A few days earlier a group of military officers had seized power in Guinea-Bissau. This was nothing unusual: the tiny country of 1.5m has seen five coups in the past decade. No president has served a full term since independence from Portugal in 1974. But this rarely poses a problem for buses from Senegal to Guinea, the country’s bigger neighbours, and then on to Sierra Leone and Liberia. The only change to the schedule today is that at the regular stop in the capital, Bissau, passengers may get on but not off.
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The soldier wrings out his cap and says he is sorry for the inconvenience: “You know how it is.” The locals nod, then start to harangue him. One shouts, “It’s your fault it’s raining.” The passengers laugh. They blame the unruly armed forces for the lack of development. The occasional killings are bad enough, says the driver, but the corruption is even worse.
Political violence has undermined state institutions, kept away foreign investment, crippled health care and education and increased inequality. Guinea-Bissau fits the picture of an African state rendered dysfunctional by violent disorder.
Yet that picture has become less common. Several big conflicts across the continent have died down. In the past decade or so Angolans stopped fighting after half a million people died and Chad lapsed into peace after four civil wars. In Ethiopia and Mozambique wars ended a decade earlier. Violence is broadly in decline, even if it does not always feel that way.
The Small Arms Survey, a Swiss research project, says that measured by the number of violent deaths per person (including in wars) only two African countries rank among the world’s leading ten, South Africa and Lesotho—though there may be some under-reporting. The number of armed conflicts in Africa has steadily declined from at least 30 at the end of the cold war to little more than a dozen today; the number of successful coups fell by two-thirds in the same period. In 2000 Robert Kaplan, an American commentator, predicted in a book called “The Coming Anarchy” that places like Africa would sink ever deeper into a violent morass. He was wrong.
Three major conflicts (defined by the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden, as those with more than 1,000 deaths a year) continue, but even they may be getting closer to a peaceful resolution. Sudan is slowly sorting itself out after the south’s secession in 2011. Congo’s east remains violent, but elsewhere the country’s main concern is poverty not war. In Somalia a coalition of international forces has brought peace to the capital, Mogadishu, for the first time in many years: building sites now outnumber bomb sites. Admittedly a new cluster of conflicts has sprung up around the Sahara. Islamic extremists are defying governments in Mali and elsewhere, but regional and Western powers are belatedly fighting back.
Golden Guinea
After a brief stop on a shuttered street in a suburb of Bissau the bus reaches the border without incident. The stretch of road south from here was for a time the most deadly in all Africa. Child soldiers would taunt captives by asking, “short sleeve or long sleeve?” and then hack off arms either below or above the elbow. The region was a paragon of cruelty. But the worst of it has faded, thanks to war fatigue and a remarkably effective intervention by UN peacekeepers.
After an uninterrupted journey through wooded valleys the bus arrives in Conakry. The capital of Guinea sits on a narrow rocky peninsula stretching into the choppy Atlantic. The city is bursting at the seams and the traffic is jammed. Every alley is a retail space. Fishermen hang their catch on strings in the shade. Hilton and Radisson are building hotels for investors to stay in. House prices have taken off. International flights are packed, as are berths in the port.
After decades of misrule and military coups that severely impoverished the country, Guineans in 2010 elected the long-time opposition leader, Alpha Condé, as their president, who promptly clipped the wings of the generals. The defence ministry is now run by a lawyer.
The event that spurred the transition to democracy was the massacre in 2009 of 150 people in a sports stadium. The commander of the troops responsible for the atrocity was Colonel Moussa Tiegboro. He has been charged and evidently fears arrest: still in his uniform, he has nine security cameras outside his office. “I’d like to go abroad,” he tells your correspondent. Alas for him, that may not be practical: the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague has started a preliminary investigation to build a case against him.
Conakry used to feel like a city under occupation. Today most checkpoints are gone, though nerves remain jangled. The government has responded heavy-handedly to opposition protests. The legal system is gummed up. Ethnic divisions persist, even in the national volleyball association. “Let’s say the glass is half full,” concedes a government minister.
Back on the overland road south to Sierra Leone the main obstacle is traffic. A border guard waves a queue of cars across the border with one hand, holding his mobile phone in the other. He is trying to calm down an irate girlfriend. “Oui, oui, chérie,” he keeps repeating.
Sierra Leone has seen a full decade of peace after an 11-year civil war that killed 50,000 people. Development is slow and most people remain poor. Rice is imported from Thailand at great expense because, despite fertile soil and plenty of rain, its own agriculture is too inefficient to produce enough. But at least violence has become rare. On average, fewer than a hundred people out of 7m are murdered in a year, according to official statistics—a fifth of the rate in New York. Private guns have been banned. Less than a decade after welcoming the world’s largest and perhaps most successful UN peacekeeping force, which collected many of the guns, Sierra Leone is secure enough to send blue-helmeted troops on a similar mission to Sudan.
These days its people rarely talk about the events of 1999 when rebels overran parts of the capital, Freetown, and killed 6,000 civilians in one swoop. Nimble war amputees playing football on the beach are among the few reminders. “It’s safe here but I’m hungry,” says one. In 2012 the (democratically elected) government said that GDP growth had soared to 32%, thanks to iron-ore exports. IMF estimates are lower, but not vastly so.
