Ending Civil War: Rhodesia and Lebanon in

Perspective

Matthew Preston

I.B. Tauris

Ending Civil War

Ending Civil War

Rhodesia and Lebanon in Perspective

MATTHEW PRESTON

I.B.Tauris Publishers LONDON ● NEW YORK

Published in 2004 by I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com In the United States of America and in Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St Martins Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © Matthew Preston, 2004 The rights of Matthew Preston to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. International Library of War Studies 2 ISBN 1 85043 579 0 EAN 978 1 85043 579 2 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress catalog card: available Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin from camera-ready copy supplied by the author

Contents

List of abbreviations vi

Note on transliteration and terminology vii

Acknowledgements viii

Maps x

Introduction 1

Peace Negotiations and Structures of Settlement 9

The Battlefield 51

Military-Civilian Relations 96

Intra-factional Politics 122

Intervention and Mediation 150

Implementation 189

Conclusion 226

Notes 249

Bibliography 283

Index 317

List of Abbreviations ANC African National Council CAOM Civil Administration of the Mountains CCJP Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace CIO Central Intelligence Organisation CMF Commonwealth Monitoring Force FLN National Liberation Front [Algeria] FRELIMO Front for the Liberation of Mozambique FROLIZI Front for the Liberation of Zimbabwe IDF Israel Defence Forces JOC Joint Operations Command LNM Lebanese National Movement NIBMAR No Independence Before Majority African Rule OAU Organisation of African Unity PLO Palestine Liberation Organisation PSP Popular Socialist Party RAR Rhodesian African Rifles RENAMO Mozambique National Resistance SAS Special Air Service SFA Security Force Auxiliaries SLA South Lebanon Army SSNP Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party SWB Summary of World Broadcasts TTL Tribal Trust Land UANC United African National Council UDI Unilateral Declaration of Independence UNIFIL United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon UNITA National Union for the Total Independence of Angola ZANLA Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army ZANU Zimbabwe African National Union ZAPU Zimbabwe African People’s Union ZIPA Zimbabwe People’s Army ZIPRA Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army ZNA Zimbabwe National Army

Note on Transliteration and Terminology Rhodesia: ‘Rhodesia’ was the formal name of the country for most of the period covered by this book. I have used that term for the political entity where appropriate, and for the geographical entity throughout. Where circumstances dictate, I have also used the titles ‘Southern Rhodesia’, ‘Zimbabwe Rhodesia’ and ‘Zimbabwe’. I refer to the settler community in Rhodesia interchangeably as ‘Rhodesian’, ‘white’ and ‘European’, and to the indigenous population as ‘African’ or ‘black’. The adjective ‘Zimbabwean’ is reserved for the African nationalist guerrillas, and for the post-independence context. During the two years following independence in April 1980, the names of various towns and cities were changed. For the sake of clarity, places are referred to by their pre-independence names where the context is prior to April 1980, and by their new names thereafter. Lebanon: Arabic words and names have mostly been transliterated according the rules set out in the International Journal for Middle East Studies. The exceptions are where other spellings have become common currency, as found in Keesing’s Record of World Events.

Acknowledgements Many helped in the research and production of this book. Philip Robins proved an inspiring mentor, encouraging gently and puncturing stray illusions. Fadia Taher and Simon Lewis were generous to a fault in their welcome to Lebanon and Zimbabwe respectively. David Keen and Raufu Mustapha probed the text helpfully and incisively. Others who were giving with their time and expertise in Oxford, Beirut or Harare include Donald Chimanikire, Jean Hannoyer, Farid el-Khazen, Alan Megahey, Nader Moumneh, Brian Raftopoulos, Paul Salem and Nadim Shehadi. I am very grateful, too, for the facilities and welcome extended by the librarians and staff of numerous establishments: in Oxford, the Middle East Centre at St. Antony’s College, Queen Elizabeth House, Rhodes House, the Centre for Lebanese Studies and the Bodleian Library; in London, the British Library and the Royal Institute of International Affairs; in Harare, the Institute of Development Studies and the University of Zimbabwe; and in Beirut, the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches sur le Moyen-Orient Contemporain. Thanks are also due to Hanako Birks at I.B.Tauris, and to Sage Publications for permission to re-use material which appeared in the Journal of Peace Research, vol. 41, no. 1. My father, Michael Preston, spent long hours deploying his considerable editorial skills on an earlier draft of this book. I owe profound thanks to him and Sherri, to my mother Stephanie Swynnerton and Charles, and to Rob, for all their support. But the largest single group of those to whom I am deeply indebted are the Rector, Fellows and staff of Exeter College, Oxford. While I am immensely grateful to all, some deserve a special mention. From 1990 to 2003, Michael Hart, Marilyn Butler, Brian Stewart and John Maddicott all offered particular inspiration, hospitality and guidance in their various roles. Others – Guy Rowlands, Oliver Pooley (and Helen Thomas), Stephen Hampton, David Garrick and Miranda Stewart among them – provided an atmosphere, friendship and warmth that I shall always cherish. Jonathan Snicker (together with Katherine Hieronymus) supplied all of the above, along with patience, a spare room, and almost limitless good humour. But ultimately, this book is for one last Fellow, my wife Nuria Capdevila Argüelles, without whose love, encouragement and example it would never have been finished. Gracias. A ti, y a Olalla.

