The ECOMOG Experience with Peacekeeping in West Africa

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Eboe Hutchful

Published in Monograph No 36: Whither Peacekeeping in Africa? April 1999

ECOMOG, the Monitoring Group of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has been hailed, with some justification, as a landmark in regional peacekeeping in Africa, if not a pointer to the new shape of peacekeeping in the post-Cold War period. A new type of vicious and intractable conflict is making traditional peacekeeping obsolete, and mandating a different (and tougher) approach to peacekeeping than in the past. The very nature of post-Cold War conflicts faces both peacekeepers and peace negotiators with daunting new challenges. These conflicts are cruel and protracted, make no distinction between combatants and civilians, often have no discernible political agendas (unlike the Cold War insurgencies), and are relatively resistant to external pressure.

On the whole, the international community has been slow to recognise these changes and, since Somalia, reluctant to get involved, assuming (rightly or wrongly) that international intervention will have limited efficacy. Given this situation, marginal countries, particularly those in Africa, have no option but to design their own collective security system. This was specifically recognised by the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, who proposed in An Agenda for Peace that regional organisations take the lead in regional peacekeeping. The ECOMOG operation in Liberia is an often painful example of the transition between the old and ‘new’ modes of peacekeeping, which tend to be regionally-based.

If ECOMOG is any indication, however, the path to regional peacekeeping is not an easy one. The weaker states in the West African region had difficulty mobilising the resources required to deal decisively with the Liberian crisis, becoming overwhelmingly dependent upon one regional power to sustain the operation. The ECOMOG operation occurred at a difficult time for the states in the region, when they themselves were involved in painful economic reforms and their own legitimacy, in most cases, was subject to internal criticism and pressures. The intervention was also complicated by linguistic and geopolitical rivalries and by cleavages within ECOWAS itself, and undermined by debilitating arguments about its legitimacy and organisation.

These difficulties were partially due to the fact that ECOWAS and its member countries, like the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), had been notoriously slow to take issues of regional security seriously. Long standing mutual security protocols that should have allowed ECOWAS to anticipate crises were not implemented. Regionalism also proved as much a source of weakness as of strength in the operation: its advantages were genuine interest (as well as self-interest) in the issues and intimate knowledge of the local political terrain (both necessary for sustained and meaningful engagement); its disadvantages were the danger of partisanship and the lack of neutrality and, in the ECOWAS case, the militarisation of existing regional conflicts and cleavages. In other words, regional (or subregional) actors are liable to be both too close to the issues and too interested in the outcomes. International intervention was ultimately required to break the deadlock.

Despite repeated setbacks, the Liberian operation was ultimately successful for several reasons:

At the same time, however, it is suggested that this realisation of the importance of common security mechanisms at the interstate level is not enough. Arguably, it is issues of human security, which lie within the borders of these states, and which such states are much more reluctant or less able to resolve, that foment violent conflicts.

The ECOMOG experience also demonstrates the necessity to go beyond traditional peacekeeping narratives — with their almost exclusive focus on the ‘intervention sites’- to new and broader fields of investigation, in particular in understanding how involvement in peacekeeping influences political processes in those states which are themselves engaged in these operations. What does involvement in protracted and expensive peacekeeping operations imply for weak states and for their own fiscal and resource viability and state-building processes? How do such states deal with the stresses and responsibilities of regional peacekeeping? How are decisions to launch or sustain peacekeeping operations taken? Why do some regimes become involved and others not, and why do some withdraw and others stay the course? There is also little idea of how the nature of regimes involved in peacekeeping affects the conduct of the operations. For instance, did it matter that most of the countries involved in ECOWAS were themselves under military regimes with contested legitimacies?

Such questions deserve some attention. Peacekeeping operations are, after all, no longer episodic exercises for some of these states and their militaries. On the contrary, they have become both a major form of outdoor relief for budget-strapped armed forces, and (ironically) the closest that these largely idle armies will come to seeing any form of ‘action’. Involvement in peacekeeping has also come to play a variety of roles in shaping relations between political authorities and their armed forces. In other words, peacekeeping serves certain domestic purposes and may involve certain domestic impacts.

The ECOMOG operation and its challenges can only be understood against the background of the ‘geopolitical facts’ of the region. Five of these were particularly important. The first was the Anglophone/Francophone cleavage in the region, a cleavage as linguistic as it is cultural and political. Of the sixteen members of ECOWAS, nine are French-speaking, five are English-speaking, while two (Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde) are Lusophone. Previous attempts at regional co-operation within West Africa have reflected, and continue to do so, these colonial linguistic and political affinities, particularly among the Francophone states. ECOWAS itself was the first attempt to overcome these historical alignments and to initiate some form of overarching regional integration; its limited success was an indication of the durability of some of these colonial relationships. A second factor was the dominance of Nigeria within the region, in terms of population and economic resources, a dominance which was greatly augmented by the oil boom in the 1970s. However, Nigeria’s pre-eminence was not uncontested.

