The International African Institute, in association with James Currey publishers, Oxford; Indiana Uniersity Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis; and Double Storey,
Cape Town.
FAMINE THAT KILLS Darfur, Sudan
Alex de Waal
Oxford University Press,
Revised edition 2005.
Fifteen years ago Alex de Waal published the first edition of Famine that kills, a study based on his doctoral thesis, which focussed on the Darfur drought of 1984-85. Darfur is now even more in the headlines, as the location for what has been called “the greatest humanitarian disaster in the world”.
This revised edition of that work retains the original text, but adds a new preface, in which the author speculates on whether the international community’s ability to respond to humanitarian crisis has changed in the intervening period. Despite the vast increase in academic knowledge about famines and their causes, De Waal finds that the current relief operations in Darfur and Chad reveal inexcusable shortcomings in both policy and execution. Too often the policy prescriptions of outsiders fail to take sufficient cognizance of the realities facing the victims. He notes the frequent lack of coherence between macro-economic theory and micro-level research on livelihoods and coping strategies.
He revisits his original questioning of the very concept of “famine”, and what it means to those who experience it. He emphasises the importance of avoiding the simplicities inherent in confusing famine with the idea of “food insecurity”, and of ignoring the broader issues of livelihoods, health and social cohesion. On this view, famine kills not merely by having people starve to death but in creating conditions that increase their vulnerability to treatable diseases, and reducing or eliminating their chances of dealing with these circumstances. He ahs written elsewhere of “famine crimes”, and argued that these need to be identified and codified into law as a necessary adjunct to the Genocide Convention.
For De Waal, famine is not a result of technical malfunction, but a consequence of the abuse of political power. The tendency to ignore the political drivers of famine as deliberate policy goes a long way to explaining why humanitarian interventions from outside have so limited an effect on the fate of those they seek to help.
Also included in the new preface is a brief but insightful background to the Darfurian crisis that started in 2003. The politicisation of identity, the conflict over diminishing land resources, the proliferation of increasingly lethal weaponry and Khartoum’s adoption of a low-budget counter-insurgency strategy based on policies of scorched earth and famine are all outlines here. In all this, the author argues, genocidal intent in terms of the Convention can be shown.
The body of the book provides a detailed analysis of the events of 1984-85, but this remains essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the nature of Darfurian society, as it existed at the onset of the catastrophe in 2003. As one has come to expect, the writing is fluent and the exposition clear. Few writers have come anywhere near explaining the complexities of this troubled region with such empathy and grace.
Richard Cornwell
WAR DOG Fighting other people’s wars
Al J Venter
Casemate, Harverton, USA, and Pinetown Printers, Pinetown, South Africa, 2003.
Al Venter is well known in military circles. He has written twenty books since 1969 ranging from accounts of insurgency wars in Guinea Bissau, Angola, the former Rhodesia and in Africa generally. For the last 25 years, Venter has served as correspondent for a number of the Jane’s publications, including International Defence Review, Defence Weekly, Terrorism and Security Monitor. He knows what he is writing about and clearly has sympathy with soldiering, with mercenaries and anything to do with guns – hence almost a chapter (one of twenty four) devoted to extolling the virtues of the mercenary magazine ‘Soldier of Fortune’ and its various contributors. Yet, although often quite a personal account, this is more than another gung ho account of one-mans search for adrenalin.
The problem with the debate on ‘guns for hire’ is that it is increasingly difficult to draw the line between legitimate government contracts to outsource specific aspects of the application and support of armed forces, and mercenary activity by foreign nationals with financial motive. While Venter does not address this issue explicitly, today first world armed forces outsource many functions that were traditionally done by men in uniform, thus drawing civilian contractors almost into the battlefield and blurring the lines between military combatant and others.