ix

Shortly after finishing the manuscript for this book I joined the Global Issues Research Group of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Needless to say, the opinions I present in this volume are my own, and should not be taken as an expression of the UK government. London December 2003

Maps

INTRODUCTION On 21 December 1972, a band of guerrillas belonging to the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) attacked Altena Farm, in the Centenary-Mount Darwin area in the north of Rhodesia. Wounding the daughter of the farms’ owners, their attack was a landmark in the Zimbabwean struggle for majority rule, representing the first use of force against white civilians in the guerrillas’ new strategy of infiltration into and subversion of rural Rhodesia. In Lebanon, just over two years later and approximately 3,500 miles away, on 13 April 1975, unidentified gunmen shot from a speeding car at a church in the Beirut suburb Ain-al-Rummane, killing four. Later that day Lebanese Maronite Christian militiamen of the Ketaeb (or Phalanges) party took revenge, killing twenty-seven Palestinians returning by bus to the Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp from a rally in the capital. The civil wars which ensued in both countries captured the world’s attention. Lebanon became a by-word for state collapse, with events such as the Israeli invasion of 1982, the massacre by Ketaeb militiamen of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, and the kidnapping of Western hostages by Hizballah radicals in the later 1980s all commanding massive media coverage. The Rhodesian war, meanwhile, further intensified a political crisis that had erupted with the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from Britain issued by Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front white minority government in November 1965. The escalation of the war in the 1970s, along with allegations that Western companies were helping Rhodesia circumvent UN sanctions and that Western mercenaries were aiding the Rhodesian cause, kept Rhodesia high up the international agenda. Representing almost the last phase of African decolonisation, the Rhodesian cause served as a rallying call to unite the newly independent states of sub-Saharan Africa and embarrass the former imperial power, Britain.

After years of violent struggle, though, both wars ended, and they ended in internationally-sponsored negotiated compromise peace deals. On 21 December 1979 the leaders of the Rhodesian government and of the Zimbabwean guerrilla movements signed a peace agreement at Lancaster House in London, providing for a cease-fire, for interim political arrangements in the lead-up to elections in February 1980, and for a new constitution to come into force two

ENDING CIVIL WAR 2

months later. Ten years later, and after a war lasting eight years more than the Rhodesian, the surviving members of the 1972 Lebanese parliament signed a comparable agreement at Taif in Saudi Arabia. Though the agreement did not secure peace immediately, the assent to it of the various fighting factions was secured in the months that followed (peacefully and forcefully), so that by the end of October 1990 the Lebanese civil war had ended.

The purpose of this book is to investigate how, why and when both wars ended, and to discover what can be learned from comparing the two as examples of negotiated civil war termination. Defining a civil war is a complex task. As Smith notes, ‘civil war’ is just one of at least thirty-six different terms used to describe what is essentially the same phenomenon.1 If ‘civil’ is taken to denote ‘intra-state’, then certainly various of the combatants in Rhodesia and Lebanon disavowed this description. For most white Rhodesians, the Zimbabwean guerrillas were agents of international ‘Communist Terrorism’ rather than indigenous resistance fighters, while they in return were described as British imperialists. In Lebanon, in the latter stages of war, widespread currency was given to the idea of a ‘guerre des autres’ caused by Israel, Syria, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), Iran, the wider Arab world, and the superpowers. The Lebanese thus absolved themselves of responsibility for their own misfortunes. Both wars certainly were heavily internationalised, with all the above powers involved in Lebanon, and with South Africa, Zambia and Mozambique particularly implicated in the Rhodesian war.