One ‘traditional’ source of challenge was the former colonial power, France. A driving force of French post-colonial policy in West Africa had been to checkmate Nigerian influence in the region, particularly in relation to its former colonies; this had informed French support for Biafra in the Nigerian civil war. Following the end of the civil war, and with the oil boom in Nigeria, however, the two powers developed several areas of common interest, political (a desire for regional stability), as well as economic (French commercial and industrial interests in Nigeria developed rapidly in the 1970s, making France one of the largest foreign investors in the country). During the same period, however, both powers found themselves being challenged by a new pretender, Libya, as it attempted to extend its influence in the region through support for armed insurrections and other radical movements. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Nigeria and France, supported by the United States, closed ranks to counter Libyan penetration in Chad and elsewhere in West Africa.

A final geopolitical factor of significance was the pervasive praetorianism in the region; this, it is suggested, was germane to both explaining the rebellions that provoked the ECOMOG intervention, as well as the manner in which ECOMOG states rationalised and conducted their operations. In sum, this regional picture constitutes essential background to an understanding of the course of the ECOWAS intervention into Liberia, and its subsequent actions in Sierra Leone.

Both the origins and diplomacy of the ECOWAS intervention in Liberia have been extensively analysed elsewhere, and will not covered in detail here.1 Suffice it to say that, during Christmas 1989, an attack was launched into Liberia by Charles Taylor and the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), from the neighbouring state of Côte d’Ivoire. This attack was allegedly aided by units from the Burkina Faso armed forces. In August 1990, following peace moves initiated by the regional organisation, an ECOWAS intervention force, ECOMOG, landed in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia.

In theory, an ECOWAS mutual defence treaty, signed in Freetown in 1981, should have governed this intervention.2 The 1981 treaty recognised any aggression against a member state as aggression against the whole community. It anticipated three possible scenarios:

The treaty provided for certain organisational structures around which intervention would be built. These were:

These national units were to be based in their respective countries, but organised for joint military exercises or deployed for armed intervention and/or assistance.

Significantly, the 1981 treaty was preceded by the establishment in June 1978 of L’ANAD (Accord de non-agression et d’assistance en matière de défense or Treaty of Non-Aggression, Assistance, and Mutual Defence), in Abidjan by seven Francophone countries: Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and Togo, with Guinea Conakry and Benin as observers. This mechanism mediated the conflict between Mali and Burkina Faso in 1985-86.

However, the ECOWAS intervention in Liberia did not follow the script envisaged by the 1981 treaty.3 One reason was that the treaty itself was never implemented. Rather, the intervention was initiated by the Standing Mediation Committee (SMC), a specialised body formed by ECOWAS three months earlier with the limited and specific mandate of mediating disputes between two or more member states. The members of the SMC consisted of three Anglophone states (Nigeria, Ghana, and the Gambia) and two Francophone ones (Togo and Mali). One difficulty was that no reference was made to civil wars in the mandate of the SMC.

However, once the decision had been taken to send in the monitoring force, the two Francophone members of the SMC, Mali and Togo, declined to contribute forces.4 Of the Francophone states, only Guinea (though not originally a member of the SMC) consented to contribute troops, partly because of its membership (together with Liberia and Sierra Leone) of the Mano River Union, and partly in reaction to the slaughter of Mandingo traders from Guinea by Taylor’s forces. This partnership was formalised when ECOWAS split the command between the three countries contributing the largest forces, with Ghana contributing the force commander, Guinea the deputy force commander, and Nigeria the chief of staff.

While well intentioned, these decisions, in effect, meant that a small group of member states lacking the required mandate, committed the regional organisation to what turned out to be a protracted and expensive military enterprise. These origins led to bitter legal wrangling and questions about the legitimacy of the ECOMOG initiative. Some countries felt that adequate consultations had not been undertaken before the force was deployed. More fundamentally, they questioned what they saw as an illegal extension of the mandate of ECOWAS from economic issues, as enshrined in its charter, to military concerns. They argued that an organisation established primarily, if not solely, for the facilitation of economic integration, had no mandate to take on political and security-related responsibilities, even for humanitarian reasons.

There were also questions whether the 1981 protocol on mutual defence, on which the entire concept of intervention was built, provided enough scope and authority for actions of this magnitude. There were several responses to these objections. The first was that the conflict became internationalised when Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso allowed Taylor to launch his attack from within their borders. Secondly, it was argued that the deployment of ECOMOG was the only option left for these subregional states in a situation of complete breakdown of sovereign authority. Third, to those who argued that the mandate of ECOWAS was limited to economic objectives, it was retorted that economic integration could not take place in a security vacuum.5

To further complicate the picture, there was a similar lack of consensus among the rebels in relation to the ECOWAS intervention. While Doe and other Liberian factions accepted the Banjul Accord, Taylor, whose forces were at the gates of Monrovia, and who suspected that the intervention was designed to cheat him out of victory, rejected it. The subsequent landing by ECOMOG was welcomed (and indeed assisted) by Prince Johnson and his faction, the INPFL (a breakaway from the NPFL), but opposed by Taylor, whose faction declared ECOMOG an invading force and fired on it as it landed, causing several casualties. ECOMOG thus broke with a cardinal principle of traditional peacekeeping: the necessity of obtaining the agreement of all warring parties to external intervention. Consequently, it was forced to take sides and ally itself with some of the very warlords and political forces that it was designed to restrain, and was thus compromised from the very beginning by a perceived lack of neutrality.

