Mercedes Sayagues A SECOND LOOK
The news of Alioune Blondin Beye’s death in a plane crash found me writing in my mind an angry letter to the Mail & Guardian, prompted by its latest stories on Angola.
My anger was not about the stories nor directed to Beye (although nothing bad is said about the dead). After all, as envoy of the United Nations secretary general, Beye followed orders of the Security Council.
Last week the council – again, for the umpteenth time – delayed sanctions against Unita. That made me angry.
Not that those sanctions meant much. If you warn that certain foreign bank accounts will be frozen in two weeks, it is likely there won’t be much left in said accounts. As for blocking Unita’s lucrative and illegal diamond trade, it is easier said than done.
When Beye was appointed special representative to Angola in 1993, the Malian diplomat took the challenge enthusiastically, doggedly, relentlessly. A hard worker, everybody agrees. A permanent optimist, throughout serious violations of the 1994 Lusaka agreement from both warring sides.
Although I had my tiffs with Beye while I was representative for the UN World Food Programme in Southern Africa between 1992 and 1994, I always conceded his devotion to a thankless task. With the benefit of hindsight, I see now that the food programme’s goal – delivering food aid – sometimes conflicted with Beye’s – political negotiation.
I felt sorry when his luggage full of fabulously embroidered Malian robes was stolen on arrival in Luanda – as was Margaret Anstee’s, the former negotiator. Angola welcomes visitors in strange ways.
Beye’s optimism often irked me, first because his interviews and soundbites remained Pollyana-esque (“we are making progress”); secondly, because he shied from publicly assigning blame for violations. This seems to have been official UN policy since the first, evidently incomplete demobilisation of Unita in 1991/92. Why? Your guess is as good as mine.
I saw it so many times through the years. Just a sample: Mavinga, 1992; Huambo, 1995; Bengo, 1996; Lundas, 1997. Young soldiers with rusty weapons and lame excuses; press- ganged peasants who fled the demobilisation camps as soon as they could; little of Unita’s formidable artillery.
How could the UN certify the demobilisation of 70 000 Unita soldiers between 1995 and 1997, and today Unita is said to have 30 000 fighters?
Again and again the press denounced this mockery of demobilisation. Again and again the UN acted like the proverbial three monkeys, covering their ears, eyes and mouth. Again and again the UN accepted excuses for not handing over territory, not presenting fighters, not relinquishing weapons, missing deadlines.
For journalists who cover Angola, it has been a long rosary of dj vu. For Angolans, an exhausting series of war, peace agreement, demobilisation, lack of war, threats of war, lack of peace – except for the heady, happy 500 days of peace between the Bicesse accord and elections in September 1992. For Angola, as a country, a permanent bleeding and rape of people and resources.
Not only Unita went unreprimanded. It may be argued that it is not UN business what the government does with its money, but the UN spoke little or nothing about Luanda’s weapons build-up, its foreign forays to help Laurent Kabila and Pascal Lissouba in the Congos.
It seems that Luanda’s role model is Nigeria, the other bully of West Africa; foreign policy based not on moral authority but on an army ready to fight beyond its borders when requested.
At the height of its operation in Angola, the UN was spending $1-million a day on peace-keeping, plus hundreds of millions in humanitarian aid. When earlier this year the Angolan Minster of Defence said that Angola should start a weapons industry, did the UN protest that Angolans have other pressing needs; or that UN aid is not supposed to save money so governments can spend it on weapons?
It was not Beye’s fault. He deeply believed in an African solution to the conflict. It was brilliant of him, although perhaps useless, to bring other African leaders into the process. But, four years after Lusaka, this strategy of accepting delays and saving face has prolonged, not solved, the conflict.
In the end, who benefits from this amorphous condition of neither war nor peace?
Unita’s Jonas Savimbi benefits first, although more and more he looks like a combination of Pol Pot, an international pariah reduced to a bit of jungle (highlands, in Savimbi’s case), and Marlon Brando’s demented Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. He may still harbour the delusion of going into history as a statesman instead of as a sinister strongman.
The MPLA government has a good excuse to continue building up its army, buying more weapons (recently it struck a deal with Russia, trading diamond concessions for spares for its Soviet military hardware, with some new ones tossed in).
In a war economy, there are plenty of opportunities for high-ranking officials to make juicy deals. And, if there were real peace, the Angolan people might start asking why the diamond and oil revenue is never spent on alleviating their wretched poverty.
The United States, although now a chum of Luanda’s, must be happy to see some restraint to MPLA greed and power.
“We didn’t own Savimbi, we only rented him,” joked once an American ambassador in Luanda. Well, maybe one day they will say the same about the MPLA government.
Who gets screwed? The Angolan people. Their social statistics are a disaster; the human development index, shocking.
None of this is Beye’s fault. Nor the UN’s. But the Angolan mess was not helped by a muddled vision of peacekeeping, peace enforcement and conflict resolution.
Since UN peacekeeping multiplied in the 1990s, the failures have been dramatic: Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Liberia, and countless other mean little wars from Chechenya to Afghanistan to Sierra Leone.
Beye never spoke loud and clear about the dirty background to Angola’s civil war. A judge by profession, he must have believed that reason and justice would prevail, and the fine print of the Lusaka agreement respected.
Sometimes I wonder if Beye’s dogged optimism, that pulled him through so many hard times, allowed him to see that, in the absence of real political will to have peace, not even the most skillful negotiator can succeed. If he did, was that chilling thought in his heart as the plane went down?