Deep down in Darfur: Nothing is as we are told in Sudan's killing fields
Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide
By Gerard Prunier. 176pp. Hurst. £15.95. 1 8506 5770 X. US: Cornell University Press. $24. 0 8014 4450 0. Reviewed by Alex De Waal.
Ahmat Acyl Aghbash is known about by few, and then mostly for his grisly end: he stepped backwards into the spinning propellers of his Cessan aeroplane in 1982.The plane was a gift from Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi; for ten years, Ahmat Acyl was both a commander in Libya's multinational pan-Sahelian ‘Islamic Legion’ and the leader of a Chadian Arab militia known as the Volcano Brigade. Today, Acyl's fighters from the Salamat of south-central Chad, and the Sudanese intermediaries who smuggled their weapons, can stake a good claim to be the original Janjawiid – the Sudan Government-backed militia now infamous for genocidal atrocity in Darfur.
Acyl's name crops up in most histories of the long-running wars between Libya, Chad and Sudan. His supplier's name doesn’t. It was Sheikh Hilal Mohamed Abdalla, whose Um Jalul clan's yearly migration routes took them from the edge of the Libyan desert in Northern Darfur to the upper reaches of the Salamat River where it crosses from Sudan into Chad. Renowned for their traditionalism, their camels and the vast reach of their semi-nomadism, the Um Jalul were a logical intermediary for Libya's gun-running. Their encounter with the Salamat militia, first social, then commercial and finally military, forged the Janjawiid, which is now headed by the Sheikh's younger son, Musa Hilal. Acyl preached an Arab supremacist ideology, advocating the rule of the lineal descendants of the Prophet Muhammad and his Koreish tribe over Muslim lands. Specifically, the Juhayna Arabs, a group that includes both Salamat and Um Jalul, should control the territories from the Nile to Lake Chad. Darfur, an independent Sultanate until just ninety years ago, lies in the centre of this land, with its fertile massif and access to the headwaters of the Salamat River. The Koreishi ideology, mobilised via a shadowy group known as the ‘Arab Alliance’ or ‘Arab Gathering’, motivates some of those involved in today's vicious war for Darfur.Understanding this hideous violence demands a grasp of complex local histories that is possessed by few Sudanese and fewer foreigners. Generally relegated to a footnote of Sudanese history, as Gerard Prunier explains in Darfur:
The ambiguous genocide, Darfur warrants its own political ethnography. Without this, it is not possible to understand the events of the past two years, nor the weighty moral and legal questions that surround them.
The Um Jalul are a clan of the Mahamid, who are in turn a section of the Abbala (‘camel-herding’) Rizeigat tribe of Northern Darfur and Chad. Their Bedouin roots can be traced back at least five centuries, when their patrilineal ancestors crossed the Libyan desert, entering Darfur from the northwest. The Abbala Rizeigat were thus in Darfur when the Fur Sultanate emerged in the early seventeenth century and a part of its bilingual Arab-Fur identity from the outset. In the mid-eighteenth century, the Sultan granted the Baggara (‘cattle-herding’) Rizeigat jurisdiction over a huge area of land southeast of the Sultanate's heartlands. Known as hawakir, such territorial grants are the basis of Darfur's land tenure today; who controls them is the subject of bitter political struggle. The Baggara's Abbala cousins, more mobile and living in the more densely administered northern lands, were less fortunate.
Until today, many Abbala Rizeigat ascribe their role in the current conflict to the fact that they weren’t given territory a quarter of a millennium ago. The Baggara Rizeigat by contrast are neutral. Other Abbala also did not receive hawakir. After annexing Darfur on 1 January 1917 – almost the last territory to be added to the Empire – British colonial officials attempted to tidy up the confusion of Darfur's ethnic geography.
Another Northern Darfur Arab group, the Beni Hussein, were collected in one district over which they were given control. The Abbala Rizeigat had their eyes on a territory north of the region's centre; but the leading families of their two main sections – Mahamid (including Um Jalul) and Mahariya – could not agree on who should be paramount chief, or nazir.
Since 1925, there have been at least six attempts to unify the different sections under a single leader. None has succeeded. One stratagem used by the rival sheikhs to increase their chances was to enlarge their numbers by attracting followers from Chad. The Um Jalul had an advantage here: there are more Mahamid than Mahariya clans in Chad, and in the 1970s the Chadian sections were armed by Libya and organised by Acyl. He enmeshed Darfur in Chad's racial war; and, pursuing his provincial ambition, Sheikh Hilal inadvertently led the Um Jalul into a maelstrom.
As we turn the political ethnographic lens, we find that the contours of Janjawiid mobilisation correspond to the political fractures and family power struggles within the Abbala Rizeigat. Heads of Mahamid lineages have key positions, while most leading Mahariya families are uninvolved. Meanwhile a third section, the Ereigat, plays a different but equally critical role. After British annexation in the 1920s, the Ereigat had few camels of their own. Some got jobs at the colonial police stables, and their sons in turn went to school and joined the police and Army. One of these boys, Abdalla Safi el Nur, rose to become an Air Force general and was Governor of Northern Darfur at the time when the Janjawiid mutated from a tribal militia tolerated by the Sudan Government into brigades organised under Government Military Intelligence. Another scion of the Ereigat became an army general and, now retired, heads Sudan's parliamentary defence committee.
Meanwhile, the Baggara Rizeigat (the southern cattle-owning branch), who are far more numerous and powerful, are themselves divided. Though several are leading lights in the Arab Gathering, the paramount chief, Nazir Saeed Madibu, is trying to steer a neutral course. This is far from the whole story of the origins of the Janjawiid but it is a means to understanding who is fighting on one side of this war and why, and for recognising that extreme violence is the choice of a small minority.
Such is the poor state of basic documen tation of Darfur that these facts have not been narrated. Unfortunately, this is still the case. Prunier's account makes not a single mention of these key figures, Ahmat Acyl, Hilal Abdalla and his son, Musa, nor of the Koreish and its manifes tos, nor indeed of the Abbala Rizeigat and the Um Jalul. The history of the Darfur rebels, the eventual enemies of the Janjawiid, is equally important and also little documented. They spring from convergent resistance movements based among Darfur's three largest non-Arab groups: the Fur, the Zaghawa and the Masalit. Multiple versions exist of the origins of the two main rebel groups, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), not least among the members of the two groups themselves. All concur that the SLA has sympathies with the Southern Sudan-based Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), and took both arms and advice from the latter in 2003, but that it emerged independently of the SPLA two years earlier from an alliance of Fur militiamen and Zaghawa desert fighters. The SPLA's late leader, John Garang, who was made Sudan's First Vice-Presi dent in late June and has since died in a helicopter crash, fought for a secular, pluralist and united Sudan dominated by Sudan's non-Arabs – an alliance of Southerners and the marginalised groups in the North – though many in his movement have made the case for a separate Southern state.