The legal arguments around the issue of mandate and legitimacy masked deeper political and diplomatic rivalries and conflicts of interest within ECOWAS itself, mirroring, in particular, the linguistic divisions in the region. Two Francophone states (Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire) were directly instrumental in the launching of Taylor’s incursion. On the other hand, the ECOMOG force that opposed the rebels consisted of (with the exception of Guinea) Anglophone states. Thus, whatever the merits of the case, the formation of ECOMOG, with its almost exclusively Anglophone membership, posed the possibility that ECOWAS would be split into two military factions or defence arrangements, one Anglophone and the other Francophone. The leading role of Nigeria in initiating the ECOMOG intervention also rekindled Francophone fears of Nigerian ‘hegemony’. The result of these cleavages was that both the rebels and the ECOMOG intervention force had allies and advocates within ECOWAS. Over time, both factions progressively also lost the capacity to exercise control over their ‘allies’ and the course of events, particularly as new factions proliferated.

Thus underlying and complicating the ECOMOG intervention from the very beginning were the contrasting geopolitical objectives and roles of key ECOWAS players.6 Several explanations have been offered for the involvement of Côte d’Ivoire in Taylor’s adventure (thus, oddly, placing the Ivorians in the same camp as the Libyans whose ‘adventurism’ and ‘subversion’ had been condemned by Houphouet-Boigny in the past). The initial motivation appears to have been Houphouet-Boigny’s disgust at the exceptional brutality of Doe’s regime and, in particular, his anger at the murder of President Tolbert and his son (the latter, also Houphouet-Boigny’s son-in-law, had been dragged out of the American Embassy where he had taken refuge, and shot). However, once Taylor had launched his attack, other motives came into play. The first was opposition to Nigerian (and Anglophone) ‘hegemony’ in the region, a cornerstone of Ivorian and French policy since the 1960s. Secondly, various French firms and Ivorian middlemen became involved in lucrative diamond, rubber, and logging business deals with Taylor’s ‘Greater Liberia’ headquarters in Gbarnga.

The role of Burkina Faso in training Taylor’s troops and funneling Libyan arms, as well as providing several hundred troops and commanders to the rebels has also received some attention in the literature.7 President Campaore, the Burkina leader, is also related by marriage to Houphouet-Boigny. In addition to the traditional dependence of Burkina on Côte d’Ivoire, Campaore was indebted to Houphouet-Boigny for his support in the conflict with Campaore’s more radical predecessor, Sankara, who had sought to radicalise regional politics as well as to challenge the historically lopsided relations with Côte d’Ivoire. On the other hand, Campaore may also have been returning a favour to Taylor, whose men, in Burkina for training, were said to have been implicated in the murder of Sankara. However, Campaore may also have had his own complex agenda, which included the need to cultivate the patronage of the Libyans, and perhaps a desire to reclaim some of the revolutionary cachet lost with the fall of Sankara.

On the Nigerian side, several personal as well as economic motives, have been cited as principal reasons for the intervention. Among these was Babangida’s friendship with Doe (in fact, Doe had appealed personally to Babangida to intervene to save his regime). But there were also economic interests at stake, such as an agreement to exploit the Bong iron ore mine in Liberia to feed the Ajaokuta iron mill, which would have been endangered with Doe’s removal. According to this view, ECOMOG was used to provide collective cover for what were, in fact, Nigeria’s unilateral objectives. On the other hand, Nigerian leaders justified their participation in ECOMOG on more dispassionate grounds, as consistent with a national tradition of peacekeeping, and the need for humanitarian intervention to stop the carnage in Liberia.

While there was some truth to both positions,8 Nigeria’s goals were again actually more complex than either position would suggest. One of these was concern with regional political stability. It should be recalled that Nigerian governments had taken a militant stance against radical subaltern military coups in the region. Thus, in 1979 when Rawlings overthrew a regime of senior military officers and executed several of them for corruption, the government of General Obasanjo put pressure on the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) by cutting off oil supplies. When Doe staged his coup a year later, the Nigerian government, now under civilian control, again took a militant stance, barring Doe from attending the OAU Heads of State meeting in Lagos and co-ordinating the move to deny him the succession as Chairman of the OAU. When Babangida came to power, however, relations with Doe improved. But the earlier pattern was repeated when Rawlings staged his second coup in 1981.9 The actions of these Nigerian governments can be ascribed to political and ideological considerations (the desire of the ascendant Nigerian bourgeoisie to act as a conservative bulwark of stability in the region), as well as to specific institutional factors (the anxiety of its military faction to avoid a repetition of the traumatic uprising of their own ranks in July 1966).10

However, Taylor’s civilian insurgency raised a somewhat different set of concerns that transcended the friendship between Doe and Babangida: the fear that the defeat of an official army by civilian insurgents (as in Uganda) would potentially have undermined the political standing of the military in the entire region. (It is reported that in the initial stages of the intervention, Babangida stressed this element in his speeches to his military commanders). The wildfire advance of the rebellions by Taylor in Liberia and the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone, and the lack of effective resistance by the armed forces of both countries, could hardly have assuaged these fears. More ominously still, the presence of known dissidents from other West African states in Taylor’s army also suggested that Taylor (and his Libyan sponsors) had a wider regional design, that once Liberia and Sierra Leone had fallen, other West African states would have followed.