‘War’ too presents problems, implying as it does both a level of intensity and the existence of a single phenomenon. Both conflicts certainly passed Small and Singer’s threshold of 1,000 battle deaths per annum at various stages, but as the results of the Uppsala Conflict Data Project show they did not do so in every year: casualties in Rhodesia rose continuously from 1972, while those in Lebanon fluctuated wildly.2 ‘War’ may be a useful and conventional shorthand for describing the violence practised in both countries, but only as long as it does not obscure the complexity and variety of the conflict experience across both time and space. Pinpointing the beginning and end of a civil war is equally problematic. Historians now see the Altena farm and Ain-al-Rummane attacks as precipitating the outbreak of war, but organised political violence had been exercised in both countries during the prior months and years. The rhetoric of the belligerents is no more helpful here: in Rhodesia, for example, ZANU mythology dated the war from the so-called Battle of Sinoia in 1966, despite the minor nature of that clash and the virtual absence of armed conflict thereafter; meanwhile, as Godwin and Hancock observe, it was not until 1976 that white Rhodesian society accepted that what it

INTRODUCTION 3

was fighting was indeed war.3 Dating war’s end is no easier, and is discussed below in Chapter 6. The paper settlements may have established a framework for the post-war political settlement, but they could not guarantee their observance. In Lebanon, in particular, it was only twelve months after its signing and the defeat of the rejectionist General Michel Aoun that the Taif agreement could come into force. Even then, the onset of ‘peace’ did not herald a complete cessation of violence in either country, nor did it mean that the political and social conflict – rather than merely the war – was settled.

These conceptual problems, though, are not unique to Lebanon or Rhodesia, and they have not prevented the emergence of a large literature on civil wars since the end of the Cold War. If civil war may usefully be thought of as ‘a violent dispute whose origins can be traced primarily to domestic rather than to systemic factors, and one in which armed violence occurs primarily within the borders of a single state’, then the cases at hand certainly count.4 Indeed, a central argument of this book is that despite the involvement of outsiders, civil war in Lebanon and Rhodesia was to an important degree an internal affair, whether in its causes, its conduct and even its ending. Outsiders provided weapons and money to fighting factions, but those factions owed their existence and manpower to political, social, economic and demographic processes within the state. The wars that emerged were essentially contests for power over the state, and to that end Lebanese shot at Lebanese, and Rhodesians and Zimbabweans shot at each other, in every year of their respective wars. And wars they were. Certainly, the intensity of both varied over time, but the average annual battle casualties clearly exceeded even the most stringent of definition of ‘war’.5 Kalyvas argues that ‘war structures choices and selects actors in fundamentally different ways than peace – even violent peace’, and the chapters that follow will reinforce that point.6

If the Lebanese and Rhodesian were civil wars, their longevity was typical of a genre which tends to last six times longer than its inter-state counterpart.7 Various reasons – structural, organisational and psychological – have been put forward for why civil war is so resistant to settlement. Perhaps the most significant structural factor is what the Lebanese civil war lacked and had been overcome towards the end of the Rhodesian civil war, that of asymmetry. Under the ‘typical’ model of government versus insurgency, the government has legitimacy, sovereignty, allies, armies and access to resources. The government will also, so Mitchell suggests, be more cohesive and better organised, if only because it controls the state apparatus. The rebels balance the government’s advantage in power terms, first with their depth of ideological and organisational commitment, and

ENDING CIVIL WAR 4

secondly because, as Henry Kissinger noted, ‘the guerrilla army wins as long as it can keep from losing’.8 Such asymmetry presents a serious barrier to negotiated settlement, for, as Zartman says, the negotiation process functions best under conditions of equality, and can only take place when the parties have some sort of mutual veto over outcomes. Indeed, asymmetry usually not only causes negotiations to fail but even prevents their taking place, as a government will refuse rebels the legitimacy conveyed on them by their participation in negotiations. 9

The remaining structural barriers to negotiated settlement must still be considered. The first, advanced by Fred Iklé, one of the first theorists of war termination, blamed the indivisible nature of the stakes in civil war:

Outcomes intermediate between victory and defeat are difficult to construct. If partition is not a feasible outcome because the belligerents are not geographically separable, one side has to get all, or nearly so, since there cannot be two governments ruling over one country, and since the passions aroused and the political cleavages opened render a sharing of power unworkable.10

This analysis was picked up by Paul Pillar, who wrote that ‘the very fact that a civil war has broken out indicates the weakness of any mechanisms for compromise. … The struggle for power becomes a struggle for survival as the options narrow to … a fight to the finish’.11 Since the end of the Cold War, however, this explanation has rightly come under attack.12 For although negotiated settlements have been unusual, they can be found. As Stedman argues, Mikhail Gorbachev’s introduction of representative institutions in the USSR in 1988 shows that leaders do not necessarily see the participation of additional people in state politics as negative. Civil war participants can recognise each other’s legitimacy, as did the Ortega government and the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, even if they do so only occasionally.

