Ending Civil War: Rhodesia and Lebanon in Perspective (International Library of War Studies)

Ending Civil War: Rhodesia and Lebanon in Perspective

Matthew Preston

I.B. Tauris

Ending Civil War

Ending Civil War Rhodesia and Lebanon in Perspective MATTHEW PRESTON

I.B.Tauris Publishers LONDON

● NEW YORK

Published in 2004 by I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com In the United States of America and in Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St Martins Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © Matthew Preston, 2004 The rights of Matthew Preston to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. International Library of War Studies 2 ISBN 1 85043 579 0 EAN 978 1 85043 579 2 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress catalog card: available Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin from camera-ready copy supplied by the author

Contents

List of abbreviations

vi

Note on transliteration and terminology

vii

Acknowledgements

viii

Maps

x

Introduction

1

Peace Negotiations and Structures of Settlement

9

The Battlefield

51

Military-Civilian Relations

96

Intra-factional Politics

122

Intervention and Mediation

150

Implementation

189

Conclusion

226

Notes

249

Bibliography

283

Index

317

List of Abbreviations ANC CAOM CCJP CIO CMF FLN FRELIMO FROLIZI IDF JOC LNM NIBMAR OAU PLO PSP RAR RENAMO SAS SFA SLA SSNP SWB TTL UANC UDI UNIFIL UNITA ZANLA ZANU ZAPU ZIPA ZIPRA ZNA

African National Council Civil Administration of the Mountains Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace Central Intelligence Organisation Commonwealth Monitoring Force National Liberation Front [Algeria] Front for the Liberation of Mozambique Front for the Liberation of Zimbabwe Israel Defence Forces Joint Operations Command Lebanese National Movement No Independence Before Majority African Rule Organisation of African Unity Palestine Liberation Organisation Popular Socialist Party Rhodesian African Rifles Mozambique National Resistance Special Air Service Security Force Auxiliaries South Lebanon Army Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party Summary of World Broadcasts Tribal Trust Land United African National Council Unilateral Declaration of Independence United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon National Union for the Total Independence of Angola Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army Zimbabwe African National Union Zimbabwe African People’s Union Zimbabwe People’s Army Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army Zimbabwe National Army

Note on Transliteration and Terminology Rhodesia: ‘Rhodesia’ was the formal name of the country for most of the period covered by this book. I have used that term for the political entity where appropriate, and for the geographical entity throughout. Where circumstances dictate, I have also used the titles ‘Southern Rhodesia’, ‘Zimbabwe Rhodesia’ and ‘Zimbabwe’. I refer to the settler community in Rhodesia interchangeably as ‘Rhodesian’, ‘white’ and ‘European’, and to the indigenous population as ‘African’ or ‘black’. The adjective ‘Zimbabwean’ is reserved for the African nationalist guerrillas, and for the post-independence context. During the two years following independence in April 1980, the names of various towns and cities were changed. For the sake of clarity, places are referred to by their pre-independence names where the context is prior to April 1980, and by their new names thereafter. Lebanon: Arabic words and names have mostly been transliterated according the rules set out in the International Journal for Middle East Studies. The exceptions are where other spellings have become common currency, as found in Keesing’s Record of World Events.

Acknowledgements Many helped in the research and production of this book. Philip Robins proved an inspiring mentor, encouraging gently and puncturing stray illusions. Fadia Taher and Simon Lewis were generous to a fault in their welcome to Lebanon and Zimbabwe respectively. David Keen and Raufu Mustapha probed the text helpfully and incisively. Others who were giving with their time and expertise in Oxford, Beirut or Harare include Donald Chimanikire, Jean Hannoyer, Farid el-Khazen, Alan Megahey, Nader Moumneh, Brian Raftopoulos, Paul Salem and Nadim Shehadi. I am very grateful, too, for the facilities and welcome extended by the librarians and staff of numerous establishments: in Oxford, the Middle East Centre at St. Antony’s College, Queen Elizabeth House, Rhodes House, the Centre for Lebanese Studies and the Bodleian Library; in London, the British Library and the Royal Institute of International Affairs; in Harare, the Institute of Development Studies and the University of Zimbabwe; and in Beirut, the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches sur le Moyen-Orient Contemporain. Thanks are also due to Hanako Birks at I.B.Tauris, and to Sage Publications for permission to re-use material which appeared in the Journal of Peace Research, vol. 41, no. 1. My father, Michael Preston, spent long hours deploying his considerable editorial skills on an earlier draft of this book. I owe profound thanks to him and Sherri, to my mother Stephanie Swynnerton and Charles, and to Rob, for all their support. But the largest single group of those to whom I am deeply indebted are the Rector, Fellows and staff of Exeter College, Oxford. While I am immensely grateful to all, some deserve a special mention. From 1990 to 2003, Michael Hart, Marilyn Butler, Brian Stewart and John Maddicott all offered particular inspiration, hospitality and guidance in their various roles. Others – Guy Rowlands, Oliver Pooley (and Helen Thomas), Stephen Hampton, David Garrick and Miranda Stewart among them – provided an atmosphere, friendship and warmth that I shall always cherish. Jonathan Snicker (together with Katherine Hieronymus) supplied all of the above, along with patience, a spare room, and almost limitless good humour. But ultimately, this book is for one last Fellow, my wife Nuria Capdevila Argüelles, without whose love, encouragement and example it would never have been finished. Gracias. A ti, y a Olalla.

ix Shortly after finishing the manuscript for this book I joined the Global Issues Research Group of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Needless to say, the opinions I present in this volume are my own, and should not be taken as an expression of the UK government. London December 2003

Maps

INTRODUCTION On 21 December 1972, a band of guerrillas belonging to the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) attacked Altena Farm, in the Centenary-Mount Darwin area in the north of Rhodesia. Wounding the daughter of the farms’ owners, their attack was a landmark in the Zimbabwean struggle for majority rule, representing the first use of force against white civilians in the guerrillas’ new strategy of infiltration into and subversion of rural Rhodesia. In Lebanon, just over two years later and approximately 3,500 miles away, on 13 April 1975, unidentified gunmen shot from a speeding car at a church in the Beirut suburb Ain-al-Rummane, killing four. Later that day Lebanese Maronite Christian militiamen of the Ketaeb (or Phalanges) party took revenge, killing twenty-seven Palestinians returning by bus to the Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp from a rally in the capital. The civil wars which ensued in both countries captured the world’s attention. Lebanon became a by-word for state collapse, with events such as the Israeli invasion of 1982, the massacre by Ketaeb militiamen of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, and the kidnapping of Western hostages by Hizballah radicals in the later 1980s all commanding massive media coverage. The Rhodesian war, meanwhile, further intensified a political crisis that had erupted with the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from Britain issued by Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front white minority government in November 1965. The escalation of the war in the 1970s, along with allegations that Western companies were helping Rhodesia circumvent UN sanctions and that Western mercenaries were aiding the Rhodesian cause, kept Rhodesia high up the international agenda. Representing almost the last phase of African decolonisation, the Rhodesian cause served as a rallying call to unite the newly independent states of sub-Saharan Africa and embarrass the former imperial power, Britain. After years of violent struggle, though, both wars ended, and they ended in internationally-sponsored negotiated compromise peace deals. On 21 December 1979 the leaders of the Rhodesian government and of the Zimbabwean guerrilla movements signed a peace agreement at Lancaster House in London, providing for a ceasefire, for interim political arrangements in the lead-up to elections in February 1980, and for a new constitution to come into force two

2

ENDING CIVIL WAR

months later. Ten years later, and after a war lasting eight years more than the Rhodesian, the surviving members of the 1972 Lebanese parliament signed a comparable agreement at Taif in Saudi Arabia. Though the agreement did not secure peace immediately, the assent to it of the various fighting factions was secured in the months that followed (peacefully and forcefully), so that by the end of October 1990 the Lebanese civil war had ended. The purpose of this book is to investigate how, why and when both wars ended, and to discover what can be learned from comparing the two as examples of negotiated civil war termination. Defining a civil war is a complex task. As Smith notes, ‘civil war’ is just one of at least thirty-six different terms used to describe what is essentially the same phenomenon.1 If ‘civil’ is taken to denote ‘intra-state’, then certainly various of the combatants in Rhodesia and Lebanon disavowed this description. For most white Rhodesians, the Zimbabwean guerrillas were agents of international ‘Communist Terrorism’ rather than indigenous resistance fighters, while they in return were described as British imperialists. In Lebanon, in the latter stages of war, widespread currency was given to the idea of a ‘guerre des autres’ caused by Israel, Syria, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), Iran, the wider Arab world, and the superpowers. The Lebanese thus absolved themselves of responsibility for their own misfortunes. Both wars certainly were heavily internationalised, with all the above powers involved in Lebanon, and with South Africa, Zambia and Mozambique particularly implicated in the Rhodesian war. ‘War’ too presents problems, implying as it does both a level of intensity and the existence of a single phenomenon. Both conflicts certainly passed Small and Singer’s threshold of 1,000 battle deaths per annum at various stages, but as the results of the Uppsala Conflict Data Project show they did not do so in every year: casualties in Rhodesia rose continuously from 1972, while those in Lebanon fluctuated wildly.2 ‘War’ may be a useful and conventional shorthand for describing the violence practised in both countries, but only as long as it does not obscure the complexity and variety of the conflict experience across both time and space. Pinpointing the beginning and end of a civil war is equally problematic. Historians now see the Altena farm and Ain-al-Rummane attacks as precipitating the outbreak of war, but organised political violence had been exercised in both countries during the prior months and years. The rhetoric of the belligerents is no more helpful here: in Rhodesia, for example, ZANU mythology dated the war from the so-called Battle of Sinoia in 1966, despite the minor nature of that clash and the virtual absence of armed conflict thereafter; meanwhile, as Godwin and Hancock observe, it was not until 1976 that white Rhodesian society accepted that what it

INTRODUCTION

3

was fighting was indeed war.3 Dating war’s end is no easier, and is discussed below in Chapter 6. The paper settlements may have established a framework for the post-war political settlement, but they could not guarantee their observance. In Lebanon, in particular, it was only twelve months after its signing and the defeat of the rejectionist General Michel Aoun that the Taif agreement could come into force. Even then, the onset of ‘peace’ did not herald a complete cessation of violence in either country, nor did it mean that the political and social conflict – rather than merely the war – was settled. These conceptual problems, though, are not unique to Lebanon or Rhodesia, and they have not prevented the emergence of a large literature on civil wars since the end of the Cold War. If civil war may usefully be thought of as ‘a violent dispute whose origins can be traced primarily to domestic rather than to systemic factors, and one in which armed violence occurs primarily within the borders of a single state’, then the cases at hand certainly count.4 Indeed, a central argument of this book is that despite the involvement of outsiders, civil war in Lebanon and Rhodesia was to an important degree an internal affair, whether in its causes, its conduct and even its ending. Outsiders provided weapons and money to fighting factions, but those factions owed their existence and manpower to political, social, economic and demographic processes within the state. The wars that emerged were essentially contests for power over the state, and to that end Lebanese shot at Lebanese, and Rhodesians and Zimbabweans shot at each other, in every year of their respective wars. And wars they were. Certainly, the intensity of both varied over time, but the average annual battle casualties clearly exceeded even the most stringent of definition of ‘war’.5 Kalyvas argues that ‘war structures choices and selects actors in fundamentally different ways than peace – even violent peace’, and the chapters that follow will reinforce that point.6 If the Lebanese and Rhodesian were civil wars, their longevity was typical of a genre which tends to last six times longer than its inter-state counterpart.7 Various reasons – structural, organisational and psychological – have been put forward for why civil war is so resistant to settlement. Perhaps the most significant structural factor is what the Lebanese civil war lacked and had been overcome towards the end of the Rhodesian civil war, that of asymmetry. Under the ‘typical’ model of government versus insurgency, the government has legitimacy, sovereignty, allies, armies and access to resources. The government will also, so Mitchell suggests, be more cohesive and better organised, if only because it controls the state apparatus. The rebels balance the government’s advantage in power terms, first with their depth of ideological and organisational commitment, and

4

ENDING CIVIL WAR

secondly because, as Henry Kissinger noted, ‘the guerrilla army wins as long as it can keep from losing’.8 Such asymmetry presents a serious barrier to negotiated settlement, for, as Zartman says, the negotiation process functions best under conditions of equality, and can only take place when the parties have some sort of mutual veto over outcomes. Indeed, asymmetry usually not only causes negotiations to fail but even prevents their taking place, as a government will refuse rebels the legitimacy conveyed on them by their participation in negotiations. 9 The remaining structural barriers to negotiated settlement must still be considered. The first, advanced by Fred Iklé, one of the first theorists of war termination, blamed the indivisible nature of the stakes in civil war: Outcomes intermediate between victory and defeat are difficult to construct. If partition is not a feasible outcome because the belligerents are not geographically separable, one side has to get all, or nearly so, since there cannot be two governments ruling over one country, and since the passions aroused and the political cleavages opened render a sharing of power unworkable.10 This analysis was picked up by Paul Pillar, who wrote that ‘the very fact that a civil war has broken out indicates the weakness of any mechanisms for compromise. … The struggle for power becomes a struggle for survival as the options narrow to … a fight to the finish’.11 Since the end of the Cold War, however, this explanation has rightly come under attack.12 For although negotiated settlements have been unusual, they can be found. As Stedman argues, Mikhail Gorbachev’s introduction of representative institutions in the USSR in 1988 shows that leaders do not necessarily see the participation of additional people in state politics as negative. Civil war participants can recognise each other’s legitimacy, as did the Ortega government and the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, even if they do so only occasionally. Nevertheless, the stakes in civil wars are commonly much higher than in non-nuclear inter-state war. As Michael Wesley says, warring for power to determine the future of the state imparts a particular desperation on the struggle, and a singularly instrumentalist and opportunist logic on the political and military calculations of the belligerents. … The importance of the stakes – control of the state, its resources, and sovereign prerogatives – means that civil wars are usually fought with particular seriousness and brutality, and the consequences of defeat, capture, or surrender are usually extreme.13

INTRODUCTION

5

Indeed, Wesley continues by arguing convincingly that because the stakes are so high, the belligerents’ political considerations are usually almost exclusively conflict-based, so that whereas in inter-state war the UN can influence the belligerents because few states wish to be blamed by the UN, this tends not to apply in civil wars, leaving the UN powerless to defuse them. Another factor in the rarity of compromise in civil war is a modified version of the realist security dilemma. Because under international anarchy the state is the ultimate guarantor of the rule of law and thus of any settlement, and because civil wars are conflicts over the nature and locus of authority within the state, all sides fear that by handing over both the temporary sovereignty achieved during the conflict and, more importantly, their weapons, they will cede control over the apparatus of the state, and thus risk being eliminated after complying with the terms of a negotiated settlement. But it is not just the nature of the interaction between the belligerents that hinders successful negotiation. The internal characteristics of those belligerents, both psychological and organisational, are also important. The organisational barriers are described aptly by Stedman as the ‘pathologies of leadership’.14 Leaders in civil wars may be so committed to the military option that it does not matter if their followers want peace, as King argues of Vellupillai Prabhakaran of the Tamil Tigers and Ratko Mladic of the Bosnian Serb army. Smith argues that once such leaders have committed themselves to war, their political advisers are afraid to criticise the leader, or they do so and are ignored or dismissed, or they fail to agree amongst themselves. Even if leaders are ideologically disposed to entertain the compromise option, the failure of leaders to achieve their objectives can engender a curious reluctance to face up to the facts. As Iklé says of wars in general, Fighting often continues long past the point where a “rational” calculation would indicate that the war should be ended – ended, perhaps, even at the price of major concessions. Government leaders often fail to explore alternatives to the policies to which they become committed, and may even unconsciously distort what they know so as to leave their past predictions undisturbed.15 Leaders often, too, become trapped by their own rhetoric, unable to back down without loss of face amongst their constituency. It may require a change of leadership, or even a complete change of regime, to alleviate the organisational barriers to settlement. Even then, the new leader may prove more hard-line than his predecessor, especially as hawks seem to prosper in civil war at the expense of doves.16

6

ENDING CIVIL WAR

Some phenomena apply not just to leaders in civil wars, but to entire populations. Foremost is the upward re-evaluation of aims that protracted civil war tends to cause. Especially in the ‘insurgent versus government’ model of civil war, government failure to respond to the insurgents’ demands for political reform lends credence to the insurgents’ ideological critique of the regime, and leads them to conclude that only by revolution can they achieve their aims. One can also observe, with Pillar, that ‘mounting costs engender an upward revaluation of one’s objectives, thereby reducing the discomfort of knowing that one has incurred costs without sufficient reason. This revaluation in turn makes further costly efforts even more justifiable’.17 Often, a combination of various of these factors makes settlement impossible, other than through military victory. The civil wars in Rhodesia and Lebanon, though, provide examples of a different form of civil war termination, that of the negotiated internationally-mediated compromise settlement. As such, they are of particular scholarly interest. Analytically such settlements present more of a puzzle than do outright military victories. If the barriers to settlement are so great, how are they overcome? Morally they seem preferable: negotiated settlement should in theory provide something for everyone, and while such settlements tend to be less durable than military victories, they are less usually followed by genocide.18 And, topically, negotiated settlements to civil wars are becoming more frequent. At the end of the Cold War Stedman could calculate that of sixty-four settled civil wars since 1900, forty-one had ended either through the elimination or capitulation of one side, while a further six should be seen as negotiated surrender rather than negotiated compromise.19 The data presented by Wallensteen and Sollenberg covering the period 1989 to 1996, though, show a marked increase in compromise settlements. While the data for 1996 onwards is less clear-cut, and while many of these intermediate solutions to civil war have resulted in the ‘freezing’ rather than the settlement of conflict, the importance of understanding why compromise settlements can emerge after years of civil war is clear.20 This book is hardly the first to investigate the dynamics of civil war and the mechanisms by which they can lead to settlement. Indeed, it draws heavily on four traditions of thinking about civil war: that of ethnic and nationalist conflict; that of military strategy in lowintensity warfare; that of the economic functions of violence in civil war; and, most importantly, that of war as a bargaining problem awaiting a propitious moment for settlement.21 The significance of this last perspective, championed by Zartman with his concept of the ‘ripe moment’ in civil war termination, is that it emphasises the role

INTRODUCTION

7

played by factors external to the negotiating table in the achievement of settlement, and that it highlights the adaptability and compromise often shown by belligerents in civil war, but without minimising the problems faced by those attempting to broker a negotiated settlement. It is the various propositions put forward by these perspectives within six distinct issue areas concerning the requirements for settlement that lend this book its structure. Thus Chapter 1 assesses the terms of the peace settlements agreed at Lancaster House and at Taif, as well as the various failed negotiations that preceded them during both wars. Chapter 2 investigates developments on the battlefield; Chapter 3 examines the relationships between military actors and their supposed civilian constituencies, while Chapter 4 looks at political developments within the belligerent factions themselves; Chapter 5 assesses the roles played by external actors in bringing both wars to an end; and, before concluding, Chapter 6 investigates how the Lancaster House and Taif agreements were implemented, with a view to understanding the durability of the post-war order in Zimbabwe and Lebanon. Each chapter begins by summarising the core requirements for settlement proposed in each issue area in the theoretical literature, and concludes with a comparison of the two wars in light of those general propositions. Unlike many political science works on civil wars on the one hand, therefore, and unlike the many histories of war in Rhodesia and Lebanon on the other, this book represents an attempt to influence the general theoretical agenda in an inductive, bottom-up manner. Like all comparative studies, the value of such an approach is that by choosing two cases rather than one it is possible to begin to separate the particular from the general, the theoretical from the specific. Examining no more than two, meanwhile, allows the attention to detail that is required in the building of ‘bottom-up’ theory. Caution must naturally be exercised in drawing comparisons: similarities between two cases, even if they are carefully selected, may be little more than coincidental. Even more importantly, great care must be taken to avoid forcing the cases into a theoretical or comparative straightjacket that does disservice to the reality of the cases themselves. But with support from scholars such as Alexander George, John Bowen, Roger Petersen, Gary King, Robert Keohane and Sidney Verba, the comparative method itself, I feel, needs no extended defence.22 More important is the justification of case selection. Why Lebanon and why Rhodesia? From a social scientific perspective, the answer is that although the two wars may on the surface seem dissimilar – they occurred on different continents, in quite different political and social cultures – they hold much in common from a conceptual standpoint.23 Both wars were protracted; they were heavily

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internationalised; externally mediated negotiated settlements played a critical role in their termination; secession was never seriously contemplated by any of the belligerent factions; and, perhaps most importantly, the barriers to settlement imposed by asymmetries of size, type and commitment between the belligerent factions were overcome at an early stage, in Rhodesia by the sheer number of insurgents facing the relatively small resources of the settler state, and in Lebanon by the split in the national army at the beginning of the war. The selection of two such conceptually similar wars thus reduces the chances of succumbing to the problems caused by Licklider’s somewhat reluctant conclusion that civil wars may differ widely in the ways that they end.24 Historically, meanwhile, focusing on two cases from the Cold War era rather than later grants some distance and perspective on the wars under investigation. It has been forcefully argued that there is no reason to suggest that the dynamics of post-Cold War civil wars differ from their predecessors: warlordism, economic motivations and ethnicity, for example, played as great a role in civil war before 1990 as they have since.25 War in the contemporary international system most commonly features state collapse, the growth of militia and guerrilla groups, drug-smuggling, kidnapping, terrorism and massacres. But these were features aplenty too of civil war in Rhodesia and Lebanon, and the lessons of how these wars ended have much to offer the field of contemporary as well as historical civil war termination. Yet most importantly of all, a comparison of the Rhodesian and Lebanese wars demonstrates the deeply political nature of civil war in these two countries. Two of the most common themes of lay and scholarly writing on contemporary civil war have been the apolitical nature of the violence perpetrated by combatants, and the centrality of economic greed to their motivations.26 Certainly, war in Rhodesia and Lebanon witnessed drug-smuggling, extortion and other such economically rather than politically-motivated activities. Certainly, too, the political motivations of the belligerents were not always immediately apparent, and, even when they were, they were as often focused on the political dynamics within fighting factions as those between them. But the core contention of this book is that both wars are best understood as complex, confusing but ultimately political struggles for control of the state. Clausewitz infamously described war as a ‘real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means’.27 As this book aims to show, the evidence from Rhodesia and Lebanon appears to support his case.