While it is clear enough that, without Nigeria’s massive contribution in funding and manpower, the ECOMOG operation could not have been sustained, there were, on the other hand, significant problems associated with Nigeria’s pre-eminence in the endeavour. Firstly, the perceived closeness of Nigerian rulers to Doe compromised the appearance of neutrality and gave Taylor the excuse to continue the war by representing it narrowly as a direct contest between the NPFL (and hence the ‘Liberian nation’) and Nigerian ‘invaders’. Secondly, as has been shown, it aroused traditional fears of Nigerian ‘hegemony’ among the Francophone states in the region, although these ‘fears’ were manufactured to a large extent. Thirdly, Nigeria’s own failed transition undermined the credibility of the claim of restoring democracy and the rule of law in other troubled states, and became a source of acute embarrassment. On the other hand, it was clear that Nigerian rulers were also using the ECOMOG operation, not altogether unsuccessfully, to deflect attention from their own legitimation crisis at home and to circumvent attempts by the international community to ostracize the regime.

However, some accounts suggest that it was Ghana, rather than Nigeria, which initiated the idea of intervention, with a plan to mount an operation into Monrovia to extricate Ghanaian refugees trapped in the embassy there.11 As it transpired, the adoption of the idea of a monitoring force following the Banjul peace agreement made such a unilateral intervention unnecessary. In addition to the humanitarian issue, the Ghana regime was also concerned by the fact that Taylor’s men included known Ghanaian dissidents (such as a Major Suleiman who had been implicated in earlier armed attacks on the regime from outside the country).12 While Ghana would form a firm partnership with Nigeria in ECOMOG, the goals of the two powers were not identical in every respect.13

For instance, while the Nigerians were seen as pro-Doe, the Ghanaians were disgusted with the Liberian president who, in their view, was playing the race card against the Americo-Liberian population, and whom they suspected to be an American agent. They were more favourably inclined towards Major-General Quiwonkpa, Doe’s main rival, and were repulsed by his brutal murder by Doe. Unlike the Nigerians, the Ghanaians were much more inclined to pull the plug on Doe; according to some accounts, General Quainoo, the first (Ghanaian) ECOMOG force commander, was under instructions not to resist Doe’s capture by his enemies should the opportunity arise. If this version of events is true, Doe’s capture (and subsequent murder) by Prince Johnson’s men, right from under the nose of ECOMOG troops at the force headquarters outside Monrovia, could not have been entirely fortuitous.14 This may also have been the conclusion of the Nigerians, who insisted on the removal of Quainoo as force commander following this incident. Subsequently, the Nigerians staged their own ‘coup’ within ECOMOG, unilaterally replacing Quainoo with their own Josiah Dogonyaro while Quainoo was away in Accra.15

From a military standpoint, the ECOMOG operation in Liberia started off inauspiciously, beset by problems with military equipment, logistics, training and interoperability, and aggravated by language differences. ECOMOG units initially landed without intelligence or military maps of Monrovia; some without their personal weapons, and with inadequate supplies of boots and uniforms, and lacking adequate logistics.16 Initially, each country also insisted on having a say in the disposition of its national forces, and ‘national’ commanders insisted on communicating or seeking clearance directly from their home governments. The overall force commander frequently found himself bargaining with, as well as acting as a go-between for contributor states. Some of these problems persisted: eight years into the operation, ECOMOG commander General Shelpidi identified "... differences in language, training, equipment and orientation" as key issues in interoperability within ECOMOG, stressing the need for bilingual language training in the region, as well as joint training and standardisation of equipment.17

These difficulties were not surprising, given the state of many of the armed forces in the region. In the case of the Ghana Armed Forces (just to cite one example), a review commissioned by the government in 1987 reported that the operational state of readiness of the Army was so low that none of the infantry brigades could readily launch one fully equipped battalion into operation and, correspondingly, that none of the infantry battalions could launch even one fully equipped company into action. Less than ten per cent of the transport fleet of any of the infantry units was operational owing to a lack of tyres and spare parts. Equipment was often obsolete or unserviceable. Of a total of 43 assorted aircraft in the inventory of the Air Force, only five were serviceable. Of eight ships officially on the active list in the Navy, only two were in a semi-operational condition, even though several were only a few years old.18 A similar story could be told of the Nigerian fleet of C-130 transport aircraft, at one time the largest in Africa, but virtually grounded by the lack of maintenance prior to the Liberian intervention.

In other respects, ECOMOG operations have raised many questions about the performance of armies in the region that have yet to be fully discussed. The lack of proper training and equipment led to inappropriate battlefield strategies, such as the indiscriminate Nigerian aerial bombing raids during Operation 120 Hours in Liberia and the well-publicised naval bombardment of Freetown, in which hundreds of civilians were killed. There have also been many reports (including several from within the force itself) alleging ECOMOG involvement in looting and illicit mining activities. There were also many instances of corruption in the administration of the ECOMOG armed forces in the field.19 Nevertheless, generalisations should be avoided, since there were observable differences in the performance of national armies, as well as in their quality of administration. For instance, in Operation Octopus, Taylor’s forces were able to break through the Nigerian lines but not those of the Senegalese. Nigerian troops, technically better funded, complained frequently of a lack of food at a time when the Ghanaians were being well fed.