Nevertheless, the stakes in civil wars are commonly much higher than in non-nuclear inter-state war. As Michael Wesley says,

warring for power to determine the future of the state imparts a particular desperation on the struggle, and a singularly instrumentalist and opportunist logic on the political and military calculations of the belligerents. … The importance of the stakes – control of the state, its resources, and sovereign prerogatives – means that civil wars are usually fought with particular seriousness and brutality, and the consequences of defeat, capture, or surrender are usually extreme.13

INTRODUCTION 5

Indeed, Wesley continues by arguing convincingly that because the stakes are so high, the belligerents’ political considerations are usually almost exclusively conflict-based, so that whereas in inter-state war the UN can influence the belligerents because few states wish to be blamed by the UN, this tends not to apply in civil wars, leaving the UN powerless to defuse them.

Another factor in the rarity of compromise in civil war is a modified version of the realist security dilemma. Because under international anarchy the state is the ultimate guarantor of the rule of law and thus of any settlement, and because civil wars are conflicts over the nature and locus of authority within the state, all sides fear that by handing over both the temporary sovereignty achieved during the conflict and, more importantly, their weapons, they will cede control over the apparatus of the state, and thus risk being eliminated after complying with the terms of a negotiated settlement.

But it is not just the nature of the interaction between the belligerents that hinders successful negotiation. The internal characteristics of those belligerents, both psychological and organisational, are also important. The organisational barriers are described aptly by Stedman as the ‘pathologies of leadership’.14 Leaders in civil wars may be so committed to the military option that it does not matter if their followers want peace, as King argues of Vellupillai Prabhakaran of the Tamil Tigers and Ratko Mladic of the Bosnian Serb army. Smith argues that once such leaders have committed themselves to war, their political advisers are afraid to criticise the leader, or they do so and are ignored or dismissed, or they fail to agree amongst themselves. Even if leaders are ideologically disposed to entertain the compromise option, the failure of leaders to achieve their objectives can engender a curious reluctance to face up to the facts. As Iklé says of wars in general,

Fighting often continues long past the point where a “rational” calculation would indicate that the war should be ended – ended, perhaps, even at the price of major concessions. Government leaders often fail to explore alternatives to the policies to which they become committed, and may even unconsciously distort what they know so as to leave their past predictions undisturbed.15

Leaders often, too, become trapped by their own rhetoric, unable to back down without loss of face amongst their constituency. It may require a change of leadership, or even a complete change of regime, to alleviate the organisational barriers to settlement. Even then, the new leader may prove more hard-line than his predecessor, especially as hawks seem to prosper in civil war at the expense of doves.16

ENDING CIVIL WAR 6

Some phenomena apply not just to leaders in civil wars, but to entire populations. Foremost is the upward re-evaluation of aims that protracted civil war tends to cause. Especially in the ‘insurgent versus government’ model of civil war, government failure to respond to the insurgents’ demands for political reform lends credence to the insurgents’ ideological critique of the regime, and leads them to conclude that only by revolution can they achieve their aims. One can also observe, with Pillar, that ‘mounting costs engender an upward revaluation of one’s objectives, thereby reducing the discomfort of knowing that one has incurred costs without sufficient reason. This revaluation in turn makes further costly efforts even more justifiable’.17

Often, a combination of various of these factors makes

settlement impossible, other than through military victory. The civil wars in Rhodesia and Lebanon, though, provide examples of a different form of civil war termination, that of the negotiated internationally-mediated compromise settlement. As such, they are of particular scholarly interest. Analytically such settlements present more of a puzzle than do outright military victories. If the barriers to settlement are so great, how are they overcome? Morally they seem preferable: negotiated settlement should in theory provide something for everyone, and while such settlements tend to be less durable than military victories, they are less usually followed by genocide.18 And, topically, negotiated settlements to civil wars are becoming more frequent. At the end of the Cold War Stedman could calculate that of sixty-four settled civil wars since 1900, forty-one had ended either through the elimination or capitulation of one side, while a further six should be seen as negotiated surrender rather than negotiated compromise.19 The data presented by Wallensteen and Sollenberg covering the period 1989 to 1996, though, show a marked increase in compromise settlements. While the data for 1996 onwards is less clear-cut, and while many of these intermediate solutions to civil war have resulted in the ‘freezing’ rather than the settlement of conflict, the importance of understanding why compromise settlements can emerge after years of civil war is clear.20

This book is hardly the first to investigate the dynamics of civil war and the mechanisms by which they can lead to settlement. Indeed, it draws heavily on four traditions of thinking about civil war: that of ethnic and nationalist conflict; that of military strategy in low-intensity warfare; that of the economic functions of violence in civil war; and, most importantly, that of war as a bargaining problem awaiting a propitious moment for settlement.21 The significance of this last perspective, championed by Zartman with his concept of the ‘ripe moment’ in civil war termination, is that it emphasises the role