1 PEACE NEGOTIATIONS AND STRUCTURES OF SETTLEMENT The obstacles that face the opening and conclusion of peace negotiations in civil wars are not easily overcome, but it is nevertheless true that when civil wars do end through negotiations, they result in a deal whose primary content addresses the future political institutions of the state.1 As such, however limited their importance may be, the terms of the peace proposals put before the warring parties in civil war clearly play a significant role in the achievement of a settlement. Peace settlements almost always claim to map out the post-war political landscape, and in all cases other than that of abject surrender by one side the terms of the settlement must prove acceptable to its signatories. This raises two important questions, though: firstly, what are the terms that will prove acceptable to all parties? And, secondly, just how ‘acceptable’ do they need to be? The first of these questions is widely addressed in the literature on internal war. For Zartman, after the battlefield situation, and the state of intra-group politics, the ‘formula for a way out’ is the third area in which favourable conditions must obtain for peace to emerge. The construction of such a ‘mutually enticing opportunity’ is challenging: Internal conflict cannot be resolved by some wise judgement on an outstanding issue, such as the location of a boundary, the exchange of disarmament quotas, or the terms of a peace treaty. Rather, the outcome must provide for the integration of the insurgency into a new body politic and for mechanisms that allow the conflict to shift from violence back to politics. Generally, this involves creating a new political system in which the parties … feel they have a stake, thus in a very positive sense coopting all parties – government and rebels – in a new creation.2

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The formula often advanced for this new system is that of ‘consociational democracy’, championed in particular by Arend Lijphart.3 By ensuring joint exercise of government control, proportionality, a minority veto, and autonomy for individual groups where the issue at stake is not of common concern, consociationalism, at least theoretically, promises a slice of the political cake to all belligerents. As Zartman says, ‘conflict resolution requires an outcome that has something for everyone. Parties cannot be expected to give up their claims without receiving compensation’.4 Even if a true power-sharing arrangement cannot be agreed upon, at the very least, it is argued, a level playing field must emerge that allows equal and fair access to the political process by formerly excluded groups.5 Importantly, procedural solutions such as elections, referenda and adjudication are considered dangerous to the peacemaking process: all sides will hope or expect that they will emerge victorious from the contest (whether electoral or judicial), and the likelihood of a return by the loser to violence will be high.6 Cautionary noises have been made. Consociational democracy as a concept appears attractive, but the implementation of its specific prescriptions has only rarely produced political stability.7 Paris has outlined forcefully the dangers of liberal institutionalism in the process of peacemaking, even though he fails to provide a realistic alternative.8 And Stedman suggests that parties to settlements may accept them not because they see the settlement as a realistic compromise, but because they hope to use its terms to achieve their political objectives through peaceful means.9 Nevertheless, the dominant theme in the theory of civil war termination is that, where unilateral solutions have proved impossible, peace is only attainable when a deal is constructed that offers something for everyone. In this respect, theories of civil war termination differ from those of social conflict resolution: ‘reconciliation’ matters less than a continued commitment to the terms of the settlement.10 If the overall shape of the settlement demands that all sides feel that they have something to gain from it, further specific components have been proposed. Barbara Walter has argued that for negotiations to be successful, external guarantees are required in the settlement document. Because a negotiated settlement in civil war asks belligerents to do what no compromise settlement does in interstate war, namely disarm and lay themselves at the mercy of their former enemies, it is only when external powers credibly commit to enforce the settlement terms that the security dilemma can be overcome and a peace deal signed.11 Caroline Hartzell, less successfully, claims that the

PEACE NEGOTIATIONS AND STRUCTURES OF SETTLEMENT

11

institutionalisation of security guarantees in the settlement is more important than external guarantors.12 Others have highlighted the importance of providing for the security and economic interests of the belligerent leaderships, as well as their political interests. Charles King points out that guarantees of physical security may have to be provided even to those leaders responsible for gross human rights abuses, while David Keen suggests that guerrilla leaders’ economic interests need to be somewhat accommodated to secure their adherence to a peace deal.13 The needs of foot-soldiers and civilian supporters may also require attention. Mats Berdal’s discussion of disarmament after civil wars demonstrates the dangers of demobilising large numbers of trained soldiers and militiamen without providing incentives for them to refrain from resorting to banditry. Moreover, he argues strongly that specific provisions for demobilisation, reintegration and the creation of new armed forces should be agreed in the course of peace negotiations and not left to be ‘sorted out’ later.14 If progress has been made, however, on how best to structure peace proposals, the evidence of history has a nasty way of intruding. For although many of the provisions highlighted above may indeed promote the cause of peace, many settlements have in fact been achieved despite serious deficiencies in the text.15 The Mozambican peace accord of 1992, for example, was imprecise and woolly over key areas – the cease-fire, demobilisation and the creation of a new national military force, reformation of the police and security forces, and the re-establishment of civilian administration in many areas of the country – yet it proved successful.16 In Cambodia, meanwhile, the Khmer Rouge excluded themselves from what nevertheless proved a reasonably successful peace process. Indeed throughout much of the theoretical literature on civil war termination runs the suggestion, implicit or explicit, that the terms of paper settlements play a less important role in the achievement of peace than the changing political and military conditions of civil war itself. The argument is made conceptually problematic by the difficulty of ranking the causes of peace, but it is of critical importance for policy-makers. For external mediators, the implication of this suggestion is that peace is brought less by the tireless and innovative drafting of foreign impartial mediators, and more by developments internal to the conflict. If external powers are to contribute to peace, they may need to twist arms rather than draft settlements. These are important questions, and it is to the answers provided by civil war in Rhodesia and Lebanon that we turn.

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Rhodesia From UDI to the Smith-Nkomo Negotiations: November 1965 to March 1976 When war broke out in Rhodesia in December 1972, the gulf between the belligerent parties appeared unbridgeable. Established as the selfgoverning crown colony of Southern Rhodesia in 1923, Rhodesia remained free from effective British control, and operated under constitutional arrangements that were in theory colour-blind but which in practice (through the use of property and educational restrictions on the franchise) perpetuated European settler rule. The defining moment in post-war Rhodesian politics occurred in November 1965, when after a series of failed negotiations with the British government, prime minister Ian Smith and his Rhodesian Front government issued their UDI.17 Negotiations between the British and Rhodesian governments to resolve the situation took place in 1966 and 1968 aboard HMS Tiger and HMS Fearless respectively but foundered over British insistence on the principle of ‘NIBMAR’ (No Independence Before Majority African Rule) and Rhodesian resistance to it. Tension was heightened by a rise in black African nationalism. From 1956 a series of nationalist parties were successively formed and banned, until in 1964 ZAPU (Zimbabwe African People’s Union) and its offshoot ZANU went underground and abroad, initiating a low-level insurgency campaign against the Rhodesian regime. The violence was easily contained, though, and the focus of negotiations continued to revolve around the British-Rhodesian axis. A critical shift occurred with the success of the Smith-Home negotiations of 1971. The British accepted an amended version of the 1969 Rhodesian constitution which provided a higher electoral roll for Africans that would give them 16 seats in a house of 72 MPs, a blocking mechanism to prevent the retrogressive amendment of entrenched clauses, a stronger Declaration of Rights than previously, and which promised a commission to investigate racial discrimination. While abandoning the NIBMAR principle, this agreement did theoretically provide for majority rule in the distant future.18 However, a final provision was that the agreement was to depend on a positive response from a commission of acceptability established to see if the majority African population approved of the agreement. With Abel Muzorewa’s newly-founded African National Council (ANC) campaigning against, the negative response that the Pearce Commission duly returned dealt a death blow to the prospect that successful negotiations to resolve the Rhodesian crisis could be

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undertaken without the participation of that country’s black political spectrum. When the guerrilla war erupted with an attack by ZANU’s armed wing ZANLA (Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army) on Altena Farm in December 1972, therefore, the positions taken up by the political factions in Rhodesia were diametrically opposed. On the one hand, at least according to the head of the Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organisation Ken Flower, Ian Smith and the Rhodesian Front had actually been pleased with the African rejection of the Smith-Home agreement, thinking their concessions were unwarranted.19 On the other hand, the political wings of the African guerrilla movements were issuing political programmes seeking not just immediate majority rule, but also revolutionary social change.20 From late 1973 until early 1974 Muzorewa and Smith held negotiations to find an amended version of the Smith-Home agreement that might prove acceptable, but although a deal was reached to increase African representation in Parliament to 22 seats, the proposal was unanimously rejected at the ANC executive meeting in June 1974.21 Even as guerrilla incursions increased, however, prospects for negotiation soon reappeared. South African prime minister Vorster’s ‘Crossroad’ speech of 28 October 1974, and Kaunda’s ‘Voice of Reason’ speech in reply three days later presaged a new regional initiative to bring the warring parties in Rhodesia to the table. Before this could happen, the issue of preconditions had to be overcome. The Rhodesian side demanded a cease-fire before releasing the guerrilla leaders they had detained, while also rejecting guerrilla calls for Smith to declare a commitment to immediate majority rule before the talks.22 After months of wrangling and pressure from neighbouring states, however, a conference finally took place on a train on the Victoria Falls bridge on 25 August 1975.23 It lasted only one day, of which only two and a half hours were spent in face-to-face contacts. While Smith agreed not to make more detentions of nationalist activists (with the exception of ‘terrorists’ on active duty), his refusal to grant an amnesty to the exiled guerrillas for them to participate in the follow-up meetings scheduled to take place inside Rhodesia effectively terminated the Victoria Falls bridge process. On the substantive issue of political reform the conference saw nothing more than a stating of positions: for immediate majority rule on one side, and a straightforward refusal on the other. The onset of war had thus had a twofold effect, not only hardening the stances of the respective parties, but also introducing procedural problems that were to dog efforts at peacemaking over the coming years.24

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Importantly, the failure of the Victoria Falls bridge process did not terminate negotiations. Within three months Joshua Nkomo, the only nationalist leader to return to Rhodesia after the failed conference, had begun preliminary talks with Ian Smith to pave the way for a constitutional conference. Although the Smith-Nkomo negotiations formally ended on 19 March 1976 without agreement, the compromise solutions proposed by each side were important in breaking down the entrenched and unyielding positions that had characterised the most recent attempts at negotiation. The Rhodesian government proposal called for a parliament of up to 120 seats, with 60 European MPs elected on a qualified franchise, 30 African MPs elected on a common roll, and up to a further 30 African MPs elected under a franchise with the same qualification standard as for the European roll.25 The exact number of African MPs elected under this higher roll was to be determined by the proportion of qualified African to qualified European electors. Only when an equal number of Africans possessed the requisite property and/or educational requirements as Europeans would African representation in parliament equal European. Nkomo in return climbed down from the ‘majority rule now’ platform to propose a complex three-tier electoral system that would ensure continued disproportionate European parliamentary representation. In addition, while ZAPU unsurprisingly demanded an end to restrictions on African land purchase outside the Tribal Trust Lands (TTLs), they made no mention of land redistribution, and promised that pensions would be secured.26 The extent to which each side went to meet the other half-way should not be overstated. Ultimately, Nkomo’s demands would have deferred majority rule only twelve months, while the Rhodesian proposals promised only parity, and not for an estimated ten to fifteen years.27 Power-sharing, not one-man one-vote majority rule was the furthest that Smith was prepared to go. Serious divergences appeared too over the interim political system before the new arrangements were to become effective. While Smith offered African involvement in the interim government, he demanded that the white-dominated parliament continue to sit, effectively holding the implementation of any agreement to ransom. When discussion turned to these issues in March 1976 it became clear that agreement would not be possible. The legacy of the talks, however, would be significant: demonstrating that for belligerents in civil war the stakes often are divisible, Smith had accepted the negotiability of UDI, while a section of the nationalist movement had publicly proposed to implement majority rule in a way that attempted to take account of European interests and fears.

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From Kissinger to Vance, Owen and Carter: April 1976 to April 1978 In a little over six months it appeared that a breakthrough had been achieved. Stung by the Angolan crisis of 1975 into fearing the possibility of further Soviet and/or Cuban influence in southern Africa, in April 1976 Henry Kissinger launched the initiative that was to lead Ian Smith publicly to accept majority rule in Rhodesia. The key to his plan was South Africa, which provided the major transit route for sanctions-busting Rhodesian imports and exports, and which was shouldering a significant proportion of the burden of the Rhodesian war effort. Kissinger aimed to persuade South Africa to pressure the Rhodesians, which in June Vorster agreed to do in order to ease US pressure on South Africa over Namibia and her own domestic situation.28 The diplomacy leading up Smith’s acceptance of the Kissinger plan was shrouded in smoke. Publicly, Vorster maintained the South African mantra of non-interference in others’ affairs while privately turning the screw on the Rhodesian supply line. Kissinger travelled to Lusaka and Dar es Salaam to meet Kaunda, Nkomo and Nyerere, but never apprised them exactly of the deal he was pressuring Smith to accept. Even while thrashing out the wording of his acceptance of majority rule, Smith was approving a statement of government policy at the Rhodesian Front annual congress which openly declared: ‘The continued development of Rhodesia depends on a stable government and a political environment which black majority rule cannot sustain’.29 Nevertheless, on 24 September 1976 Ian Smith addressed the nation detailing and accepting the Kissinger plan, now made public for the first time. Under it, Rhodesia agreed to majority rule within two years. A meeting would be held between Rhodesian government officials and African leaders to form an interim government comprising a Council of State in which African and European representation would be equal, and a Council of Ministers in which Africans would have a majority but in which the Ministers of Defence and of Law and Order would be European. On the establishment of the interim government, all fighting would cease and sanctions would be lifted. On the economic front, an international trust fund would be established ‘to provide assurance to Rhodesians about the economic future of the country’. In addition, ‘pension rights, the investment of the individual in his own home and/or farm and the remittances overseas of an individual’s liquid resources within levels yet to be stipulated will be guarantees [sic] by the interim and subsequent governments’.30

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But what retrospectively appears as a significant climbdown by the Rhodesians was dismissed by the Front-Line presidents and the nationalist guerrillas. While pocketing the concession of majority rule, the presidents dismissed the specific proposals as ‘legalising the colonialist and racist structures of power’, and refused to discuss the composition of the transitional government before an all-party conference.31 Indeed, under the Kissinger proposals the transitional arrangements took on an additional importance. Under the conditions discussed by Smith and Nkomo earlier in the year, concerns had been raised that a white-dominated transitional parliament might backtrack on the constitutional terms agreed in the negotiations. But under the new proposals, the terms themselves were to be established by the transitional government. In Stedman’s words, ‘the party that controlled the transition controlled the framing of the constitution, and who controlled framing the constitution controlled independent Zimbabwe’.32 ‘Majority rule’ might be the goal of the African nationalists, and had been established by Britain as a condition for Rhodesian independence, but left many questions open: what sort of state the new Zimbabwe would be (capitalist or socialist, Western- or Communist-oriented); who would control the ‘levers of power’; whether the European population would be able to retain their economic predominance, or whether revolutionary landreform and nationalisation would succeed the establishment of majority rule. These and many other questions were left open by the Kissinger plan. It was thus with the guerrillas, newly-united under the banner of the Patriotic Front, arguing that the Kissinger plan consisted of no more than negotiating issues, and the Rhodesian government insisting on its implementation as a package deal that the parties met at Geneva in October 1976 under the chairmanship of Ivor Richard, the British Ambassador to the UN. The conference proved futile: the first three weeks were stalemated over the exact date of independence, itself part of the only provision of the Kissinger plan accepted by the nationalists. When discussion moved to details of the transitional arrangements, it was clear that there was no hope of agreement. With the conference adjourned in mid-December, Richard undertook a month of shuttle diplomacy to try to establish some consensus. However, he was no more successful away from Geneva than he had been there, and by the end of January 1977 the Kissinger-Geneva process was dead. The easing of South African pressure on Rhodesia had been important in hardening Smith’s position at Geneva against further compromise, but more significant had been the radicalisation of the nationalists’ position. Where, less than a year earlier, Nkomo had argued for parity in government and parliament in the interim period before independence, at Geneva the Patriotic Front rejected

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such a power-sharing arrangement, claiming instead that ‘the people of Zimbabwe demand an interim Constitution whose capacity, content, and direction clearly gives them [i.e. the Patriotic Front] control over the institutions of Government which are strategic in the determination of the certainty of and the pace to independence’.33 By 1977 the failure of previous peacemaking efforts had persuaded British and US officials that the warring parties in Rhodesia would be unable to forge a deal by themselves, but that as mediators they themselves should bring a compromise to the table. The impetus to do so came from the installation both of Jimmy Carter as US president and David Owen as British foreign secretary. Working from March 1977 with his US counterparts, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and UN representative Andrew Young, after months of diplomacy on 1 September 1977 Owen published his (much-leaked) proposals. They called for: a universal franchise, but with 20 of the 100 seats reserved for whites; a Bill of Rights (and protection from confiscation of property without adequate compensation); a transition of not more than six months; government in the transition to be exercised by a British resident commissioner with total legislative and executive powers; the maintenance of law and order in the transition to be entrusted to the Commissioner of Police, to be appointed by the resident commissioner and commanding the existing Rhodesian police force; the formation of a new Zimbabwean national army by the commissioner; free and fair elections to be overseen by the UN; and a sweetener in the form of a Zimbabwe Development Fund.34 Most significant for the proposals’ prospects for success, however, was Owen’s simultaneous explanatory statement that the new national army would be formed at the start of the transition, and that ‘enrolment in this army will be open to all citizens, but … based on the Liberation Forces’.35 Owen himself had been railroaded into this position by Carter’s unilateral acceptance of a demand in early August from Julius Nyerere that the guerrillas should constitute the national army in the transitional period.36 It was this provision above all that stalled the so-called Anglo-American initiative in its tracks, prompting as it did immediate rejection from the Rhodesian government. It was not just the Rhodesians, though, who rejected the proposals: the Patriotic Front saw in the appointment of a British resident commissioner an attempt to safeguard both British interests and those of the settler community, it objected strongly to the use of Rhodesian police to maintain law and order in the transition period, and it opposed UN participation (as did the Rhodesians themselves).37 Designed as a compromise mid-way between the positions of the government and the guerrillas, the Anglo-American initiative of

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1977 only served to alienate all sides. While Ian Smith had not retracted his new-found ‘commitment’ to majority rule, he was not ready to grant the surrender to the Patriotic Front that he believed the proposals represented. In this he was probably justified: no-one in southern Africa deluded himself that exclusive control over the military in the transition meant other than allowing that party the ability to manipulate both elections and the constitution to bring themselves to power. As Mugabe himself commented in May 1977, Britain would like us to believe that if we got a majority of ministerial seats in the [transitional] council, that will constitute power. Of course we reject that. We would rather Smith got all the seats in Parliament and we got all the soldiers!.38 Even when conceded this, the guerrillas’ attitude towards a compromise settlement remained ambivalent at best, standing as it did in the way of revolutionary change in an independent Zimbabwe. Like the Kissinger plan, the Anglo-American initiative died a slow death. With government and guerrillas reluctant to court international disapproval by rejecting the initiative outright, in November the British appointed Lord Carver as resident commissioner designate and General Prem Chand as his assistant, sending them to southern Africa to thrash out details of a cease-fire.39 Their woeful failure, attempting to establish the terms of a cease-fire before agreement on a political solution, was followed in January 1978 by a meeting in Malta between the Anglo-American team and the Patriotic Front. The modicum of success achieved here, though, was washed away by the abortive ‘Malta II’ discussions in Dar es Salaam in April 1978. The Internal Settlement of March 1978 and its Consequences With international initiatives floundering, Ian Smith turned inwards in his search for an acceptable settlement. The idea of reaching an accord with moderate nationalists that conceded majority rule while preserving essential white interests had been desultorily pursued since the death of the Kissinger plan. The incipient failure of the AngloAmerican initiative and its consequence of sidelining Abel Muzorewa and Ndabaningi Sithole, thereby pushing them into the arms of the Rhodesian Front, gave Smith the opportunity to implement this idea. After unsuccessfully trying to drag Nkomo into the orbit of the internal negotiations, Smith opened talks with Muzorewa, Sithole and Chief Chirau in December 1977. His proposal was reasonably straightforward: in return for majority rule, he demanded a series of measures designed to protect white interests and confidence. These