Indeed, the difference between the official and warlord armies became blurred over time as ECOMOG units cultivated their own warlords (or stimulated ethnic rivalries) to counterattack Taylor’s forces, or as the Sierra Leone government employed Kamajors and hired mercenary armies (Executive Outcomes) for use against the RUF forces. A ‘strategic’ reason for this blurring of the lines between conventional and irregular armies lay in the fact that the very nature of the conflicts in Liberia and Sierra Leone placed conventional armed forces in extremely ambiguous and dangerous situations, and limited their effectiveness.20 There were two types of forces that responded more effectively than official or multinational forces: mercenaries or private armies with less ambiguous mandates or, ironically enough, other warlords, whose methods were better adjusted to the physical and tactical terrain.21

Another characteristic of the ECOMOG operation was the tenuous control exercised over the field force by the political directorate, technically the ECOWAS Secretariat. To a large extent, this was due to the fact that ECOWAS was unable to play its anticipated role in relation to the funding of the force. It had been agreed that troops from participating countries were to be self-sufficient for the first thirty days, after which ECOWAS was to pick up the funding, but it was unable to do so. This made it difficult for the ECOWAS directorate to claim control over a military force that was acting in its name, but for which it could not pay. It fortified perceptions of ECOMOG as a ‘Nigerian’ operation. As far as the participating countries were concerned, funding and other resource constraints (including communications) led to commanders on the ground being given considerable latitude to conduct operations as they saw fit, and to deal with problems as they arose. As it turned out, this was a blessing in disguise, since it provided flexibility on the ground and avoided the delays normally associated with UN peacekeeping operations

However, possibly the most notable aspect of the ECOWAS initiative was less the military than the diplomatic dimension. By every conceivable measure, Liberia was a diplomatic minefield. Commitments were repeatedly made and broken. In all, there were approximately ten cease-fires and seventeen negotiated agreements before ‘peace’ was achieved with the elections in 1997. Taylor was the worst, but by no means only offender in this respect. For instance, Ivorian leaders failed to shut off the border as required by the Yamoussoukro process, and other ECOWAS leaders, including both Soglo and Rawlings, would express the sentiment that the Nigerians were determined to dictate the peace process, and that no peace was possible unless they were the prime players.22

In addition to the recalcitrance of individual players, the difficulty in securing commitments to agreements was due to two characteristics of the warlord formations, which have become a feature of these wars. Firstly, their easy access to light weapons and small arms procured largely (though not exclusively) from growing private and black market arms sources and funded by exploiting raw material resources under their control — makes them able to operate with minimal international patronage or support, and thus relatively resistant to external pressure. Secondly, unlike the earlier Cold War insurgencies, these warlords have little by way of political organisation or agenda, or compelling motivations to seek peace; the war is its own justification. Thirdly, the low costs of entry and their own lack of internal ideological coherence pose the danger of splintering and thus the consequent proliferation of warlord factions. Negotiated agreements were rendered academic by the emergence of new warlord factions.

These characteristics make warlord formations a nightmare for peace negotiators, as well. As has been seen, however, some of these ‘warlord factions’ (such as ULIMO-K, the Alhaji Kromah faction of the United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy and the Liberian Peace Council) were actually generated by governments or they collaborated closely with official armies, while others were breakaways from existing factions (INPFL, ULIMO-J, the Roosevelt Johnson faction and the Sierra Leone People’s Democratic League (SLPDL), an RUF breakaway under Alimany Sankoh).

If the process seemed interminable and often thankless, the ECOWAS peace negotiations nevertheless moved in three or four distinct phases, in retrospect, each crucial to the process of generating and broadening consensus. The first was the SMC phase that resulted in the creation of ECOMOG, but at the same time alienated the Francophone supporters of Taylor. This was followed by the so-called Yamoussoukro phase, which sought to ‘de-Nigerianise’ ECOMOG (by bringing in Senegalese troops) while shifting control of the diplomatic dimension to Houphouet-Boigny and Francophone countries considered to be favourably disposed to Taylor. However, this also failed to secure agreement, largely because of Taylor’s continuing refractiveness, and led Taylor’s ‘patrons’ to reconsider their relationship with him. This stage was followed by a broadening of the negotiating process, signified by the creation of the ‘Committee of Nine’, drawn respectively from both ‘factions’ (the former SMC and the ‘Yamo’ camp), with responsibility to monitor the Cotonou Accord of October 1992.

