Negotiation in International Conflict

Understanding Persuasion

Deborah Goodwin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780714651910
• eBook ISBN: 9781135312411
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This work explores the application and structure of negotiation within existing international conflicts, and assesses the effectiveness, or otherwise, of such forms of dispute resolution. It examines the role of negotiation and the skills required by any practitioner in the field.

Part 1
The Place of Negotiation in the World Today

1
Negotiating within Cultures: The United Nations and the Resolution of Civil Conflict

STEPHEN HILL

Introduction

At the beginning of the 1980s few people could have predicted the dramatic changes which were to take place within the international political system by the end of the decade. The election of Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary of the USSR in 1985 heralded an end to over four decades of ideological confrontation and effectively eradicated the risk of military conflict. Spurred on by domestic financial pressures, both superpowers sought peace dividends by ending overtly expensive support for regimes in areas of the world which they no longer deemed to be in their national interest. The international community, caught up in the euphoria brought about by the expectation of a new peaceful age, hoped that all that would be required was a method of overseeing the conclusion of conflicts which had resulted from, and been sustained by, a now defunct global rivalry.

However, expectations that the proxy wars fought on behalf of the superpowers would dry up, along with the financial and military support they provided, were to be sadly misguided. Rather, the retreat of super­power hegemony simply uncovered a Pandora’s box of cultural, ethnic, religious and nationalistic disagreements, which were all too ready to fill the vacuum left behind and which possessed a force and momentum of their own. With the fog of Cold War antagonism lifting, public attention focused on the ability of the major international powers to resolve these conflicts, which through war and famine were claiming hundreds of thousands of victims every year. With a consensus never before attained, the international community turned to the UN, not only to oversee the withdrawal of the superpowers themselves but to attempt ever increasingly ambitious methods of bringing seemingly intractable conflicts to a peaceful conclusion.

The dilemma facing the UN in its attempts to reconcile warring parties and reconstruct these so called ‘failed states’ was apparent. As Licklider writes:

Ending international war is hard enough, but at least there the opponents will presumably eventually retreat to their own territories … But in civil wars the members of the two sides must live side by side and work together in a common government to make the country work … How do groups of people who have been killing one another with considerable enthusiasm and success come together to form a common government.¹

As if this dilemma were not enough to deal with, the UN’s peacemaking efforts were to be complicated by a new dimension presented by such intrastate conflicts: the need to negotiate with non-state actors. As Sydney Bailey noted, ‘the [UN] Charter was drafted on the assumption that disputes arise between states and included no provision by which the Security Council or General Assembly [could] relate to non-state agencies such as liberation movements, communal minorities, or political parties’.²

In the early post-Cold War operations the UN avoided such complications by omitting non-state actors from settlement negotiations. This was the case for the various mujahadeen in Afghanistan and the resistance factions in Angola and Namibia.³ However, the nature of the conflicts in which the UN was later to become involved prescribed that the organisation had little choice but to include such non-state actors in negotiations. In fact by the time the UN became involved in the humanitarian tragedy in Somalia in 1992, the only actors left to deal with were those of a non­state type.

As this chapter will show, the UN’s increasing involvement in the resolution of civil wars has forced it to come to terms with the particular problems posed by negotiations with non-state actors in non-western cultures. As the UN was eventually to realise, the various non-state entities with which it was now being called to negotiate were mostly unaffected by the expectations of the Western-orientated ‘diplomatic culture’ which pervaded the formal circles of interstate negotiations.⁴ The initial failure of the UN to take account of this not only led it to expect behaviour incongruous with the cultural traditions of the internal parties themselves but also allowed the UN to attempt conflict-resolution procedures incompatible with the cultures within which they were being introduced. The UN’s cultural sensitivity, or lack of it, goes a long way to explaining the relative success or failure of many of its past peacekeeping missions.

