Why peace agreements
often fail to end
civil wars
BY KATHLEEN O'TOOLE
For some people sometimes,
war is safer than peace. Starting with that premise helps
one understand why the United Nations, the United States
and others so often fail to implement the peace treaties
they help others negotiate. Add to that the incompetence,
inconsistency and bickering of the would-be peacemakers
and you get a better idea of why civil war seems to flare
up in the headlines not long after the formal
announcement that peace has broken out.
Four diplomats who have
been involved in negotiating and implementing both failed
and successful peace accords in civil wars made those
points to a Stanford audience in Annenberg Auditorium on
Veterans Day, Nov. 11. They were among eight such
diplomats here for three days to meet with scholars
studying how to give peace a better chance. During the
public discussion moderated by former Secretary of State
George Shultz, professor emeritus, the four who were
involved in Cambodia, El Salvador, Angola and Bosnia
emphasized the importance of outsiders other countries
and international organizations reaching consensus on
the key roles they should play in implementing not
just negotiating peace.
The conference was
designed as a "reality check" for scholars who
are beginning a systematic study of the first three years
of implementation of peace agreements in 15
civil-war-torn countries, said Stephen Stedman, a senior
research scholar at Stanford's Center for International
Security and Arms Control. He is the coordinator of six
Stanford scholars who are part of the international team
involved in the two-year study financed by the Ford
Foundation. The conference was the first of four planned,
and was funded by a gift from Reuben and Ingrid Hills of
San Francisco to the university's Institute for
International Studies.
Civil war, the most common
type of war since the end of World War II, is far less
likely to be ended by a negotiated agreement than wars
between countries, Stedman found during his doctoral
studies at Stanford in the late 1980s. At that time
"there were calls for negotiated settlements in El
Salvador and South Africa," he said, and
"conflict resolution studies were focused on how to
mediate civil wars under the illusion that all you needed
to do was get an agreement and the war would end. "
Successful agreements were
achieved in Zimbabwe, Namibia and El Salvador, "but
then very quickly we ran into the problem children of
Angola, Cambodia and Rwanda," Stedman said after the
conference. "By a huge magnitude, more people died
after the peace accords in Angola and Rwanda than during
the civil wars that preceded them." Negotiating a
second peace agreement after one has failed is often more
costly in time, money and lives, conference participants
said. Hence the urgency attached to implementation,
rather than to mediation itself.
"The brutally
depressing fact is that for most of the parties in most
of these conflicts, war is a safer bet" than peace,
James Schear, deputy assistant secretary of defense for
peacekeeping and humanitarian affairs, told the campus
audience. Schear previously worked for the United Nations
in Cambodia and Bosnia. War is often safer, he said,
because it has "a familiar pattern; it imposes
order, stifles dissent, generates profits in Angola and
other places, provides employment, provides a pathway to
advance."
"Peace, on the other
hand, is a leap into the unknown," Schear said.
"It involves bargaining concessions, contingent
exchanges of promises that can come undone. . . . Most of
all peace involves loss of political control and
cohesion. It tends to dissolve the glue that cements
wartime coalitions together whether on the political left
in El Salvador or among the non-communists in Cambodia or
as we see today among the nationalist Serbs in
Bosnia."
To be effective as
peacemakers and keepers, the international governmental
and private organizations involved must be more skillful
and consistent in the signals they send, Schear and the
others with implementation experience said.
Implementation requires careful development of carrots
and sticks for foot-draggers, they said. Too often, the
peace agreements are vague, which makes implementation
more difficult. Bureaucratic turf wars among the
peacemaking organizations also don't help. Schear, for
example, pointed out that the United States has eight
different agencies involved in peacekeeping missions. A
May 1997 presidential directive attempts to deal with
coordination problems by requiring an overall plan and a
team of senior officials from each agency, he said.
"Sometimes factors
that facilitated the agreement are problems for
implementation," said Margaret Anstee, who had the
unfortunate experience of being assigned as the U.N.
secretary general's special representative to the Angolan
peace implementation. The 1991 Angolan agreement was
brokered by the United States, Russia and Portugal
without any U.N. involvement, she said, but the United
Nations was designated to enforce it.
The brokers negotiated
"winner-take-all" elections, like those held
for congressional districts in the United States, she
said. Both major factions assumed they would win the
September 1992 elections, and when one, UNITA, lost with
40 percent of the vote, it went back to war. "You
might say the operation was successful but the patient
died," Anstee said, because the Western brokers did
not take into account that in many Third World countries
"control of the government is the prize there
isn't anything else."
When Angola's UNITA rebels
went back to war, the U.N. Security Council took a year
to apply sanctions, which were not effective, she said.
An estimated 300,000 Angolans died in the year following
the election. A second brokered peace is in trouble now,
she and others speakers said, and the Security Council
has issued new sanctions against UNITA.