INTRODUCTION 7

played by factors external to the negotiating table in the achievement of settlement, and that it highlights the adaptability and compromise often shown by belligerents in civil war, but without minimising the problems faced by those attempting to broker a negotiated settlement. It is the various propositions put forward by these perspectives within six distinct issue areas concerning the requirements for settlement that lend this book its structure. Thus Chapter 1 assesses the terms of the peace settlements agreed at Lancaster House and at Taif, as well as the various failed negotiations that preceded them during both wars. Chapter 2 investigates developments on the battlefield; Chapter 3 examines the relationships between military actors and their supposed civilian constituencies, while Chapter 4 looks at political developments within the belligerent factions themselves; Chapter 5 assesses the roles played by external actors in bringing both wars to an end; and, before concluding, Chapter 6 investigates how the Lancaster House and Taif agreements were implemented, with a view to understanding the durability of the post-war order in Zimbabwe and Lebanon. Each chapter begins by summarising the core requirements for settlement proposed in each issue area in the theoretical literature, and concludes with a comparison of the two wars in light of those general propositions.

Unlike many political science works on civil wars on the one hand, therefore, and unlike the many histories of war in Rhodesia and Lebanon on the other, this book represents an attempt to influence the general theoretical agenda in an inductive, bottom-up manner. Like all comparative studies, the value of such an approach is that by choosing two cases rather than one it is possible to begin to separate the particular from the general, the theoretical from the specific. Examining no more than two, meanwhile, allows the attention to detail that is required in the building of ‘bottom-up’ theory. Caution must naturally be exercised in drawing comparisons: similarities between two cases, even if they are carefully selected, may be little more than coincidental. Even more importantly, great care must be taken to avoid forcing the cases into a theoretical or comparative straightjacket that does disservice to the reality of the cases themselves. But with support from scholars such as Alexander George, John Bowen, Roger Petersen, Gary King, Robert Keohane and Sidney Verba, the comparative method itself, I feel, needs no extended defence.22

More important is the justification of case selection. Why Lebanon and why Rhodesia? From a social scientific perspective, the answer is that although the two wars may on the surface seem dissimilar – they occurred on different continents, in quite different political and social cultures – they hold much in common from a conceptual standpoint.23 Both wars were protracted; they were heavily

ENDING CIVIL WAR 8

internationalised; externally mediated negotiated settlements played a critical role in their termination; secession was never seriously contemplated by any of the belligerent factions; and, perhaps most importantly, the barriers to settlement imposed by asymmetries of size, type and commitment between the belligerent factions were overcome at an early stage, in Rhodesia by the sheer number of insurgents facing the relatively small resources of the settler state, and in Lebanon by the split in the national army at the beginning of the war. The selection of two such conceptually similar wars thus reduces the chances of succumbing to the problems caused by Licklider’s somewhat reluctant conclusion that civil wars may differ widely in the ways that they end.24 Historically, meanwhile, focusing on two cases from the Cold War era rather than later grants some distance and perspective on the wars under investigation. It has been forcefully argued that there is no reason to suggest that the dynamics of post-Cold War civil wars differ from their predecessors: warlordism, economic motivations and ethnicity, for example, played as great a role in civil war before 1990 as they have since.25 War in the contemporary international system most commonly features state collapse, the growth of militia and guerrilla groups, drug-smuggling, kidnapping, terrorism and massacres. But these were features aplenty too of civil war in Rhodesia and Lebanon, and the lessons of how these wars ended have much to offer the field of contemporary as well as historical civil war termination.

Yet most importantly of all, a comparison of the Rhodesian and Lebanese wars demonstrates the deeply political nature of civil war in these two countries. Two of the most common themes of lay and scholarly writing on contemporary civil war have been the apolitical nature of the violence perpetrated by combatants, and the centrality of economic greed to their motivations.26 Certainly, war in Rhodesia and Lebanon witnessed drug-smuggling, extortion and other such economically rather than politically-motivated activities. Certainly, too, the political motivations of the belligerents were not always immediately apparent, and, even when they were, they were as often focused on the political dynamics within fighting factions as those between them. But the core contention of this book is that both wars are best understood as complex, confusing but ultimately political struggles for control of the state. Clausewitz infamously described war as a ‘real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means’.27 As this book aims to show, the evidence from Rhodesia and Lebanon appears to support his case.