In order to show how and why this has been the case, this chapter will compare the UN’s experiences in four of its peacekeeping operations conducted between 1991 and 1995. These include the second Angolan mission (1991-92), together with the operations in Cambodia (1991-93), Mozambique (1992-94) and Somalia (1992-95).⁵

The objective of this chapter is threefold. First, to show how the frustrations felt by the UN when internal parties failed to ‘honour’ negotiated agreements was to a significant extent created by its own cultural misunderstandings. Second, to illustrate that although the UN managed to develop cultural sensitivity in at least one of its operations in order to avert a mission failure, in others the organisation still retained the potential to be culturally insensitive. Third, and finally, to show how the eventual outcomes of peacekeeping operations can be affected by the UN’s sensitivity (or lack of it) to the cultural contexts in which it operates.

Angola

With the signing of the Accords de Paz para Angola on 31 May 1991, the two main parties to the civil war, the Movimento Popular de Lieragao de Angola (MPLA) and Uniao Nacional para a Independencia Total de Angola (UNITA), agreed to disband their respective armies, create a new unified armed force and conduct democratic elections within 17 months. Initially, the UN was to be given only a peripheral role in the peace process. Essentially the organisation’s role was to monitor the workings of the body created to oversee the implementation of the accords, the Joint Political Military Commission (CCPM), which was to be composed of members of both parties. However, a combination of a lack of preparation and inadequate resources ensured that the UN was to be dragged further and further into helping the parties fulfil their obligations. By the time the elections were held, the UN had become the official electoral observer and was increasingly involved in providing help for the demobilisation of the parties’ forces and the creation of the national force.⁶

Despite the UN’s efforts, however, the Angolan operation was to end in disaster. UNITA’s leader Jonas Savimbi refused to accept the election results, which not only placed his party second in the parliamentary elections but more importantly placed him second in the presidential elections. The results, declared free and fair on 11 October 1992, gave the MPLA and UNITA 53.7 per cent and 34.1 per cent respectively in the parliamentary elections. The MPLA candidate, Jose Eduardo dos Santos, won 49.57 per cent, whilst Savimbi won 40.07 per cent in the presidential elections. Although the failure of either presidential candidate to win over 50 per cent of the votes meant that a run-off election was required within six weeks, Savimbi refused to wait and UNITA returned to war. Angola was once again plunged into chaos.

The 17-month period of the Angolan operation was a source of constant frustration for the UN and its negotiators. Despite their commitments to disarm and demobilise their forces before elections were held, neither party in fact did so. By June 1992, only three months before the elections, barely 4 per cent of UNITA’s forces had demobilised and approximately 18 per cent of the MPLA’s had done the same. Regardless of the UN’s attempts to negotiate new commitments from both parties and the constant reaffirmations of the accords which it received from both leaders, neither party fulfilled its promises.

Expectations that the UN could negotiate the disarmament of either party in the circumstances prevailing in Angola were essentially grounded in a misunderstanding of the cultural context of the operation. The ‘Western’ state system, imposed by the colonial powers on traditional African cultures, has in many instances resulted in the power of the state becoming simply another resource for which to compete. The democratic process in such circumstances becomes a winner-take-all strategy, in which the concept of democratic opposition is anathema to so-called political parties mostly formed along ethnic, religious or tribal grounds. This cultural difference with regard to the organisation of the state was elaborated by Pondi, when at a conference held on the future of Angola he stated that

The ‘winner-take-all’ strategy which is enforced in Western democratic society cannot be accepted in the context of Africa because the state is a distributive instrument rather than a productive one. It does not organise or galvanise people into productivity but is perceived as something over which one has control in order to distribute and to take control of the resources of the country.⁷

This cultural mindset was initially apparent during the negotiations for the accords. Despite the attempts of some of those present to persuade the parties to agree to an accommodation for the eventual losers of the elections, neither party would accept such a settlement. Indeed, ‘each was bent on nothing less than total victory’.⁸ UNITA had even called for elections to be held within 12 months of the start of the operation - an indication that it perceived democratic elections as little more than an opportunity for the peaceful transference of power.⁹ In such a cultural context the UN could not hope to negotiate the disarmament of either party or the eventual peaceful transference of power. In fact the UN’s willingness to continue negotiations whilst the parties repeatedly failed to fulfil their obligations has been blamed by some for giving UNITA the impression that compliance with the military elements of the accords was unimportant because it was destined to win power anyway.¹⁰