War Dog is a book about mercenaries, specifically (but not exclusively) South African mercenaries. The book is high on detail and low on theory and concept – but fascinating for the insight that it provides on external engagement in African wars as well as the detail that Venter provides to a number of recent conflicts. The first clutch of chapters are a personal account of five weeks that Venter spent flying combat missions in the front seat of an Mi-24 attack helicopter in Sierra Leone in support of the Army of President Kabbah against the Revolutionary United Front during 2000. The pilot is South African Neall Ellis – a former colonel in the South African Air Force and self-acknowledged former mercenary. The admiration that Venter has for Ellis is self-evident. Having variously served in Bosnia, and earlier with a Mi-9 helicopter dubbed ‘Bokkie’ (literally ‘little deer’), Ellis undertook daily missions against the advancing RUF forces over several months after the war restarted on May 6 th, 2000. Interspersed in Venters’ account of air operations into the hinterland of Freetown are insightful accounts of Operation Palliser (the British deployment of their Quick Reaction Force to West Africa in 2000), UN operations and events at a time when very little stood between RUF leader Foday Sankoh, the fall of Freetown and defeat of President Tejan Kabbah. At that point, Ellis is flying three to four combat missions daily as a contract pilot for Kabah’s government, in close cooperation with the British military continent and UNAMSIL. These operations take place at a time when a 13 000 UN peacekeeping mission had replaced Executive Outcomes but proved itself incapable of rescuing eleven of their own that had been taken prisoner by the West Side Boys. Venter uses the detail in these chapters to argue his case in favour of mercenaries and clearly believes that they are a cheaper, most effective alternative to UN peacekeepers in situations where there is no peace to keep. He views the United Nations and its efforts with barely concealed contempt as expensive, ineffectual and generally a waste of money and effort.
Venter’s views in this regard are contested and controversial. More recent events particularly in the Kivu areas of eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, is that the UN is taking a much more robust approach to making peace including the use of armed missions. And even this development follows on that of the deployment of parallel military missions (such as Operation Artemis in the same area) to a regular UN peacekeeping mission to enforce the peace where UN multilateral arrangements cannot effectively do so. Many would argue that this closes any space that there may have been for the type of mercenary engagement that Venter advocates – beyond arguments regarding morality and ethics.
To back up his views on the utility of mercenaries, Venter uses detail descriptions of the excesses of the RUF and the extent to which Executive Outcomes managed to turn the tide on the Sankoh and his terrorists (for that is what they were) in 1996. They manage to do so within a matter of months shortly after they were contracted by a desperate President Valentine Strasser to save Freetown from imminent capture.
Executive Outcomes was disbanded shortly after the South African government enacted the Foreign Military Assistance Act, designed to outlaw mercenary activities and to regulate the engagement of South Africans in any foreign wars or conflict zones. While Venter is at pains to point out that the majority of South African mercenaries were black, the leader group were white former members of South African special forces during apartheid and their very existence an affront to the governments of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki. Executive Outcomes made much of the fact that they only accepted contracts from governments, and not from rebel forces such as UNITA and the RUF. The problem is that South African mercenaries were popping up all over Africa – on both sides of the wars in Angola and Sierra Leone. Thus Ellis finds, in Freetown, that he is on the receiving end of a campaign apparently supported by comrades from the apartheid-era South African Defence Force.
Venter clearly has excellent access to the mercenaries about whom he writes and a number of chapters include details that have not previously appeared in the public domain. For example, he provides a detailed account of the operations conducted by Executive Outcomes in Angola at the instigation of the British company Ranger Oil West Africa (ROWAL) as from 1993 (when 28 former South African special forces personnel managed to expel a sizeable UNITA force from the strategic oil facility at Soyo). EO’s role in Angola effectively ends early in 1996 when their contract was terminated. By that time, EO and its up to 500 South African mercenaries had turned the tables on UNITA, denying the rebels access to the diamond fields or Lunda Sul and eventually those around Cafunfo. To do this job the South Africans trained Angola’s 16 th Brigade, planned the operations and fought alongside them. These operations contributing significantly to the defeat of UNITA – an ironic turn of events since many EO operatives had previously served with and trained UNITA as members of the former South African Defence Force (SADF). In fact, Venter notes in passing, that UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi was killed when led into an ambush by South African mercenaries but does not further elaborate on the circumstances. Deprived of their source of income, the loss of the diamond fields was the start of the end for UNITA, and the beginning of a lucrative new contract for EO in Sierra Leone where many EO operatives redeployed to and their efforts soon managed to turn the RUF tide. But EO only secured its contract in Sierre Leone after a pervious private military company, Gurkha Security Group, had failed and its leader Bob MacKenzie captured, cooked and eaten in part by the RUF as part of their barbaric rituals.
