Conflicts in the Great Lakes of Africa: A Contextual Introduction
Samuel Kale Ewusi and Jean-Bosco Butera
If you are a leader of peace, listen to the discourse of the petitioner. Be not abrupt with him; that would trouble him. —Egyptian Proverb
Intractable conflicts have had the people of the Great Lakes region in its grasp for many decades. This situation came to its apogee when photographs of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda appeared on our television screens. Against the backdrop of macabre terms such as genocide, ethnic cleansing, rape, exploitation, corruption, etc. used in describing the events that have characterized the Great Lakes region, two overriding questions come to mind. First is whether peace can be achieved in the region and, second, why peace has been so elusive in the region. In attempting to respond to the first question, we are reminded of Barash's mathematical analogy of peace being an asymptote. That is something that can be approached but not quite reached. Although this could be a pessimistic view, one can afford to be optimistic with the second question through the lenses of theologian and antiwar activist A. J. Muste when he wrote, "There is no way to peace. Peace is the way." The reason for this optimistic view resides in the fact that the Great Lakes region, after so many decades of intractable conflicts, does not have the luxury of bemoaning a near miss by regretting that, although through countless initiatives and interventions, they have come close to achieving peace, but it continues to elude the people of the region.
Achieving peace, promoting good governance, and transforming conflicts in the Great Lakes region requires an understanding of the myriad causes of the widespread conflicts that have engulfed the region and the propensity of the people in the region to resort to violence as a means of settling disputes from the spectacles of people of the region. The preponderant narratives regarding the causes, which have gained traction over the years, have mostly emanated from outside the region. In fact, literature on the conflicts in the region has often fallen short of the contextual flavor required for a deeper understanding of the ingredients required for achieving long-lasting peace.
An example of this lack of context is strongly highlighted in the preface to Phil Clark and Zachary Kaufman (editor) where President Paul Kagame of Rwanda testily takes on René Lemarchand's contention that the Hutu/ Tutsi terminologies form the basis of the problem of ethnicity in Rwanda. President Kagame does not only dispute Lemarchand's premise but also advocates the criminalization of the philosophy of denial and revisionism, which have typically stereotyped some postgenocide narratives. His central argument remains that if denial of the Holocaust can be criminalized, denial of the genocide should also be criminalized. There is abundant literature on revisionists and denialists of the genocide in Rwanda in spite of the international political and judicial recognition. This reflects Francois Mitterrand's assertion that "in such countries [Rwanda], genocide is not too important." A further justification for the critical need for context in literature on the situation in the Great Lakes region is contained in Severine Autesserre's piece in African Affairs on the international community's response to the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He argues that the narratives that have driven the action of the international community in Congo and, of course, the Great Lakes region have focused on the primary causes of violence, the illegal exploitation of mineral resources with the consequential human rights abuses, and a central solution of extending the authority of the state. Severine believes that the international actor's concentration on the exploitation and trafficking of mineral resources as a source of violence has led them to overlook the myriad other causes such as land conflict; poverty; corruption; local, political, and social antagonisms; and hostile relations between state officials, including security forces and the general population. The result has been that "interveners have singled out for support one category of victims, namely sexually injured women and girls at the expense of others, notably those tortured in a nonsexual manner, child soldiers and the families of those killed."
Based on the existence of a dearth in contextual insight and understanding regarding the situation of peace, governance, and conflict transformation in the Great Lakes region, this survey titled "Wisdom from the Source: Essays on Peace, Governance, and Conflict Transformation" sought to compile essays on the themes from academicians, practitioners from the region, all of whom have lived through the situation for decades. Their insights provide the contextual ingredient usually absent in the majority of existing discourse on the region.
Hence, in trying to comprehend the causes and the intractability of conflicts in the region, it is important to ascertain that although the conflicts are interrelated and interwoven in the causes and course, conflicts do not occur as a generality. This book takes the view that the wars or conflict in the various countries of the region are individual wars (in spite of the spillover effect) requiring individual and detailed studies. The generalization of the conflicts in the region and how to achieve sustainable peace has often led to an understanding reminiscent of poet John Saxe's depiction of the blind men and the elephant. The solution therefore seems to be to put all issues discussed on achieving peace, good governance, and conflict transformation, which are partly wrong and partly true—like Saxe's blind men—and add a good number of others to possibly obtain a comprehensive and peculiar view of the complex elephant, which is intractability of the conflict in the region.
Separating the Sheep from the Goat
Be it as it may, there is no denying the fact that deep-rooted conflict in most countries in the Great Lakes region has plumbed the depths of human emotion and produced inhumane actions, which have caused immense human misery. This region has contributed generously to the litany of savage prone leaders who have stalked the continent of Africa since the continent shook off the shackles of colonialism. The likes of Idi Amin, Mobutu Sese Seko, Augustin Bizimungu, Joseph Kony, and Thomas Lubanga come to mind. These names have became synonymous with torture, assassination, genocide, cannibalism, and other crimes that still make the world cringe with their sheer levels of brutality.
