Africa's Wars and Prospects for Peace

Raymond W. Copson

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315484396
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Storia
• Categoria: Storia mondiale

A collection of articles addressing the issue of whether the industrial model of human progress can be sustained in the long term. It asks what the social, political, economic and environmental implications as well as potential solutions to the problem of resource-intensive growth are.

1 THE COSTS OF AFRICA’S WARS

---

The costs of war for Africa’s people, its cultures and societies, and its economies have been immense. Indeed, measured in terms of deaths, refugees and displaced persons, and lost economic opportunities, African war is one of the great calamities of our era. It is also a calamity in dimensions that are more difficult to measure, including the anguish and suffering of millions, and the destruction of traditional ways of life, perhaps forever.

The extent of the disaster may never be fully grasped, both for technical and emotional reasons. Data on fatalities, coming from remote regions of remote countries, are highly uncertain. Available information must be treated with caution since both governments and non-governmental organizations may have an interest in over- or under-reporting casualty figures. Refugee figures are more reliable, since counts, however rough, can be made in camps outside the war zones; but in most conflicts it has been impossible for outside observers to obtain an accurate picture of the number of internally displaced persons. What may be happening to traditional human societies and to wildlife in the war zones is largely a matter of speculation. And we have no way to gauge the psychic pain of the homeless, the orphans, and the destitute. In short, in attempting to measure the costs of Africa’s wars, we must work with inadequate statistics, with dry data divorced from the reality of suffering, with anecdotal information, and with conjecture.

This introduction can only review the available information, reporting ranges of published figures and noting shortcomings where appropriate. Costs can be examined by reviewing the effects of war at three levels: people, cultures and societies, and economies. The materials used in this assessment are primarily the reports and studies that have been produced by academics, international relief organizations, humanitarian groups, and journalists. Despite their inevitable limitations, these materials yield a startling and depressing picture of the ravages of war.

Effects on People

Mortality

Data on mortality in each of Africa’s wars will be presented in the next chapter. Overall, they suggest that from 2 million to upwards of 4 million people have died as the direct or indirect result of war since 1980. Just where the true figure might lie is difficult to say, but it seems likely to be in the upper end of the range for two reasons. First, the death toll in recent fighting in some countries—particularly Sudan and Angola—is highly uncertain and could eventually add large numbers to the total. Second, studies completed by UNICEF for Angola and Mozambique,¹ which compare child mortality in the afflicted countries with child mortality in similar but peaceful countries, give much larger fatality estimates than those ordinarily published. If such studies were completed and accepted for the other wars, the mortality estimate for the continent as a whole could be multiplied more than twice.

For the sake of analysis, however, let us say provisionally that 3 million people have died in Africa as a result of war since 1980. According to one study, worldwide war-related deaths, civilian and military, totaled 141.9 million for the period 1500–1990.² Deaths in Africa’s wars just since 1980 may thus approximate 2 percent of all deaths in wars in the entire modern era—surely a large enough proportion to qualify these wars as a global disaster.

War and Famine

The role of war in promoting famine was a major factor contributing to the high mortality in Africa. Africa’s food producers, including settled agriculturists and nomadic herders, were often the primary victims of war, and this reality struck a major blow at food output. The farmers and herders of southern Sudan gave up their normal activities over wide areas and crowded into towns, where they waited for unreliable deliveries of food aid. In Eritrea, vegetable gardening became a dangerous activity, best done at night when the Ethiopian air force was off duty. In Mozambique, the productive Zambezi valley was rendered highly insecure by war, and thousands of Mozambican farmers became refugees or displaced persons, dependent on food aid.

In ordinary times, Africa’s food shortages could be made up by food aid or by transferring food from productive areas to areas of shortage. The great drought that struck wide areas of the continent in 1982–1984 disrupted farming in many countries, but most food shortages were dealt with by food relief and the workings of the local economy. The countries that suffered actual famine were all victims of war: Sudan, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Angola.³ Similarly, in 1992, drought again struck several countries in southern Africa and the Horn, but it was only war-torn Somalia that suffered hundreds of thousands of famine deaths. There was also widespread hunger during this drought in southern Sudan and Mozambique, but war in these countries made it impossible for the world’s media to penetrate remote areas and report on the extent of suffering.

In countries undergoing both war and drought, roads are typically cut by combatants, while relief trucks and planes become subject to attack. Relief workers fall under suspicion of helping one side or another, and both governments and guerrillas interfere with their activities. What should have been fairly ordinary relief operations in Sudan in 1988, for example, became matters of heroism and daring, as pilots spiraled their Hercules transports down into Juba and other towns. Truck drivers from Kenya and Uganda gave their lives in the relief operations in southern Sudan, while to the north other drivers working for relief agencies were undertaking hazardous journeys by night across the Sudanese border into Ethiopia to bring food to the civilian victims of another war. In April 1988, as 3 million people in northern Ethiopia were facing severe food shortages, President Mengistu Haile Mariam expelled most foreign relief workers from the region. Meanwhile, the Ethiopian government was giving priority at its ports and airfields to military cargoes, hampering famine relief deliveries.

In short, there was a synergism between war and drought in precipitating famine. In northern Ethiopia particularly, recurrent drought combined with the disruptions of war to create major hunger crises. This happened in late 1984, 1987, 1988, and again in late 1989. Drought was often a factor in other hunger situations, but it was war that turned drought into famine. War alone, however, could cause hunger and starvation, as was amply demonstrated as hunger deaths continued in southern Sudan, even after the return of good rains, because farmers and herders could not return to their work. Indeed, war could at times work synergistically with good weather to add to Africa’s food production problems. The locust swarms that attacked crops over wide areas of Sahelian Africa in 1988 got their start, at least in part, when rain returned in 1986 and 1987 to areas of Chad, Sudan, and Ethiopia, whose locust control programs had broken down because of war.⁴

Injuries

Data on injuries in Africa’s wars are almost wholly lacking, but it must be presumed that many countries will bear a heavy burden in caring for the wounded and lame for years to come. Some will be unable to care for them, and their misery, as a result, will be very great indeed.

Injuries to civilians caused by land mines in Angola did receive some attention and were numbered at above 10,000 by the U.S. Department of State in 1987.⁵ Other estimates, in 1989, were running at between 20,000 and 50,000.⁶ Many of the victims were productive farmers who suddenly became burdens on their communities after encountering mines in their fields or on rural paths. A report from southern Sudan late in the decade spoke of an increase in injuries from hyena attacks on living humans.⁷ The hyenas had evidently developed a taste for human flesh after eating corpses on the battlefield. Many of those attacked did not live because of a shortage of antibiotics under wartime conditions.

Refugees and Displaced Persons

The toll of war on Africa’s people is revealed in part in the statistics on refugees and disp...