1

PEACE NEGOTIATIONS AND STRUCTURES OF

SETTLEMENT

The obstacles that face the opening and conclusion of peace negotiations in civil wars are not easily overcome, but it is nevertheless true that when civil wars do end through negotiations, they result in a deal whose primary content addresses the future political institutions of the state.1 As such, however limited their importance may be, the terms of the peace proposals put before the warring parties in civil war clearly play a significant role in the achievement of a settlement. Peace settlements almost always claim to map out the post-war political landscape, and in all cases other than that of abject surrender by one side the terms of the settlement must prove acceptable to its signatories. This raises two important questions, though: firstly, what are the terms that will prove acceptable to all parties? And, secondly, just how ‘acceptable’ do they need to be? The first of these questions is widely addressed in the literature on internal war. For Zartman, after the battlefield situation, and the state of intra-group politics, the ‘formula for a way out’ is the third area in which favourable conditions must obtain for peace to emerge. The construction of such a ‘mutually enticing opportunity’ is challenging:

Internal conflict cannot be resolved by some wise judgement on an outstanding issue, such as the location of a boundary, the exchange of disarmament quotas, or the terms of a peace treaty. Rather, the outcome must provide for the integration of the insurgency into a new body politic and for mechanisms that allow the conflict to shift from violence back to politics. Generally, this involves creating a new political system in which the parties … feel they have a stake, thus in a very positive sense coopting all parties – government and rebels – in a new creation.2

ENDING CIVIL WAR 10

The formula often advanced for this new system is that of ‘consociational democracy’, championed in particular by Arend Lijphart.3 By ensuring joint exercise of government control, proportionality, a minority veto, and autonomy for individual groups where the issue at stake is not of common concern, consociationalism, at least theoretically, promises a slice of the political cake to all belligerents. As Zartman says, ‘conflict resolution requires an outcome that has something for everyone. Parties cannot be expected to give up their claims without receiving compensation’.4 Even if a true power-sharing arrangement cannot be agreed upon, at the very least, it is argued, a level playing field must emerge that allows equal and fair access to the political process by formerly excluded groups.5 Importantly, procedural solutions such as elections, referenda and adjudication are considered dangerous to the peacemaking process: all sides will hope or expect that they will emerge victorious from the contest (whether electoral or judicial), and the likelihood of a return by the loser to violence will be high.6

Cautionary noises have been made. Consociational democracy as a concept appears attractive, but the implementation of its specific prescriptions has only rarely produced political stability.7 Paris has outlined forcefully the dangers of liberal institutionalism in the process of peacemaking, even though he fails to provide a realistic alternative.8 And Stedman suggests that parties to settlements may accept them not because they see the settlement as a realistic compromise, but because they hope to use its terms to achieve their political objectives through peaceful means.9 Nevertheless, the dominant theme in the theory of civil war termination is that, where unilateral solutions have proved impossible, peace is only attainable when a deal is constructed that offers something for everyone. In this respect, theories of civil war termination differ from those of social conflict resolution: ‘reconciliation’ matters less than a continued commitment to the terms of the settlement.10

If the overall shape of the settlement demands that all sides feel

that they have something to gain from it, further specific components have been proposed. Barbara Walter has argued that for negotiations to be successful, external guarantees are required in the settlement document. Because a negotiated settlement in civil war asks belligerents to do what no compromise settlement does in interstate war, namely disarm and lay themselves at the mercy of their former enemies, it is only when external powers credibly commit to enforce the settlement terms that the security dilemma can be overcome and a peace deal signed.11 Caroline Hartzell, less successfully, claims that the

PEACE NEGOTIATIONS AND STRUCTURES OF SETTLEMENT 11

institutionalisation of security guarantees in the settlement is more important than external guarantors.12

Others have highlighted the importance of providing for the security and economic interests of the belligerent leaderships, as well as their political interests. Charles King points out that guarantees of physical security may have to be provided even to those leaders responsible for gross human rights abuses, while David Keen suggests that guerrilla leaders’ economic interests need to be somewhat accommodated to secure their adherence to a peace deal.13 The needs of foot-soldiers and civilian supporters may also require attention. Mats Berdal’s discussion of disarmament after civil wars demonstrates the dangers of demobilising large numbers of trained soldiers and militiamen without providing incentives for them to refrain from resorting to banditry. Moreover, he argues strongly that specific provisions for demobilisation, reintegration and the creation of new armed forces should be agreed in the course of peace negotiations and not left to be ‘sorted out’ later.14

If progress has been made, however, on how best to structure

peace proposals, the evidence of history has a nasty way of intruding. For although many of the provisions highlighted above may indeed promote the cause of peace, many settlements have in fact been achieved despite serious deficiencies in the text.15 The Mozambican peace accord of 1992, for example, was imprecise and woolly over key areas – the cease-fire, demobilisation and the creation of a new national military force, reformation of the police and security forces, and the re-establishment of civilian administration in many areas of the country – yet it proved successful.16 In Cambodia, meanwhile, the Khmer Rouge excluded themselves from what nevertheless proved a reasonably successful peace process. Indeed throughout much of the theoretical literature on civil war termination runs the suggestion, implicit or explicit, that the terms of paper settlements play a less important role in the achievement of peace than the changing political and military conditions of civil war itself. The argument is made conceptually problematic by the difficulty of ranking the causes of peace, but it is of critical importance for policy-makers. For external mediators, the implication of this suggestion is that peace is brought less by the tireless and innovative drafting of foreign impartial mediators, and more by developments internal to the conflict. If external powers are to contribute to peace, they may need to twist arms rather than draft settlements. These are important questions, and it is to the answers provided by civil war in Rhodesia and Lebanon that we turn.