Until 2003 – when SPLA members helped to write the SLA manifesto – the main SPLA role had been to train Masalit volunteers who crossed from Sudan into Eritrea. A couple of battalions of these Darfurian rebels were transferred to Southern Sudan, from where they planned to return home to bolster local self-defence units.Thwarted by the Government, many deserted and went back home in 2001. The SPLA then lost interest in Darfur, while the local rebellion quietly gathered force. After reconnecting, in January 2003, Garang and Darfur's guerrillas regarded each other with ambivalence. The SLA could indeed become part of a grand alliance of Sudan's marginalised peoples but Darfurian leaders fear that they will be manipulated – and with good cause.
The SLA was catapulted to prominence before it could develop internal political institutions so that it is an amalgam of village militias and rural intellectuals marshalled by indigenous warrior tradition and the discipline of former Army NCOs. The Fur and Zaghawa wings have often disagreed and on one occasion, even fought each other. The origins of JEM are even more controversial. The leadership is drawn from the ranks of Darfurian Islamists, widely believed to have received funds from Islamists abroad. In contrast to the amateur public relations machinery of the SLA, JEM runs a sophisticated political bureau.
JEM's roots lie in the fragmentation of Sudan's Islamist movement in the late 1990s, as the twin dreams of national development as an Islamic state, and the emancipation of all Muslims as equal citizens, disintegrated into internal squabbling. The implosion of the Islamic project was clear when, in December 1999, President Omar al Bashir dismissed the Government's eminence grise, Hassan al Turabi, sheikh of the Sudanese Islamists, and later put him in jail. Darfur's Islamist leaders were already disaffected. Handicapped by the latent Arabist racism of the leadership, which hails, as it always has, almost entirely from Khartoum and the Middle Nile Valley, few Darfurians had risen to the top ranks of the Government or the Civil Service.
A clandestine Black Book, which appeared in Sudan at this time, documented the racial and regional domination of the Sudanese state by those drawn from riverain Arab groups.There are many conspiracy theories concerning the origins of the SLA and JEM, but Prunier's account – that the Darfur rebellion emerged as a direct consequence of a memorandum of understanding between Garang and Turabi in 2001 – is among the unlikeliest. Putting forward such a claim requires strong supporting documentation, of which Prunier provides none. The critique in the Black Book was aimed, in fact, at Turabi as well as Bashir. Following the 1999 split and Turabi's imprisonment, President Bashir and his lieutenant, Vice-President Ali Osman Taha, relied increasingly on their own kinsmen, security officers and Islamist cadres drawn from precisely the same Nile Valley tribes fingered in the Black Book. Alarmed at its haemorrhage of support in Darfur, Khartoum's security cabal turned to one of the few senior military figures from Darfur, General Abdalla Safi el Nur of the Ereigat Rizeigat, who responded by putting his kinsmen into key local security posts.
The alliance between Khartoum and the Saharan Bedouins is one of convenience. Accustomed to seeing Sudan through an ‘Arab vs. African’ lens, many observers have missed the fact that there is more than one kind of Arabism at work: the riverain Arabism of Bashir and Taha, coloured by the Islamic movement's orientation to Arab civilisation, is a far cry from the Koreishi beliefs of Acyl's Bedouin acolytes. Khartoum's ruling elites regard the Darfur Arabs as no less backward than their non-Arab neighbours.
True adherents of the Koreish ideology reciprocate by dismissing the riverain tribes as half-caste ‘Arabized Nubians’.
However opportunistic, the Khartoum-Janjawiid alliance proved an effective machine for devastation. Between February and August 2003, the SLA's mobile forces ran rings around inept Government garrisons; Khartoum's response was a merciless campaign of assault by militia and air force. Janjawiid brigades now became Military Intelligence's strike force, allowed to promote whatever local agenda they saw fit, provided they contained the rebellion. It worked, at hideous human cost.
By early 2004, the SLA was losing ground, and later rebel offensives into Eastern and Southern Darfur were halted, using similar tactics. Since the beginning of this year, the level of organised violence has dropped dramatically, but half of Darfur's people are confined indefinitely to displaced persons’ camps. Lacking local knowledge about what is actually driving the Darfur conflict, many have given it their own spin, particularly over the notion of ‘genocide’. Both its diagnosis and reaction to it are fraught with ambiguity. One approach was followed by the United States Government. Following a Congressional resolution in May 2004, the State Department dispatched a team of investigators to refugee camps in Chad to ascertain whether the Sudan Government was committing genocide. On 9 September, Secretary of State Colin Powell reported,
genocide has been committed in Darfur and that the government of Sudan and the Jingaweit [sic] bear responsibility and genocide may still be occurring.
A different approach to determining genocide was adopted by the International Commission of Inquiry into Darfur (ICID), set up by the United Nations Security Council, which reported in January 2005. The ICID detailed the same pattern of abuses as in the State Department report. ‘However’, it continued, the crucial element of genocidal intent appears to be missing, at least as far as the central Government authorities are concerned. Generally speaking the policy of attacking, killing and forcibly displacing members of some tribes does not evince a specific intent to annihilate, in whole or in part, a group. Rather it would seem that those who planned and organized attacks on villages pursued the intent to drive the victims from their homes, primarily for the purposes of counter-insurgency warfare.
In short, the killings in Darfur looked like genocide but were actually a by-product of defeating the rebellion. The Commissioners, all of them veteran independent human-rights specialists, had shied away from the fence that the Americans had so readily jumped. But the Khartoum Government – despite trumpeting the ‘no genocide’ finding – could take no solace from a report that found that ‘the crimes against humanity and war crimes that have been committed in Darfur may be no less serious and heinous than genocide’, and which noted that individuals – including Government officials – may have possessed genocidal intent. Unlike Powell, the ICID recommended a specific course of action, namely referral to the International Criminal Court (ICC). In March 2005, the US set aside its long-standing opposition to the ICC, and allowed the Security Council to refer the Darfur case to The Hague. The prosecutor is currently examining a sealed list of 51 individuals identified by the ICID. Although indictments are many months away, the prospect of extradition to face prosecution has prompted a shiver of fear among Khartoum's security chiefs. The blades are whirring just behind them.
The ICID determination is based on a higher standard of proof than that of the State Department. It is open to complex legal dispute; much hinges on primary purpose and double effect. Could it not be argued that genocide is a predictable corollary of counter-insurgency conducted in a certain manner? And is there not reason enough to deduce as much from the previous two decades of warfare in Sudan – and indeed from other modern wars? On the other hand, the 1948 Convention identifies genocidal intent in a precise way, and hard legal work needs to be done if that is to be broadened to include genocidal outcomes as a secondary impact of other aims.