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included a Bill of Rights to protect individual freedoms and property rights; an independent and competent judiciary; an independent Public Services Board; an ‘efficient’ civil service, police, defence force and prison service, all free from political interference (in effect, therefore, guaranteeing continued white domination in the organs of government); the safeguarding of government and private pensions, and permission for them to be fully remittable overseas; and the retention of dual citizenship. All of these were to be alterable only by a parliamentary majority of two-thirds plus one, and with one-third of parliamentary seats reserved for whites, elected on an exclusively white roll.40 Trapped between the nationalist guerrillas over whom they had now lost all influence, and a Rhodesian Front pressing for the entrenchment of domineering white influence at the very heart of the future polity, the black moderates capitulated to most of Smith’s demands. In the Internal Settlement agreement of March 1978, the only serious compromise the Rhodesians accepted was the reduction of white seats in Parliament to 28 out of 100 (though to compensate, the number of votes required to amend the constitution was raised to 78).41 On 21 March 1978 Ian Smith was joined by Muzorewa, Sithole and Chirau in a transitional Executive Council, intended to lead up to majority rule elections at the end of December, but which were eventually held in April 1979. However, the Internal Settlement failed to live up to its authors’ hopes. As should have been readily apparent, Muzorewa’s and Sithole’s claim to be able to deliver a cease-fire proved mere bravado. Despite occasional encouraging noises, neither Britain nor the US were prepared to lift sanctions while the war not only continued but actually increased in intensity. And despite the lifting of the ban on ZANU and ZAPU, and the offer of amnesty to the guerrillas, the Patriotic Front unsurprisingly showed no interest in a settlement that offered them little more than the appearance of power, and that only if they could win an election conducted under the auspices of the white civil and security services and their black political opponents. As the internal negotiations begun, Mugabe attacked the black moderates for acquiescing in the continued existence of the settler army, the effective retention of the whites-only public service and judiciary, the provision for special white seats in Parliament elected purely by whites, the failure to reallocate land, and the maintenance of exploitative rights and privileges in the hands of white farmers and businessmen.42 The possibility of the Rhodesians splitting the Patriotic Front by involving Nkomo in the Internal Settlement, explored in a meeting between Smith and Nkomo in Lusaka in August 1978, was torpedoed by black opposition in Salisbury and by the

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shooting down of an Air Rhodesia Viscount by guerrillas of ZAPU’s armed wing ZIPRA (Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army) on 3 September 1978 and their subsequent killing of ten surviving civilians.43 The enactment of the Internal Settlement and the prospect of Ian Smith stepping down in favour of a black prime minister served only to increase guerrilla opposition to the settlement, threatening as it did to siphon away international opposition to their enemies in Salisbury. By the end of 1978, therefore, peace seemed very distant. In the countryside the guerrilla war waged unabated. In terms of the actual issues, there had been a significant degree of convergence since 1972. However conditional and tactical, Smith’s concession of the concept of majority rule had removed a major obstacle to settlement. From the guerrillas, suggestions were heard that a modified one-man one-vote system might be acceptable, allowing the whites a disproportionate representation in Parliament on condition that this did not permit them to block majority decisions.44 Nevertheless, on the core issue of who would control the levers of power in any postwar state there was little or no consensus. The Rhodesian Front and the black moderates were committed to the evolutionary solution of the Internal Settlement, in which the continued influence of the white population both politically and economically was to be represented by their surprise decision on the name of the new state: Zimbabwe Rhodesia. The guerrilla position was perhaps best summed up by Robert Mugabe in an interview in September 1978: They [the West] want a settlement of a neo-colonialist character capable of preserving their economic interests. But as we are concerned, we want a genuine settlement that will bestow on the people of Zimbabwe, through their authentic representative, the Patriotic Front, full sovereignty. We want to enter the period of independence with our hands unfettered, with clear policies and a clear vision, a direction of ideology that will help us transform our country in accordance with our socialist principles.45 Furthermore, any progress on the substantive issue of the constitution must be weighed against the reverses that persisted over the procedural issue of the transition period to full independence. As 1979 dawned, each side continued to demand control over the security and political apparatus of Rhodesia between cease-fire and election, demands which, if granted, threatened to make any agreement on a constitution worth no more than the paper it was written on. Cledwyn Hughes, dispatched by David Owen to southern Africa in late 1978 to

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assess the prospects for an all-party conference, summed up the situation quite clearly: ‘After the most careful consideration, I cannot advise you that a sufficient basis exists at the present to justify you convening an allparty conference. … I am deeply aware of the suffering caused by the conflict, and the implications of its continuation, but an unsuccessful conference would also have grave consequences’.46 The Lancaster House Conference Within twelve months of Hughes’ report, however, Rhodesia was at peace: an agreement had been signed establishing details of the new constitution and the arrangements for both a cease-fire and the transitional period leading to independence, and a British governor in Salisbury presided over the organisation of elections that would usher in the new state of Zimbabwe. Armed with a mandate from the Commonwealth summit in Lusaka in August 1979, Lord Carrington, foreign secretary in Margaret Thatcher’s new Conservative government, had successfully mediated a three-month conference at Lancaster House in London. Dealing strictly in succession with disputes over the constitution, the transitional period and the ceasefire, Carrington obtained agreement in all three areas. In all cases this represented a compromise for the parties involved.47 Further, in all three areas, the agreement signed at the end of the conference reflected in form and substance the draft proposals presented by the British mediating team at the outset of each stage of the discussions. The compromise tenor of the British constitutional proposals is perhaps best illustrated by a passage from their rough outline issued before the conference, under which the Public Service Commission and the other service commissions would be reformed so that they should: take due account of the need to preserve a high standard of efficiency and … recognise the legitimate claims of the majority of the population to increasing representation in all forms of public office.48 The proposals themselves accepted most of the formalities of the new Zimbabwe Rhodesia constitution, itself the product of the Internal Settlement, but eliminated most of that settlement’s discriminatory provisions.49 In many ways, therefore, the envisaged constitution would establish a British-style parliamentary democracy and so rightfully if belatedly rank amongst the independence constitutions issued by the decolonising Britain of the third quarter of the twentieth century. The white blocking mechanism in Parliament was to be

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removed, and those provisions of the Internal Settlement designed to prevent the executive and legislature from influencing the manpower composition of the judiciary, armed forces, civil service and other government organs were to be eliminated. In their place, the Lancaster House constitution allowed the president to make policy to achieve a ‘suitable’ representation of the various elements of the population in the public service, thereby placating the African intelligentsia whose political support for Muzorewa and the Internal Settlement had been tempered by the fact that the terms of that settlement had done little to advance their own personal claims for advancement.50 At the same time, the British constitutional proposals put forward a series of measures aimed at protecting minority rights and interests. Politically, they offered an undetermined number of seats reserved for whites in a 100-seat lower house of parliament, guaranteed for seven years. During the negotiations the number was set at twenty, ten short of the number of votes required to block constitutional amendments. At an individual and economic level, they offered a comprehensive Bill of Rights guaranteeing individual freedoms, and protection against confiscation of land without suitable compensation and against any refusal to pay the pensions of white officials of the Rhodesian regime. Representing, as they did, nearly a mid-point between the most uncompromising members of the Salisbury and Patriotic Front delegations, Carrington’s proposals drew criticism from both sides. Ian Smith objected vigorously to the removal of the white blocking mechanism and to the prospect of ‘standards’ being compromised by the advancement of black officials in government service.51 But as only one member of the Salisbury delegation under prime minister Muzorewa, he found himself opposed by his three fellow whites, and his arguments were unsupported by his eight black colleagues, who found in Carrington’s proposals almost exactly what they had sought from the Internal Settlement negotiations. On 21 September, therefore, the Salisbury delegation announced their acceptance of the constitutional proposals.52 More fundamental opposition came from the Patriotic Front, for whom the Carrington proposals promised to set unacceptable limitations on the ability of any future government of Zimbabwe to repair the injustices of ninety years of settler colonialism.53 As far as the proposed legislature was concerned, having reluctantly accepted the principle of the twenty white seats, they objected that seven years was too long for this over-representation to be guaranteed, and that there was no provision preventing the whites from forming a government with a minority party against the wishes of the majority of

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the population (a provision included in the Internal Settlement agreement). In terms of the prospective effects of the proposed constitution on Zimbabwean government and society, the Patriotic Front made many objections, including that it made the Declaration of Rights unamendable for ten years without unanimous parliamentary approval; that it allowed the expatriation of capital; that it included pension rights in the unalterable provision of the Declaration of Rights; that it allowed the retention of dual citizenship; that it allowed racially segregated (i.e. private) schools, and much besides. Most importantly, in the words of the Patriotic Front: The basic objective of the struggle in Zimbabwe is the recovery of the land of which the people were dispossessed. … The Government must have the right to acquire any land in the public interest, compensation being in the discretion of the Government.54 None of these objections was new: all had featured previously either in negotiations themselves or in Patriotic Front discourse. Now, however, they did not prove insurmountable. With an eye on the discussions on the transition and the cease-fire, under pressure from Nkomo and from the Front-Line states not to let the land issue jeopardise the conference, and using the cover of an ambiguous US offer to help cover the costs of land redistribution to disguise the fact that they were backing down primarily because of outside pressure, the Patriotic Front accepted the constitutional proposals on 18 October 1979.55 With compromise obtained on the constitutional make-up of independent Zimbabwe, attention now turned to the procedural questions of how to reach that independence. These issues had become increasingly prominent as the war wore on, and their solution proved more fraught than that of the constitution. For where the constitution, at least in theory, established how the new rulers would rule, the transitional and cease-fire arrangements threatened to determine who those rulers would be. In the event, the signed agreement (again tallying very closely with Lord Carrington’s proposals at the outset of the respective stages of the negotiations) left that question remarkably open. The transition proposals provided that government would be exercised in the nine-week transitional period before multi-party elections by a British governor with full legislative and executive power. As soon as he took office, sanctions would be lifted. He would govern through the existing Rhodesian machinery of government, and the Rhodesian security forces and police would be responsible for law and order under his command. The governor’s

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primary task would be to organise free and fair elections observed by Commonwealth representatives, with elections for Common Roll seats held on a party list basis, and with no voter registration but with measures taken to prevent fraudulent voting.56 After one month’s fierce negotiating and posturing, the only concession the Patriotic Front had been able to wring from Carrington was a provision that, while the Rhodesian security forces were to be primarily responsible for law and order in the transitional period, the ‘Patriotic Front’s forces will also be required to comply with the directions of the Governor’.57 The cease-fire arrangements, which were settled a further month after those on the transition, specified that troops of the Salisbury regime would deploy to their main barracks and that the Patriotic Front guerrillas inside Rhodesia would then gather at assembly points, where they would be fed and monitored by soldiers of a small Commonwealth Monitoring Force (CMF).58 The cease-fire would thus have to be self-enforcing, dependent on the mutual restraint of the belligerents. Each of the belligerent parties had much to be dissatisfied with the transition and cease-fire arrangements. The arrival of a British governor meant that Muzorewa would have to resign as prime minister, which he had been only since April. While he fully expected to win the subsequent election, the danger existed that his resignation might appear as weakness in the electorate’s eyes and look like defeat rather than compromise. No leader in independent Africa had yet been known to regain power having once voluntarily surrendered it. Similar effects might result from the cease-fire arrangements, with the subordination of the Zimbabwe Rhodesian security forces to a British governor, a provision that would also place severe limitations on their ability to combat intimidation of voters by guerrillas who stayed out of the assembly points.59 For the Patriotic Front, the agreement they eventually signed meant conceding on the procedural demands they had obdurately maintained since 1976: the continued use of the existing Rhodesian security forces in the interim period offered no protection to the guerrillas, whose security would depend on the ability of the governor and his small staff to control the Rhodesian troops whom they would nominally command. The provision that the guerrillas had to comply with the governor’s directions did accord them some nominal legitimacy, but gave no guarantee that the governor would actually use them. And the fact that both elections and government in the interim period would be conducted without the participation of the political representatives of the Patriotic Front meant that the Patriotic Front would not appear to have equal legitimacy with the existing regime. Further troubling considerations were that the speed with which

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elections were to be held threatened to give insufficient time for the Patriotic Front to move its civilian supporters from refugee camps in neighbouring countries back home to vote, and the absence of voter registration made them wary of the possibility of vote-rigging by the Rhodesian authorities.60 The terms of the cease-fire, too, fell well short of Patriotic Front demands. They had advanced a proposal to divide the country into guerrilla- and government-held zones, that would give them effective administrative control over a large part of Rhodesia.61 Instead, they were faced with assembling their irregulars into 16 assembly points (only one more than originally proposed by Carrington), where they could easily be destroyed if the cease-fire broke down. And as to the proposed Commonwealth Monitoring Force, the Patriotic Front felt that it was too small, that its dominant British representation prevented it from being truly impartial, and that its mandate, to facilitate the cease-fire rather than enforce it, was too benign.62 The Lancaster House Agreement: An Analysis By the time that the heads of the British, Salisbury and Patriotic Front delegations signed the Lancaster House agreement on 21 December 1979, they did so after more than three months of bitter wrangling. Well documented by participants, observers and historians, the conference had seen more than its fair share of brinkmanship, pressure, and threats to walk out.63 Any notion that the Lancaster House conference, because successful, was in any way more amicable or straightforward than the previous efforts to solve the war in Rhodesia would be entirely misleading. Until the very end, observers remained sceptical that an agreement would actually be signed.64 Yet an agreement was signed. Moreover, once signed, it successfully set the basis for peace in Rhodesia and the advent of Zimbabwe. How should the Lancaster House agreement be analysed? Who won and who lost? The superficial answer would be that the overwhelming ZANU victory in the elections of 27-29 February 1980 showed the agreement to be no more than a ‘negotiated surrender’ by the Salisbury regime to the Patriotic Front.65 Certainly, it offered the guerrillas more than any previous peace deal either proposed or accepted by Ian Smith and the Rhodesian Front. Unlike the Internal Settlement, the Lancaster House agreement provided for majority control not only over the legislature but also over the organs of government. Unlike the Kissinger proposals, ultimate control over the military and police during the transition was now to rest with a British governor instead of with white Rhodesian politicians.

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However, such an assessment conflicts with that of Robert Mugabe himself, who confessed to feeling cheated by the agreement he had signed.66 Moreover, Mugabe’s election victory was not preordained. Rather, as Weitzer argues, ‘the Lancaster House talks were successful in part because each delegation – the incumbent regime, ZANU, and ZAPU – was convinced that its party would win the proposed election’.67 Never the most astute of politicians, Muzorewa failed to recognise how far popular support had drained away from him by the end of 1979, fastening instead for evidence of support on the memory of the rapturous welcome he had received from over 100,000 black Rhodesians on his return from exile in July 1977.68 As for the white Rhodesian establishment, self-deception had always helped to obscure the extent of potential electoral support for the guerrillas – in his September 1977 meeting with Kaunda, Smith had not even considered Mugabe when analysing the popular support commanded by the various black leaders.69 Supported by the belief that Carrington had indicated at Lancaster House the British government’s desire for a Muzorewa victory, even the most pessimistic of white politicians and officials failed to foresee the ZANU landslide, predicting at worst a marginal victory for the Patriotic Front in the common-roll elections, against which the twenty white votes in parliament could be deployed.70 Rather than allocating power in postwar Zimbabwe, the Lancaster House agreement left that decision to a traumatised electorate, most of whom had voted for the first time only nine months previously. In this context, therefore, the evenhandedness of the transitional arrangements proposed by Carrington was particularly important: only if they believed that they could win the independence elections would the parties commit to the agreement. For Muzorewa and Sithole a strong electoral showing would reap them the rewards of Lancaster House. For the whites in Rhodesia, political power (whether overt or covert) would terminate whoever won the election. Instead, however, the agreement promised to secure their economic and social interests to a remarkable degree. By reaffirming the role of the white commercial farming sector, and removing the definition of ‘adequate’ compensation for confiscated land from the executive to the judiciary, the agreement promised to blunt the ZANU claim to be ‘revolutionary’, not ‘evolutionary’.71 The long-term offered the possibility of amending the constitution and ‘rectifying’ this problem, a point made by Mugabe himself, but even supporters of the guerrillas expressed their unease at the extent of capitulation to white economic interests at Lancaster House.72 In many ways, therefore, the Lancaster House agreement was not a solution that put to rest the issues over which the war was fought.

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Rather, it was a fudge, ‘an agreement to delay the resolution of important parts of the conflict’.73

Lebanon Civil War: Factions and Platforms Two issues dominated the politics of peace-making in Lebanon: the internal make-up of the Lebanese political system, and the relationship between Lebanon and her neighbours. Out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, ‘Greater Lebanon’ had been proclaimed by the French mandatory authorities on 1 September 1920. Comprising the Mount Lebanon heartland, Beirut and the coastal towns, the fertile Bekaa valley in the east, and the hills of the Jebel Amal in the south, Lebanon possessed great diversity in its geography, economy, and confessional allegiance. The 1932 census revealed a population almost equally divided between Christians and Muslims. The Christian community was dominated by the Maronites, with smaller proportions of Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholics and Armenians. In the Muslim community, Sunnis marginally outnumbered Shiis, while a small Druze community existed mainly in the Shouf mountains. A constitution was introduced during the French mandate, establishing a parliamentary democracy with seats distributed pro rata to the numbers of the religious communities and with wide powers for the president, but effective independence was gained only in 1943. The political system that emerged was a classic example of powersharing, characterised by political theorists as ‘the corporate organisation of societies along communal lines’.74 The National Pact, as the unwritten understanding was known, laid down that the president was to be a Maronite, the prime minister a Sunni, and the speaker of the Chamber of Deputies a Shii. Article 95 of the Constitution was amended to provide that civil service positions were to be distributed so that each community was proportionally represented, and seats in parliament were distributed six to five in favour of the Christian community, reflecting their slight numerical advantage among the wider population. Importantly, too, the Christians renounced the protection of the Western powers, while the Muslims accepted the independence of Lebanon.75 In broad-brush terms, when war erupted in 1975 the Lebanese Christian community sought to defend their privileges under this system, while Muslim groups wanted the existing arrangements amended to give them greater influence and to bring Lebanon closer

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into line with her Arab neighbours, in particular with either the Palestinians or Syria. The detail, however, was much more complex.76 The majority of the Maronite political establishment represented in the Lebanese Front admittedly maintained the principles of the National Pact, seeing ‘the 1943 power-sharing agreement, with its distribution of power between the three estates, as permanent security for its very existence’.77 In particular, the retention of the presidency in Maronite hands served as a beacon signifying the political institutionalisation of Christianity in the midst of a Muslim Arab world. These zu’ama, however, were not the sole voice in Christian politics. Not only did the claims of the other Christian communities intrude intermittently, but the National Pact also came under fire from dynamic young elements in the Maronite camp itself who were to crystallise in the Lebanese Forces under Bashir Gemayel. Demanding an end to the ‘old politics’ of haggling and compromise, the Lebanese Forces sought a decentralised structure for Lebanon to allow the various communities effective self-government within a loose federal structure.78 On the regional level, few Maronite politicians actively desired more than a passing role for either Syria or Israel in Lebanon, but few were above forming alliances with either of the two regional heavyweights for tactical purposes. Almost all, however, were agreed on the undesirability of the armed Palestinian presence in Lebanon. The Muslim spectrum was more divided than the Christian. The Lebanese National Movement (LNM), the assemblage of Muslim groups whose clashes with Christian militiamen triggered the war in 1975, demanded radical change to the political system. Their comprehensive reform proposal announced on 18 August sought the abolition of confessionalism in Lebanon and the total secularisation of the political system. The Sunni establishment allied themselves with the LNM politically, but held back from the idea of a secular society. Instead, they stuck to demands for deconfessionalisation of the political system and for adjustments in the relative powers of the president and prime minister to tilt the balance of power in favour of the Sunni prime minister. At least initially, both groups favoured greater integration of Lebanon into the Arab world, and supported the right of the PLO to launch attacks on Israel from Lebanese territory, even though this was to bring them into direct confrontation with Syria in 1976. After the blunting of the initial LNM assault in 1975-76, however, further splintering occurred. The most significant groups to emerge were the Popular Socialist Party (PSP), Amal and Hizballah. Led by Walid Jumblatt after the assassination of his father and LNM leader Kamal in 1977, the PSP was a principally Druze, supposedly socialist, organisation. Calling for political deconfessionalisation, the

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PSP demanded the addition of a Druze-led Senate as an upper house, and allied itself closely with Syria. Both products of a Shia community which had provided a great many foot-soldiers for the battles of 197576 but which had failed to enunciate effectively its own particular aspirations, Amal and Hizballah each in its own way demanded major recasting of Lebanese politics.79 On internal matters, Amal aligned itself with the PSP in its call to remove the factor of religion from Lebanese politics. Externally, Amal’s principal enemy were the proArafat sections of the PLO, whose control over most of South Lebanon since the early 1970s had oppressed the majority Shia population and whose attacks on Israel had induced savage retaliation on Shia civilians. Born out of opposition to the Israeli invasion of 1982 and inspired by the Iranian revolution, Amal’s greatest competitor for power in the Shia community was Hizballah. Closely allied with Iran, Hizballah demanded the establishment of an Islamic Republic in Lebanon. Peacemaking: 1975 to 1985 With so many groups, aims and objectives, the creation of a generally acceptable peace settlement promised to be all but impossible. This did not inhibit attempts, however, and the history of the Lebanese civil war is as much one of peace plans and politics as of battles and military developments. After the failure of the National Dialogue Committee in late 1975 to resolve the differences between the Maronites, who wanted law and order restored before discussing political reform, and the Muslim politicians who demanded the exact opposite, the first serious effort at peacemaking was launched in February 1976. Developed by President Suleiman Franjieh and Syrian foreign minister Khaddam, the so-called Constitutional Document conceded some of the reforms wanted by the Muslim leaders in return for a Syrian guarantee to curtail PLO activity in Lebanon. The Document upheld the sectarian distribution of the posts of president, prime minister, and speaker of the House of Deputies, but proposed an equal distribution of parliamentary seats between Christians and Muslims, to replace the existing six-to-five ratio. There were further concessions to Muslim interests: the prime minister was to be elected by parliament, not appointed by the president; the sectarian distribution of government jobs was to be abolished, except for senior civil service posts, which were to be divided equally between Christians and Muslims; a supreme council was to be formed to conduct trials of presidents and ministers, and a supreme constitutional court to determine the constitutionality of laws and decrees; and a higher council for planning and development was to be appointed, implicitly

