necessary here to mention the atrocities committed by all sides, though especially the
Serbs, in the former Yugoslavia, the like of which had not been seen in Europe since
- Every possible horror was visited upon the innocent: mass murder, systematic
rape as policy, and torture were all commonplace. And the international community,
that fictional body, did nothing effective to prevent or arrest it, even though it was present
at the scene of the crimes in the form of UNPROFOR. The exemplar of the beastliness
was the cold-blooded massacre by Bosnian Serbs of 7,000 male civilian Bosniacs in
Srebrenica in 1995, while a battalion of Dutch UN troops stood by helplessly. The Dutch
soldiers’ rules of engagement – like those of the rest of the UN mission – forbade them
from fighting, except in self-defence.
African anarchy
If the post-Cold War Balkans were disorderly and bloody, post-Cold War Africa was
much worse. Whereas the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia produced fatality lists in the
tens of thousands, at least two of the conflicts in Africa yielded fatalities in the millions.
Journalist Robert D. Kaplan best captured the nature of the problem in the continent with
an article first published in February 1994 and prophetically titled ‘The Coming Anarchy’
(reprinted in Kaplan, 2000: 3–57). It is important not to exaggerate the anarchy in 1990s
Africa. Of course there were islands of stability and some major examples of multi-ethnic
toleration, even reconciliation and progress. The political transformation of South Africa
under the inspired leadership of Nelson Mandela was a historic event. Unfortunately,
though, that beacon of hope was not matched widely elsewhere on the continent. This
strategic history will not dwell on Africa’s galloping health crisis, but it must take note
of the fact that many African societies have been devastated, literally decimated or worse,
by the spread of HIV/AIDS. Also, much of the continent, especially in the north-east,
has been assaulted and further impoverished by the effects of protracted and repeated
droughts. But the principal focus here must be upon the violence that people have visited
upon each other.
In the 1990s and subsequently, there was ‘warfare’, to stretch the term somewhat,
almost everywhere in Africa. By and large, that warfare was internal and irregular in
character, but it also occurred between states, frequently across Africa’s artificial and
arbitrary international frontiers. This narrative will take special note of just three
geographical seats of conflict in the continent. The world noticed the first, in Rwanda in
1994, albeit belatedly and to no useful consequence. The second, in the Democratic
Republic of Congo from 1998 to the present day, has rumbled on, overshadowed for the
West by 9/11 and the subsequent ‘global war on terror’. The third area of conflict is West
Africa as a whole, though especially Liberia and Sierra Leone. These countries, speaking
loosely, in common with such other troubled states as the Congo, Somalia, Angola,
Sudan, Ethiopia, the Ivory Coast, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique, suffer from endemic
social and political disorder. Some of this disorder does not fit comfortably into a
Clausewitzian frame of analysis. While Clausewitz insisted that war ‘is an act of policy’
(Clausewitz, 1976: 87), in Africa, and sometimes in the former Yugoslavia, the violence
often has been casual, even spontaneous and recreational, rather than politically moti-
vated. Some of the massacres that Africa has registered since 1990 have appeared more
like lethal, contagious hooliganism than calculated strategic behaviour.
After the Cold War: an interwar decade 231