Beyond Freetown, lush ridgelines slope down to the sea. Near a town called Devil’s Hole, in a house surrounded by mango trees, lives Valentine Strasser, who as a 25-year-old army captain in 1992 seized power and became the world’s youngest head of state. “Val,” his mother yells, “you have a visitor.” He staggers downstairs in cut-off jeans, reeking of booze. Captain Strasser—as he still likes to be called—has been sidelined. Yet other wartime leaders continue to hold positions of power, aiding rather than hindering stability, according to insiders. Desmond Luke, a former chief justice, is hopeful. “Descend into violence again? I don’t think so,” he says. “We have learnt our lesson.”
The ins and outs of war
What has changed to make Africa less violent? Three factors have played a part. First, after the end of the cold war two decades ago, America and Russia stopped propping up violent dictators simply to keep them out of each other’s clutches. At first this brought more conflict as strongmen like Congo’s Mobutu Sese Seko, an American protégé, fought for their lives, some with weapons from privatised Soviet armouries supplied by Viktor Bout, a Russian arms smuggler. But in the longer run lack of superpower support has deprived armies as well as rebels of the means to keep going.
Disarmament campaigns, like the one in Sierra Leone, proved useful
Second, Western attitudes have changed. Europeans in particular no longer turn a blind eye to gross human-rights violations in Africa. The creation of the ICC in 2002 marked a shift toward liberal interventionism, both the legal and the armed kind. Norwegian officials played a key role in negotiating peace in Sudan. British troops shut down Sierra Leone’s war. Peacekeeping evolved into conflict prevention. The UN got better at intervening and at cleaning up afterwards. Disarmament campaigns, like the one in Sierra Leone, proved useful. A combined UN and African Union mission in Somalia started in 2007 made more progress than an American expeditionary force in 1993.
Third, some of Africa’s wars burned themselves out. Most are conducted within countries, since ethnic rivalry has been the most common cause of conflict. Civil wars usually end when one or both sides become exhausted, often after many years. Radicalised during the 1960s, even the hardiest rebels were tired by the turn of the century. When Jonas Savimbi, an Angolan guerrilla leader, was killed in 2002 after fighting for almost three decades, his men gave up. Political wounds have not necessarily healed but they are covered in scar tissue. Fighters as well as citizens grudgingly accept the status quo because they are sick of war; some of the time that is good enough.
Liberia, the next stop on the road south, knows this all too well. It went through two cycles of civil war, starting in 1989. Within a year a warlord named Prince Johnson killed Samuel Doe, a nasty dictator who had initially enjoyed and then lost American support. Fighters first sliced off Doe’s ears while Mr Johnson looked on drinking beer, fanned by a woman in a nurse’s outfit. The video cuts out after that, but the next morning Doe was dead. Fighting continued for another six years until Charles Taylor, a rival warlord, was elected president. Not long afterwards lingering tensions sparked a second civil war. Liberians had a further six years of fight in them, but in 2003 the UN at last dispatched a large peacekeeping force which is still in the country today. With the help of the ICC Mr Taylor was indicted for war crimes committed in neighbouring Sierra Leone and recently sentenced to 50 years in prison.
Back in Liberia peace is still too tentative for prosecutions. The country is at rest now but not at peace. The government is democratically elected but feeble. The UN runs the security forces but knows that government offices are littered with war criminals: “A form of reconciliation,” quips a UN official. Mr Johnson, who tortured and killed Doe (as well as many others), is now a senator. Sitting in a traditional “palaver hut” in the garden of his villa and wearing a glittery green fez, he says, “I don’t think anyone should be prosecuted. The American civil war—who was prosecuted?”
Some of the fighters he once led in battle live nearby in a derelict building under a tarpaulin. Some were as young as five when he recruited them; now they are men with hard eyes and no jobs. And yet there is hope. They live harmoniously together in one compound with 200 fighters from other factions in the war. A 22-year-old who started killing at seven after losing his parents and only knows his nickname, Domination, explains: “We decided to let bygones be bygones. No revenge. It would be even more of a disaster.” But Liberia is still a far cry from Rwanda, which tried 400,000 genocidal killers in gacaca community courts, or South Africa, which pioneered the use of truth and reconciliation commissions.
Across the country violence still flares occasionally, but it is now perfectly possible to drive out of Monrovia, a city without traffic lights for want of a reliable power supply, and into the overgrown interior that was once terrorised by warring tribes of children. Broken tarmac with potholes large enough to bury a car leads to the border with Côte d’Ivoire. On the other side a miracle awaits: not only smooth paving but street lights that are casually left on even in daytime.
Côte d’Ivoire was once the pearl of the region. It foundered and brawled when France, the former colonial power, stopped supporting rule by strongmen in the 1990s, causing ethnic tensions to flare. Eventually fighters tired and held elections, and then fought again. In 2011 French forces intervened to bring back democracy. Abidjan, the country’s commercial capital and beating heart, is aglitter once more.
This may be the new pattern in Africa. Conflicts flare up—most recently in the Central African Republic—but usually less violently than before. Armed forces spend more time in their barracks, though ethnic and religious tensions remain. With the growth of market economies and the spread of democracy, land disputes and election fights flicker, then die down again. The continent is not quite at peace, but it is safer than it was.
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