This latter stage in the process was carried forward at Abuja in November 1992, where a call was once again made for a cease-fire, combined with a land, sea and air embargo against the NPFL. Taylor accepted, and then broke this latest cease-fire, resulting in Nigerian aircraft carrying out Operation 120 Hours — a sustained bombardment against his forces. This, in effect, exhausted regional initiatives, and led to an appeal by ECOWAS to both the OAU and the UN Security Council for assistance. The OAU and the international community brought two crucial (if largely symbolic) resources which had been missing from the subregional peace process: firstly, transparency and impartiality; and secondly, legitimacy through force of international oversight and sanction.23

Ironically, a crucial factor in the success of the ECOWAS peace effort was the manner in which military, political and diplomatic initiatives were articulated — or rather ‘disarticulated’. In the UN system, the relationship between field commanders and the political directorate — centred around the Security Council and the office of the Secretary-General and/or their representatives — has always bedevilled peacekeeping operations. In this sense, the tenuous control over ECOMOG by the ECOWAS Secretariat noted earlier was actually a positive factor in the success of ECOMOG. It facilitated what was, in effect, a two-track approach to military operations, on the one hand, and diplomatic negotiations, on the other, permitting the former to be disengaged to a surprising degree from the fractious politics of ECOWAS itself. Military operations were thus not held hostage to political bickering.

While Nigeria and the SMC countries abdicated control of the diplomatic process, they were able to retain control of the military operation; the dual track allowed other forces to be brought into — and even to take leadership of — the protracted and often inconclusive negotiating process, without affecting military resolve on the ground. The ability to sustain military pressure, in turn, was crucial in sustaining the diplomatic momentum, thereby forcing recalcitrant warlords to return to the bargaining table.

The ECOMOG experience also demonstrates the need to go beyond the traditional concerns of peacekeeping literature to arrive at some understanding of the impact of peacekeeping on domestic political processes within countries that participate in such operations. The decision to participate in peacekeeping or peace enforcement activities, whether in the case of Nigeria in ECOMOG, Zimbabwe in the Congo-Kinshasa, or South Africa in Lesotho, has often been taken under circumstances that have significant repercussions for domestic politics, in particular in the area of accountability, as well as for fiscal stability. In all these instances, military operations were launched (and sustained) with no political consultation with domestic political constituencies and no attempt to reach a consensus with critics.

Participation in peacekeeping may also partially reflect domestic political imperatives, obvious examples being the Babangida and Abacha regimes. A corollary is how the political nature of regimes shapes peacekeeping interventions and their outcomes. To be sure, the conflicts in the West African region could not be understood without reference to the deep history of praetorianism in the region. This was clear in the background to the rebellions in Liberia and Sierra Leone, both of which began, albeit to various degrees, as movements of armed resistance to brutal dictatorships and failing states24 and, secondly, in the fact that, with one exception, all the countries that participated in ECOMOG were themselves under military rule (though some would subsequently undertake ‘democratic’ transitions involving the constitutionalisation of the erstwhile military regime).25

There was thus some irony to the fact that, at the time of the Banjul Accord which opened the way for the ECOMOG intervention in 1990 (of which the demand for free elections was a critical component), ECOMOG countries were themselves under military rulers who refused to concede to the demands for elections emanating from their own struggling civil societies.26 Indeed, from the point of view of political legitimacy, there was often little to choose between the official heads of state in the region and the warlords whom they were fighting.27

The ability of ECOMOG countries, and Nigeria in particular, to sustain the almost indefinite support of the force in a period of critical economic and fiscal difficulty at home, could only be explained in terms of the existence of authoritarian political structures, which did not permit any political debate on, oversight of or accountability towards these actions.

It can be assumed that, given the high economic costs (not to mention human casualties), a more democratic regime would have difficulty to sustain this role. Ironically, the same authoritarian context that facilitated decisive regional action undermined the meaning of security in the sense of human and political rights at the same time. Likewise, the military nature of these regimes helps to explain why ECOMOG itself, as a peacekeeping enterprise, remained primarily a military venture, with little of the collateral civilian activities that have come to be associated with peacekeeping (such as policing, human rights monitoring and other forms of humanitarian activity, and the setting up of administrative structures in ‘pacified’ areas). Civil society organisations in the region concerned with conflict resolution have also complained that the siting of ECOWAS headquarters in Abuja (where it would be directly under the influence of Abacha’s regime) created an atmosphere of militarisation, which discouraged civilian participation. In this sense, the nature of regimes may affect the conduct of peacekeeping.

Yet another impact of ECOMOG may be the development of a militarised form of regionalism, involving increasing integration between military structures and personnel in the region, through regular joint training exercises and meetings of the ECOWAS Chiefs of Staff, facilitated by foreign military programmes and initiatives (mainly American and French). These military relationships have a focused and coherent character, largely missing from the historically fractured relationships which have tended to characterise ECOWAS political authorities (not to mention the weak civil society linkages in the region). In other words, ECOMOG is accomplishing military integration while it is failing to realise economic integration.

At another level, peacekeeping has become a major form of outdoor relief for budget-strapped armed forces. As Erskine says of Ghanaian troops in Lebanon:

Soldiers were not the only ones to benefit. Payments to the Ghanaian government by the UN for peacekeeping operations, though modest, have helped to subsidise military spending at a time of severely diminishing military budgets. Put unkindly, ‘peacekeeping’ has become a new form of low wage labour export. By contrast, of course, Liberia and Sierra Leone were far from being well-heeled peacekeeping operations, making it necessary for ECOMOG soldiers to compensate by literally ‘mining’ the battlefield in both countries (ECOMOG troops have repeatedly been accused of prolonging the conflict for this reason). Politically, on the other hand, peacekeeping payments can also be a poisoned chalice, as both the Ghanaian and Togolese authorities have realised.29

Given the lack of transparency, it is difficult to determine how much participating West African countries have spent to support their ECOMOG operations, although Nigeria’s contribution has conservatively been estimated to be well in excess of US $500 million (though much of this was recycled back into the country through military contracts and other forms of patronage),30 and it is known that unscheduled ECOMOG expenditures were also in part responsible for the record fiscal deficits suffered by Ghana in 1992.