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to remedy the economic backwardness of the primarily Muslim hinterland.80 In essence, therefore, the document was a rebalancing of the National Pact to take account of increased Muslim activism and of a population whose proportion of Muslims had increased significantly since that pact was made. As such, however, it was rejected primarily by the LNM, but also by Bashir Gemayel and his followers. Moreover, the Document was conspicuously silent about Lebanon’s external relations, arousing suspicion on the part of Muslims and Christians alike. Lacking a credible enforcement mechanism, the peace plan was finally shelved when an attempted coup by the commander of the Beirut army garrison on 11 March 1976 turned President Franjieh’s attention from peace efforts to the evolving military situation. With all sides committed to alternatives away from the negotiating table, whether in terms of direct military confrontation or of alliance-building, the following years saw few signs of compromise. The only significant glimmer of hope lay in President Elias Sarkis’ ‘Fourteen Points of Understanding’ launched in March 1980. But, though accepted in principle by Christians and Muslims, the Maronites continued to bear reservations about it, and after a hopeful start the attempt was abandoned. Importantly, though, the Fourteen Points introduced for the first time an explicit mention of Lebanese-Syrian relations, an issue that was to dog attempts at peace-making for the next decade.81 The Israeli invasion of 1982 threw Lebanon’s external relations into greater relief. Prevented from achieving their maximalist objectives, at least in part by the assassination of president-elect Bashir Gemayel, the Israelis nevertheless extracted from his brother and successor Amin a written peace agreement. Signed on 17 May 1983, it provided for an end to the hostilities that had technically existed between Lebanon and Israel since 1948; mutual recognition of independence, sovereignty and inviolability of borders; prohibition on hostile activities and propaganda; opening of missions with diplomatic status; and the abrogation of all treaties whose provisions contradicted those of the agreement.82 The Israelis soon discovered, however, that the signing of an agreement did not guarantee its implementation. Rather, the increased intensity of fighting following 17 May showed the extent of the opposition to it from both Syria and her mainly Muslim allies in Lebanon. The Israeli pullback of August 1983 triggered a fresh attempt at dialogue in Lebanon, with many of the central figures in the war meeting in Geneva on 31 October 1983.83

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The Geneva conference, which broke up after only five days, focused on three interdependent issues: the 17 May agreement, political reform in Lebanon, and ending the war. The participants each submitted a written proposal covering all three issues, thereby serving only to clarify the wide differences in perspective. In the words of Amin Gemayel’s foreign minister Elie Salem: Each point under discussion was a cluster loaded with history, with precarious notions, and with fears. What seemed good to one party seemed dangerous to the other. We must recall that the debate in Geneva was between leaders who had been fighting not with words but with weapons for the past eight years, and each was virtually shouting from his trench.84 Even though representation at the conference was balanced according to the Lebanese confessional formula, Amin Gemayel could not muster a solid Christian front even on the question of reforms. Both his father Pierre and Chamoun were so independent and outspoken as to cause him constant problems. On the agreement with Israel, the president and the Lebanese Front were conservative, preferring overall to retain it, guaranteeing as it did Lebanese sovereignty against an Arabism with whose Syrian and Islamic component they had always been uneasy. Franjieh meanwhile continued the fierce opposition he had maintained towards the Gemayel clan ever since his son Tony had been killed by Bashir Gemayel’s henchmen in 1978. His only concession to the president was to make an uncompromising stand against any reduction in the powers of the Maronite presidency, in opposition to Muslim demands. While the Christian representatives argued broadly in favour of the status quo, the Muslim representatives (especially Berri, Jumblatt and former prime minister Rashid Karami) called for cancellation of the 17 May agreement and a national struggle to liberate South Lebanon. For them, Lebanese identity should be clearly Arab, and Lebanon should have special relations with Syria. They demanded either for the presidency to be opened to all or for its powers to be reduced; that an expanded parliament should elect the prime minister instead of his being appointed by the president; that confessionalism be abolished and all state positions be opened to everyone; and that development projects be undertaken for outlying, predominantly Muslim, districts such as Akkar, the Bekaa, and South Lebanon. The Geneva conference was not entirely futile: some progress was made on the question of internal reforms. Interestingly, even Syrian vice-president Abdel Halim Khaddam, present as an ‘official observer’, pressed for no more than equal representation in parliament, with the presidency, internal security and the command of

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the army remaining in Christian hands. Though supposedly supporting the Muslims, the Syrians indicated that if the Christians turned to Damascus, they would not push Muslim demands too far.85 But the turn to Damascus was more than the Maronites would make, implying as it did the repudiation of the 17 May agreement. And without a consensus on the 17 May agreement, the Muslims and Franjieh would not hold substantive discussions on internal reforms. After five days, therefore, the conference was adjourned with agreement solely on a statement about Lebanon’s identity that meaninglessly cobbled together the principles of Arabism and Lebanonism espoused by the various parties. The fate of the 17 May agreement was decided not at the conference table but on the battlefield. With the army suffering at the hands of Shia and Druze militias in South and West Beirut, the Lebanese Forces rebuffed in the Shouf, the Israelis withdrawn to the south, and the American and European troops of the Multinational Force departed with their tails between their legs, Amin Gemayel turned to Damascus for help. On 5 March 1984 he led the abrogation of the agreement with the Israelis, and with Syrian blessing the Lebanese belligerents convened for another conference in Lausanne one week later, the first conclave of the war to be personally attended by all the major faction leaders. The document discussed at Lausanne, prepared by Elie Salem and Walid Jumblatt’s adviser Marwan Himadeh, attempted a reasonable compromise between the contending positions. It reiterated the definition of Lebanese identity agreed at Geneva, confirmed the abrogation of the 17 May agreement, and provided for the formation of a national unity government to appoint a constituent assembly to prepare a new draft constitution. That constitution would follow a series of guidelines: confessionalism to be abolished in all administrative posts, except for Grade I (which were to be divided equally between Christians and Muslims); the Council of Ministers to be regarded as the country’s highest political-administrative authority; the prime minister to be elected by parliament, and, together with the president, to appoint the government; the speaker to be elected for a two-year term (instead of annually as hitherto, which had tended to undercut the influence of the Shia incumbent); the number of parliamentary seats to be increased to 120, divided equally between the two religions; a higher court for trying ministers would be created, as would a social and economic council and a constitutional court; and administrative decentralisation would ‘be enhanced and rendered more effective’.86 As to ending the war, the militias would be dissolved, the security forces strengthened, refugees returned to their homes, and normalcy restored.

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If Lebanon’s external relations had scuppered the Geneva conference, it was internal reforms that did the same to the Lausanne conference. While some common ground had been found, in particular on a continued commitment to the existence of Lebanon as a democratic parliamentary republic open to the world and built on the foundations of human rights, equity, justice and freedom, almost none of the parties was prepared to accept the compromise, the more so as internal conflicts wracked the shaky alliances.87 Their dreams of dominating a centralised Lebanon dashed by the assassination of Bashir Gemayel and the failure of the Israeli alliance, the Lebanese Forces demanded a federal system, far exceeding the purely administrative devolution envisaged by the conference document. Franjieh railed against the reduction in presidential powers, while the Muslim politicians and militia leaders with whom he normally lined up demanded the abolition of sectarianism not only in the administration but also in the legislature, hoping thereby to relegate the Maronite community to a minority position in Lebanon.88 The adjourning of the conference after only nine days did not end the Lausanne process immediately. Although agreement had not been reached, a government of national unity was formed at the end of April 1984 with Rashid Karami as prime minister and foreign minister. However, progress forming an assembly to draft a new constitution was rocky, and, more importantly, the fighting continued. Amin Gemayel had turned to Damascus instead of Jerusalem, in defiance of significant sections of the Maronite hierarchy, but the Syrians either could or would not effect a political reconciliation between the Lebanese presidency and their Muslim allies. A further mini-summit was held in Bikfayya in March 1985 at which the usual arguments were rehearsed without agreement,89 but in the same month Samir Jaja, Elie Hubeiqa and Karim Pakradouni successfully ousted Amin Gemayel and his lieutenants from the Lebanese Forces, leaving him as president but shearing away the Maronite heartland of Mount Lebanon. Peacemaking: 1985 to 1988 The episode that followed over the ensuing nine months illustrates well the problems facing peacemaking in Lebanon: given time, effort and commitment, outside powers could occasionally extract signed agreements to stop the war, but they continually found their implementation stymied either by groups excluded from the negotiating process, or by rejectionist elements within the signatory parties. With Gemayel’s presidency dead in the water, in the summer of 1985 the Syrians turned away from the deputies with their traditional politics, and chose instead to deal directly with those who

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wielded military power: the leaders of the Lebanese Forces, Amal and PSP militias. In a remarkable volte-face, Hubeiqa abandoned his previous fierce opposition to Syrian involvement in Lebanon, and the stage was set for productive discussions. The agreement signed in Damascus on 28 December 1985, known as the Tripartite agreement, contained many of the seeds of previous proposals, but went beyond them in various significant ways.90 As had been proposed at Lausanne, the Tripartite agreement provided for a reduction in presidential powers and, in the short term, for an equalisation of Muslim and Christian representation in parliament. However, this equalisation was to be only temporary pending the full abolition of the confessional system of politics, which was to be effected according to a strict timetable. A Druze-led Senate was now definitely to be created, with the power to decide on constitutional amendments. And any moves towards political decentralisation, federalisation, confederalisation, cantonisation or developmental decentralisation were dismissed as ‘partitionist’.91 If on internal political reforms the agreement pandered much to the demands of its Shia and Druze signatories, on the dimension of Lebanon’s external relations it heavily endorsed Syrian objectives. Henceforward, Lebanese-Syrian relations were to be ‘coordinated’ by ‘direct and confidential communication’; Syrian military units were to continue to be stationed in Lebanon; security relations between the two states were to be conducted on the basis of ‘coordination and complementarity’; the Lebanese education system was to be reformed according the recommendations of mixed LebaneseSyrian committees; and, the agreement specified, as distinctive relations must be protected against disinformation coming from Lebanon, Lebanese information must attain a high degree of national responsibility and must adhere to the agreed upon principles defining the new orientation of the state.92 The Tripartite agreement did not satisfy everyone. Gemayel in particular resented how he was informed of the draft agreement only in November, and his attempts to amend the proposals were rebuffed. His objections to the proposed abolition of sectarianism, the rejection of decentralisation, and the Syrian content of the accord were shared by the Maronite political establishment (including Suleiman Franjieh), the Maronite monks of Kaslik, and the Maronite bishops. Sunni leaders also disliked the proposals: with no militia of their own they had been frozen out of the talks, and the abolition of confessional quotas opened the prospect of the Shiis assuming leadership of Lebanon’s Muslims. Even Jumblatt and the PSP were lukewarm about the agreement.93 None of these groups, however, had both the will openly to defy Syria by rejecting the agreement and the power to get

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away with it. The group that did was the Lebanese Forces. Dissatisfaction with the agreement and Hubeiqa’s turn to Damascus had long simmered within the Lebanese Forces’ upper echelons, and in mid-January 1986 Samir Jaja launched an internal coup, deposing Hubeiqa and killing the Tripartite agreement. Between 1985 and 1988 diplomatic progress was slow and desultory. Direct communication between Muslim and Christian leaders stopped as Muslim ministers boycotted the cabinet, but rather than react drastically to the Tripartite agreement’s collapse, Syrian president Asad initiated a process of consultation with leading Lebanese figures, so discovering the wide-ranging unease with which the agreement had been viewed in Lebanon. A series of initiatives followed from a variety of sources, all doomed to failure. In FebruaryMarch 1986 a Saudi initiative was launched, strongly backed by the Vatican, on whose behalf papal foreign minister Achille Silvestrini visited Damascus and Lebanon, but it fizzled out through a lack of Syrian interest. Discussions between Elie Salem and Syrian foreign minister Faruq al-Shara in January 1987 led to a paper which called for a reaffirmation of Lebanon’s Arab identity, the gradual abolition of confessionalism through a parliamentary commission, the transfer of many powers from the president to either the prime minister or the cabinet, equalisation of Christian and Muslim votes in parliament, and a series of measures to end the war with Syrian assistance.94 While Christian leaders accepted the draft (though some, especially Jaja, had reservations), Shara returned to the table in February 1987 with a series of modifications demanded by the Lebanese opposition which amounted to a return to the Tripartite agreement, including a firm deadline for the abolition of confessionalism. Discussions continued, but fizzled out towards the end of 1987. In September 1987, with only one year until the potentially destabilising end of Amin Gemayel’s presidential term, the US showed their first interest in Lebanon since 1984 with aims greater than solely to rescue their hostages held there by radical Islamist groups. Basing her proposals around those discussed in the failed Salem-Shara talks, US envoy April Glaspie attempted to reconcile the various groups.95 However, the parties’ positions were too far apart: the Syrians stood by the demands of their Lebanese Muslim allies to deconfessionalise politics in Lebanon, and became increasingly strident towards the Lebanese Forces, whom they accused of assassinating prime minister Rashid Karami in June 1987. The Maronites, meanwhile, rejected all such radical proposals, and by April 1988 the US decided to reduce the scope of their efforts to the immediate problem of finding an

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acceptable successor to Amin Gemayel, whose presidential term would expire on 22 September 1988. The failure to find an acceptable presidential successor and the subsequent formal splitting of the Lebanese government for the first time since hostilities commenced in 1975 ushered in a new and more deadly phase of the civil war. Clashes between Amal and Hizballah had erupted in South Lebanon and in the southern suburbs of Beirut in April 1988, and continued to do so despite an agreement signed in Damascus on 30 January 1989 whereby fighting would cease, Amal would be granted overall responsibility for security in the south, and Hizballah would be permitted to launch operations against Israel and the its proxy, the South Lebanon Army (SLA).96 In February 1989 army forces loyal to Michel Aoun, the Christian general named temporary prime minister by the outgoing Amin Gemayel, clashed with Lebanese Forces troops in the port area of East Beirut; and on 14 March Aoun launched his new ‘War of Liberation’ against the Syrian presence in Lebanon. Despite, or perhaps because of, efforts by the Arab League to mediate the crisis in Lebanon, the rhetoric of the various parties in the twelve months following the government split showed no sign of an imminent political consensus. Rejecting the role for Syria in Lebanon envisaged by the Tripartite agreement and equating the Syrian and Israeli presences in Lebanon, Michel Aoun demanded an immediate Syrian withdrawal, before consideration of political reforms: Raising the issue of reforms always in comparison with the occupation is part of the crime and even the cover of the plot. How can one link reforms and occupation? … Reforms are essential for the Lebanese, but are not linked to the occupation. The occupation will always hamper reforms. Reforms can never take place under occupation, whereas the atmosphere of freedom after the occupation will lead to firm and solid reforms.97 Salim al-Hoss, the Sunni Muslim prime minister, took exactly the opposite view: The problem should be tackled from the centre and spread out: agreement on political reforms, election of a new president, and reunification of government and army, so that, starting from Beirut, the Lebanese state could expand to take the place of withdrawing outsiders.98 Without Syrian military support, Muslim groups knew their bargaining position would be weaker over internal reforms, and were thus anxious

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that Syrian troops should remain at least until a settlement had been agreed. In this they were supported by Syria herself. Publicly Syria claimed to observe the principles enunciated by Khaddam of guaranteeing Lebanese unity, assisting in achieving a national accord, supporting the struggle against the Israeli occupation, and supporting nationalists in Lebanon ‘regardless of their political, social, and geographic affiliations’ as well as those believing in Lebanon’s Arabism.99 Indeed, Damascus continually maintained that Syria was not a party to the fighting in Lebanon, and that any solution to the conflict had to come from the Lebanese themselves. In fact, however, Syria had no intention of permitting an agreement that did not serve its interests. While Aoun refused to discuss internal reforms, and the Hoss government hoped for moderate revision of the National Pact to increase Sunni influence, there were conflicting demands for radical reform from all around. Jaja reiterated the theme that had increasingly predominated in the Lebanese Forces since Bashir Gemayel’s assassination: ‘we oppose the 1943 covenant and support a formula of decentralisation and complete rather than partial federalism’.100 Jumblatt too opposed the continuation of the National Pact, but his solution was different: the cabinet should rule instead of the president, any Syrian withdrawal should only be discussed after a full Israeli withdrawal, Lebanon should be treated as one electoral constituency, and the presidency should be open to all.101 ‘We have not made so many sacrifices’, he said, ‘to be happy with getting a few extra deputies and a transfer of some of the prerogatives of the Maronite president of the Republic to a Sunni prime minister’.102 Berri meanwhile demanded the abolition of confessionalism in politics, conceding only that as a temporary measure Amal might accept a system of rotation between the Maronite, Sunni and Shia communities for the posts of president, prime minister, and speaker of parliament.103 Hizballah went even further, threatening to ‘fight to the death’ to prevent the presidency remaining Maronite, demanding that any future regime actively support its fight against Israel, and rejecting Arab League mediation.104 The Taif Agreement of 1989 Exactly thirteen months after the end of Amin Gemayel’s presidency, however, the Lebanese parliament had approved an accord which was to provide the basis for the end of the civil war. Within a further year, the civil war could realistically be said to be over. This is not to say that Lebanon had seen its last military activity: Palestinian groups opposed to the process held out until the early summer of 1991, and

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an often vicious cycle of guerrilla attacks and Israeli retaliation continued until May 2000 in South Lebanon between Hizballah and the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), the latter mainly fighting through its Christian-led proxies in the SLA. Nevertheless, the middle of October 1990 represented a watershed in the means by which the struggle for power was conducted. Faced with the growing crisis in Lebanon, the Arab League decided on action. At the Casablanca summit from 23 May to 26 May 1989 a tripartite committee of the heads of state of Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Algeria was created expressly to solve the war. In contrast to the Tripartite agreement of 1985, the Casablanca document called for any peace plan to be ratified by the Chamber of Deputies, rather than by the leaders of the militias.105 On 31 July the committee reported. It not only admitted failure, but directly attributed responsibility for this failure to Syrian intransigence: The Syrian position concerning the extension of sovereignty … takes a view contrary to the view … put forward by the committee and which affirms the importance of drawing up a timetable under which the government of Lebanese national accord would extend its power to the whole of Lebanese territory by means of its own forces. According to the Syrian view, … extending Lebanese authority must not be settled in advance within a specific period of time, but … should be left until after the emergence of the government of national accord. … As to the question of the future of Syrian-Lebanese relations, Syria considered that the proposal of the committee is not in agreement with its view as to how these relations should be from the strategic, security, economic, social and other aspects.106 As fighting escalated in August, the UN Security Council met to discuss the situation, but their only decision was to encourage the Arab League to redouble its efforts. By August, therefore, a solution was no nearer. With the death toll in Lebanon since March rising over 1,000, the Arab League committee performed a dramatic about-turn. Meeting on 16 September, the foreign ministers of the states forming the committee proposed a cease-fire plan: they called for the establishment of a purely Lebanese security committee to oversee the cease-fire (even though, as Aoun rightly claimed, it was the Syrians whom he was fighting, not principally the Lebanese Muslims), for an arms embargo, of which Aoun would be the principal victim, and also for the Lebanese deputies to meet abroad to discuss political reforms.