Most of the literature on the causes of the conflicts in the Great Lakes region places colonialism at the center of every dispute. This may not be farfetched, especially with regards to Rwanda, Burundi, and DR Congo, which constitute the epicenter of the conflict earthquake in the region and which were all colonized by Belgium. However, with the benefit of hindsight and the ever presence of the invisible hand of former colonies, it is abundantly clear that postcolonial governance by the leaderships in these countries did more to further entrench the much-blamed colonial policies of divide and rule. What they blame the colonialists was used to entrench personal and ethnic power to the detriment of the others, to commit mass atrocities against the perceived others, and to loot the resources of their countries at the detriment of the majority.
Therefore, peeling the onion in order to decipher the real causes of the conflicts in the region requires an analogy of Newton's laws of motion. Newton's first law of motion, formulated in his book Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687), states that the velocity of a body is acted upon by an external force. In other words, every motion has a mover, and every effect has a cause. The conflicts in the Great Lakes have always never been short of movers. Furthermore, Newton's third law of motion tells us more about the cause and effect by stating that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The recognition of the cause and effect is one of the basic premises of philosophy and one of the first observations of sentient man. Causality is the engine that drives scientific enquiry to the wonder of discovery. Causation is also the essence of history. Therefore, logic recognizes three kinds of causes namely: the necessary, sufficient, and contributory causes, which could all be applied in the understanding of the myriad conflicts in the GLR.
The necessary cause is one that must be present for the effect to occur—some of which include large-scale poverty, abundance of natural resources, and bad governance. The sufficient cause is one that, on its own, can make the effect occur. With this, we can comfortably name ethnic oppression and dictatorship of either the minority or the majority. While the contributory cause is one that precedes the effect and whose alteration alters the effect. However, a cause may be necessary but not sufficient or sufficient but not necessary. Only the necessary cause is truly indispensable. This is especially true in all the conflicts in the Great Lakes in particular and Africa in general.
In fact, the necessary causes of the instability in the Great Lakes reside in its history, geopolitical, economic, and sociocultural setup. The porosity of the states, their ethnic makeup, the abundance of natural resources and lack thereof in some of the countries, the hugeness and smallness of some of the countries, and the curse of shady and dictatorial postindependence leaders have all made instability a necessary situation.
The sufficient causes are mostly related to the issue of fear. One of the overwhelming and overshadowing feelings preponderant in the region is fear. The greatest enemy of the people of the region is fear. There was fear in Rwanda by the Hutus that the Tutsis would reestablish the monarchy. How genuine that fear was is immaterial but sufficient to institute socioeconomic, political, and cultural institutions for self-preservation through the obliteration of the Tutsis through a well-orchestrated process of ethnic cleansing. Boutros Ghali corroborates this sentiment in Burundi—this time on the opposite ethnic group when the ruling minority Tutsi carried out frequent cycles of massacre on the Hutus out of fear that the overwhelming objective of Hutu rebellion was the annihilation of the minority Tutsis. Fear became a predicator for self-defense and inhumane actions. The Nelson Mandela midwife Arusha Accord (2000) brought a breath of fresh air to Burundi's conflict situation through ethnic power-sharing agreements that led to two transitional periods of thirty-six months with Tutsi and Hutu leadership—eighteen months apiece—and later the election of Mr. Pierre Nkurunziza in 2005, and 2010 brought some modicum of stability in spite of the threats posed by the stubborn FNL of Agathon Rwasa. However, Burundi is far from becoming a normal postconflict country. The prevalence of AK-47—gun-trotting soldiers in the streets of Bujumbura and reports of extrajudicial killings does not augur well for sustainable peace.
The Democratic Republic of Congo has had a tortured history. There are generations of people in that country, which is one of Africa's most endowed in terms of natural resources, who have never experienced living in a normal state with a common purpose for the realization of the highest aspirations of human life—from Mobutu Sese Seko's kleptocratic authoritarian rule to Laurent Kabila's short-lived arrival in Kinshasa, to today's Joseph Kabila's pseudo-statehood. DR Congo remains a failed state especially in the eastern region, which borders Rwanda and Burundi. Today the vast majority of people in DR Congo find themselves in the biblical Adam-and-Eve situation where they live in paradise but have no clothes. The dog-eat-dog mentality prevails among politicians, whose major preoccupation is sit-tighting either through shameless sycophancy or ruthless brutality. President Joseph Kabila's famous economic development platform of Cinq chantier is now derogatorily called by some opposition leaders as Cinq chansons. Meanwhile, DR Congo's wealth is hemorrhaging, and the people remain the casualty. The status quo of DR Congo, especially the region, is best captured when the state is shown to be adequate in protecting and guaranteeing a minimum of security for its population and the widespread cases of rape, especially the eastern region. Little wonder why Nickolas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn named the region the "Rape Capital of the world." This was further illustrated by Noel Rwabirinba, a sixteen-year-old who had been a militiaman for two years, who said, "If we see girls, it's our right ... we can violate them." This casual statement reflects a generally callous attitude toward the female sex as well as the normalization of rape in the DR Congo. The unimaginable cruelty of sexual violence reported in the DRC conflict includes public rape in front of the family and community, forced rape between victims, the introduction of objects into the victims' cavities, pouring melted rubber into women's vaginas, shooting women in the vagina, and inducing abortions using sharp objects.