Peacekeeping operations may also play various roles in shaping political relations with the armed forces. In the Ghanaian case cited above, troop earnings from peacekeeping operations abroad have become a major factor in stabilising relations between the army and the Rawlings government, with participation in peacekeeping operations carefully regulated so that all soldiers feel that they have fair access to opportunities to augment their income. In the case of Nigeria, on the other hand, Abacha used ECOMOG postings to get rid of troublesome units and officers, many of whom were subsequently sent off on retirement at the end of their posting. Among the other unanticipated (and unsavoury) ‘spin-offs’ of participation in peacekeeping are the reported use of ECOMOG veterans in internal ‘peacekeeping operations’ in the Ogoni area, and the proliferation of small arms in Nigeria, thought to have been smuggled in by soldiers returning from the Liberian theatre of operations.

ECOMOG, its glaring deficiencies notwithstanding, is an important example of the emerging modes of regionally based peacekeeping. Yet, the ECOMOG operations also demonstrate the difficulties and pitfalls of such regional peacekeeping. In a geopolitically fissured region like West Africa, regionalism proved to be a problematic vehicle for intervention. While regional self-interest forced ECOWAS to stay in the operation, factional frictions within the organisation (exploited in turn by the warlords), forced a prolongation of the conflict. On the other hand, many of the challenges faced by ECOWAS/ECOMOG were also inherent in the very nature of post-Cold War conflicts and peacekeeping. The deep-seated causes of these conflicts, and the lack of overwhelming military advantage on the part of governments and intervention forces, make for protracted violence, and call for political commitment as well as open-endedness in the intervention agenda (in the ECOMOG case, the peacekeepers went in expecting the intervention to last between six and twelve months, and ended up with an involvement that lasted eight years).

These challenges are likely to be exacerbated in the context of weak regional states and collectivities, as ECOWAS demonstrates. The ECOMOG operation occurred at a difficult moment for the states in the region. Firstly, the members of the regional organisation were themselves involved in complex political transitions, with most of their regimes under considerable challenge from their own civil societies. Secondly, the war generated huge resource demands — economic, military, political and diplomatic — that these states were ill-equipped to fulfil, and which the international community was disinclined to deliver. Thirdly, the structural and political crises that sustained these rebellions — economic stress, state decay and delegitimisation, the dislocation of youth — were present among other states in the region. There was thus a real danger that the conflict would spread beyond the borders of Liberia and Sierra Leone. The major dilemma of weak states is that they are vulnerable to such regional disturbances, but have limited power to stop or suppress them. Ironically, it was arguably this very sense of their own vulnerability, and of the possibility of a ‘domino effect’ within the region, that furnished ECOWAS with the political will to remain engaged in the Liberian issue.

Despite the often discouraging prospects, the ECOMOG operation was ultimately successful for several reasons. The first was the sheer political will and tenacity of ECOWAS. The organisation did not have the option of cutting and running, for reasons that were as much self-interested as humanitarian. The second was the ability to combine three phases of conflict resolution: peacekeeping, peacemaking, and peace enforcement, thereby changing mandates of forces in the field as developments on the ground required (a flexibility due, ironically, to the autonomy enjoyed by the military command and as a result of the weak control exercised by the ECOWAS directorate). In addition, the subregional, regional, and international initiatives each brought different strengths and weaknesses to the peace process.

One of the more notable achievements of ECOMOG, in the long term, is its success in pushing the region from argument to consensus and from division to unity on matters of regional security. Prior to the Liberian crisis, as well as throughout the early stages of the intervention, ECOWAS members displayed little commitment to the ideals of regional security embodied in the 1981 treaty. This cynical disregard was apparent, on the one side, in the way in which certain Francophone states connived in the attack on Liberia and deliberately frustrated peace initiatives and, on the other side, in the way in which the intervening states (Nigeria in particular) acted unilaterally and resisted control by the regional political directorate. And as has been shown, the operation was bedevilled by linguistic and geopolitical rivalries, and undermined by questions about its legitimacy and format. Following the ‘resolution’ of the Liberian crisis, two crises have revived and extended these disputes in particular.

