Angola's Last Best Chance for Peace: An Insider's Account of the Peace Process

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Angola's Last Best Chance for Peace: An Insider's Account of the Peace Process by Paul Hare (Washington: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1998, xix, 182pp, US$14.95 paper).IN THEIR EDITED VOLUME on the roots and resolution of civil wars in Africa, Taisier Ali and Robert Matthews conclude that 'leaders dedicated to inclusive policies, [and] to the broadest participation in the political process,' among other things, 'will probably avoid the horrors of civil war' (p 292). In Elections and Conflict Management in Africa, Timothy Sisk and Andrew Reynolds agree, citing a United States State Department official that 'the key to conflict resolution in a multiethnic African state is a political deal that gives a share of power to each of the major ethnic groups' (p 29). Power-sharing, it would seem, is an important avenue to successful conflict management in Africa.Power-sharing agreements, however, have not always led to the satisfactory management of violent conflict. In his article on the failed peace process in Rwanda, Bruce Jones writes in Civil Wars in Africa that the 1993 agreement, itself a power-sharing pact, 'failed to resolve adequately the role of the hardliners [and] actually became one of the proximate causes of the genocide' (p 66). This omission proved lethal. By his count, the subsequent three-month genocide in Rwanda in 1994 resulted in one million deaths.Each of the four volumes examined here provides important insights into the manner in which violent conflict emerges during the post-cold war transition and the possibilities for resolving them. Two volumes by Paul Hare and Terrence Lyons offer first-hand accounts of the peace processes in Angola and Liberia respectively. The other two volumes are collections of essays on Africa's most intransigent civil wars and, in the case of the Sisk and Reynolds volume, the possibilities that electoral processes offer as transitions to democracies. Upon reading the case studies, however, one might wonder if the optimism regarding the possibilities for inclusion and power-sharing is warranted. Does their own case study material lead inexorably to the conclusion that powersharing and inclusion are viable means to effective and stable governance in Africa's multiethnic states?There is something intuitively appealing about power-sharing as a means of conflict resolution. Sisk and Reynolds note its value as a 'confidence building mechanism that allows both political elites and cultural/ethnic communities to feel that they have influence on the decisions of the state and ... that their rights are protected' (p 29). Power-sharing also allows for a better and wider distribution of resources - perhaps the central problem in conflict management in Africa - and has the effect of committing all parties to resolving difficult issues which emerge in processes of structural adjustment. But Sisk and Reynolds note that the most compelling reason for the sharing of power is that there is no apparent alternative. Power-sharing and democracy remain the only reasonable options for governance in deeply divided African societies.Despite their encouraging words about such political arrangements, Sisk and Reynolds risk undermining their own argument. They cite more examples of power-sharing's failure than of its success and often hold up South African as the best (and perhaps only, albeit short-term) example. Indeed, most writers in all four volumes accept that inclusion or some degree of power-sharing is self-evidently the only realistic solution to civil war. But there is scant evidence that power-sharing, on its own, is a viable solution to Africa's most intractable conflicts.I should, however, add a couple of caveats. First, inclusion does not necessarily equal power-sharing; power-sharing can be seen as an ideal form of inclusion wherein political power is more uniformly, even equally, distributed among the chief disputants in a conflict. The authors, however, do not make this distinction and, indeed, frequently use power-sharing and inclusion interchangeably. …