Making War, Not Peace

The West is focused on the conflict in Mali these days, but there has also been fighting in the Central African Republic. A rebel takeover of Bangui, the capital, was narrowly averted by emergency peace talks last week.

This war may not seem as alarming as Mali’s, but it is worth noting for another reason: The C.A.R. has long been a laboratory for international peace-building initiatives, and they have failed again. The latest negotiations, held in Gabon, were the fourth major round of talks since 2002. In fact, the latest fighting was led by Seleka, a coalition of rebel groups most of which had previously signed peace agreements, and it grew out of the failures of earlier international efforts.

Time and again, United Nations planners have promoted “D.D.R.” programs — disarmament, demobilization and reintegration — to help armed groups rejoin civilian communities as productive workers. But this approach has ended up sidelining those it was meant to benefit and creating incentives for the disenchanted to take up arms.

One reason is that D.D.R. relies on a model of how politics is supposed to work, but not how politics actually works in a place like C.A.R. The programs assume that the governments they assist function like Max Weber’s ideal state — maintaining a monopoly on the use of force, providing services to all citizens — though they lack the skills and cash to do so. So international organizations try to fix this capacity deficit.

But the places where peace-building tends to occur do not follow this script. From the colonial era to today, for example, the government of the C.A.R. has lived off kickbacks while leaving rural authorities mostly to their own devices. National politicians make promises to international actors but pursue their own ends. And factionalism flourishes because heading up a rebel group is a good way to be taken seriously.

The roots of the latest struggle for power in the C.A.R. go back to the mid-1990s. The president at the time, Ange-Félix Patassé, favored himself and his cronies while neglecting the military. Soldiers started mutinying in protest, and in 2003 François Bozizé seized the presidency with support from Chad.

But within a couple of years, Bozizé’s neglect of rural areas and repressive tactics led to new armed opposition. The dissent has since spread, yet Bozizé has managed to retain his power in part by using the internationally sponsored initiatives that were supposed to get him to cooperate with his opponents.

Talks held in 2008 produced a slew of recommendations about empowering the opposition, but in their wake Bozizé only tightened control over key government positions. The presidential elections in January 2011 fell far short of being free and fair. Once again, taking up arms became the only way for the dispossessed to express their grievances.

One enduring source of discontent has been the disconnect between the fighters on the ground and the political leaders who negotiate with international organizations. The three main rebel groups in the C.A.R. since Bozizé took power — the Popular Army for the Restoration of Democracy in the northwest, and the Union of Democratic Forces for Unity and the Convention of Patriots for Justice and Peace in the northeast — began as informal local defense forces. (The latter two form the core of Seleka.)

They became more organized after their communities were attacked by government soldiers trying to pre-empt insurrections. Seeing an opportunity in the disaffection, politicians who had been sidelined by the government started developing relationships with rural residents. That often meant helping them organize into rebel groups.

Given the small and poorly equipped national army, it doesn’t take much force in the C.A.R. to capture a town, and whenever a rebel group did, its political backers would fan fears of wider unrest. That allowed them to become participants in peace negotiations — and to promise their fighters the spoils of any resulting international programs.

In 2009 and 2010, while conducting dissertation research on politics in northeastern C.A.R., I spoke with fighters in Tiringoulou and Kaga Bandoro, remote towns now claimed by Seleka, about why they’d taken up arms.

Their responses fell into three categories: government forces had attacked their people; the government had failed to provide roads, schools and health clinics; they were poor, and if they became rebels they might obtain something from disarmament programs, maybe even government jobs. They fought the government less to overturn it than to get something for themselves.

In that same period, the D.D.R. Steering Committee established in 2009 under the auspices of the international community — a group of rebel leaders, government ministers and U.N. representatives — was regularly convening in Bangui, talking and dithering. By 2011, after two years and more than 50 meetings during which no important political issue was addressed, the millions allocated to the program had more or less run out. Nothing had been done for former combatants. But the members of the committee, as well as foreign staffers, had pocketed comfortable salaries. The D.D.R. process was left in limbo. Support from donors, including the U.N. Development Program, fizzled.

Fast-forward to mid-December 2012 and the emergence of the Seleka rebel coalition. Although the force’s fighters are among those who were most neglected during the last, aborted initiative, the peace agreement brokered by the Economic Community of Central African States last week called again for disarmament, demobilization and reintegration. International actors still see D.D.R. as a necessary element of the peacemaking toolkit; combatants still demand it of their civilian leaders as payment for services rendered.

I often think of a rebel officer and children’s rights advocate known as Colonel Tarzan whom I met in Tiringoulou in 2009. “Sometimes I ask myself why I was born here,” he once said. “The C.A.R. sure is a bizarre place.” It is that bizarreness, not idealized templates, that peace-building must take as its starting point.

Louisa Lombard is a postdoctoral fellow in the department of geography at the University of California at Berkeley.

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