By the time the ICID began its work, Sudan Government Military Intelligence and the Janjawiid had largely completed theirs. Mass murder and burning had been replaced by pervasive fear that kept Darfur's two million displaced people and refugees in their places of exile. African Union ceasefire observers were on the ground, along with an array of international humanitarian agencies. As a result, the ICID's main brief was to identify the scope of the crimes and the individuals responsible. As the Hague Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia has shown, the most effective way to prosecute crimes of genocide is to begin with multiple instances of mass murder and group-directed war crimes and then to deduce that these cumulatively amount to genocide. Both empirically and legally, the ICID took a serious and thoughtful position, which will doubtless be scrutinised and contested as the ICC goes about its work.Prunier, however, has no truck with such nuance. He opens his discussion by characterising the ICID report as part of ‘a coordinated show of egregious disingenuousness’. ‘The semantic play’, he writes, ‘ended up being an evasion of reality. The notion that this was probably not a ‘genocide’ in the most strict sense of the word seemed to satisfy the Commission that things were not too serious after all.’
Given the subtitle of his Darfur and Prunier's previous work on the Rwanda genocide, this is a disappointingly inad equate conclusion. After the question of genocide, the most controversial issue in Darfur is the death rate. The question of how many people have died is important, but desktop demography is hazard ous when the methods of data collection are varied and have not been fully scrutinised. Prunier is not alone in hing ing strong claims on the fact that, in one survey of refugees, 61% said that they had seen a ‘family member’ killed. As a general index of horror this is a compel ling statistic. But it is impossible to make any numerical inference until one knows what the investigators meant by ‘family’. Demographers distinguish the household (usually defined as those who eat together daily, and usually used as the unit of enumeration) from the family, which commonly stretches far wider than those five or six individuals. Until there is a thorough population-based survey of mortality in Darfur, all esti mates for deaths from violence, disease and hunger will remain conjecture.
Prunier has some good sources but often treats them casually. In his catalogue of international neglect of the conflict he says that Justice Africa failed to mention Darfur in its October 2003 briefing. There were in fact four paragraphs that month on Darfur, which had been covered in every issue of the briefing since March, including a warning on 27 May that the strategy of ‘arming local militia’ would, if followed, ‘run the risk of creating a vicious internecine war targeting civilians’. Prunier does provide a competent sketch of the history of Darfur and the position of the conflict within the politics of Sudan and the region. And his ac count is valuable in locating Darfur within the politics of the Central Sahara and the long-running three-cornered wars between Libya, Chad and Sudan. He correctly describes pre-colonial Darfur as an ‘ethnic mosaic’ rather than a region with a binary polarized ‘Arab’– ’African’ identity divide. He notes the ambiguity of the term ‘Arab’ (though he doesn’t explore the varieties of Arabism); he makes useful points on the politics of the Umma Party, the main party in the ruling coalition toppled by the current Sudan Government, and the Darfur De velopment Front in the 1960s and 1980s and on Libyan-Sudanese relations in the 1970s and 1980s. Errors and omissions are inevitable in any analytical narrative of Darfur but Prunier omits entirely the central protagonists. He is also too sweeping in his account of the role of interna tional mediation in Sudan.
International efforts to find a solution to Darfur's agony are now in the hands of the African Union, which Prunier dis misses as ‘the politically correct way of saying “We do not really care“’. But American, British and other interna tional support to the Kenyan-headed North-South peace process followed a similar formula of ad hoc multilateralism, and did bring an end to 20 years of comparably vicious war. Darfur's peace process is in some respects more challenging. Having sealed its big win in the North-South peace, the Sudan Government is playing for tactical advantage while the rebel leadership is deeply divided. The political issues that divide the belligerents have yet to be thrashed out; the agenda for negotiations is itself a matter of acrimony.
The place of Chad at the mediation table is also controversial. Chadian President Idris Deby was brought to power in 1990 by a threecornered alliance of Zaghawa, Chadian Arabs and Sudanese security. This coalition fell apart when its members went to war in Darfur, and the ailing Deby is desperately playing divide-andrule among his own Zaghawa kinsmen to prevent another civil war in Chad.
Meanwhile, the best hopes for a settlement may come from connecting external peacemaking to internal initiatives. Darfur's own provincial aristocrats, the paramount chiefs – including the ruling Arab families – are seeking an exit from their predicament: one that restores a conservative social order and salvages their tribes’ reputation. If the Janjawiid are to be politically decapitated, it may be through the efforts of these hardened old tribal chiefs, arguing that for the Government and its allies to submit to their mediation is a better option than extradition to The Hague and a cell in a Dutch basement.
Editor's Note: This review first appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, 12 August 2005. See ROAPE No. 97 (September 2003) for a review of the Black Book of Sudan.
Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide
By Gérard Prunier (2005), London: Hurst & Company, 212 pages, xxiii. Darfur: A Short History of a Long War by Julie Flint & Alex de Waal (2005), London: Zed Books, 152 pages, xiv. Reviewed by Jago Salmon, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Germany.
Insecurity remains pervasive in Darfur despite a recent decline in direct fighting between government and rebel forces. Meanwhile since the UN's conclusion that this catastrophe was not genocide,1 the explanatory dichotomies that had clarified this conflict have been lost. And with them it seems the media coverage. These two important books provide the reader with a timely analysis of the political and ethnographic histories that lie behind the last three years of violence in Darfur.
Both works conclude that the war is the fault of a half-century of ‘partly unintended and partly deliberate policy’ (p. 109) of African discrimination by Khartoum that culminated with the mobilisation of proxy militias to fight the resultant rebellion. These books differ, however, in their approach and their conclusions. Whilst Prunier looks from the ‘top-down’ at the twentieth century political history of the province, Flint and de Waal describe from the ‘bottom up’ the emergence and constitution of the actors and ideologies employed to fight.
Darfur has a perhaps uniquely complex political-ethnography. Its population, unified by Islam and the Arabic language, is divided into between forty and ninety ethnic groups scattered in a complex ‘ethnic mosaic’ or ‘moral geography’ of land allocation, tribal cohesion and party affiliation. Before the current conflict, identity was never fixed or defined by polar divisions, whether Arab/African, or even farmer/nomad, but was fluid and contextual.
That these relations changed was the fault of three factors. First, the expansion of the Northern deserts due to the continuing Sahelian drought; second, the importation of weaponry and Arab supremacist ideologies from Darfur's neighbours Libya and Chad and third, the fragmentation of Northern Sudan's Islamic unity following the repeated failures of the current regime's Islamist ‘Revolution’. As many observers were anticipating the end of the 20-year long civil war between North and South in 2003, these converged and the ‘first Genocide of the twenty-first century’ was born.