ENDING CIVIL WAR 12

Rhodesia From UDI to the Smith-Nkomo Negotiations: November 1965 to March 1976

When war broke out in Rhodesia in December 1972, the gulf between the belligerent parties appeared unbridgeable. Established as the self-governing crown colony of Southern Rhodesia in 1923, Rhodesia remained free from effective British control, and operated under constitutional arrangements that were in theory colour-blind but which in practice (through the use of property and educational restrictions on the franchise) perpetuated European settler rule. The defining moment in post-war Rhodesian politics occurred in November 1965, when after a series of failed negotiations with the British government, prime minister Ian Smith and his Rhodesian Front government issued their UDI.17 Negotiations between the British and Rhodesian governments to resolve the situation took place in 1966 and 1968 aboard HMS Tiger and HMS Fearless respectively but foundered over British insistence on the principle of ‘NIBMAR’ (No Independence Before Majority African Rule) and Rhodesian resistance to it. Tension was heightened by a rise in black African nationalism. From 1956 a series of nationalist parties were successively formed and banned, until in 1964 ZAPU (Zimbabwe African People’s Union) and its offshoot ZANU went underground and abroad, initiating a low-level insurgency campaign against the Rhodesian regime. The violence was easily contained, though, and the focus of negotiations continued to revolve around the British-Rhodesian axis.

A critical shift occurred with the success of the Smith-Home negotiations of 1971. The British accepted an amended version of the 1969 Rhodesian constitution which provided a higher electoral roll for Africans that would give them 16 seats in a house of 72 MPs, a blocking mechanism to prevent the retrogressive amendment of entrenched clauses, a stronger Declaration of Rights than previously, and which promised a commission to investigate racial discrimination. While abandoning the NIBMAR principle, this agreement did theoretically provide for majority rule in the distant future.18 However, a final provision was that the agreement was to depend on a positive response from a commission of acceptability established to see if the majority African population approved of the agreement. With Abel Muzorewa’s newly-founded African National Council (ANC) campaigning against, the negative response that the Pearce Commission duly returned dealt a death blow to the prospect that successful negotiations to resolve the Rhodesian crisis could be

PEACE NEGOTIATIONS AND STRUCTURES OF SETTLEMENT 13

undertaken without the participation of that country’s black political spectrum.

When the guerrilla war erupted with an attack by ZANU’s armed wing ZANLA (Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army) on Altena Farm in December 1972, therefore, the positions taken up by the political factions in Rhodesia were diametrically opposed. On the one hand, at least according to the head of the Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organisation Ken Flower, Ian Smith and the Rhodesian Front had actually been pleased with the African rejection of the Smith-Home agreement, thinking their concessions were unwarranted.19 On the other hand, the political wings of the African guerrilla movements were issuing political programmes seeking not just immediate majority rule, but also revolutionary social change.20 From late 1973 until early 1974 Muzorewa and Smith held negotiations to find an amended version of the Smith-Home agreement that might prove acceptable, but although a deal was reached to increase African representation in Parliament to 22 seats, the proposal was unanimously rejected at the ANC executive meeting in June 1974.21

Even as guerrilla incursions increased, however, prospects for

negotiation soon reappeared. South African prime minister Vorster’s ‘Crossroad’ speech of 28 October 1974, and Kaunda’s ‘Voice of Reason’ speech in reply three days later presaged a new regional initiative to bring the warring parties in Rhodesia to the table. Before this could happen, the issue of preconditions had to be overcome. The Rhodesian side demanded a cease-fire before releasing the guerrilla leaders they had detained, while also rejecting guerrilla calls for Smith to declare a commitment to immediate majority rule before the talks.22 After months of wrangling and pressure from neighbouring states, however, a conference finally took place on a train on the Victoria Falls bridge on 25 August 1975.23 It lasted only one day, of which only two and a half hours were spent in face-to-face contacts. While Smith agreed not to make more detentions of nationalist activists (with the exception of ‘terrorists’ on active duty), his refusal to grant an amnesty to the exiled guerrillas for them to participate in the follow-up meetings scheduled to take place inside Rhodesia effectively terminated the Victoria Falls bridge process. On the substantive issue of political reform the conference saw nothing more than a stating of positions: for immediate majority rule on one side, and a straightforward refusal on the other. The onset of war had thus had a twofold effect, not only hardening the stances of the respective parties, but also introducing procedural problems that were to dog efforts at peacemaking over the coming years.24