In his recently published
analysis of the "spoilers" of peace agreements
and how they were dealt with in five situations, Stedman
reported that part of the problem in Angola stemmed from
the failure of American officials in Washington to
recognize the true character of Jonas Savimbi, the UNITA
leader. "Individuals [in the Defense Department and
intelligence agencies] who knew Savimbi and had been
romanced by him could not bring themselves to find him at
fault. Likewise, the negotiators who worked hard to get
an agreement could not believe that one of the
signatories was rejecting a compromise solution
outright," wrote Stedman, who was an observer in
Angola at the time. In Rwanda, he wrote, the French
government's connections to the former state government
was partly responsible for the failure of U.N. management
there. The international community dealt effectively with
Renamo in Mozambique and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, he
concluded, but not with the state government of Cambodia.
"From the beginning,
we need to think about an integrated operation of
peace-building," said Anstee, who is now a financial
consultant to Bolivia. "That means involvement in
reconstruction and restoring the possibility of economic
and social development, establishing democratic
institutions and providing training for a neutral police
force."
International actors who
bring warring factions to the bargaining table expect
them to "turn into boy scouts" after signing an
agreement, complained Y.K. Saksena, an Indian general who
was the deputy force commander for the U.N. mission in
Angola and more recently involved in U.N. planning for
Sierra Leone. Disarming soldiers and guerrilla groups is
no small task for the military units involved, Saksena
said, because no one has an incentive to tell the truth
about the numbers involved, and commanders often hold
back weapons and troops because they don't trust the
other side.
He and Anstee stressed
that foot soldiers in civil wars become a problem quickly
if implementation does not include provisions for their
employment. "Soldiers have patience for about six
months" after a peace agreement, Saksena estimated,
but become "bandits" soon afterward if no other
provisions have been made for them. Soldiers are used to
"living off the land and killing to survive in
sub-Sahara Africa," Saksena said, so that
"totally observer-type peacekeeping missions are no
longer feasible there. The observers are vulnerable to
becoming hostages" of former fighters.
In his view, he said,
international financial organizations such as the
International Monetary Fund and World Bank have more of a
role in ensuring implementation of peace agreements than
do U.N. "blue helmets" or other military units.
Alvaro de Soto, the U.N.
assistant secretary general for political affairs who
negotiated the peace agreement in El Salvador, stressed
the importance of having only one lead mediator in
negotiations someone who is both knowledgeable of the
particular conflict and consistently impartial. He also
cautioned the international community against expecting
mediators to achieve "justice" for victims of
war atrocities.
During private sessions of
the conference, human rights abuses emerged as one of the
"sources of tension," Stedman said afterward.
Some of the scholars and diplomats felt human rights
violations should be given a higher priority than they
have been in the past. "The mediators found that
very problematic because they have to make deals with
people who have guns and who have committed atrocities,
and the implementers have to make them give up their
guns," Stedman said.
Those at the negotiating
table have "a strong temptation to turn the page and
to seek amnesty for themselves," de Soto told the
Annenberg Auditorium audience. Whether war criminals are
brought to justice or not, he said, "may be less
important than addressing the issue and facing the truth
of what happened" in the country during the war.
The U.N., he said, has
"slightly conflicting mandates." It's
peacekeeping values call for its representatives to be
neutral and seek the consent of the parties at the table,
while its human rights policy calls for combating
impunity for human rights violators.
Virtually everyone at the
conference agreed that negotiated accords are usually
"incomplete, vague and expedient agreements that are
bad for implementation," Stedman said.
Said Anstee: "The
U.N. works on the basis of political compromise,
especially in the Security Council. This leads to
ambiguous mandates." She urged a change in direction
where the secretary general takes the initiative to
present a "strategic, overall policy framework"
to the Security Council, which then must act on it. Once
the framework is in place, she said, "we need
maximum delegation of responsibility to the field."
Nearly everyone at the
conference felt that implementers need to be brought into
the process before negotiations are complete, Stedman
said, in order for them to have a better sense of what
has been left out of the written agreement and where
various parties are likely to waffle.
"The pattern tends to
be that the implementers are completely divorced from the
mediators. One set of individuals or states creates an
agreement and hands if off to another group," he
said. "The situation was a little different with
Bosnia, where the Pentagon laid down very restrictive
conditions for the negotiators. What was fudged and
omitted was the civilian aspects of implementation in the
Dayton accords. That was a total hand-off with very
little forethought or strategy."
In his recent published
analysis of how the international community has tried to
handle parties who try to "spoil" a negotiated
agreement, Stedman concludes that a "common
denominator among the successful cases. . . is unity and
coordination among external parties in defining the
problem, establishing legitimacy for the strategy and
applying the strategy."
In the failed cases he
analyzed, Stedman wrote, "no international consensus
formed about legitimate and illegitimate solutions to the
civil wars." While they talk about having standards,
he said, "the member states and many U.N. personnel
seldom act like they mean it" when it comes to
protecting peace agreements.
The comparison of recent
examples, he wrote in the journal International
Security, "counters the adage that solutions to
internal conflicts must come from the participants
themselves. In this study successful management of
internal conflict has resulted from the willingness of
external actors to take sides as to which demands and
grievances are legitimate and which are not." SR
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