Gérard Prunier, known most widely for his lucid account of the genocide in Rwanda,2 has written a comprehensive if uncontroversial political history of Darfur from 1916 (since it ceased to exist as an independent sultanate) until early 2005. Relying heavily on secondary sources, the central fact of Darfur, in this account, is that it is far away and, except for bloc voting, entirely worthless. Subse quent central governments allowed traditionalism to thrive, and low-level violence to fester. Almost no state investment found it's way to Darfur. It remained poor, unintegrated, and politi cally disorganised.
Prunier identifies an overlapping of ‘false consciousness’ and escalating resource conflicts at the source of the latest war. Whilst since the 1980s Arab nomads and African farming groups had competed violently for land, since the 1990s these conflicts were increasingly entwined with a racist ideology of Arab supremacy fomented by Libyan and Chadian factions in the 70s and 80s. When Darfur's Africans rebelled in 2003, fearing disenfranchisement under the terms of the North-South peace agreement, a divided and weak Islamist regime in Khartoum mobilised this ideology to guarantee their survival. Somewhat intentionally, somewhat as an accident, Darfur slid into crisis.
Prunier has written a timely political history of Darfur, intended for a public audience hungry to understand why this region collapsed so brutally. Stressing the importance of political, rather than atavistic or solely ecological vari ables, Prunier's account rightly rejects any essentialist analysis of Darfuri ethnicity. He describes in depth the motives and regional politics behind Libyan and Chadian involvement, and the failure of Sudanese political parties from the 1960s onwards. Rather than a comprehensive analysis this book is an often excellent summary of existing secondary sources. Furthermore, his rage at the inaction of the international community, despite the ‘moral indignation and its attendant media coverage’ (p. 128), does not interfere with his calm dissection of its cause.
Nevertheless, despite its benefits, this is an account that bears the taint of deter minism. Knowing where he will end, he does not convincingly capture the local ethno-politics behind the ferocious vio lence. Perhaps less forgivable is that the Ambiguous Genocide is occasionally let down by a casual style and poor editing. For example, in describing how, when news of Darfur broke in 2004, ‘suddenly everybody got frantic’; or in the repeti tion of two almost identical paragraphs on pages one and fifteen. These failings aside if it were not for the simultaneous release of Julie Flint and Alex de Waal's work, Prunier's book would certainly be one of the best available.3
Whilst Prunier presents a picture of violent political and societal racism shared and manipulated by Sudanese Arabs ‘unsure about the purity of their Arab credentials’ (p.163), Flint and de Waal present a much more convincing picture of minority political strategies implemented by proxy.
Launching rapidly into a fast pace and highly structured account, A Short History of a Long War differentiates between and describes the internal politics of the armed factions and ethnic groups and takes the reader up to the death of Southern rebel leader John Garang on 30 July 2005.
Julie Flint and Alex de Waal are both highly experienced Sudan scholars and their expertise is plainly evident. They take the reader on a chapter by chapter tour of the structural history and actors in the war including detailed analyses of the origins of the Janjaweed, the different rebel factions and the ebbs and flows of the fighting itself. Avoiding all generalisations, the authors describe the emergence of an Arab supremacist ideology, but also the dispossession of the nomadic communities and the collapse of the ‘old order’ of ethnic cooperation. In this account there is no central policy of genocide but rather a series of opportunistic land-grabs, historical grievances and private motives which allowed a very small number of ideological combatants to unravel Darfur's social order. In their conclusion they describe ongoing peace efforts – not of the international community – but of the majority of Arab tribal leaders in Darfur even in the face of resistance from Khartoum.
Flint and de Waal's book, flowing easily in a clear and convincing style, uses original primary and secondary sources to explain the process of politicisation and organisation behind the war. Most impressively, the book forces the reader through genuine horror, including eyewitness reports of violence but, unlike Prunier's jaded anger, Flint and de Waal's activism demands from the reader that he/she contemplates action not despair.
The most significant difference between the two books is in their account of the importance of the Naivasha peace talks and the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) signed on 9 January 2005. For Prunier the government is a unitary agent sworn to defend Arab supremacy, weak in capacity but deftly controlling
events through informal channels and deceit. The CPA in this view is nothing but a means of ‘de-fanging’ (p. 105) the SPLA rebels and perpetuating Nile Valley Arab domination of Sudan. For Flint and de Waal, Khartoum, though manipulative and weak, is also often paranoid and myopic rather than supremely Machivellian. This doesn’t reduce the moral responsibility of Khartoum for the massacres in Darfur, but presents the CPA as essential and a ‘tremendous achievement’ (xiii) that must not be dismissed or neglected by the international community.
Flint and de Waal's is the better book for the informed or expert reader but the failings of these two analyses are in a final account complementary. Whilst Prunier excels in the politics of regional interference, Flint and de Waal often skim over Darfur's complex history in favour of a readable and detailed ethnography.
Both books refuse the myth of a good/ evil side in this war, and offer a grey-scale of incompetence, ignorance and selfishness from all sides. This leaves the reader confronted with the more disturbing reality of a conflict – like many in Africa – that is cyclical, structural and most importantly profoundly unnecessary.
Jago Salmon is a Research Associate with the Volkswagen Foundation research project on the ‘Micro-Politics of Armed Groups’ at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. He is completing a doctorate studying the comparative politics of militias in civil war using the Popular Defence Forces in Sudan and the Lebanese Forces in Lebanon as case studies.
Western Sahara: Anatomy of a Stalemate
By Erik Jensen, ‘Forward’ by David M. Malone (2004); published by Lynne Reinner, pp. 180, 2 maps, $15.95 (paper), ISBN 1-58826-305-3 PB. Reviewed by Jacob Mundy.
From 1993 to 1998, career United Nations civil servant Erik Jensen was at the forefront of the referendum effort in Western Sahara. During the latter four years of his tenure, Jensen headed the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO). Since leaving the mission, Jensen has taken up academic posts in the United States and England.
Jensen's book on the Western Sahara conflict was published as an occasional paper of the International Peace Academy (IPA). Jensen brings to bear his intimate knowledge of MINURSO's dual effort to identify an electorate for the referendum while maintaining a dialog between the Moroccan government and the Western Saharan nationalist movement, the Polisario Front. Jensen backs this up with more than enough well referenced historical context to make the average non-expert reader comfortable with the complexities of the United Nations administered peace process since 1988. As IPA president, David Malone, wrote in his forward, ‘Useful to policymakers, civil society organizations, and academics, Jensen's book provides a treasure trove of behind-the-scenes lessons on conflict mediation’ (p.10).