Venter also tells of the ham-handed and eventually failed effort by a group of American mercenaries, paid for by Chinese criminal groups, to overthrow self-installed Ghanaian ruler Jerry Rawlings in 1985. The author also observed, at first hand the role of foreigners in the failed secession effort by Biafra in 1967.
Other shorter chapters deal with mercenary involvement in former Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Venter starts his story in 1960 with Moise Tshobe in Katanga province and the role of the first clutch of notorious mercenaries including Bob Denard, Jean ‘Black Jack’ Schramme, ‘Mad Mike’ Hoare and others. Much has been written on these mercenaries of a bygone era but the chapters do provide context to the book as a whole. More important and comprehensive chapters focus on the efforts by various mercenaries to sell their services to government of Mobuto Seso Seko as the forces of Laurent Kabila closed on Kinshasa in 1996. Amongst various offers and contracts by mercenaries from France, Belgium, Russia, Ukraine and Yugoslavia, two South Africans, Mauritz le Roux and Harold Muller, establish a company Stability Control (later known as Stablico) and offer their service to Mobuto’s chief of security General Kpama Baramoto. This as the largely Francophone mercenary contingent already fighting in support of Mobuto found that they were no match for Rwanda and its allies. Ellis is again called in to put together the aerial effort, but Mobuto is either too ill or misjudges the threat until it is too late. Eventually Ellis and two fellow South Africans escape, literally in their underpants in a canoe across the Congo River to the Central African Republic.
Then the scene moves to the massive support provided by Zimbabwe to secure their ally Laurent Kabila against the advances of Rwanda and Uganda. To this end, President Robert Mugabe deploys more than 10 000 troops and almost his entire air force to the Congo. Nine aircraft, four helicopters and the lives of several hundreds Zimbabwean soldiers are lost in the ensuing campaign. In a daring operation to outflank the Zimbabwean troops that were delaying their advance, Rwanda deploys some 20 000 troops by air (Russian pilots) across several hundred miles of tropical rainforest from Kigali in the east to Matadi, to the West of Kinshasa. Kabila is saved only by the intervention of Angola who fear that the fall of Kabila to Rwanda would (re)open up the UNITA front to their north. Eventually the Rwandans are forced to retreat into northern Angola and are evacuated – again by a host of Russian contract pilots. Laurent Kabila survives the first serious threat to his presidency.
Various other chapters deal with earlier episodes of mercenary engagement in Africa and its evident that Venter has had a passion for the subject since the day he started reporting – hence the details that he presents have eluded many investigative journalists. Although War Dog primarily deals with South African mercenary engagement, and despite the notoriety of Executive Outcomes, the locus of modern mercenary initiation probably remains in London. At the same time, this is an international phenomenon intimately linked to the end of conflict somewhere and the subsequent availability of surplus military manpower ready to fight other people’s wars in a different spot. In this manner, the end of war in one country fuels conflict elsewhere. While London and Paris are the traditional hubs of mercenary organization, from where the links are made, contracts signed and plans put into operation, the supply of mercenaries and arms from Russia, Ukraine and Serbia are much more evident than ever before.