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Neither Syria nor Syrian withdrawal was mentioned.107 Under heavy diplomatic and popular pressure, Aoun accepted the plan. On 30 September 1989, 62 of the surviving 73 parliamentary deputies elected in 1972, half Christian and half Muslim, met in Taif in Saudi Arabia to discuss political reform under the Saudi message that failure was forbidden. Working from a draft paper presented by Arab League mediator Lakhdar Brahimi, by 22 October an agreement had been reached in the form of the ‘national reconciliation agreement’, otherwise known as the Taif agreement.108 It addressed both the internal nature of the Lebanese state and the regional environment. On internal matters one unnamed deputy commented that ‘everyone was dissenting but almost everyone found it acceptable’.109 The provisions on which they agreed were: the presidency was to remain Maronite, but become largely ceremonial; the powers of the Sunni prime minister and Shia speaker were to be increased; the Chamber of Deputies was to be increased from 99 members to 108, with seats allocated equally between Christians and Muslims, rather than six-tofive as before; and the strongest constitutional organ was to be the cabinet, rather than the traditional president-prime minister duumvirate. The Taif agreement also provided for the creation of a supreme court, a constitutional court, and an economic and social council. It also called for the abolition of sectarianism in the future, and for the creation of a committee chaired by the president whose aim was to achieve this. Importantly, no timetable or deadline for the abolition of sectarianism was specified. In addition statements of principle were made regarding the character of Lebanon rejecting any form of dependence or partition, and affirming loyalty towards democracy, the National Pact, and a free market economy with adequate state welfare. Administrative decentralisation was also mentioned, but as Joseph Maila points out: ‘nowhere does the Taif Document show any intention of creating public figures with true decision-making powers. All the envisaged reforms fall within the framework of a transfer of power to the representatives of central power’.110 Internally the Arab League left the deputies to debate among themselves. Externally there was no room for manoeuvre. Instead, the members of the Tripartite Committee presented the deputies with a document already worked out with Damascus. The Syrian military presence was to be legalised, and was to remain in its existing positions for two years after the implementation of the domestic reforms agreed at Taif. Syrian troops were then to be redeployed to the Bekaa, the mountains, and ‘other places’ to be decided between the Syrian and Lebanese governments. The Syrian army was to be thanked for its

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assistance in settling the conflict. And lastly, Syria and Lebanon were to make bilateral treaties establishing ‘privileged relationships in all fields’.111 All efforts by the Christian deputies to negotiate these provisions were rebuffed. The Arab League committee seemed determined to wash its hands of Lebanon. Nowhere in the agreement was the Arab League given a future role to play in Lebanon without Syrian and Lebanese agreement. A communiqué issued on 24 October offered only a moral pledge to help Lebanon regain its sovereignty.112 On paper, the Taif agreement established a relationship between Lebanon and Syria unlike any other between two Middle Eastern states: the Lebanese were obliged not to intervene in Syrian affairs, while Syria’s commitment was based on the right of military and political intervention in other states.113 The Christian deputies, led by Ketaeb leader Georges Saadeh, did not like the proposals regarding the ongoing role in Lebanon that the agreement granted to Syria. Privately, though, outsiders rushed to give reassurance: the Arab League committee promised that they would push Syria to disengage from Beirut more rapidly than the twoyear period allowed on paper.114 Shara gave assurances that Syria would indeed withdraw as soon as the Lebanese settled their internal differences; Syria did not want to remain in Lebanon, ‘because our presence there is a sacrifice on our part’.115 Encouraged partly by such noises, but perhaps more so by the fact that pieces of paper had rarely dictated events on the ground in Lebanon, the Christian deputies assented. More serious obstacles to the agreement’s successful implementation were offered by those not represented in the negotiations. Even as the deputies met at Taif, the Muslim militia leaders convened a summit in Tehran to oppose the proposed deal. Berri thundered that We will not accept any agreement that does not provide for the absolute elimination of political sectarianism according to a specific timetable or … that does not supersede the existing constitution.116 Jumblatt meanwhile criticised the draft agreement, saying that it would only lead to marginal reforms and ‘an ambiguous agreement that would satisfy all parties except the Druz [sic] and the national forces’.117 The various Islamic militias, Hizballah foremost amongst them, also rejected it, and they were echoed in their opposition by their Iranian hosts.118 Significantly, though, even before the agreement was signed the militias hedged their rejection of the Taif agreement with suggestions that they might restrict themselves to non-violent

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opposition.119 By the beginning of December 1989 the Amal political bureau had announced that Berri would participate in the cabinet being established under the agreement, to ‘fulfil his responsibility to fight and abort the partitionist plan and the sectarian formula which the Ta’if agreement has tried to consolidate’.120 Rhetoric aside, what mattered was that Berri was joining the cabinet. Though their objections differed diametrically from those of the Muslim militias, the Lebanese Forces played a similar game, seeing in the agreement an opportunity to secure the election of a new president (and thus rid themselves of the dangerous Aoun) without actually approving the measures envisaged by Taif.121 None of the militias liked the agreement. All were prepared to ‘wait-and-see’. Taif: Opposition, Implementation and Assessment The fiercest opposition to Taif, however, came from Michel Aoun and his massive Maronite civilian following. Only under pressure had Aoun agreed to allow the deputies residing in the enclave under his control to go to Taif in the first place. Having signed the agreement, they dared not return. Aoun first objected to the Syrian domination of Lebanon that the agreement threatened, but by early November he was also objecting to the proposed internal reforms.122 Unlike the militias, however, he refused to wait to see which way the wind was turning. On 4 November Aoun dissolved the chamber of deputies. The speaker of the house, Hussein al-Husseini, ignored the dissolution and convened parliament the next day, resulting in the election of the pro-Syrian René Moawad as president. Moawad appointed Hoss as his prime minister, and received international recognition, including from the US. On 22 November, however, Moawad was assassinated by a bomb. Two days later another pro-Syrian Maronite, Elias Hrawi, was elected as his successor, vowing to eliminate Aoun as a political presence by any means. By the month’s end Syrian forces had massed around the Christian enclave, within striking range of the presidential palace at Baabda where Aoun was based. Only a crowd of tens of thousands of pro-Aoun civilians massing around the palace prevented an assault, by raising the prospect of a diplomatic disaster for Asad. With fighting resuming in the south between Amal and Hizballah after the breakdown of an earlier cease-fire, and also between Palestinian groups and Hizballah on one side and the SLA and IDF on the other, the end of 1989 showed no signs of marking the end of the war. With the Christian enclave surrounded, the tensions between the pro-Taif Lebanese Forces and the pro-Aoun army exploded. Hastened by the Hrawi government’s decision to cut off funds to Aoun in December 1989 and in common with Aoun’s effort earlier

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that year to subject the militias to the authority of the state, fighting erupted between the army and the Lebanese Forces towards the end of January 1990. Bitter fighting continued for just over a month, in which tanks, heavy artillery and rockets were used in the most densely populated parts of the country. Although the Lebanese Forces’ tactics earned them the hatred of much of the population they were supposed to be defending, the militia on balance came out best from the resultant stalemate. Not only had they survived Aoun’s onslaught, they also ultimately controlled two-thirds of the Christian enclave’s territory. Aoun was left only with East Beirut. From March until the end of July 1990, the situation in Lebanon smouldered. As it did so, the militias, both Christian and Muslim, began to soften their objections towards the Taif process. Jaja, in particular, spoke in positive terms of Taif, noting that, ‘as for the substance of the process, it can be modified’.123 Then, on 30 July, the Hrawi government announced the imposition of an economic and diplomatic blockade against Aoun’s territory. With both regional and global attention focused on Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, on 21 August the Chamber of Deputies was convened to approve constitutional reforms based on the Taif agreement, thus apparently beginning the timetable for Syrian withdrawal from areas of Lebanon. And in early September, Syrian troops again took up offensive positions on the edge of the Christian sector. On 13 October Syria launched an air and ground assault, and by day’s end Aoun had sought asylum in the French embassy in Beirut. Aoun’s defeat represented a critical point in the end of the Lebanese civil war. It was quickly followed by a formal agreement between Amal and Hizballah to cease their hostilities. Brokered by Syria and Iran and signed on 5 November 1990, the so-called Second Damascus agreement restated many of the provisions of its predecessor of January 1989. It therefore enshrined Hizballah’s right to carry out offensive operations against Israel and her allies, but circumscribed their freedom of manoeuvre by committing the Party of God to planning its moves in conjunction with other parties through a ‘co-ordination committee’, and to refrain from attacking positions or troops of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).124 Additionally, the new agreement pledged the parties to facilitate and remove the obstacles facing the deployment of the Lebanese army in South Lebanon, to allow the return of refugees displaced by the AmalHizballah fighting, and to recognise the supervisory role of Syrian and Iran in its implementation.125 By the end of 1990, therefore, written agreements had been signed addressing three of the major political issues in Lebanon: the shape of the political system, Syria’s role in Lebanon, and domestic

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resistance to Israel in post-civil war Lebanon. The remaining major issue, that of the place of the PLO and the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, was settled in July 1991 after a brief but sharp bout of fighting. The result was a humiliation for the Palestinians. Wary of signing written agreements with the Palestinians after the Cairo agreement of 1969 and the Melkart protocols of 1973, which had given the PLO such influence in Lebanon, the Lebanese government refused even to commit their 1991 understanding to paper. Under it, the PLO was to be allowed to protect the refugee camps with light weapons, but was to be confined to those camps and to withdraw all heavy weapons from Lebanon. In return, a two-man liaison committee was to be established to discuss the future status of the over 300,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, but with no guarantee that it would satisfy Palestinian demands.126 How should the Taif agreement and the settlements that followed it soon afterwards be viewed? By the end of 1992 a clear pattern was emerging, paramount in which was the effective transformation of Lebanon into a Syrian satellite. Syrian troops remained in Lebanon, despite the expiry of the two-year deadline for withdrawal stipulated at Taif. Legitimation, or at least legalisation, of Syrian influence had been achieved by the signing in May 1991 of the Treaty of Brotherhood, Co-operation and Co-ordination. Gerrymandered elections, boycotted by the Maronite community, had been held in the late summer of 1992, cementing Syrian control over the Lebanese legislature. In parliament and government, the Syrians found allies first and foremost amongst the Sunnis, whose influence was personified in the political success of billionaire prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. The Amal and PSP militias found themselves at odds with the developing situation, but were partially mollified by the inclusion of their leaders in government and their troops in the reconstituted security services. Hizballah settled down to a controlled war against Israel and the SLA in the south, but with their supply line controlled by Syria, were constrained to act within the limits imposed by Syrian strategic imperatives. The formerly predominant Maronite community, however, found itself leaderless and powerless. The Lebanese Forces had lost their ability to exert influence on the government, and the Christians in parliament were effectively no more than Syrian stooges. Meanwhile, the deteriorating economic situation meant that, whatever the political gains and losses, the end of the civil war brought little material benefit beyond that of greater physical security to the average Lebanese of whatever religion or confession. However, to see the above developments as the natural outgrowth of the Taif agreement would be to misunderstand that

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agreement and its circumstances. For to a great extent, those developments resulted not from the text of the agreement, but from how it was implemented and even ignored. In fact, the agreement itself had been a masterful example of the art of obfuscation. That is not to say that the agreements themselves gave no clue as to the future of politics in Lebanon: observers noted at the time the gains made by the Sunnis at Taif.127 The Syrian component of Taif exceeded that of all previous proposals, with the exception of the 1985 Tripartite agreement. Potential losers could also be identified, primarily the Palestinians and those who truly believed in radical change in Lebanon. The militias, whose budgets greatly depended on the paralegal systems of taxation and exploitation of government facilities they had imposed on the territory under their control, were naturally threatened by the prospect of the extension of state sovereignty over the whole of Lebanon. This applied especially to the PSP and the Lebanese Forces.128 But the overall theme of the settlement that ended the Lebanese civil war was that almost everyone could find in it the possibility of achieving significant gains in the future. Christian autonomists could point to the provisions on decentralisation, Muslim radicals to the clauses on deconfessionalisation. Anti-Syrians latched on to the two-year deadline for Syrian withdrawal to the Bekaa. Indeed, in early 1990 one anonymous Lebanese figure could interpret Taif as a sign of Syrian weakness in Lebanon rather than of strength.129 Pro-Syrians, and the Syrians themselves, were comforted by the absence of a date for a final Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon and the failure of the opposition to secure a formal role for either Arab or international powers in guaranteeing the implementation of the clauses on Syrian withdrawal. Later, many would come to regret their co-operation with the Taif process. They should perhaps have appreciated the danger signals earlier than they did. But to understand the role of peace settlements in the ending of civil wars, it is important to note that those signals were to be found not primarily in the text of the Taif agreement, but in the political and military circumstances that surrounded it.

Comparison As 1979 and 1989 opened in Rhodesia and Lebanon respectively, both countries were very much at war, and this situation showed no sign of ending. The military conflict was as intense as ever, and the gaps between the political positions of the belligerents showed no signs of narrowing. Within a year in each case, however, peace settlements had been signed at Lancaster House in London in December 1979 to end

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the Rhodesian civil war, and in Taif in Saudi Arabia in October 1989 to end the Lebanese civil war. In Lebanon it was to take a further twelve months to establish an effective cease-fire, but in both countries the framework for peace had unarguably been established. The two key questions concerning those settlements are: in what ways did their specific provisions contribute towards peace? And how much importance should be attached to the terms of the settlements in understanding the cessation of fighting? The second question is particularly challenging, and can ultimately only be answered after a full consideration of all the various dimensions of civil war in Rhodesia and Lebanon. At first cut, though, there do appear to be important reasons for doubting the contribution of the terms of the Lancaster House and Taif agreements to the end of their respective conflicts. Interestingly, despite the observations of writers on civil war that negotiations are not easily started in such conflicts, in Rhodesia and Lebanon negotiations were a repeated feature of the war dynamic. In Rhodesia, the Lancaster House conference was foreshadowed by the Victoria Falls bridge conference in 1975, the Smith-Nkomo negotiations in 1975-76 and 1978, the Kissinger-Geneva process in 1976, the Anglo-American initiative in 1977-78, and the Internal Settlement negotiations also in 1977-78; in Lebanon, the Taif agreement was preceded by the Constitutional Document thirteen years earlier in 1976, Sarkis’ Fourteen Points in 1980, the 17 May agreement and the Geneva conference both in 1983, the Lausanne conference in 1984, and the Tripartite agreement in 1985. Some involved all parties but failed to produce an agreement, others were limited to certain factions and so doomed at the hands of nonparticipants. All, however, challenge Zartman’s contention that ‘the asymmetry of internal conflict rarely produces the stalemate needed for negotiation’.130 In both countries under analysis, asymmetry was overcome at an early stage. In Lebanon, the disintegration of the state in 1975 and the subsequent involvement of the PLO meant that the war never matched the government-versus-insurgent model so often assumed in writing on civil war. In Rhodesia, the British inclusion of the African test of acceptability in the 1971 Smith-Home agreement forced the Rhodesian Front to deal with African politicians, and the active support given to the guerrillas by the Front-Line states broke the taboo on direct negotiations with the guerrillas. Even as the Patriotic Front believed the balance was turning in their favour and that mediation by the ‘imperialists’ could only disadvantage them, they too continued to negotiate, ‘like the addicted gamblers who know that the local poker game is fixed, but continue to play because it is the only game in town’.131 Another important factor was external pressure. As

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will be argued in Chapter 5, the ability of external actors to force a settlement was circumscribed by the interests of the belligerent parties themselves. But what outsiders were consistently capable of was using their leverage over the belligerents to bring them to the table, most notably in the cases of the Front-Line states and the Patriotic Front, South Africa and the Rhodesian regime, and Syria and the Lebanese Muslim militias. The result was a series of set-piece negotiations – the Victoria Falls bridge conference and the Geneva conference in Rhodesia, the Lausanne conference and Tripartite negotiations in Lebanon – which were held under the auspices of external powers, attended by the belligerents to avoid embarrassing their regional patrons by a refusal to participate, but which failed to produce a successful settlement. The result of these repeated negotiations was that, rather than operating as a phenomenon distinct from and to put an end to civil war, negotiations became an integral part of the civil war dynamic itself. Far from being considered all or nothing struggles over indivisible stakes, the Lebanese and Rhodesian civil wars were punctuated with proposals to readjust rather than to overthrow the internal political balance, by modifying variously the distribution of seats within the legislature, the details of the franchise and electoral system, the powers of the branches of the executive, and the extent of political and economic decentralisation. Naturally, external mediators were more disposed to see opportunities for sharing the spoils than were the belligerents themselves. External initiatives, by Syria in the 1976 Constitutional Document, by David Owen and Cyrus Vance in the 1977 Anglo-American initiative, by Carrington at Lancaster House in 1979, and by Lakhdar Brahimi at Taif in 1989, all attempted to square the circle of indivisibility with reasonable balance. But insiders too could see the possibility of achieving a compromise settlement. Naturally, they tended to propose settlements in their own favour, the Rhodesian Internal Settlement of 1978 and the Tripartite agreement of 1985 being classic examples, but the fact remains that the refusal to consider compromise showed by Smith at Victoria Falls in 1975 and Hizballah in the late 1980s was generally untypical of civil war in Lebanon and Rhodesia. If the Lancaster House and Taif negotiations were but the last in a series, there are reasons to believe that the contents of the agreements reached there contributed to the ending of civil war in Lebanon and Rhodesia only in a strictly limited sense. Three factors illustrate this: the derivative nature of the accords themselves, their socially conservative nature, and the degree to which they left open the direction of the future polity.

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Neither the Lancaster House nor Taif agreements were in any sense original or innovative. On the core issue of parliamentary representation they drew heavily on previous proposals. The principles of equalisation of Christian-Muslim representation in the Lebanese parliament and of majority rule in Rhodesia had long been formally accepted, in both cases in 1976, by the Lebanese Maronite establishment and the Smith government respectively. On other issues the final agreements represented a half-way house between various previous proposals: the Taif provisions on deconfessionalisation and relations with Syria were thus a climbdown from those enshrined in the Tripartite agreement, which laid down a strict timetable for the former and threatened the effective satellisation of Lebanon through the latter, but were at the same time stronger than those pushed by the Christian establishment. In Rhodesia, meanwhile, the arrangements established for the transitional period before elections were more favourable to the guerrillas than those promised by Kissinger in 1976, under which the ministries of Defence and of Law and Order would remain in white hands, but were less favourable to the guerrillas than the ‘national army to be based upon the liberation forces’ formula proposed by the Anglo-American plan of 1977. Even allowing for the egotism of politicians, there is much in the claims both of Elie Salem and David Owen that the successful agreements in Rhodesia and Lebanon respectively owed much to the proposals they had each made two years beforehand.132 Indeed, to claim that the Lancaster House and Taif agreements represented a creative and original response to the problem of dividing the stakes in civil war is to underestimate the importance of the learning process that had taken place in each conflict, and the maturation and socialisation of ideas about a possible settlement. But while Stedman is right to highlight how mediators slowly learn all the players’ positions, their minimum demands, the limits of their leverage, the struggles within groups, and which players simply will not settle, there is little in either settlement to suggest that it was their terms that provided the key difference from previous peace-making efforts.133 The overcoming at Lancaster House and at Taif of the key sticking points that had undermined previous negotiations – in Rhodesia the interim political and military arrangements, and the future role for the white community in the political and economic system, and in Lebanon the powers of the presidency and the role of Syria in Lebanon – was achieved not through innovative drafting, but through the changing preparedness of the belligerent factions to accept longtrailed proposals.

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Not only did the Lancaster House and Taif settlements draw heavily on previous proposals, they were both also conservative in nature, constitutionally, socially and economically. This challenges the notion that the effects of protracted intra-state conflict mean that radical solutions are required to reconstitute the state on a successful basis. In Lebanon and Rhodesia, the more popular demands of the belligerents were largely ignored in the settlement process. How sincere their rhetoric really was is discussed in Chapter 4, but the demands for socialism of the LNM and the Patriotic Front were almost totally ignored in the Taif and Lancaster House settlements. Neither accord did much to address the social and economic inequalities that lay close to the heart of the conflicts. The Patriotic Front’s long-standing demand for land redistribution was left effectively unmet, with the Lancaster House agreement providing that the current land-owners be fully compensated, and with only the vague promise of an American-backed fund to support such land purchases. Similar lip-service was paid to the Lebanese Muslim militias’ demands for deconfessionalisation, a more overtly political than economic demand for sure, but no less popular for being political. Provision for deconfessionalisation was enshrined in the Taif agreement, but, without the timetable laid down in the Tripartite agreement of 1985, its presence was no more than symbolic, as indeed it had been in the National Pact of 1943. As Michael Hudson points out, the Taif agreement may have modified the ‘Rules of the Game’ of Lebanese politics, but it did not alter their basic character.134 Even the contours of the future political systems envisaged at Lancaster House and Taif mirrored closely those of the pre-war period. Certainly, the adjustments to the franchise in Rhodesia and to the powers of the president and prime minister in Lebanon represented a comprehensive readjustment of the power relations between the ethnic and confessional communities in the two countries. But though the personnel might change, the political system in each country was to remain essentially the same. Thus the Taif agreement retained the principles of the 1943 National Pact, while Lancaster House confirmed the new Zimbabwe’s status in the short run at least as a parliamentary democracy with a ceremonial head of state.135 In this light, the case for regarding a creative settlement as the mainspring of peace in either country looks weaker still. But perhaps the most important counter-argument to the notion that it was the terms of the settlement that brought peace in Lebanon and Rhodesia is to be found in the ambiguities inherent in both settlements. For while the bargaining school of conflict resolution may explain actors’ acquiescence in terms of the acceptance

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of the smaller but fixed returns of peace instead of the uncertain payoffs of continued war, neither Taif nor Lancaster House offered any such fixed pay-offs.136 Instead, while it can be argued that both settlements addressed certain minimum needs of the participants, each contained the clear potential for a winner-take-all future under its consociational outward appearance. This is clearest in the case of Rhodesia: the use of the procedural solution of elections offered the opportunity for one side to emerge on top from the settlement process, and actually resulted in ZANU obtaining a large enough majority to be able to institute an effective one-party state within ten years. But though the Taif agreement confirmed the end of Maronite dominance in Lebanon and emphasised that Syria would have a significant role to play in Lebanese politics for some time to come, it too was plagued by uncertainties. The first uncertainty was whether it would prove anything more than a dead letter. At the time of its signing, under outspoken attack from the widely popular Michel Aoun and from the Muslim militias, the so-called ‘Document of National Reconciliation’ could be seen simply as a paper text devised by a group of aged nonrepresentative politicians last elected seventeen years previously, whose legitimacy and power had long since waned. Even as the agreement took on a practical significance over the twelve months following the conference, the extent to which it benefited the Syrians and their Lebanese allies was dictated less by its text than by emerging political realities, in particular Aoun’s defeat, developments in the wider Middle Eastern world, and the miscalculations of the Lebanese Forces. The Taif agreement remained important as a constitutional formula which all sides became prepared to accept, a ‘secure’ banner around which all actors could converge, offering not absolute security but at least a framework which most could find acceptable. But on the critical issues either it was silent, in the case of who would benefit from Syrian patronage and the rewards of corruption and who within each community would wield power, or it was ‘interpreted’ in a way that benefited those in power, most obviously in the case of the gerrymandered 1992 elections and Syria’s refusal to withdraw their troops within the supposed two-year period. As with the Lancaster House agreement, the text of Taif allows us to understand what a Lebanese optimist might have hoped to gain from it, but in both cases the terms of settlement fail to explain why the belligerent parties should have felt optimistic after years of civil war. Despite these arguments, the Lancaster House and Taif agreements were not mere by-products of an obvious drive for peace. Indeed, as already noted, the conclusion of a successful agreement in

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each case seemed highly improbable less than a year before each was made, and many contemporary observers gave neither much chance of succeeding even when they had been signed. Had either Carrington or Brahimi tried to insist on a provision that one of the attending factions could not accept, failure would almost certainly have resulted. Moreover, the settlements did incorporate many of the notions discussed in the introduction to this chapter: provisions were made in each case for the incorporation of irregular troops into the security services; the socially conservative nature of the settlements protected the economic interests of privileged groups; amnesty laws offered security even to those who were to lose out in the post-war political contest; and external actors were to oversee the transition to peace. Yet the protection afforded by these provisions was illusory: the external overseers could attempt to restrain firebrands and moderate the consequences of internal anarchy in the period before the state could be rebuilt, but the British were too lightly armed and the Syrians too self-interested to provide a concrete security guarantee for the belligerent parties. And within five years of the settlement, Samir Jaja and Joshua Nkomo, the former in prison and the latter in exile, might have commented interestingly on the value of amnesty laws. For all that the belligerents were able to agree on a compromise formula for ending the war, such a formula could not provide guarantees for the future. The fact that this did not prevent the successful conclusion of peace settlements in both countries supports the argument that the timing of a peace initiative is likely to be more critical than its content. Or, as Stedman puts it, that a high fear of what will happen if the war continues is more important than a low fear of settlement.137 If we are to find what makes such timing propitious, we must look elsewhere, away from the conference table, and towards the battlefield, the internal politics of the belligerent factions, and the international political situation.