Jensen's meticulously detailed account makes a significant contribution to what is now known about the initial – but now largely abandoned – referendum process in Western Sahara between 1991–2000. It also adds much to the previously published accounts of such former MINURSO insiders as Ambassador Frank Ruddy (‘What I saw in Western Sahara: The referendum that wasn’t and the one that could still be’, Mediterranean Quarterly 9/ 4, Fall, 1998; Ambassador Charles Dunbar, ‘Saharan Stasis’, Middle East Journal 54/4, Autumn, 2000; Adekeye Adebajo, ‘Selling Out the Sahara: The Tragic Tale of the UN Referendum’, Occasional Papers Series, Cornell: Institute for African Development, Spring 2002; and Marrak Goulding, Peacemonger, London: John Murray, 2002). Jensen also offers some insight into the peace process since 2000, which was dominated by the efforts of former US Secretary of State James Baker until his departure in 2004.
Largely a chronological narrative, Jensen structures his book into nine chapters. For the reader's benefit, Anatomy of a Stalemate includes five annexes of relevant United Nations documents, a list of acronyms and a select bibliography. Though there are some scattered errors of typography (p.41), citation (p.37, note 12), and history (p.107), the text is otherwise very clean.
Following a brief preface, Jensen's first chapter is introductory, and frames the central problem that preoccupied the mission for most of the 1990s: ‘who is a Sahrawi, who is a Western Saharan, and who should be entitled to vote’ (p.13). Jensen then provides a brief introduction to the conflict and the work of the United Nations in Western Sahara to the present. The next two chapters respectively deal with the broad history of Western Sahara to the end of Spanish colonialism (i.e., 1975–1976) and the efforts of the Organization of African Unity (OAU, now the African Union) and the United Nations to resolve the conflict (1976–1988). Though both Morocco and Polisario had ostensibly agreed to the same proposal in 1988, chapter four covers the United Nations initial efforts to reconcile their conflicting interpretations before and after the Secretary General unilaterally declared a ceasefire in 1991. As the all important voter identification process got underway in 1994, Jensen personally enters the picture, first as head of MINURSO's Identification Commission in 1993 and later as head of the mission in 1994. Though the narrative is sufficiently brisk, the identification process described in chapters five and six includes a variety of details, from the negotiated composition of voter application forms to the process of resolving the contested status of OAU observers.
What becomes clear early on in Jensen's account is that the UN Secretariat believed the point of MINURSO was not a referendum (despite the mission's name) but a means for sustained dialog between the parties. Most observers assumed, as did most MINURSO employees, that the Secretariat's peacekeeping department was sincere in their efforts hold an honest referendum in Western Sahara. Jensen, however, claims quite the contrary. ‘Although not made explicit,’ he writes, ‘it was my impression, subsequently reinforced by word and in action, that I was not expected to succeed’ (p.59). Indeed, Jensen earlier described ‘the launch of identification … as a means of locking Morocco and the Frente Polisario into regular and nonviolent interaction’ (p.15) rather than an end in itself. Thus Jensen wastes no time in dispelling the myth that the mission in Western Sahara was about upholding international law or providing the Western Saharans with their long denied right to self-determination. Confirming a claim made earlier by Adebajo, Jensen notes, ‘[Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali] had not really expected the referendum as envisioned in the settlement plan to prove possible’ (p.83). The preferred settlement would come from ‘direct negotiations’ (p.83) inspired by the outcome of identification, and later ratified through a referendum. In fact, all three relevant secretaries-general – Pérez de Cuéllar, Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan – have shared this view and constantly disparaged the chances of holding an authentic referendum in the face of Moroccan intransigence.
One of the most interesting aspects of the book is Jensen's brief account of his own personal initiative to settle the conflict outside of the 1991 Settlement Plan's winner-take-all framework. After the identification effort stalled and MINURSO's force-size was reduced to a skeleton crew in mid-1996, Jensen began approaching both sides, using the ‘impact and likely product of identification, which they were able to deduce,’ as ‘the premise for talking’ (p.88). Though Jensen does not say it outright, the results of voter identification seemingly favoured Polisairo at that time, giving Morocco a strong reason to seek a compromise formula between independence and integration. This initiative led to a secret high-level meeting between Morocco's crown prince – now king – Mohammed and several key figures in the Polisario's leadership in August 1996. This effort was partially undermined by the appointment of Baker as Kofi Annan's Personal Envoy to Western Sahara. Ironically, Baker took on the job believing that a compromise autonomy agreement was at hand but, as Jensen chronicles in chapter seven, both sides reverted back to the 1991 Settlement Plan believing that their interests would be better served. Chapter seven then goes on to trace the final two years of the identification effort following the Baker-negotiated Houston Accords of September 1997 and Dunbar's succeeding Jensen in early 1998.
Chapter eight deals with the two unfruitful autonomy-referendum proposals offered by Baker in 2001 and 2003 following the abandonment of the original referendum envisaged under the 1991 Settlement Plan. Given Jensen's familiarity with the range of acceptable settlements and his expertise in conflict resolution, one would hope that he might conclude by suggesting new avenues for peace in Western Sahara. Sadly, the final chapter is mostly a review of the ground covered and a dim assessment of future prospects for peace and self-determination.
While Anatomy of a Stalemate is perhaps the most thorough history of the United Nations efforts in Western Sahara to date, Jensen's book refuses to address some of the accusations of malfeasance leveled against MINURSO, including a strong institutional bias towards Moroccan interests. Jensen is largely dismissive of such claims, and simplistically attributes these ‘efforts to discredit the UN’ to ‘one right-wing US critic’ (p.74) – i.e., Ruddy.
In a footnote, Jensen cites an unprecedented internal United Nations audit that ignored many of the accusations against MINURSO, and attributed Ruddy's whistle blowing to the early termination of his contract with MINURSO. Yet both the New York Times and Human Rights Watch, following up on Ruddy's claims, investigated and discovered that the Moroccan government had made serious efforts to compromise the process.
Similar charges were leveled by the testimony of former MINURSO peacekeepers and independent academic researches before such bodies as the United Nations Fourth Committee and the United States Congress. Jensen, more than any other participant in the five-year identification effort, could have provided some insight and perspective on the Moroccan government's alleged efforts to fill the polls with non-Saharans, and MINURSO's apparent willingness to accommodate it. Instead of clarifying the historical record, Jensen ultimately elides over this unseemly aspect of the United Nations in Western Sahara. What little attention Jensen gives such claims is explained away all too easily. ‘Moroccan heavy-handedness,’ Jensen argues, was to be expected because MINURSO ‘depended, as always, on the parties’ willing cooperation,’ (p.74) even if it meant tolerating acts meant to ‘predetermine the outcome of the referendum’ by controlling ‘the composition of the electoral body’ (p.100). And yet the fact that ‘the Security Council never so much as whispered the word sanction’ (p.75, his emphasis) – i.e., against Morocco – is incidental to Jensen's analysis.
