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South African Military Praised as Post-Conflict Model

21 November 2005

Scholar says integration of previously warring factions key

By Jim Fisher-Thompson
Washington File Staff Writer

Washington -- South Africa stands as a model for the way the military of a formerly exclusionary government can be made into an important part of peaceful "post conflict political reconstruction," says Professor Stephen Burgess of the U.S. Air War College's Department of Strategy and International Security.

Burgess delivered a paper entitled Fashioning Integrated Militaries and Police Forces out of Formerly Warring Militias in Africa at the African Studies Association's Annual General Meeting, held in Washington November 17-20.

Howard Wolpe, a former congressman who later served as President Clinton's special envoy to the Africa Great Lakes region, joined him at a roundtable discussion on reconstituting states in Africa.

Burgess said one of the most important aspects of post-conflict political reconstruction in Africa has been "the reconstitution of the security sector."

Starting with Zimbabwe in the early 1980s and followed by Namibia, South Africa and Mozambique in the early 1990s, Burgess said, "peacemakers established working arrangements to fashion integrated militaries and police forces out of what were warring government and rebel forces" in Africa.

A model of success, said Burgess, who studied on the continent as a Fulbright-Hays fellow, was South Africa, where in the 1970s and 1980s, the 90,000-member South African Defense Force was "the most feared military in Africa, fighting fiercely for the survival of the apartheid regime."

Opposing the apartheid regime were the 28,000 guerrillas of the African National Congress (ANC) -- Umkhonto We Sizwe -- and the 6,000 guerillas of the armed wing of the Pan-Africanist Congress -- the Azanian Peoples Liberation Army, he told the panel.

Burgess said a key factor in the successful integration of the guerilla units with the South African military proved to be an organization of defense experts, originally established by the ANC, called the Military Research Group (MRG).

The MRG primarily was opposed to a large military establishment and strongly supported civilian control over the military, integration and a more defensive security strategy, all points that characterized the new South African National Defense Force (SANDF) after 1994.

In addition, the British armed forces were invited as arbitrators overseeing the creation of the SANDF and the integration process, the scholar said.  "The planning process brought warring militias together and created the basis for a common institutional culture," he said.

The overall result was that SANDF's size was reduced from 90,000 to 57,000 uniformed members.  And "its effectiveness has not dissipated greatly, as evidenced by the dispatch of peacekeeping forces to Burundi, [the Democratic Republic of the Congo] and Liberia," said Burgess.

"On the whole, the transformation and integration of the SANDF was a major contribution to permanent peace in South Africa," the scholar concluded.

WOLPE DESCRIBES BURUNDI CONFLICT RESOLUTION PROJECT

As head of the Africa program at the Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, Howard Wolpe has been working on a conflict resolution project in Burundi involving the integration of its military.

Sustaining peacebuilding is the real challenge in war-torn regions like Africa’s Great Lakes, where there is a total breakdown of the rules for sharing power, Wolpe told the panel.

"You have to resolve conflict where there is no value attached to collaboration" and where there is a large-scale "fracturing of trust" among all the institutions of society, especially the army and police, he said.

Wolpe's recipe for success was to re-ignite "the ability to communicate" among the warring parties and institutions in Burundi, whose representatives were accustomed to "screaming at each other" or worse, he said.

To tackle the problem, Wolpe said, the Wilson Center worked to identify 100 leaders around whom a training program could be built based on "conflict analysis, strategic planning and problem solving."  This group became a network that reached out to local leaders and opinion makers throughout the nation.

The program has been so successful in entrenching Burundi's new multiethnic government that the government has requested similar training for its national army and police force, Wolpe told the panel.

While Africans are making inroads in conflict prevention, Wolpe said the level of U.S. abilities in this area has disappointed him.  "In my five years at the Department of State [as special envoy], I was stunned that diplomats got no training in conflict resolution or management," he said.

“They [diplomats] know a lot about the political affairs of the countries they operate in, but not enough about conflict prevention techniques," Wolpe concluded.

(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)