2 THE BATTLEFIELD The role played by military dynamics in explaining negotiated outcomes to civil war is not generally well understood. To a large degree this is due to trends within strategic studies and political science which have tended to view the military dimensions of civil wars with suspicion. For students of strategic studies, ‘guerrilla warfare’ was pigeon-holed as a separate type of warfare, distinct from other forms of war, and its doctrines were first built up and then abandoned during the Vietnam era. Thereafter it has received little attention.1 Moreover, as military doctrine has tended to focus more on how to fight wars rather than on how wars work, and thus on how wars are won or lost, the phenomenon of the compromise solution lies outside of the objectives of the area of study. But if civil war has proved too political for scholars of the military, the reverse is also true that political scientists have tended to view military affairs as beyond their area of core interest or competence. This has been reinforced in the postCold War era by a tendency to view violence in civil wars either as irrational or as a function of economic interests rather than political.2 The synthesis of the military and the political has only sporadically been attempted. Amongst those who have made the attempt to understand the contribution of military affairs to the achievement of a negotiated settlement, the concept of ‘stalemate’ is that most often employed. Only when there is a military deadlock that keeps both parties from achieving their goals, it is argued, will they sit down and negotiate.3 Moreover, such a deadlock must be ‘mutually hurting’ if it is to bring peace, for in reality stalemate in civil war may become stable and supportable. The very length of civil wars shows that governments, militias and guerrillas have found ways of coping with protracted violence. Even more, they may profit from protracted violence. Whether in Colombia, Sierra Leone, Cambodia or Angola, conflict has created war economies, where individual soldiers and guerrillas, as well as rebel movements and governments, exploit the civilian population for their own financial benefit. This is obtained from pillage, protection money, illegal trade (especially in drugs and gems),

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exploitation of labour, land, stolen aid supplies, and increased military budgets.4 According to Keen, the breakdown of the state and the emergence of local warlords represents not a descent into chaos, but rather the introduction of a reconstituted system in which some of the activities previously conducted by the state are appropriated by those warlords. What emerges, as Reginald Maudling described of the situation in Northern Ireland, is an ‘acceptable level of violence’.5 According to the theory of the mutually hurting stalemate, therefore, parties will negotiate not just when their objectives are unachievable, but only when the resulting stalemate becomes unbearable. Components that contribute to the mutually hurting stalemate, meanwhile, include ‘escalation’ and the ‘turning point’. Escalation is a ‘significant change in the nature of the conflict in the direction of increased violence as distinct from a gradual intensification of conflict with no definable change in its nature’.6 The turning point, meanwhile, serves to reinforce belligerents’ awareness of the futility of continued fighting. The sources of turning points can include an inconclusive defeat, a bloody stand-off that suddenly brings costs home, a loss of foreign support or an increase in foreign pressure, or a shift in fortunes that weakens the stronger side or strengthens the weaker. Despite these propositions, though, beyond the basic principle that belligerents in civil war prefer not to make a negotiated compromise when victory on the battlefield is only a stone’s throw away (a hardly surprising conclusion), we actually have very little systematic idea of how military developments impact on the prospects for a successful settlement. In practice, stalemate – even in its mutually hurting guise – has proved a slippery concept. The ‘deadlock that keeps both parties from achieving their goals’ obscures the point that war aims change in the course of war, and that ‘achievement’ is a matter of degree. Even when stalemate hurts, it rarely does so evenly to all sides. The belligerent that is hurting least may therefore hold out hopes for victory. It is unclear, meanwhile, whether it is meant to be the cost of the current escalation that pushes parties to negotiate, or the fear of imminent escalation.7 The concept of the turning point is clearly valuable in the study of civil war termination, but the difficulty is that one party’s setback is another’s success. The mutually hurting stalemate, however, demands that all belligerents suffer setbacks simultaneously. But perhaps most importantly, as Pillar notes, ‘combat does not influence diplomacy directly; it does so through the intervening variables of a belligerent’s perceptions, interpretations, and expectations’. For a stalemate to lead to successful negotiations, both sides must be prevented not only from winning, but from thinking that

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they can win. For this, it is argued, both sides must agree on their relative bargaining power and the likelihood of that bargaining power changing over time.8 Such assessments of relative strengths are notoriously difficult to make for the outside observer, let alone the belligerent. The periodic, diffuse and seasonal nature of fighting in most civil wars makes ‘success’ extremely difficult to assess. In addition, apart from one’s own and the enemy’s present strength, one has to consider latent strength, which may be involved not only financial, economic and manpower factors, but also levels of morale and the frequent uncertainty surrounding the extent and possibility of outside help. In fact, the evidence of war in, for example, the Krajina between 1991 and 1995 or Chechnya in 1999-2000 suggests that battlefield victories tend to be overvalued by the victors, leading to an unrealistic increase in ambition, and to create a siege mentality amongst the losers. There appear to be, therefore, strong prima facie reasons for approaching the concept of the mutually hurting stalemate with caution. But given the dearth of alternative tools with which to analyse the linkages between the military and the political in civil war, and the fact that inability to win a war must play at least some role in the decision to accept a compromise peace, it cannot be dismissed completely. Indeed, as we will see as we investigate the military dimension of civil war in Rhodesia and Lebanon, both stalemate and its inherent weaknesses can act as a useful lens through which to understand the complex and shifting military dynamics of civil war.

Rhodesia Assessments of Stalemate The state of the military balance in Rhodesia in mid to late 1979 was and is a source of disagreement amongst outside analysts, even though most have drawn their conclusions from virtually identical evidence. Stedman refutes notions of stalemate, stating that ‘for the Rhodesians, the situation was worse than a stalemate: they were facing a desperate crisis’.9 He is joined in this by several writers: by Godwin and Hancock, who refer to the ‘desperate situation confronting the Rhodesians in late 1979’; by Ellert and Bhebe; and by Cilliers, who claims that by the end of the war, Ian Smith and his inflexible colleagues had been entirely circumvented in a revolutionary struggle of classic proportions fought on a total frontage. It could proudly be asserted that

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But while no-one suggests that the Rhodesian forces were winning the war in 1979, many claim that the military situation resembled that of parity or stalemate, ‘albeit a stalemate that reflected the enormous gains made by the Patriotic Front … in the previous eighteen months’.11 Though Rhodesia’s resources were ‘stretched dangerously thin’ by the end of 1979, Beckett claims that the war was not lost.12 Other supporters of the stalemate or parity line include Tamarkin, who argues that though hardly victorious the Rhodesian security forces were not on the verge of defeat, and Gann and Henriksen, who see the war for Zimbabwe as ending in a military draw: The guerrillas, though politically victorious – failed to disrupt the armed forces of their enemy … Theirs was the “war of the flea” that tormented a settler government into surrender, without (as yet) stinging it to death.13 Even the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace (CCJP), hardly sympathetic to the Rhodesian Front, acknowledged in 1979 that ‘the armies of Zanu and Zapu cannot hope to achieve the liberation of Zimbabwe by … conventional battlefield victories’.14 Within this tendency, though, the nature of the military parity and the question of stalemate have been interpreted differently. Smiley claims that ‘both sides were near exhaustion’, thereby hinting at a mutually hurting stalemate; Griffith meanwhile suggests that the situation was ‘less a stalemate than an incapacity of the Rhodesian forces to move from the defensive’; while Barber argues for a stalemate, but one which was not mutually hurting: Although by 1979 the principal parties … were weary of the conflict, their anxiety for peace was not such that they were prepared to accept any settlement. The situation … was far from clear cut. … On the military front there was stalemate, with the government forces unable to rid the country of the guerrillas while on their side the guerrillas, for all the disorder they had created, were unable to inflict a final defeat on the government. In their own distinctive ways the forces of the government and the Patriotic Front were still in the field and fully capable of fighting on, but neither had the prospect of quick victory.15 To assess accurately the military situation during the Lancaster House negotiations, and to understand its impact upon their success, one must appreciate the difficulties posed by the seasonal and political

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nature of the fighting in Rhodesia. There were no set-piece battles, rather a series of small-unit actions, ambushes and counter-raids. Guerrilla incursions usually occurred between mid-November and August of each year, avoiding the dry season when the absence of vegetation in the bush deprived the guerrillas of cover.16 In the Tribal Trust Lands where the guerrillas mainly operated, a system of ‘dual power’ emerged: during the daytime government troops moved freely and the quiescent normal peasant existence continued, but after curfew the guerrillas emerged from the bush to operate a parallel network of councils and committees that challenged and in many areas superseded those of the settler state.17 In such a war without demarcated front lines, assessments of the military balance based on territorial possession are much harder. Moreover, military initiatives were often taken with a political rather than a military intention. Thus ZANU sent thousands of guerrillas across the border into Rhodesia to coincide with the Geneva conference in 1976, and ZAPU did likewise during the Lancaster House talks. Their aim in each case was to strengthen their negotiating hand, but the guerrillas themselves, many poorly prepared and all too visible, suffered terrible casualties.18 The Rhodesian forces were equally susceptible to political motivation, for example launching air-raids against ZAPU’s Westland Farm headquarters during Smith’s visit to the US in October 1978 and against Patriotic Front arms dumps in Mozambique to coincide with the Cledwyn Hughes and Stephen Low diplomatic mission two months later.19 One must consider the real military value, rather than the just propaganda value, of such manoeuvres. Finally, when considering the latent power of the opposing forces, one must take account of the limited nature of civil war in Rhodesia. This was most evident on the question of external intervention, most importantly when Mugabe and Nkomo refused a Cuban/Mozambican offer of direct military assistance on Rhodesian soil in June 1979.20 Even internally, though, for all its brutality the war did not approach the savagery of many other civil wars, such as those in Spain or Rwanda. Despite all the civilian casualties, there was no systematic slaughter of the civilian population, black or white. The Zimbabwean guerrillas may have been fighting the Rhodesian state and all it represented, but they usually allowed officials from the Department of Social Welfare to pass unmolested in rural areas. Government detention camps were certainly unpleasant, but prisoners were fed and those who could pay for courses were allowed to study. Massacres of whites did occur, most notably at the Elim mission in June 1978, but white civilian prisoners were generally well treated by the guerrillas.21 And for all the furore from the shooting down of the Air Rhodesia Viscount and subsequent killing of the survivors in

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September 1978, one should note that the main purpose of the flight was to carry holidaymakers from Kariba to Salisbury.22 Civil war in Rhodesia was indeed war, but it was not total war. Zimbabwean Guerrilla Strategy From Zambian independence in 1964, when Zimbabwean guerrillas first infiltrated across the Zambezi, until 1972, the Rhodesian security forces exerted almost total mastery. In contrast to the co-ordinated campaigns of the FLN (National Liberation Front) in Algeria and the Viet Cong in South Vietnam, the guerrilla campaign in Rhodesia began slowly and haphazardly. Guerrilla strategy was based on the erroneous twofold assumption firstly that Britain would intervene if law and order seemed about to collapse, and secondly that all that was needed was to enter Rhodesia with guns to trigger an uncontrollable wave of civil disobedience.23 Instead, the 150 or so guerrillas estimated by Rhodesian intelligence to have infiltrated between 1964 and 1968 were easily picked off, mostly before they had crossed the shelter-free Zambezi escarpment. A lull followed between 1968 and 1972, during which Rhodesian intelligence penetration of the guerrilla organisations remained comprehensive and devastating.24 Certain features of the pre-1972 period were to return to haunt Rhodesian strategy: despite their losses, the insurgents retained the initiative, and the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) were slow to grasp the extent of collaboration between ZANU and their Mozambican allies in FRELIMO (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique). The security forces did not understand the full implications of a ZANU strategy change away from direct military confrontation and towards mobilisation of the peasantry, and prepared themselves, therefore, for the wrong war.25 But few gave the guerrillas much chance of success. From December 1972, all that began to change. Under Chinese instruction, ZANLA guerrillas (who represented the majority of those entering Rhodesia) began to cross the Mozambican border and infiltrated the TTLs to subvert the organs of the Rhodesian state. Even allowing for the hyperbole of propaganda, there is some truth in Martin and Johnson’s claim that until 1978, ‘ZANLA was not on the offensive but was engaged in defending the process of mass The diaries and correspondence of the Elim mobilization’.26 missionaries allow us to trace guerrilla strategy. On entering a region, ZANLA guerrillas would come with a list of names already known to be sympathisers. Aided by mujibas, local unarmed boys who acted as the guerrillas’ eyes and ears, the guerrillas would initially go from homestead to homestead mobilising these pockets of support. Having established a foothold in the community, they would hold pungwes,

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night-time rallies of the villagers at which party slogans and songs were chanted and sung. Food and clothing were extracted from the local population, whether willing or not, and local committees established to service the guerrillas’ needs and as a rudimentary alternative rural power structure to that of the regime. Local headmen and chiefs with strong associations with the regime were killed, and uncooperative storekeepers were either killed or had their stores burned down.27 While ZANLA paid more attention than ZIPRA to subverting the civilian population, both undertook acts of sabotage against the regime, directed principally against the communications network: bridges were blown up, roads mined, and attempts made to disrupt the railway system, especially the link between Rhodesia and South Africa. Unable to maintain constant communication with command centres, lower-level commanders were given wide discretionary powers to select targets and make daily decisions.28 These aggressive actions by the guerrilla forces, representing the ‘strategic offensive’ or second phase of Mao’s three-phase strategy of guerrilla warfare, stepped up significantly from 1977-78, with attacks on isolated white farmsteads and on the security forces themselves.29 A third phase, meanwhile, was under preparation. Though Bhebe and Ranger are right to caution us not to overdo the contrasts in strategy between ZANLA and ZIPRA, in November 1978 the ZIPRA High Command adopted their so-called ‘Turning Point’ strategy to move from guerrilla to mobile warfare.30 Though the plan was forestalled by delays in training the nascent ZIPRA air force and the success of the Lancaster House conference, ZIPRA spent much of 1979 training and equipping a regular military force capable not just of infiltrating and subverting the TTLs, but of defending these gains against the hitherto-successful Rhodesian counter-attacks.31 The evolution of guerrilla strategy was accompanied and aided by successes in recruitment. In the 1960s both ZANU and ZAPU had relied on press-ganging to fill their ranks, targeting in particular poorly-educated Zimbabwean peasant refugees in the Mumbwa region of Zambia and in Lusaka. The policy was only partly successful: extra guerrillas were obtained, but many recruits deserted, providing valuable intelligence gains for the Rhodesian security forces. Moreover, the practice of forced recruitment caused international outcry. The reaction to ZANU’s abduction of hundreds of students from the Roman Catholic Mission of St Albert in 1973, and to a similar operation by ZAPU at the Manama secondary school in January 1977, ensured that these were the last such operations undertaken by the respective forces.32

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However, by 1977 forcible recruiting of peasants was no longer necessary. Four factors ensured that the guerrilla armies benefited from a constant supply of recruits: attachment to the guerrilla cause, the declining rural economy, disruption by the war of rural services, and Rhodesian policies themselves. Adherence to the cause was grounded in peasant and worker grievances, and fanned by guerrilla policies of popular mobilisation employed from the early 1970s onwards and by the psychological impact of the decolonisation of Portugal’s African possessions after the fall of the Caetano regime in 1974.33 This was coupled later in the 1970s with a crisis in the African economy in Rhodesia. Despite sanctions, from 1968 to 1975 overall employment had steadily increased in Rhodesia by 40,000 jobs per annum. The impact of the global post-1974 recession, however, was disastrous on the rural and low-wage economy. Between 1975 and 1978 real GDP decreased by over 12%, and real per capita income by 20%. While the regime’s economic spending was focused on sustaining the industrial, commercial and European agricultural sectors of the economy, and (with some success) at containing inflation for higher income groups, the costs of rent, fuel and light for lower income groups rose by 70% between 1975 and 1979.34 This downturn coincided with an African population explosion. From 750,000 in 1900, the black population rose to 5.5 million in 1970 and to 7.5 million in 1980.35 By 1976, more than 50,000 blacks were leaving school each year with no jobs to go to and no land to till. The only option for many was to leave Rhodesia to join the guerrillas.36 For young men of between 19 and 24 years old (the age group which contributed over 75% of ZANLA manpower) the need to leave was especially pressing, subject as they were to harassment and torture by the security forces as suspected ‘terrorists’ and from 1977 to call-ups by the Rhodesian authorities.37 The flow of those actively seeking to join the guerrilla armies was augmented by a general civilian flight from the war. ZANLA and ZIPRA policies of attacking the institutions of the settler state, including hospitals, cattle dips and some schools, caused an exodus of refugees into Botswana and Mozambique. Officials of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that 10,000 to 14,000 fled to Botswana and 35,000 to Mozambique in 1976 alone. Of the men, the younger ones were sent to school, the older to guerrilla training.38 The benefits to ZANLA and ZIPRA of this flow of recruits were significant, though not uncomplicated. Thousands, it has been claimed, left Rhodesia to fight ‘in the Bishop’s [i.e. Muzorewa’s] army’; they were corralled into the forces of Mugabe or Nkomo.39 This may not have been a problem in 1976, but by 1979 was dangerous. Moreover, in ZANLA’s case the flood of recruits in the late 1970s

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often swamped training facilities and supplies of equipment. Sent into the field with inadequate training, maps and medicines, these new troops showed frequent signs of resentment against their superiors.40 The influx of new recruits in the mid-1970s and the increased rate of guerrilla infiltration into Rhodesia enabled ZANLA and ZIPRA to neutralise the rural civilian population. Martin and Johnson claim that by 1973, ‘the new ZANLA strategy of concentrating on political education was paying dividends. Once the groundwork had been laid among a generally receptive population, the Rhodesians were never able to uproot or contain it’.41 The reality was less rosy. For peasants, the lines between resistance, banditry and social banditry were often blurred. Indeed, along the eastern border, where guerrilla action was strongest in the 1970s, a long sequence of interaction between these three forms of non-state violence had occurred for much of the twentieth century.42 The guerrillas regularly used force to intimidate the peasant population. In the words of Eddison Zvobgo, Minister of Local Government and Housing in the first post-independence government, ‘in every guerrilla war there is a need to demonstrate power. When you do so depends on careful calculation, because too much repulses and you lose support, while too little demonstrates weakness’.43 Such demonstrations of power were not confined to ZANLA. One ZIPRA commissar, interviewed by Brickhill, recalls how local people in the Gokwe area were very cautious about the arrival of ZIPRA troops: ‘I first discovered there were very few political branches for ZAPU. Most were the UANC [i.e. proMuzorewa]. So we started to show them politically until they started to pull up their socks’.44 One of the most common methods was killing traditional leaders and suspected ‘sell-outs’. Those chiefs, headmen and village heads who survived quickly severed their links to the Rhodesian district administration and stopped going to the district commissioner’s office to collect their monthly allowances. Under guerrilla pressure, the rudimentary system of local representation and legitimation established by the settler state collapsed like a pack of cards.45 As discussed in Chapter 3 below, the question of whether guerrilla forces required the active support of the rural population to achieve success is handled differently in the revolutionary and the counter-insurgency perspectives on guerrilla warfare. The former sees such active support as critical if the revolution is to succeed, but even the latter emphasises the importance to guerrillas of neutralising the rural population. T.E. Lawrence, for example, claimed that to be successful, guerrillas ‘must have a friendly population, not actively friendly, but sympathetic to the point of not betraying rebel

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movements to the enemy’.46 The question of the relationship between guerrillas and peasants in Rhodesia is extremely complex, and will be addressed in Chapter 3, but in strictly military terms the Patriotic Front succeeded in achieving Lawrence’s criterion for success. Rhodesian Counter-Insurgency Rhodesian strategy to counter the guerrilla threat was only partly effective. It has entered mythology that while the security forces fought ‘one of the most innovative, tactically flexible and determined counter-insurgency campaigns of modern times’, failures on the political front led to ultimate defeat.47 There is some truth in this, but further investigation is required. The broad theme of Rhodesian strategy, established by 1974 when the north-east of the country was designated Joint Operations Command (JOC) Hurricane, was to create depopulated zones into which to channel insurgents. Once isolated from the local population, the guerrillas could theoretically be easily found by lightly armed and irregular troops, especially the Selous Scouts. Thus would begin ‘vertical envelopment’ operations, whereby these troops would call in the ‘Fireforce’ of helicopter gunships and heli-borne infantry to destroy the guerrilla band. A report from the Directorate of Military Intelligence from 1978 claimed that 68% of guerrilla deaths inside Rhodesia were attributable to the Selous Scouts, most in this manner.48 Less conventional tactics were used too, most infamously the infiltration of poisoned clothing and foodstuffs into the guerrilla supply chain. Yet while Rhodesian forces almost always prevailed in direct encounters with the guerrillas, and the poisoning programme proved effective not only at killing guerrillas but also at breeding mistrust between guerrillas and their commanders and between guerrillas and rural Africans, the Rhodesians employed, according to Maechling’s definition, a counter-guerrilla doctrine rather than a counterinsurgency one.49 Having adopted a strategy that gave priority to killing guerrillas rather than to defending the rural African population, the security forces required success in many areas if they were to turn the raw body-count of dead guerrillas into meaningful military results. The most important of these areas were command and control, the security forces-peasant relationship, the economy, alliances with black paramilitaries, recruitment and external operations against guerrilla forces. Rhodesian effectiveness in each of these areas will be now analysed, in particular as it related to the escalation of civil war in the late 1970s.