ENDING CIVIL WAR 14

Importantly, the failure of the Victoria Falls bridge process did not terminate negotiations. Within three months Joshua Nkomo, the only nationalist leader to return to Rhodesia after the failed conference, had begun preliminary talks with Ian Smith to pave the way for a constitutional conference. Although the Smith-Nkomo negotiations formally ended on 19 March 1976 without agreement, the compromise solutions proposed by each side were important in breaking down the entrenched and unyielding positions that had characterised the most recent attempts at negotiation. The Rhodesian government proposal called for a parliament of up to 120 seats, with 60 European MPs elected on a qualified franchise, 30 African MPs elected on a common roll, and up to a further 30 African MPs elected under a franchise with the same qualification standard as for the European roll.25 The exact number of African MPs elected under this higher roll was to be determined by the proportion of qualified African to qualified European electors. Only when an equal number of Africans possessed the requisite property and/or educational requirements as Europeans would African representation in parliament equal European. Nkomo in return climbed down from the ‘majority rule now’ platform to propose a complex three-tier electoral system that would ensure continued disproportionate European parliamentary representation. In addition, while ZAPU unsurprisingly demanded an end to restrictions on African land purchase outside the Tribal Trust Lands (TTLs), they made no mention of land redistribution, and promised that pensions would be secured.26

The extent to which each side went to meet the other half-way should not be overstated. Ultimately, Nkomo’s demands would have deferred majority rule only twelve months, while the Rhodesian proposals promised only parity, and not for an estimated ten to fifteen years.27 Power-sharing, not one-man one-vote majority rule was the furthest that Smith was prepared to go. Serious divergences appeared too over the interim political system before the new arrangements were to become effective. While Smith offered African involvement in the interim government, he demanded that the white-dominated parliament continue to sit, effectively holding the implementation of any agreement to ransom. When discussion turned to these issues in March 1976 it became clear that agreement would not be possible. The legacy of the talks, however, would be significant: demonstrating that for belligerents in civil war the stakes often are divisible, Smith had accepted the negotiability of UDI, while a section of the nationalist movement had publicly proposed to implement majority rule in a way that attempted to take account of European interests and fears.

PEACE NEGOTIATIONS AND STRUCTURES OF SETTLEMENT 15

From Kissinger to Vance, Owen and Carter: April 1976 to April 1978

In a little over six months it appeared that a breakthrough had been achieved. Stung by the Angolan crisis of 1975 into fearing the possibility of further Soviet and/or Cuban influence in southern Africa, in April 1976 Henry Kissinger launched the initiative that was to lead Ian Smith publicly to accept majority rule in Rhodesia. The key to his plan was South Africa, which provided the major transit route for sanctions-busting Rhodesian imports and exports, and which was shouldering a significant proportion of the burden of the Rhodesian war effort. Kissinger aimed to persuade South Africa to pressure the Rhodesians, which in June Vorster agreed to do in order to ease US pressure on South Africa over Namibia and her own domestic situation.28 The diplomacy leading up Smith’s acceptance of the Kissinger plan was shrouded in smoke. Publicly, Vorster maintained the South African mantra of non-interference in others’ affairs while privately turning the screw on the Rhodesian supply line. Kissinger travelled to Lusaka and Dar es Salaam to meet Kaunda, Nkomo and Nyerere, but never apprised them exactly of the deal he was pressuring Smith to accept. Even while thrashing out the wording of his acceptance of majority rule, Smith was approving a statement of government policy at the Rhodesian Front annual congress which openly declared: ‘The continued development of Rhodesia depends on a stable government and a political environment which black majority rule cannot sustain’.29

Nevertheless, on 24 September 1976 Ian Smith addressed the nation detailing and accepting the Kissinger plan, now made public for the first time. Under it, Rhodesia agreed to majority rule within two years. A meeting would be held between Rhodesian government officials and African leaders to form an interim government comprising a Council of State in which African and European representation would be equal, and a Council of Ministers in which Africans would have a majority but in which the Ministers of Defence and of Law and Order would be European. On the establishment of the interim government, all fighting would cease and sanctions would be lifted. On the economic front, an international trust fund would be established ‘to provide assurance to Rhodesians about the economic future of the country’. In addition, ‘pension rights, the investment of the individual in his own home and/or farm and the remittances overseas of an individual’s liquid resources within levels yet to be stipulated will be guarantees [sic] by the interim and subsequent governments’.30