In Uganda, the colonial boundaries created by Britain to delimit Uganda grouped together a wide range of ethnic groups with different political systems and cultures. These differences prevented the establishment of a working political community after independence was achieved in 1962. The dictatorial regime of Idi Amin (1971-1979) was responsible for the deaths of some three hundred thousand opponents; guerrilla war and human rights abuses under Milton Obote (1980-1985) claimed at least another one hundred thousand lives. The rule of Yoweri Museveni since 1986 has brought relative stability and economic growth to Uganda. During the 1990s, the government promulgated nonparty presidential and legislative elections.
Uganda is subject to armed fighting among hostile ethnic groups, rebels, armed gangs, militias, and various government forces that extend across its borders; Uganda hosts 209,860 Sudanese, 27,560 Congolese, and 19,710 Rwandan refugees while Ugandan refugees as well as members of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) seek shelter in southern Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo's Garamba National Park. LRA forces have also attacked Kenyan villages across the border. The designation of Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army on the list of terrorist organizations by the United States and the placement of its leader Joseph Kony by the United States Department of Treasury on August 28, 2008, on its list of specially designated global terrorist has upped the hunt for the cannibalistic rebel leader.
On October 14, 2011, President Obama announced that he had ordered the deployment of one hundred US military advisors with a mandate to train, assist, and provide intelligence to help combat the Lord's Resistance Army, reportedly from the Army Special Forces, at a cost of approximately $4.5 million per month. Human Rights Watch welcomed the deployment, which they had previously advocated for.
Violence in Kenya's recent history can be situated within two broad fronts. One is intrinsically linked to inter-ethnic conflict deeply embedded in competition for power with elections acting as the trigger, and the other, linked to terrorism from outside forces with Al Qaeda providing the first major attack at the American Embassy in Nairobi in 1998 and the subsequent multiple attacks linked to Somali's Al Shabab following Kenya's involvement in Somalia. The former has created some high level of discomfort and uncertainty regarding security especially as Kenya prepares for general elections early 2013.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from WEAVING PEACE Copyright © 2012 by Samuel Kale Ewusi. Excerpted by permission of Trafford Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgment....................ixDedication....................xi
Contributors....................xiii
Preface: By Jean Bosco Butera....................xix
Part 1: Defining the Region....................1
Chapter 1: Achieving Peace, Promoting Good Governance, and Transforming Conflicts in the Great Lakes of Africa: A Contextual Introduction Samuel Kale Ewusi and Jean-Bosco Butera....................3
Chapter 2: The Great Lakes Region after Five Decades of Political Independence: Challenges and Future Prospects Mathew Banda....................28
Chapter 3: Memory and Historical Realities in Shaping Politics and Armed Conflicts in Rwanda Maximiano Ngabirano and David Tsimbi....................45
Part 2: Peace Education....................73
Chapter 4: Educating for the Twenty-First Century: Peace Education for the Postgenocide Rwanda Jean Bosco Habyarimana....................75
Chapter 5: Fundamental Pillars of Culture of Peace in the Great Lakes Region: A Case Study of the Democratic Republic of Congo Vincent Muderhwa....................93
Part 3: Conflict Resolution and Transformation....................119
Chapter 6: Rwanda's Social Transformation Process: Leader or Leadership Ruzidana Eugene Methode....................121
Chapter 7: Traditional Mechanisms of Conflict Resolution in the Great Lakes Region Ignatius Mukunto, Jean-Bosco Habyarimana, and Jacob Mwitwa....................146
Chapter 8: Temporality and Timescale in Dialogue Discourse: A Discursive Reconstruction of Conventional Frame of Dialogue Komakech Daniel and Otim Denis Barnabas....................166
Chapter 9: Postconflict Gender Challenges and Implications in the Great Lake Regions: Case Study of Northern Uganda Stella Layolo Omona....................189
Part 4: Governance....................209
Chapter 10: Governing Conflict: The Case of the Right to Asylum and Security Concerns of Uganda in the Wake of Global Terrorism Esibo Simon Omaada....................211