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The Rhodesian command and control structure was characterised by an over-emphasis on the military as an instrument of policy, and by deep rivalries between the various agencies of government and even within the military itself. The army, the police and the Department of Internal Affairs all quarrelled amongst themselves. Within the army, disputes arose between John Hickman’s Rhodesian African Rifles (RAR) and territorial forces on the one hand, and Peter Walls’ offensive and special forces on the other. Even within the special forces, the Special Air Service (SAS), the Selous Scouts and the Security Force Auxiliaries (SFA) often pulled in competing directions.50 Not only were the lessons of the British campaign in Malaya misapplied, they were also applied in an often contradictory manner.51 Nowhere was this more evident than in the failure of the security forces to deprive the guerrillas of the ‘loyalty’ (to borrow Hirschman’s term) of the local population.52 Rhodesian attitudes towards the black population were summed up by information minister P.K. van der Byl: I wanted to step up use of the bayonet. That’s the most effective propaganda – the bayonet. … You see, hearts and minds are conditioned very much by what happens militarily.53 Acting on the basis of emergency legislation passed in 1973-74 aimed at penalising ‘terrorist’ activity, Rhodesian security forces employed collective punishment to coerce the rural population. The guerrillas capitalised: If there was an area which was hostile to us, we would encourage our comrades to go into that area, and generally make themselves a nuisance. Then the regime would move in with bulldozers and wipe out villages. After that the regime was through, everyone – man, woman or child – was now our supporters, overnight (Eddison Zvobgo).54 As the war intensified, some effort was directed at winning hearts and minds. 1 Psychological Operations Unit was formed in July 1977, and the Directorate of Psychological Warfare established in early 1979. The former achieved some success in the already subverted Chiota TTL in 1978-79, disrupting the guerrilla command and control structure and discovering large arms caches. But the nearly 200 armed guerrillas that emerged from Chiota TTL after Lancaster House spoke volumes about the failure of Rhodesian ‘psyops’.55 At a tactical level, psyops units were underfunded and undersupplied. At a strategic level, the mobile counter-offensive strategy that the Rhodesian forces employed against the guerrillas, rather than one of area defence, left the rural African population defenceless against small guerrilla bands,

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who exacted a terrible revenge on ‘sell-outs’.56 The ‘Protected Village’ programme that the government lurched into in July 1974 failed to produce meaningful results. Rather than providing concrete benefits to the rural population to contrast with the long-term promises of majority rule, the programme was fatally underfunded and left villagers with miles to walk to their fields, exacerbated traditional problems of malnutrition and disease, and disrupted social structures. Even the minimal aim of physically cutting off the population from the guerrillas was not achieved, with many Protected Villages subverted from the inside.57 The Protected Village programme may have been based on the successful Malayan experience, but in practice it more closely resembled the disastrous efforts made in South Vietnam.58 By 1979 the state of the Rhodesian economy was limiting the state’s counter-insurgency capacity. The economy was not on the point of actual collapse. As Renwick points out, although the economy was hit hard by the post-1974 global recession and the rise in oil prices, sanctions did not prevent exports rising from R$541 million in 1977 to R$702 million in 1979. Since the imposition of sanctions in 1965, commercial agricultural production had nearly doubled in real terms, the amount of tobacco produced remained the same despite a halving of the number of growers, and mineral production had nearly trebled in value. 59 Nevertheless, there is little doubt that the application of sanctions limited the growth in the Rhodesian economy required to combat the guerrilla threat. By the mid-1970s presanctions machinery was wearing out, and spare parts were all but impossible to obtain.60 The unexpected timing of the closure of the Mozambican border in March 1976 trapped one-sixth of Rhodesian rolling stock in Mozambique.61 Most commentators agree that it was war, not sanctions, that had the most profound effects on the economy.62 From 1976 this became increasingly noticeable to white Rhodesians. Sales tax doubled to 10% in April, while taxes were increased on alcohol and tobacco. The 1976-77 budget, announced in July 1976, gave for the first time a clear and official admission on the impact of the war, and the budget deficit, from a low of R$2.4 million in 1975, spiralled to R$262.3 million in 1979.63 To much public outcry from 1976 to 1979 taxes continued to rise, and foreign currency allowances were reduced to emigrating families and for overseas travel. By David Smith’s ‘budget of war’ of 26 July 1979, the war was consuming 37% of the budget.64 Such strictures limited the ability of the state to fight back. The need to sustain the white economy long prevented the politicians from ordering a general mobilisation, as Ian Smith admitted in August 1978.65 Most markedly, it was economic situation that dictated the demobilisation that took place immediately

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after the internal elections, so successful in security terms, of April 1979.66 By the time of Lancaster House, the Rhodesian Permanent Secretary of Finance David Young was preaching the economic necessity of a settlement.67 The alliance with moderate black nationalism constituted in the Internal Settlement failed to turn the war. Politically, it failed to convince the Western powers to relax sanctions, it steadily led to the delegitimation of Muzorewa and Sithole amongst the general population, and it failed to split the Patriotic Front alliance. The military results were little better. Muzorewa’s amnesty to returning guerrillas in March 1979 attracted only a few fighters, undermining the Internal Settlement leaders’ prediction that the guerrilla fighters would return home as soon as the settlement was signed.68 Fractionally more success was achieved by forces loyal to Muzorewa and Sithole inside Rhodesia. After long resisting the idea of ‘arming tribesmen’, in early 1978 the Rhodesian Special Branch launched a pilot scheme in Msana TTL under which local black militias were formed to protect the local population. Initially designed as a non-political force, they quickly became effective private armies of Muzorewa and Sithole. By the end of 1978, 2,000 militiamen were operating in the TTLs surrounding Salisbury. The militias’ success in stabilising their areas of operation led to a massive expansion in what were now known as the Security Force Auxiliaries (SFA), with over 10,000 in the field by April 1979. Not only was their role vital in safeguarding the internal elections, in some areas (such as the Karoi, Chinamore and Seki TTLs) they actually repelled Patriotic Front forces.69 As Ranger points out, their methods were hardly kind – torturing peasants to find guerrilla bases was common – but they succeeded in making 1978 and especially 1979 ‘the hardest years of the war’ for the guerrillas.70 However, SFA effectiveness began to wane after the internal elections. Although it was originally intended to recruit and train peasants, and return them to their home areas, the Rhodesian High Command and Special Branch came to see the SFA expansion as an opportunity to solve urban black unemployment. The introduction of ‘townies’ into an alien environment led to an increase in rape, murder and general crime. Most publicly, after the April 1979 Internal Settlement elections, 2,000 auxiliaries loyal to Sithole, making accusations of electoral fraud after their party’s poor electoral showing, became virtual enemies of the government, leading to a battle with the security forces at Gokwe on 20 June 1979 in which 183 auxiliaries were killed.71 If the politicised auxiliaries caused problems for the regime, black recruitment to the regular army continued successfully. The failure in January 1979 of the first multi-racial call-up, in which only

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250 out of 1,800 black conscripts reported for duty, should not be misinterpreted. The call-up was essentially a political exercise aimed at placating a white public which objected to whites-only conscription continuing now that ‘majority rule’ had been agreed. In reality there was no shortage of volunteers for the RAR, the black-manned regiment of the Rhodesian army.72 Recruited especially from the Karanga people, by 1977 Africans made up almost 80% of the regular army, with a similar proportion in the paramilitary British South Africa Police.73 Though fighting for a supposedly alien regime, African troops proved just as loyal as Europeans. This was even so with African personnel in the Selous Scouts, many of whom were in fact captured former guerrillas.74 Yet this conceals some worrying trends facing the Rhodesian military commanders. The loyalty of the typical African soldier was towards his unit, not to the political system. Indeed, it has been claimed that in the 1980 elections RAR soldiers voted overwhelmingly for Mugabe. In an immensely over-supplied labour market, the army offered financial reward, status, job security, and a range of services to the men and their families. This was mainly why Africans enlisted in the Rhodesian army.75 Moreover, although Africans had a clear numerical majority in the Rhodesian army, until 1979 they represented only a minimal proportion of the officer corps.76 Both this and the crack Rhodesian Light Infantry regiment remained predominantly white, a fact which presented problems by 1979. On the one hand, the small size of the white population, exacerbated by increased emigration and the need to sustain the economy, limited the pool of European manpower available to the security forces. By the end of the war, all European males between 18 and 60 were subject to the draft.77 Against that, both political and military developments in the late 1970s were damaging the morale of these European troops. The advent of ‘majority rule’ under Muzorewa left many white troops less willing to risk their lives, without bringing any compensatory increase in morale amongst their black counterparts. And military stalemate had serious detrimental effects on morale in ‘the best counter-insurgency force in the world’.78 In the words of one intelligence officer, Towards … the last eighteen months, people on the ground … realized that we were containing, not winning. There were lots of factors involved – you’ve got a wife at home, an emotional break-up, and the divorce rate in this country during the war was incredible. Now that also added to the poor morale of the troops. So, the aggression wound down. People who in the past had been all too willing to go into the bush would find a

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tame doctor to get them struck off for a couple of months. They wouldn’t fight.79 The main way for the Rhodesian security forces to regain the initiative was to attack guerrilla bases in neighbouring countries. The FrontLine states hosted three types of guerrilla camps: base camps, transit camps and staging areas. The first, holding thousands and used for housing refugees and training guerrillas, came increasingly under attack as the war progressed.80 Indeed, Lieutenant-General Peter Walls stated clearly in September 1978 that ‘there is no single day of the year when we are not operating beyond our borders’.81 Although Rhodesian forces had regularly operated on Mozambican soil with the connivance of the Portuguese colonial authorities, the first major cross-border raid took place in June 1976 against the Mapai transit camp and Chicualacuala staging post, followed up by a major raid Despite against the Nyadzonia camp two months later.82 contemporary claims that such attacks were in fact ‘massacres’ of civilian refugees, guerrilla sources now acknowledge that many military targets were indeed hit.83 With the camps virtually undefended against aerial assault, these initial attacks and similar operations against ZIPRA targets in Zambia brought direct results, with infiltration rates dropping dramatically for months afterwards.84 Before long, however, both ZANLA and ZIPRA massively improved their camp defences, reducing personnel concentrations, rotating the location of training sites, introducing missile defences, and building camouflaged and concealed emplacements. Further factors also limited the effectiveness of external operations. With only the Selous Scouts of the non-white units permitted to operate off Rhodesian soil, external operations risked disproportionate white casualties. The helicopters required to carry the main assault force were limited in number, with any large-scale external operation effectively denuding internal operational areas of Fireforce. In addition, neighbouring countries themselves presented obstacles. Ironically this applied less to Zambia and Mozambique, whose forces consistently refrained from approaching Rhodesian intruders, than to South Africa, whose reluctance to allow Rhodesia to undermine regional stability led to frequent pressure to stop attacking the FrontLine states.85 This did not prevent such attacks continuing. On the contrary, they escalated in 1978 and 1979, supported in Mozambique by CIO-organised RENAMO (Mozambique National Resistance) rebels. By this time, however, they focused more on economic and logistical targets, including SAS raids into Lusaka in April and June 1979.86

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War in Rhodesia: Escalation and Evaluation Before 1976 the Rhodesian security forces contained the guerrilla threat. Spinola’s promise of independence to the Portuguese colonies on 27 July 1974 and subsequent agreement to transfer power in Mozambique to FRELIMO had provided ZANLA with much improved opportunities for infiltration. But by late 1975 Rhodesian military action combined with political manoeuvring by the Front-Line states to avoid derailing the détente process left only 30 guerrillas in Rhodesia according to Rhodesian sources, with even guerrilla commanders claiming only slightly more.87 With ZANU chairman Herbert Chitepo assassinated (probably by Rhodesian agents) in Lusaka in March, 1975 was described by Mugabe himself as a ‘dismal chapter in our war of liberation’.88 From 1976 onwards, though, the pattern was of steady increase in guerrilla infiltration. Caution must be exercised when discussing numbers – more so even when discussing the Rhodesian security forces than the guerrillas, as the call-up system employed by Salisbury and the need to balance the demands of the economy with those of the military ensured that security force numbers fluctuated wildly during the war – but the numbers of guerrillas accepted as having crossed into Rhodesia are indicative of a general trend of escalation between 1976 and 1979. January 1976 saw incursions renewed, with over 600 guerrillas crossing into Rhodesia.89 As conflict spread beyond the north-eastern border area, eastern Rhodesia was designated JOC Thrasher in February 1976, the south-east was designated JOC Repulse two months later, and in August JOC Tangent was launched in the north-west to counter incursions from Zambia.90 Over 2,000 guerrillas were estimated to have been operating inside Rhodesia by the end of October 1976.91 By 1977 sporadic insurgent activity had surfaced around several central plateau towns; and the extent of guerrilla operations was illustrated by the designation of the Midlands as JOC Grapple in August 1977. At the end of 1977 insurgent numbers had risen to over 5,000.92 They continued to rise thereafter: to 8,000 in mid-1978, by a further thousand by December 1978, and to 11,000 in January 1979. By the internal elections in April 1979, ZANLA could boast of 13,500 guerrillas (9,500 of whom were operating inside Rhodesia) with a further 12,000 recruits undergoing training in Tanzania, Ethiopia and Libya. ZIPRA, meanwhile, had 2,900 men in the field, with 17,000 in reserve and over 5,000 in training.93 The steady increase in guerrilla numbers from 1976 was matched by a similar pattern in military casualties. Official statistics claimed 600 guerrilla deaths in Rhodesia between December 1972 and

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December 1975, with 106 security forces personnel killed during the same period.94 For 1977 alone, these figures increased to 1,774 guerrillas and 197 from the security forces, and they continued to rise thereafter.95 As during most of the war, civilian casualties possibly even surpassed military ones. As the internal elections approached, guerrilla infiltration increased and so did their casualties, from 208 in February 1979, to 423 in March, and to nearly 650 in April.96. Overall, between December 1972 and December 1979 official Rhodesian military statistics estimated that at least 20,350 war-related deaths occurred on Rhodesian soil, of which 468 were white civilians, 1,361 security forces personnel (just under half of them white), 10,450 guerrillas, and 7,790 black civilians.97 For the state of Zimbabwe Rhodesia that Muzorewa inherited in April 1979 the military situation was clearly hardly rosy. Increasingly large rural areas no longer had veterinary services. The rural bus service which transported most of the black population between the towns and the TTLs had virtually collapsed. Medical services had declined, especially after the Elim massacre in June 1978. White farming had dwindled in most of eastern Rhodesia. The administration had lost control of much of the countryside, and in December 1978 in a major public relations coup guerrillas had blown up the main Salisbury oil depot, which burned for four days.98 By the opening of the Lancaster House talks, martial law had been extended over 90% of the country, plans by the Selous Scouts to assassinate Nkomo in Lusaka had collapsed, and secret Rhodesian documents suggested that strategists were already distinguishing between expendable areas and those designated as Vital Assets Ground.99 But perhaps most significantly, the strategies which the security forces had hoped would work against the guerrillas had disappointed their expectations: the amnesty offer which Muzorewa had claimed would bring in the majority of Patriotic Front fighters had proved worthless, raids against guerrilla bases in neighbouring countries were proving less effective than previously, and political expediency demanded the opening up of the Protected Villages once a black government was in power. Moreover, the limited effects of international sanctions meant that even if they were lifted, the Zimbabwe Rhodesia government could not seriously expect a significant military upturn. Only a massive programme of foreign military assistance could do that. It would be wrong, however, to see Muzorewa’s regime as on the verge of defeat. As Robin Renwick, head of the Rhodesian department in the British Foreign Office, noted on his first trip to Salisbury in March 1979,

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ENDING CIVIL WAR despite the increasingly desperate situation in the rural areas, Salisbury still appeared strangely unaffected by the war. The African townships showed better housing and greater prosperity than in most other parts of the continent. … Within the European city, streets lined with flowering trees gave an impression of calm and orderliness.100

Rarely does guerrilla warfare alone defeat the enemy. Even in Vietnam, it was from a massive offensive by North Vietnamese regulars, not the Viet Cong, that the Saigon regime fell.101 The reverses suffered by ZIPRA regulars in 1978 and 1979 showed that the transition from guerrilla to mobile warfare would be far from straightforward in Rhodesia.102 The ‘liberated zones’ in which the guerrillas could operate freely and exert uncontested control over the local population were still few in number. Of a population exceeding six million, Mugabe claimed only between 500,000 and 750,000 were living in such zones in October 1978, and in the second half of 1979 the ZANU magazine only boasted that these areas made up one-third of Zimbabwe.103 In fact, there was still no area that the security forces could not freely enter. The Rhodesians had surrendered no city and no major communication route. The first-hand recollections of Vic and Pat Gifford, a farmer and his wife from Chipinga, testify to the sufferings of rural white communities, but they were able to remain on their farm right on the Mozambican border throughout the war.104 In particular, the ability of the Rhodesian regime to conduct the internal elections in April 1979 had amply demonstrated its continuing power. The Patriotic Front castigated the entire procedure. ‘You must not go to vote’, Mugabe said in his address to the people, ‘…rather die than commit such a crime on your people and country’.105 The turnout of 64.5%, however, demonstrated that talk of ‘liberated zones’ was boastful. The guerrillas only managed to attack eighteen of the 932 polling booths, and were unable to force any to close.106 Objectively, therefore, it can be argued that if there was no stalemate in Rhodesia in 1979 (with its implicit notion of staticness), there was at least some sort of rough parity between the belligerents. Certainly, during 1979, many senior British figures stated openly their belief that a rough military equivalence existed in Rhodesia. In May 1979 David Owen encouraged the Conservative government to act, claiming that ‘there is now a unique opportunity for a successful negotiation. Neither the internal nor external nationalists are in a position to impose their dominance over the other’.107 At the end of December 1979 Carrington, asked whether he believed the cease-fire would hold, replied in the affirmative on the grounds that ‘neither side

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is absolutely certain it can win the war’.108 Soames meanwhile went further, leaning towards the mutually hurting stalemate interpretation: ‘both sides in the war in Rhodesia were weary of it as they had never been before’.109 However, whatever objective criteria we might use to conclude that victory was far from close at hand for the guerrillas or the security forces by 1979, there is no evidence that the principal belligerents themselves saw the situation as one of stalemate. The evidence suggests that the belligerents tended to overestimate their own position. In the early stages, the Rhodesian authorities were convinced they were winning the war. The collapse of Portuguese rule in Mozambique in 1974 should perhaps have acted as a warning, but the rising guerrilla body-count, the assassination of Chitepo, dissension within guerrilla ranks, and the strained relations between the guerrillas and their patrons all encouraged Smith not to settle.110 There was some recognition of the worsening circumstances. The security forces and CIO were much less hopeful of winning the war than were the politicians. By 1977 a government paper on the ‘Military and Police Implications of the Quarterly Threat’ reported that: No successful result can be attained by purely military means. It is now more vital than ever to arrive at an early political settlement before the point of no return beyond which it will be impossible to achieve any viable political or military/political solution.111 But even if the Smith regime came to believe that a negotiated settlement was necessary, they still believed that the military balance would allow them to negotiate from a position of strength. Walls’ and his fellow officers’ acceptance of the need for a political solution was a recognition of the Rhodesian inability to achieve outright victory, not an admission of defeat. As Smith stated in December 1978, ‘I don’t think we can honestly say we are winning now, but I believe that we can hold the position’. And after the war’s end, he claimed firmly that ‘in no stage did we arrive at a situation where we believed we couldn’t carry on … We were still going, at the end’.112 As for the guerrillas, at no stage did they accept that the military situation dictated a compromise settlement. The Patriotic Front reacted angrily to David Owen’s suggestion that the attacks on Tembue and Chimoio in November 1977 might force them to recognise that the Rhodesian regime was not on its back.113 And as Nkomo boasted seven months later, ‘we are winning the war, so why should we talk when we are soon going to get there anyway?’.114 There is no evidence of any fundamental change by the time of Lancaster House. Ten years later Mugabe himself acknowledged that

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‘at the time, we did regret that the conference had come too soon. We did not agree … that the time was then ripe for us to have a political settlement’.115 Not everyone in the Patriotic Front camp was so opposed to a settlement. ZANLA commander Josiah Tongogara was less optimistic that a quick victory was in sight.116 Nkomo, meanwhile, was in the tricky situation of preferring a settlement which would give him political power, but knowing that any settlement which excluded ZANU could not hold. The negotiating table was where Nkomo preferred to be, but the much-vaunted ‘Turning Point’ strategy remained a potential alternative.117 On the Salisbury side, Muzorewa and his delegation were aware of the need for a settlement, but for them the settlement needed only be partial. Indeed, Muzorewa’s first preference was for an agreement not with the Patriotic Front, but rather with the British, leading to the removal of sanctions. We may agree with Renwick and Stedman that this ‘second-class’ solution would very probably not have tipped the balance in favour of Muzorewa’s forces, but he and his delegation believed it would.118 In this context, the case for a mutually hurting stalemate contributing to a successful settlement in Rhodesia appears weaker still. It is argued above that victory was not imminent for either side as the belligerents attended the Lancaster House talks. But not only was the military situation too fluid to be ‘stalemate’, the protagonists themselves saw little in the military balance of power to justify making substantial concessions. In the concluding section of this chapter it will be argued that events on the battlefield did contribute to the end of civil war in Rhodesia, but in a complex, subtle and partial way that the concept of stalemate fails to illuminate.