The first is the 25 May 1997 coup that overthrew the newly installed democratic civilian government in Sierra Leone. The Nigerians responded to the coup with a naval bombardment of Freetown, followed by an invasion a year later to dislodge the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) coup-makers by force. While the earlier ECOMOG intervention into Sierra Leone had generated little controversy, largely because of the (mistaken) assumption that the RUF was merely a creature of the Liberian NPFL, these later events evoked very different responses. Those opposed to the second ECOMOG intervention in Sierra Leone pointed to the ‘material’ differences between Liberia and Sierra Leone: in the latter case, the civil war had ended, and a government had been elected into power. This made the event of 25 May an internal affair outside the competence of the 1981 Agreement. Hence Bundu Abass, who had put forward arguments in support of the intervention into Liberia as Secretary-General of ECOWAS, now made powerful arguments opposing the (Nigerian) intervention into Sierra Leone.31

The intervention also raised fears once more of Nigerian unilateralism. However, there was unanimity within the ranks of ECOWAS, the OAU and the international community that the coup was intolerable and could not be allowed to stand. This rationalisation, missing in the 1981 treaty, suggests an expanding horizon of what constitutes ‘regional security’ and of the acceptable justifications for intervention.

The second event is the civil war in Guinea-Bissau, which began as a military rebellion following an attempt by President Nino Vieira to remove his armed chief, General Asunmane Mane, on charges of trading arms with Casamance rebels across the border in Senegal. Forces from Senegal and Guinea intervened to support Vieira’s government, but unlike Liberia and Sierra Leone, ECOMOG forces were not committed. One explanation was that the Anglophone countries in ECOMOG were anxious to pay back Senegal and the Francophone countries for their earlier lack of support to ECOMOG. It should be noted, however, that the mediation effort in Guinea-Bissau, by contrast, was not conducted exclusively by ECOWAS, but co-ordinated with the Community of Portuguese-speaking Countries (CPLP), which included Portugal, and there was some ill-disguised rivalry with ECOWAS.32

These ‘post-Liberia’ developments have revived several issues. For example, what are the parameters for intervention (in other words, which conflicts in the region qualify for intervention, and which not)? Who initiates intervention? Should intervention be unilateral, bilateral, or multilateral? With reference to Guinea-Bissau, how is ‘region’ to be defined? Is the criterion territorial, or linguistic? Another source of debate is how the mutual security mechanism is to be defined. It is noteworthy that the L’ANAD structure has continued to exist alongside the ECOWAS mutual defence arrangement.

In December 1997, the Fourth Extraordinary Summit of the ECOWAS Heads of State and Government held in Lomé directly confronted these issues, approving the establishment of a regional mechanism for conflict prevention, management and resolution, and regional security. Following this, a meeting of experts in Banjul in July 1998 drafted a set of proposals for such a Mechanism for the approval of the ECOWAS Heads of State meeting in Ouagadougou in October.33 These proposals recognised that "... though the organization [ECOWAS] was established for the primary purpose of economic integration of the region, economic development can only be effectively pursued in a secure and stable environment", thus getting around the ‘constitutional’ issue that had earlier generated such heat.

The mechanism consisted of an elaborate set of structures, with a Mediation and Security Council of nine member states at the apex, elected from among the sixteen members of the organisation, and responsible for taking decisions on issues of regional peace and security on behalf of the ECOWAS Authority of Heads of State. The military force would continue to be called ECOMOG. ECOMOG would be deployed in accordance with the terms of the 1981 treaty (see above). But there was also a significant new twist. While the provisions for intervention would not extend to "... internal situations that are sustained and maintained from within", it would apply to those situations in which an internally-driven conflict:

These prescriptions are the result of a growing consensus within the region and between the various factions in ECOWAS that conflict is self-defeating. As a result, states in the region were able to demonstrate considerable flexibility, redefining their positions in order to promote consensus regarding the nature of regional security mechanisms. For the region, the conflicts in Liberia and Sierra Leone have been a traumatic experience, conferring both a sense of its vulnerability as well as its ‘regionness’. After years of myopic focus on national sovereignty and security, West African states now see the connection between domestic anarchy and regional political instability much more clearly. States are ready to concede that ‘my neighbour’s business is my business’ and, correspondingly, accepting the necessity of acting collaboratively within a regional framework to tackle these problems rather than attempting to seek favoured status and arrangements with external powers.

Notwithstanding this consensus, which helped to facilitate an end to the Liberian crisis, the ECOMOG experience teaches the important lesson that one should not conflate regional security and human security. The sharp polarisation that greeted Abacha’s sudden death in June — with those who remembered him primarily for his contributions to regional peacekeeping (such as the OAU Secretary General and President Kabbah of Sierra Leone) celebrating him as a ‘great statesman’, while those (including the majority of Nigerians) who recalled his brutal repression of human rights and democracy at home rejoicing publicly — demonstrated the tension in the region between these two forms of security. The authoritarian structures prevalent in the region facilitated external intervention to support regional security but, at the same time, undermined human security on the domestic front. There have been further indications that, while regional political stability is a necessary condition for human security, it is far from sufficient.

The settlements that brought ‘peace’ to Liberia and Sierra Leone did not forcefully seek to address the domestic issues (of governance, economic justice and exclusion, etc.) at the root of regional conflagration. The end of hostilities in Liberia, capped by ‘successful’ elections, has not prevented the reappearance, under Taylor’s government, of many of the same abuses which provoked the war in the first place. In many respects, the post-civil war government in Liberia has assumed the predatory hues common to the region’s governments. After its prodigious sacrifices to ensure peace, ECOWAS has shown much less inclination or ability to impose acceptable standards of governance on the region. Without this, the ‘regional security’ mechanism is liable to degenerate into a protection racket for autocrats.34

Endnotes