Not only is the history presented in Anatomy of a Stalemate incomplete, so is the analysis of Western interests. No conflict is an island, and Morocco's importance to the West has much to do with the problem of Western Sahara's irresolution as the mutually exclusive interests of Polisario and Morocco. Western interests might be more glacial in their movement, but that does not exempt them from interrogation. Like a good diplomat, Jensen steers clear of these more controversial topics. In presenting his diplomatic experiences, Jensen has made a strong contribution to what is known about the botched referendum in Western Sahara; yet Jensen's unwillingness to overcome his diplomat's perspective has severely impaired the scope of his historical analysis.
Africa's Media: Democracy and the Politics of Belonging
By Francis B. Nyamnjoh; Published by Zed Books, pp. 308; Re viewed by Desmond Smith.
Francis Nyamnjoh's monograph presents an overview of Africa's media and situates them within ongoing attempts to democratise various states on the conti nent. As a survey the book offers a useful primer on some of these countries’ sepa rate paths towards or away from democ racy; it employs a political economy perspective to analyse key players and agencies, and some of the processes within the media which have led to the current situation, together with some of their more obvious shortcomings. It also offers a profile of Cameroon and some of its media, using ethnographic accounts and a brief survey of certain media encounters since independence within the country's one-party state.
In the introduction, Nyamnjoh pauses to take stock of Africa's level of technologi cal development, not only with regard to ‘traditional’ mass media such as the broadcast and print media but also to the relatively ‘new’ IT medium of the worldwide web. This latter is something of a digression so early in the book, given that Africa as a continent is not yet at the forefront of frequent IT use for political purposes. Moreover serious analytical research into the real, as distinct from potential, role(s) of IT in democratisation – in Africa as elsewhere – is still some what in its infancy, and it is therefore moot whether realistic assessments can be made of its role in mass politics at this early stage.
However IT's early appearance in the text does tie in with one of the themes of the book which is the relationship between African communities and the state and authority on the one hand and, on the other, the evolved and evolving forms of communication and dialogue – or lack of them – available to citizens.
Nyamnjoh seems to be ambivalent about essentialist explanations of African media and culture. He is rightly sceptical of the idea that there are somehow elements of African political and cultural behaviour which do not admit of rational explanation. Yet he appears to be less critical of analyses which invoke ethnic ity and tribalism to explain those African polities which have been repeatedly overwhelmed in the past by the authoritarian or despotic behaviour of their elites. Critical analysis must surely also point here towards a lack of developed politi cal and civic institutions, and the uncer tain outcomes of mobilisations and struggles over a protracted period in many African states. These struggles have not infrequently been predomi nantly between those political actors with the political and economic clout to engage in the political arena. Yet these same actors, if and when they have finally come to power, have frequently been possessed of very short memories of what it was they were initially strug gling about.
Certainly as Nyamnjoh repeatedly points out, in Africa – again, as elsewhere – the political performances of key players once they achieve power can fall woefully short of the political rhetoric they have employed in rallying mass support to attain that power. It may well be one of the mass media's more important roles in a democracy to keep these shortcom ings and failures steadily in the public eye, in spite of authority's strong proclivities for amnesia. The media might ideally be seen as a conduit for chal lenges, open or implied, to the status quo, and for critiques and dissent to abusive regimes. Political and cultural atavism, in this context, would therefore indicate a lack of alternative channels for politi cal mobilisation and consequent frustra tion at local levels with the state's performance ‘on the ground’, not the primacy of ethnic or communal politics.
Njamnjoh refers intriguingly to radio trottoir ‘epitomised by rumour and politi cal derision’ as playing ‘a significant role in the lives of ordinary Africans’. He points to the overwhelming preponder ance of the transistor radio as a source of news for Africans whose access to printed news is often severely limited, either through rural isolation, the financial priorities of potential audiences (given the relatively high cost of newspapers) and/or low levels of literacy. Yet tanta lisingly there is simply not enough flesh and bones in Njamnjoh's account for a casual reader to assess the significance or indeed the ‘flavour’ of radio trottoir and its actual role in African political mobilisations. It is not even entirely clear from his account whether radio trottoir should be taken to refer simply to infor mal information networks, equivalent to the ‘bush telegraph’ of former times, or whether it is also to include the kind of political gossip and rumour-mongering which exists independently of the mass media but also finds an outlet on the airwaves.
Western commentators, usually at a com fortable distance, have tended to focus approvingly on local media which have lent their platform to critics of the politi cal status quo. There appears to be an assumption that such oppositional media, including radio stations, could be a force for democratisation; yet such mass appeal without journalistic responsibil ity and the mechanisms for verification and accuracy can also act counter to democratic interests.
Case studies from Latin America and South East Asia indicate that radio as a popular source of information can become a genuine conduit for oppositional and critical voices in times of rapid political change. This has indeed some times been the case. In Latin America in the 1980s, for example. Radio Venceremos in El Salvador was seen as an under ground radio station which struggled to present the left-wing guerrillas’ case against established elite agendas, and instruments of suppression, in the battle for hearts and minds in that country's civil war.
Yet local radio, partly because of its distance from the political centre and partly through lower journalistic standards of verification, can just as readily become a megaphone for unsubstanti ated political gossip and elite rumour mongering. This can rapidly descend into populist, not to say demagogic, distortions and manipulation
The Philippines, also in the early 1980s as it happens, offers a useful case of these opposing tendencies. Radio Veritas, a Roman Catholic radio station in Manila added its relatively influential voice to the small oppositional ‘mosquito’ presses which were increasingly critical of the dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, who by then had outstayed his welcome for well over a decade. He was finally ousted in 1986 through what in effect was a US-condoned military coup which, partly thanks to the media climate of regime criticism, had received popular support in a much-vaunted ‘People Power Revolt’.
However, shortly thereafter in the late eighties, as disaffection with the incom ing government of Cory Aquino contin ued among the country's poor and dispossessed, a local radio station in the crisis-torn southern region of Mindanao was effectively hi-jacked by a radio broadcaster backed by right-wing elites and the Philippine army, who started exhorting his listeners to ‘hunt down, in the name of democracy, […] all hotbeds of communism’. These he defined on air as, in effect, any NGO or other organised group who resisted his threats and blan dishments to contribute to the funds of the right-wing paramilitaries sponsoring the radio station.