Cambodia

In contrast to the operation in Angola, the UN’s involvement in the Cambodian peace process was intended to be far more intrusive. The Comprehensive Political Settlement of Cambodia, signed on 23 October 1991, required the UN not only to supervise the disarmament of the four main parties’ forces but also to create a ‘neutral political environment’ conducive to free and fair elections. To achieve this all governmental administrative agencies, bodies and offices which could directly influence the outcome of elections were placed under direct UN supervision or control. The UN was also required to organise and conduct the elections- not just supervise them as it had done in Angola.

By May 1992, however, the operation was already beginning to falter. The Khmer Rouge, by far the largest of the three resistance factions, began to refuse to assemble and disarm its troops, blaming its intransigence on the failure of the UN to fulfil its promises to ensure either a neutral political environment or the withdrawal of Vietnamese forces. Although the UN claimed the Khmer Rouge had misinterpreted the agreements and the UN’s role in their implementation, no amount of negotiations could persuade the Khmer Rouge to return to the peace process.

By November 1992, therefore, the UN Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, knowing that none of the parties had disarmed their troops, was faced with the decision of whether or not to continue to hold the elections planned for May 1993. Despite attempts by the Khmer Rouge to disrupt the elections with the threat of violence, the Secretary-General was able to declare the poll both ‘free and fair’ on 29 May 1993, although he could not say the same for the electoral campaign.¹¹ When

the final results were released on 10 June the party of the nominal government, the Cambodian Peoples Party (CPP) had won only 38.23 per cent of the vote. One of the three resistance factions, the Front Uni National pour un Cambodge Indépendent, Neutre, Pacifique et Coopératif (FUNCINPEC), led by the country’s former head of state, Prince Sihanouk, had won 45.47 per cent of the vote.¹²

Unhappy and unwilling to accept the election result the CPP candidates of the new assembly resigned in protest, claiming electoral fraud. In order to prevent a military coup by the CPP, which still controlled the army and the main organs of government, Prince Sihanouk established a 50-50 power-sharing arrangement between the CPP and FUNCINPEC. Although the UN initially refused to accept such an undemocratic outcome, the unpredictable circumstances of post-electoral Cambodia ensured its eventual acquiescence. The CPP had, therefore, managed to threaten its way back into power.¹³

As in Angola, the UN’s negotiations with the internal parties were to take place in a cultural context which it did not fully appreciate. Its hopes to negotiate a return of the Khmer Rouge and of the peaceful transference of power following democratic elections were both forlorn. This argument is posited by Pierre Lizee, who has suggested that the refusal of the Cambodian parties to participate in the peace process as the UN had expected was based on their idiosyncratic cultural attitudes towards conflict and democracy. Whilst the UN’s ‘Western’ traditions prescribed ‘liberal democracy’ through the organisation of elections as the key to the transformation of the conflict, Cambodian society, dominated by Brahmanism and Buddhism, confined social interactions to small groups of personal relations in which ‘well-defined status and ranks’ and predestined ‘fatalistic outlooks’ precluded its introduction. When the French, during their period of colonial rule, introduced legal and administrative structures into the Cambodian state, they did so by superimposing them over the traditional cultural influences of Cambodian society. The Western model of the state and the requisite understanding of democracy had just never properly developed.¹⁴ Indeed, until a few years ago, the words ‘society’ and ‘consensus’ did not even exist in Khmer language.¹⁵

Throughout their negotiations with the UN the common denominator between all the internal factions was their refusal to move politics beyond the factionalism which characterised Cambodian society.¹⁶ The failure to appreciate the Cambodian understanding of conflict, articulated as it is around the ‘family-patronage-dynastic’ (Buddhist) model, led the UN into inappropriate negotiating strategies. This was never more evident than when the UN promulgated its first electoral law in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Dedication
• Contributors
• Series Editor's Preface
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Glossary
• Part 1 The Place of Negotiation in the World Today
• Part 2 Negotiation and the Military
• Part 3 Seeking Frameworks
• Bibliography
• Index