Angola

Article published by Developments magazine, January 2005:

Angola, imperfect peace
A new report on Angola’s drawn-out civil war draws important lessons for other African conflicts, says Huw Spanner. No one can pretend that Angola offers a shining role model to the rest of Africa. Every attempt to make peace in the civil war, that first broke out in 1975, failed until government forces succeeded in killing Jonas Savimbi, the leader of Unita, 27 years later – which would seem to recommend violence as the most effective way to resolve conflict. Moreover, peacebuilding is not proceeding as smoothly as it might, and the secessionist war in the enclave of Cabinda is still grinding on. Nevertheless, a major report published by Conciliation Resources draws important lessons from Angola’s recent history – which the authors believe can be applied to other armed conflicts across the continent. From Military Peace to Social Justice? is the fruit of a two-year analysis of the successive peace processes that sought to bring to an end the civil war. Editor, Guus Meijer, describes the project as "something of a challenge" but the 14 report authors argue that valuable lessons can be learnt, even from failure. Most controversially, they reject the "myth of redemptive violence", pointing out that when one side wins a war outright it has no great incentive to understand and deal with the grievances of those it has defeated. Military victory encourages a winner-takes-all mentality rather than the "dialogue, negotiation, respect for other points of view and eventual compromise" that are the stuff of democracy. For sure, the intractability of conflicts like that in northern Uganda between the government and Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army – not to mention the uncompromising rhetoric of the so-called "war against terror" – has encouraged belief in "the one-bullet solution". But in Angola the fact that the MPLA and its supporters now have a virtually free hand means that, almost two