His broadcasts became a torrid and dangerous amalgam of rumour and mis-reporting, culminating in hysterical reports of illegal caches of arms being unearthed at a local monastery. The reports were completely erroneous: the ‘illegal caches’ were the invention of an over-zealous local army captain. Yet the radio broadcaster, Jan Pala, subsequently confessed to ‘hugely enjoying [this power] game’ and admitted his model had been the ‘Big Lie’ techniques of Goebbels and Nazi and other psycho logical warfare.
It has been precisely these techniques of media-promoted abuse (of factual reporting and ultimately the human rights which depend on it) which in the last two decades have led, in the Philippines, Rwanda, the Congo, Kosovo and else where, to indiscriminate killing of vul nerable communities defined through, and castigated for, their different beliefs, be they religious, cultural or ideological. The genocidal murders witnessed in Rwanda were certainly strongly encour aged by the broadcasts of Radio Cinq Collines, which incited and then fanned ethnic hatreds, with apparent impunity.
Thus radio trottoir, whether it is the irresponsible political gossip around the village pump itself, or the unchecked reporting of such gossip, is a two-edged sword. Moustapha Thiombiano, a radio broadcaster from the Ivory Coast who has experienced the potential threat of such unrestrained broadcasting at first hand, has said in interview that he believes that in Africa – as elsewhere:
La radio est bonne, la radio est dangereuse et il ne faut pas la mettre dans les mains d’un fou (‘Radio is good, [but also] radio is dangerous, and it should not be in the hands of a madman’).
Njamnjoh has chosen as a case study a country profile of Cameroon and its media. It is not entirely clear why this country in particular has been singled out to illustrate Africa's media rather than countries such as South Africa or Nigeria where struggles for democratisation have been both more protracted and more highly contested. The veritable mass mobilisations in both these areas, together with struggles over, and contri butions from, the country's mass media have there produced tangible results, more susceptible of detailed analysis than those of a country still locked in an effective one-party dictatorship with few present indications of imminent political change.
However, Cameroon's colonial past has determined that at independence the country was four-fifths Francophone, and one-fifth Anglophone, and this cul tural and language divide is still alive today. On the face of it, this factor alone would make it atypical of the majority of African states. Questions of ethnicity and political opposition to the status quo here become complicated by considerations of linguistic representations in both broadcast and press media, in addition to those debates about non-elite access to the media, political and eco nomic power in a country which since independence has known only one-party rule.
In 1982 Cameroon's first President, Ahidjo, was succeeded by his prime minister, Paul Biya. Faced with popular discontent, Mr Biya has allowed multiparty presidential elections in 1992, 1997 and yet again in 2004, but these have consistently been perceived as neither free nor fair nor even, by many, as worth taking part in at all. The electoral commission has been ridiculed as a rubber stamp for the ruling party, with electoral rolls widely perceived as fictitious.
Cameroon has one of the best literacy rates in Africa, yet the country's continued development is hampered by a level of corruption that is among the highest in the world. Cameroon as a whole is hardly flourishing, but Anglophone Cameroon is totally starved of development. The question then remains: how to get development and greater democracy without the country deteriorating into civil war?
President Biya is not by all accounts a particularly tyrannical man. The press appears to be free and several private radio stations appear to flourish. Yet ordinary Cameroonians know practically nothing about their president and they get to see him even less. The general citizenry, and rural Cameroonians in particular, are kept largely in the dark about government policies, aside from pro-government ‘information’ – the kind of ‘developmental journalism’ prevalent in some developing countries during the seventies and eighties which has now been fully-discredited elsewhere. Any discontent is furthermore controlled by the omnipresent police and gendarmerie. The government, in short, is rarely if ever called to account.
Opponents in the church have attempted to use their own (private) newspapers to denounce and hector Mr Biya, but until now he has refused to go. Meanwhile applications for a private church radio station have been stymied by the government using the simple and oft-employed tactic of refusal to issue a licence. Clearly the ruling party, in this one-party state, fears outspoken and influential critics, and they consequently fear a radio station run by the church. The parallels with Radio Veritas and its role in helping to oust the Philippine dictator Marcos in 1986 spring to mind. Yet without any obvious political opening in the near future it is difficult to see, let alone analyse, what contributions oppositional radio – or indeed any mass media – might contribute to effective democratization in Cameroon.
Nyamnjoh's book is, in sum, a useful survey of selected aspects of Africa's media. Certainly it raises numerous interesting questions about the roles of the media in future movements towards real democratisation on the continent, as distinct from what he calls the lip-service of ‘face-powder democracy’. This he rightly suspects is little more than window-dressing for gullible potential Western sponsors.
Interestingly, the BBC World Service asked listeners in 2004 whether radio phone-ins should be banned, following a call to halt them in the run-up to general elections in Ghana, where it was feared that potentially ‘defamatory or careless utterances’ might result in election violence. African listeners, many of them significantly from Nigeria, responded with an overwhelming affirmation of the need for free media, including radio, in Africa with comments like: ‘[they are] the only watchdog [to criticise] our governments’ and ‘government[s] should stop monopolising the media to communicate what they want’, and ‘Africans need self-realisation [to wipe out] the culture of intolerance’ in order that ‘self-seeking politicians [can no longer] manipulate the people […] for personal gain’. Other listeners observed variously that African governments and society in general must acquire ‘the capacity to hear the voice of the ‘man on the street and consider his [sic] opinion’ and that ‘radio [phone-ins] provide the easiest access to voicing one's opinion’. However, one listener did recognise that ‘citizens in rural areas [of Africa] are being fed with a lot of political rhetoric through phone-ins’. These comments suggest that Africans are becoming increasingly aware of the value of the media, however flawed, in expanding and defending the slow gains of democracy.
Democratisation in Africa will be a journey – as elsewhere – along a long and doubtless winding road, which will hopefully enable its citizens to learn, among other things to detect and resist the facile rhetoric of both Western and African demagoguery, but also to tolerate dissent. Nyamnjoh's monograph is perhaps one starting point for the debates and struggles which lie ahead. However further studies might usefully build on this general picture with more detail. This would provide valuable source material for more nuanced assessments of the various roles Africa's media are actually playing currently within broader attempts at democratization, as seen at street rather than ‘bird's eye’ level.
Desmond Smith is the author of Democracy and the Philippine Media.
The State They're in: an Agenda for International Action on Poverty in Africa
By Matthew Lockwood, ITDG Publishing, Bourton Hall, Bourton-on-Dunsmore, Rugby CV23 9QZ, UK; available also via www.developmentbookshop.com and in US from www.styluspub.com. Reviewed by Tina Wallace.