This is a fascinating book for those interested in the murky world of private security and realpolitiek in Africa, but could have done with more attention to presenting a tighter, reasoned argument – and in a more chronological fashion. Venter has the experience of decades of journalism and reportage in Africa and War Dog ends up being a mixture between a personal story about one reporters engagement in hot conflict, a tantalizing history of the lesser known aspects of many of those wars, and a thesis about ending hot conflict. Although rich in all three areas, it ends up satisfying none, but contributing to all.
Jakkie Cilliers
LETTING THEM DIE Why HIV prevention programmes
often fail
Catherine Campbell
The International African Institute, in association with James Currey publishers, Oxford; Indiana Uniersity Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis; and Double Storey,
Cape Town.
With the HIV/AIDS epidemic increasingly recognised as one of the greatest humanitarian, development and, many argue, security challenges of our time, vast resources are being pumped into preventing the spread of the virus. Encouraging responsible, healthy sexuality has become a veritable industry, fuelled by a multitude of ‘gold standard’ models, research studies and practice guidelines. Yet for all the time, money and energy devoted to such initiatives, most still fail to significantly reduce transmission rates.
In this book, Catherine Campbell attempts to answer the twin questions of why, despite knowledge of HIV, people still knowingly engage in sexual behaviour that could lead to a slow and painful premature death; and why the best-intentioned efforts to stem the tide of the epidemic often have so little effect. She draws on her seven-year involvement in a promising but, ultimately, ineffective HIV prevention project in one of South Africa ’s severely affected mining communities.
This project contained all the elements for success: it was initiated by a local grassroots group, responded to a locally identified need and, although underwritten by a large overseas development grant, could realistically be sustained in the long-term – yet it failed to achieve a reduction in either levels of HIV or sexually transmitted infections (STIs), or to become self sustaining. In examining what went wrong, Campbell illustrates how both understandings of sexuality and a range of other environmental, political and organisational factors – and the failure to factor these into project design – can reduce the effectiveness of theoretically sound initiatives.
She tells the stories of four groups: sex workers, miners, the community’s youth and a group loosely referred to as the project’s ‘stakeholders’, including community representatives, mine management, trade unions, scientists, donors and academics. Through their views and experiences, she illustrates the complex dynamics surrounding the decision to practice safer sex, the politics surrounding the mobilisation of diverse groups of actors in support of HIV prevention and the practicalities of implementing successful interventions.
Her conclusions are twofold. First, although many prevention campaigns target the individual as the locus of behavioural and sexual change, sexual decision making is heavily influenced by wider social and economic processes that make it hard for individuals to practice safer sex – even where they may want to. Second, initiatives are often undermined by a lack of inappropriate conceptual frameworks and insufficient attention to issues such as capacity building, organisational infrastructure and systems for ensuring accountability. She attributes these obstacles to a lack of political will on the part of the project’s various role players to create what she calls a ‘health enabling’ environment; a lack of will which will result in the death of thousands.
She ends on a positive note, however, arguing that many of these problems could have been avoided through more careful planning and greater attention to creating a sense of ownership and responsibility amongst all those involved. The latter is viewed as particularly important. In her view, HIV/AIDS constitutes an epidemic unlike any humanity has encountered before. More than other epidemics, its spread can not be divorced from wider social and economic dynamics, and successful interventions need to find ways of engaging all available actors to help shift beliefs and practices as both the individual and community levels – while at the same time supporting and encouraging efforts to address factors such as poverty and gender inequality.
“Letting them die” is a compelling and important book. As noted by another of the book’s reviewers, it is seldom that a book is published documenting a failure, and it provides important insight into the pitfalls inherent in attempting something as complex as behavioural change. It is refreshingly honest about the difficulties and complexities of implementing such initiatives in poor and highly diverse settings and should be read by anyone with an interest in improving, designing or implementing HIV prevention programmes in the developing world. The book is fairly academic in places, but is for the most part extremely accessible, and provides practical, hands on advice that is relevant for practitioners, donors and researchers alike.