This book has been written at a time when ‘the development project’ is increasingly uncertain and contested. The beliefs about what will and will not lead to real positive change in Africa are divergent, although the current focus of the Washington consensus, and most international donors and NGOs, is that the answer lies somewhere in combining an increase in aid, cancellation of the debt and dropping trade barriers to goods from Africa. The focus of the Make Poverty History campaign encapsulates this approach, which was echoed in the G8 discussions in the summer of 2005.
The author rejects the recipes on offer and is overtly frustrated with the quality of the analysis of the problems of Africa to be found both among the donor and NGO communities in UK. The book has been written out of a strong belief that the solutions being offered now do not and cannot address the challenges of getting Africa out of poverty because they ignore the realities of the nature of the African state and politics in Africa. Few readers of ROAPE would argue with that point, as the journal has grappled for years with the nature and operations of different states in Africa.
Including the importance of politics and state actors in Africa is clearly critical to any analysis of the problems of continuing poverty in Africa, and how to tackle them. Taking this issue as central enables the author to raise many pertinent and important issues that need to be taken seriously in the current debates about how to move forward internationally and nationally. He stresses, rightly in my view, the importance of state intervention in development; however, this is something even the World Bank now acknowledges even though relations between them and states in sub-Saharan Africa are highly problematic. Lockwood is right to warn that states are ignored at the peril of the development agencies. His analysis of the failure of conditionality – one approach intended to bring African states into line in terms of their policies and practices – to change the behaviour of most states in Africa is well grounded in research, and he rightly highlights the reality that aid keeps flowing whether the conditions of that aid are met or not. The imperatives of aid mean that performance is often divorced from rewards; the money needs to be spent and in the absence of clear alternatives it continues to go to countries that are hardly reformed or reforming.
Writing with passion about the failures of current thinking and analysis among development agencies is also very welcome. It is easy to share Lockwood's frustration with the proposals being bandied about and the growing consensus across all kinds of agencies that is poorly rooted in good analytical, critical thinking.
It is also to be welcomed that the book recognises, although almost in passing, the importance of colonial relations and their continuance into modern day African states, something that much development analysis completely ignores. Lockwood tries to unpack and explore the realities of aid flows, and highlights the fact that they are substantial, and yet apparently ineffective in many ways in Africa. So why, he wonders, should doubling aid be an effective tool for solving poverty? He similarly explores the arguments and data around the issues of debt and trade, and assembles a lot of facts and figures to question current orthodoxies. He returns to some older policy prescriptions around increasing agricultural production, diversification, and industrialisation to seek for ways out of the cycles of primary commodity production and low productivity that keep Africa poor in a context of declining terms of trade globally. But it is in the very process of unravelling the realities of aid, trade and debt and seeking alternative approaches that the book is weakest.
First, the performance in Africa is compared, in every way unfavourably, with the states of East Asia. While this comparison is fashionable, it is not illuminating. The history, geography and political economy of East Asia and the continent of Africa are different along almost every dimension and the congruence of factors that enable major changes to take place in the East Asian economies do not apply in Africa today. These include, for example, the inherited state and bureaucratic structures, access to cheap and unregulated labour, state repression, major flows of foreign direct investment from the region, and the trading conditions of the recent past. Even Lockwood admits that the global terrain has changed, and the threat of China to other newly industrialising countries is going to pose a massive challenge for Africa.
Second, the analysis of East Asia is, inevitably, quite superficial. The problems become much worse in relation to the analysis of the problems in Africa, because Africa is a continent with highly diverse countries, contexts and states. While a huge number of facts and figures are mustered to support his arguments, the level of generalisation involved in presenting the situation in Africa as a whole is often too broad to be meaningful. The data presented are often highly questionable given the paucity of good quantitative data available on Africa. The comparison risks, at times, becoming relatively meaningless. This is more so when he compares the idea of ‘developmental states’ to be found in East Asia, with the ‘non-developmental states’ in Africa.
Lockwood is upfront about his belief that capitalism will provide the answer for Africa, a socialised capitalism that is aimed at using growth for development and development for growth. He has no analysis of the negative impacts of capitalist development, not even in relation to some of the core issues he is exploring such as growing social inequalities, environmental degradation, and corruption. The capitalist model followed in East Asia is the model for Africa to aspire to; the negative aspects of the model are glossed over. The model of socialised capitalism presented is one where corruption is limited or under control, where privatisation works to the benefit of the consumer, where things work. There is often an almost unconscious contrasting of everything that is wrong in Africa, with an idealised context where bureaucracies work impartially, patronage does not exist, corruption is limited, the private sector deliver efficiently and effectively, clientalism is replaced by formal democratic structures and so on. I suspect that behind the East Asia model, which was overtly presented, Lockwood has a relatively uncritical view of the way things work in the United Kingdom. The contrasts he made often felt as if they were with the ‘promotional material’ of life in Blair's UK. I found it hard to think of anywhere, any bureaucracy, any company or country, that fitted the ideal types that seem to underlie his analysis.
The sense that Lockwood was comparing Africa with UK as well as East Asia seemed implicit in the title. This distancing of Africa, the vast generalisations, and the comparisons with almost idealised ‘other places’ – especially East Asia – detracted significantly from the power of some of his arguments. He does recognise the problems of over-generalisation and looks towards the end of the book at case studies of countries that are said to be improving faster in Africa, including Ghana, Uganda and Tanzania, but again these are so brief and presented at such a level of generalisation that it is hard to really understand in any detailed way the problems or the solutions being tried in those countries. He, anyway, sees them as all very limited in their ability to break away from being states that are anti-developmental and does not feel they hold out great hope for the future.
The way the book is written labels all African states as anti-developmental; the history and political economy of every country is elided into statements that are supposed to apply continent wide; and every state is engaged in ‘spoils politics’, with only one – Ghana – identified as having a strong civil society able to even start negotiating with the state around development issues. The way the data are presented leads to an over-simplification that sometimes hide more than it reveals.
Having said that, the book is intended in part to be a polemic and was expected to be a shot across the bows of the G8 and subsequent meetings in 2005, urging them to relook at the data and to explore the effectiveness of the current approaches to promoting development in Africaaid, trade and debt. He has developed a range of policy recommendations around, for example, agriculture and diversification, industrialisation and exports, retrenchment, the role of the civil service, patronage, the role of civil society, corruption that are hard to grapple with when discussed Africa-wide, but which could provide useful questions and even a framework for analysis within individual African countries. Many good points are raised through the discussion that the development community do need to take seriously and engage with. Unfortunately the way the book is framed, comparing Africa unfavourably on every dimension with East Asia, and beyond that implicitly with northern countries, ultimately undermines the power of his arguments.