Lebanon Civil War in the mid-1980s By the time writers on the Lebanese imbroglio get to … 1985, they are exhausted and begin to ignore the details in favour of selected vignettes. The war situation had by then deteriorated to such confusion and banality that it could hardly be called war. It was, instead, violence, bloodletting, kidnapping, skirmishing and conferring.119 The political and military combinations and confrontations following the Israeli withdrawal were bewildering. Palestinians fought Palestinians in the camps; Sunni radicals of the Tawheed fought proSyrian Lebanese and Palestinians in Tripoli; Amal militiamen and

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Muslim army units fought the PLO; pro-Syrian Christians fought each other; the PSP and Amal fought the Sunni Murabitun and then each other; the emerging Iranian-backed Shia radical militia Hizballah fought Israel and the Shiis of Amal; Christians fought Christians for control of the Lebanese Forces; Lebanese Forces troops fought Sunni Nasserites and Palestinians, and then joined with the PLO to fight Amal and the Syrians; and Christian units of the Lebanese army fought pro-Syrian Christians. As for so much of the war, all was not as it seemed. Never more than 30,000 of a population of three million, the militias consistently proved themselves superb defenders of their own but poor invaders of others’ territory.120 The result, Israeli and on occasion Syrian intervention apart, was what Messara describes as ‘regulated violence’. Reciprocal bombardments of headquarters and population centres, co-operation between opposing militias to ensure the repair of water conduits or the distribution of flour (and also to facilitate their drug-trading activities), and the development of a ‘confessional exchange currency’ to deal with Lebanese hostages were all features of this limited war.121 Elites maintained an unwritten ‘honour code of feuding’, whereby their followers could inflict the most horrific cruelty on each other, but they themselves generally refrained from treating each other as targets. With only a few exceptions (such as Tony Franjieh), most of the prominent Lebanese leaders killed during the war died at the hands of Syrian or other external agencies.122 The fighting developed a distinctive rhythm, described as ‘recrudescence progressive en cours de journée, ralentissement la nuit, quasi-pause à l’aube’.123 The war was punctuated by temporary cease-fires, as many as fifty-three by November 1976, while the months of June, July and August were typically characterised as ‘une saison de tractations politiques et de décompression militaire’.124 Where the fighting slowed, the logic of night and day often prevailed, for example in the Yazbek quarter of West Beirut which by day remained open for customers of the vegetable market and by night was closely controlled and patrolled by the militia.125 Even the individual militias, especially the Muslim ones, though usually reported as coherent organisations, were often no more than loose alliances of localised groups linked to their mother-militias by financial and/or quasi-feudal ties.126 To ignore the details of the war after 1985, however, is to forfeit the opportunity of understanding the configurations of power and interest that led to its end in 1990-91. By 1988 three bids for mastery of the Lebanese system had been launched and had failed: by Kamal Jumblatt’s LNM and their PLO allies in 1975-76; by Bashir

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Gemayel and the Lebanese Forces with Israeli support between 1977 and 1982, and continued until ignominious failure in summer 1983 by his brother Amin; and by a resurgent Shia community primarily in the shape of Amal between 1984 and 1987. Meanwhile, despite the failure of the Tripartite agreement, Syria had been manoeuvring herself into position for her own ultimately successful bid. The Syrian strategy since the campaign against the 17 May agreement was to use proxies. This strategy’s advantages to the Syrians were multiple: they could avoid being clearly cast as belligerents; it was low cost; they could exploit local differences between their proxies; and it allowed a broad section of the population to wage a ‘popular war of liberation’ against Israel.127 To date, its greatest success had occurred in February 1987 when 12,000 Syrian troops entered West Beirut to restore order, a move accepted by the local population as preferable to the depredations of the warring Muslim militias. Yet Syrian control over Lebanon was far from complete. Her troops were deployed in the north, the Bekaa and West Beirut, but the south, the southern suburbs of Beirut, and the Christian enclave of East Beirut and Mount Lebanon lay beyond her reach. The proxy strategy had its advantages, but it had pitfalls too. Chief among these was the danger that irreconcilable differences between the internal Lebanese factions would make it impossible to forge a coalition capable of achieving military victory and ensuring stability thereafter. The presidential manoeuvrings in autumn 1988 demonstrated how far Syria still had to go. Rather than further split the already divided Christian camp, Syrian sponsorship of the candidacy first of Suleiman Franjieh and then of Michel Daher served only to effect a reconciliation between army commander Michel Aoun and Lebanese Forces leader Samir Jaja, the pair backed by the Maronite patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir.128 Tensions between the Muslim militias, meanwhile, especially between Amal and Hizballah, denied the Syrians respite even in territories they already occupied. For any assault on the Christian enclave, whose urban and mountainous terrain in any case offered significant advantages for its defenders, the Syrians and their allies could realistically only raise 40,000 troops against the 25,000 of Aoun and Jaja combined.129 War in Lebanon: Autumn 1988 to Summer 1990 In the period before Amin Gemayel’s retirement as president on 22 September 1988, therefore, there was nothing in the military situation that indicated that a decisive victory was imminent. Yet the year leading up to the Taif agreement in October 1989 and the further year before a cease-fire was achieved resembled neither plateau – ‘a flat,

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unpleasant terrain stretching into the future, providing no later possibilities for decisive escalation or for graceful escape’ – nor precipice.130 Instead, all sides continued to jockey for position both within their own communities and within the wider Lebanese political spectrum. Of the various binary conflicts that proliferated in the latter stages of the Lebanese civil war, the end of 1988 marked the end of two. In early October, the Lebanese Forces moved swiftly and bloodlessly against Amin Gemayel’s personal militia, whose Upper Metn fiefdom occupied one-fifth of the Christian enclave. With Aoun’s acceptance of the move bought with Jaja’s assent to Aoun’s appointment as prime minister, half of Amin Gemayel’s estimated 500 to 1,000 militiamen joined the Lebanese Forces, while the rest went home.131 In December, meanwhile, a truce brokered by Popular Nasserist Organisation leader Mustafa Saad officially concluded over three years of fighting between Amal and the PLO. Though clashes between the two had erupted as early as 1982, the so-called Camps War began in May 1985, with Amal militiamen laying siege to the Palestinian refugee camps in an ultimately fruitless attempt to prevent the return of the PLO to Beirut and South Lebanon after their expulsion by the Israelis in 1982.132 The end of the Camps War, though, gave no respite to their beleaguered civilians. Effective control of the camps was divided. Arafat’s Fatah branch of the PLO controlled those in the south of Lebanon, principally around Tyre and Sidon. Those in the north were controlled by the pro-Syrian Abu Musa, whose rebellion against Arafat had begun in May 1983 in protest at his poor military leadership during the 1982 Israeli invasion.133 The flashpoint occurred in Beirut, where as the pressure from Amal eased in May 1988 Palestinian guerrillas of each faction who had stood together against the Shia onslaught turned their guns back on each other. After initial Fatah successes, the balance swung in favour of Abu Musa, whose troops captured the Shatila camp in late June and Burj al-Barajneh ten days later. Allowed to keep their light weapons only, pro-Arafat fighters were escorted by Lebanese internal security forces and Syrian troops to Ain-al-Helwe camp outside Sidon.134 Over the following two years Abu Musa’s pro-Syrian Palestinians kept an iron grip on the camps in Beirut and the north, while Arafat loyalists struggled at times to maintain their hold in the south, most notably in September 1990 when 78 were killed and 240 wounded as Fatah troops crushed Abu Nidal’s Fatah Revolutionary Council in Ain-al-Helwe.135 Yet if the end of 1988 saw the end of the Camps War and of the cold war between Amin Gemayel and the Lebanese Forces, this presaged an escalation in fighting in 1989 and 1990, not a lessening of

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it. Three conflicts dominated 1989 and the first half of 1990: Aoun’s ‘War of Liberation’ against the Syrian army and its Lebanese allies, the Shia civil war between Amal and Hizballah, and the Christian civil war between Aoun’s army and the Lebanese Forces. Each produced no clear-cut victor, and so might be interpreted as a series of ministalemates. But rather than provide a more general Lebanon-wide settlement-inducing stalemate, these conflicts illustrate the almost infinite twists and turns taken by the belligerents in Lebanon’s shifting alliance system to avoid the logical consequences of a weak military position. The War of Liberation In March 1989, General Michel Aoun launched his War of Liberation, as an attempt to achieve diplomatic recognition of Syria’s involvement in Lebanon as a belligerent rather than a neutral mediator. For the analyst, the War of Liberation probably represents the apotheosis of the bataille à la libanaise: a battle between adversaries some of whom denied they were fighting when they were, and some of whom claimed they were fighting when they were not. It was a battle in which the ground troops of neither side made any serious effort to advance, where civilian casualties outnumbered military ones by a factor of ten, with a blockade as much psychological as real, with cease-fires that broke down within the day, and with an agreement for the deployment of an Arab League peacekeeping force that never arrived. For the civilians of both East and West Beirut, the War of Liberation was painfully real. By the middle of July 1989 police figures put the total Lebanese casualty rate since March at 418 dead and 1,673 wounded, the vast majority civilian.136 This increased substantially with the subsequent military involvement of the Lebanese Forces, whose Iraqisupplied rocket launchers sprayed fire indiscriminately over the civilian population of West Beirut.137 Militarily, however, the War of Liberation was no more than glorified shadow-boxing. Of the Muslim militias (whom Syria claimed were the major anti-Aoun protagonists) only the PSP and the Lebanese Communist Party were consistently active. Amal and Hizballah offered only moral support, while some have claimed that Muslim officers serving in the brigades loyal to the Hoss government in West Beirut passed information about Syrian battery placements to their counterparts in Aoun’s army.138 Engagements consisted mainly of artillery duels. On the main seven-mile Suq al-Gharb front to the south-east of Beirut, Aoun’s forces lost only four soldiers killed in the first six weeks of the War of Liberation.139 Aounists made much propaganda of their repulse of a joint Syrian-Druze-Palestinian attack

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at Suq al-Gharb on 13 August 1989, but in reality it was no more than a forceful probe, with less than seventy-five attackers killed.140 But if the War of Liberation was a shadow-boxing match, it was one that its initiator lost on points. Having launched the campaign in March 1989, in mid-September Aoun was brought to accept an Arab League ceasefire plan that provided only for an intra-Lebanese security committee to monitor its effectiveness and which ignored Syria.141 Moreover, the cease-fire terms spelled a reverse for Aoun’s blockade strategy. The spark for the entire campaign had been Aoun’s blockade of the ‘illegal’ ports controlled by the Muslim militias. Its end was marked by his agreeing to lift it and accept the continuation of the maritime counterembargo that Syria and the Hoss government had placed on further arms supplies. As discussed below, though, the greatest ramifications of the War of Liberation were not military. Aoun’s losses in matériel were easily compensated by Iraqi resupply.142 It was the political consequences that were ultimately to prove fatal to the Aounist project. Civil War within the Shia Community While the Christian enclave preoccupied itself with battles both external and internal, a less publicised but no less bloody campaign was fought between Amal and Hizballah, principally in the southern suburbs of Beirut and in the areas of South Lebanon bordering the Israeli ‘security zone’. Between 1987 and 1990, at a cost of over 1,200 dead and 4,000 wounded, the two main Shia militias fought a war punctuated by cease-fires, flare-ups and both Syrian and Iranian attempts to ease the tensions. Serious fighting began in April 1988, as Amal militiamen turned from their siege of the Palestinian refugee camps to attempting, successfully in part, to dislodge Hizballah from South Lebanon. In May, though, Hizballah counter-attacked in South Beirut. Amal leaders found their militia infiltrated by Hizballah sympathisers, and were left with only a tenuous foothold in only one district, Jiyah, of the southern suburbs.143 To protect its ally, on 17 May 1989 Syrian troops moved into South Beirut. Three major campaigns ensued over the following eighteen months. In October 1989 Berri responded to the assassination on 22 September by Hizballah of the Amal chief in South Lebanon, Dawud Dawud, with an assault on Hizballah positions north of Nabatiyeh.144 That the fighting was intra-communal did not lessen its intensity. Police reported bodies brought to hospital in Sidon with heads chopped off by axes or throats cut with knives.145 Despite Hizballah counter-attacks, by the time of the Syro-Iranian sponsored Damascus

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agreement of 30 January 1990, Amal had expelled all but ten Hizballah fighters from the hilly Iqlim al-Tuffah region north of Nabatiyeh.146 The loss of South Lebanon was a serious strategic blow for Hizballah. Though they remained strong in South Beirut and the Bekaa, it was possession of positions in the south that let them launch attacks against the Israeli occupation and provide their Iranian sponsors with a base for the exercise of influence in the Arab-Israeli conflict.147 The problem was exacerbated in November 1989 as the Syrian deployment along the Green Line in Beirut to threaten Aoun at Baabda had the effect of displacing Hizballah militiamen who had occupied the area.148 The following month Hizballah launched a fresh assault in South Lebanon, capturing five villages, repelling Amal counter-attacks against Kfar-Fila and Ain-Qana, and leaving Amal in possession of only one village in the Iqlim al-Tuffah.149 This time, however, it was not Syria that came to Amal’s rescue but Fatah guerrillas of the PLO. Opposed to Hizballah encroachment on the areas around the refugee camps still controlled by Arafat loyalists and fearful that Hizballah might stir up anti-Arafat sentiment in the camps, Fatah abandoned its previous enmity towards Amal and deployed eastwards from the camps. Outnumbered by the Palestinians, Hizballah militiamen were forced to back off.150 A further Hizballah offensive in July 1990 was similarly inconclusive. Though capturing the village of Jarju, Hizballah forces again ran into PLO opposition, and after a month of fighting which killed over two hundred they halted their campaign.151 Civil War within the Christian Community During 1990 the civil war between the Shia militias was mirrored by war within the Christian community between Aoun’s army and the Lebanese Forces. The precedent had been set on Valentine’s Day in February 1989, when in a move that preceded his actions against the Muslim militias, Aoun had attempted to dislodge the militia from the 5th Dock of Beirut port. After three days of heavy fighting that left over forty dead, Jaja withdrew from the port and from a few checkpoints in East Beirut.152 With Aoun launching his War of Liberation shortly afterwards, attention shifted to wider concerns, but at the end of January 1990 clashes broke out in earnest when an army unit raided a Lebanese Forces-occupied school. Theoretically, Aoun had 16,000 troops available, but half existed only on paper or were assigned to logistical functions. He was further weakened by the fact that when the intra-Christian conflict began most of his regular units were stationed on the front lines opposite the Syrians rather than on the internal dividing lines within the Christian enclave. The Lebanese

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Forces were weaker numerically: estimates vary, but a figure of between 3,000 and 6,000 seems realistic.153 However, they were well supplied with tanks and armoured personnel carriers, and had plenty of heavy artillery and Katyusha rocket batteries. In terrain that favoured the defensive, Aoun’s bid to eliminate his militia rival ended in humiliation. The army scored early successes, driving the Lebanese Forces from all but the Ashrafieh district of East Beirut and capturing the port of Dbaye.154 The militia fought back hard, though, retaining control over the northern two-thirds of the Christian enclave (including Jounieh and Byblos). Three weeks of heavy fighting, which caused more casualties than the six months of the War of Liberation, were followed by the all-too-familiar pattern of attritional stalemate punctuated by cease-fires observed more in their breach than in their observance.155 The Syrians and their allies, meanwhile, helped to maintain the balance between the combatants by allowing supplies to reach Aoun and permitting Lebanese Forces militiamen to retreat through the southern suburbs of Beirut and then move northwards to rejoin their colleagues.156 Syria and Aoun Militarily, these three conflicts – the War of Liberation, the AmalHizballah war, and the intra-Christian war of 1990 – were relatively insignificant to the achievement of peace in Lebanon. They did not advance the prospect of decisive military victory: the inconclusive nature of the fighting left all sides alive to fight another day. But nor did they contribute to the signing of the compromise settlement at Taif. Of the five belligerent parties in conflicts discussed above, none was directly represented at Taif, and only two – Syria and the Lebanese Forces – played an indirect role in the negotiations Politically, however, the effects of these three conflicts were decisive. In September 1988 Syria dared not attack the Christian enclave. Even after Taif and the election of Elias Hrawi in November 1989, with Syrian troops massing around the enclave, the Syrians and their Lebanese allies had recoiled in the face of massive popular demonstrations around the presidential palace at Baabda, Jaja’s public declaration that he would commit his militiamen to defend the enclave, and Israeli threats of retaliation. By driving Aoun’s opponents into the Syrian camp, by weakening both Aoun’s and Jaja’s forces, and by facilitating the introduction of Syrian troops into the southern suburbs of Beirut, the War of Liberation, the Amal-Hizballah war, and the intra-Christian civil war succeeded in creating a proSyrian and anti-Aoun coalition that finally had the potential to destroy militarily the remaining opposition to Syrian hegemony over Lebanon.

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Critical to the creation of the Syrian-led bandwagon were the actions of Michel Aoun himself. Aoun’s rhetoric was extremely antiSyrian: ‘Il ne faut pas dire les régions chrétiennes mais les régions libres du Liban’.157 The reality was more shaded. Contemporary reports suggested that his anti-Lebanese Forces stance commended him to Syria as a possible presidential candidate, and at the end of September 1988 he made an early overture to Damascus.158 Though this was rebuffed, in February 1989 Syrian chief of military intelligence in Lebanon Ghazi Kanaan encouraged Aoun’s moves against the Lebanese Forces by promising that if he did so, and accepted a strategic role for Syria in Lebanon, Syrian troops would withdraw from West Beirut and Aoun himself would be accorded a ‘national role’.159 Even the War of Liberation left the possibility of an Aoun-Syria rapprochement intact. His war against the Lebanese Forces in 1990 led him stop criticising Syria publicly, referring now to Syria’s ‘presence’ in Lebanon rather than its ‘occupation’.160 However, Syria’s price for her support was consistently too high for Aoun. At meetings, for example with Arab League mediator Lakhdar Brahimi in late July 1990 and with Hoss’s agriculture minister Muhsin Dallul in early October, Aoun refused to join Hrawi’s government under the terms of Taif, preferring instead to wait for ‘des moments plus propices’.161 In choosing instead to smoke Asad out from his public position as neutral arbiter in Lebanon and to reveal Syria as the combatant she was, Aoun chose a strategy that was principally regional and international. The external response to this strategy is discussed in Chapter 5. Internally, Aoun’s actions were disastrous. Politically, he succeeded in drawing to his side only Etienne Sacre’s Guardians of the Cedars and Dany Chamoun’s National Liberal Party, the former in April 1989 and the latter one year later.162 His main support base was not political but popular, as Christians openly, and Muslims more discreetly, voiced their approval of his anti-militia and anti-Syrian position.163 The so-called ‘Aoun phenomenon’, however, may have deterred the attack that Hrawi threatened in November 1989, but it was no substitute for political support. On the contrary, the threat that Aoun’s very popularity held to the political and financial interests of all the other factions in Lebanon predisposed them to view him with extreme suspicion. Building Syria’s Coalition (1): Lebanon’s Muslims The pro-Syrian coalition in place by October 1990 was caused by more than just opposition to Aoun. By then, through careful manoeuvring described best as ‘divide and rule’, Syria had bought the acceptance of, or at least acquiescence in, the Taif solution by the most significant

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actors in the political spectrum: Amal, the PSP, Hizballah and the Sunni Islamist militias, the remaining Lebanese Muslim militias and the Lebanese Muslim zu’ama, the Lebanese Forces, the Franjieh family’s Marada militia, and the Christian political and religious elite. At the core of the coalition lay Amal and the PSP, and the conditional nature of their attachment highlights the Syrian achievement in assembling the coalition. Neither Amal nor the PSP had any great ideological commitment to Syria. Amal’s rise to prominence in 1982-84 was characterised by an attempt to keep Syria at arm’s length. Berri’s willingness to participate in Amin Gemayel’s government alienated Damascus; while declaring his support for its aims, Berri refused to join the National Salvation Front formed in July 1983 to fight the 17 May agreement; and he would not allow Syrianbacked Palestinian leaders to enter West Beirut after the Amal takeover there in February 1984. But perhaps most importantly, Amal’s anti-PLO stance and the need to serve the interests of their constituents in their South Lebanon power-base dictated an attitude to Israel far more ambivalent and nuanced than Asad could comfortably permit. For Berri, ‘foreign withdrawal’ involved Syria as well as Israel.164 At least in the early years of the war, such strictures applied even more strongly to the PSP. Where Amal had deserted Kamal Jumblatt’s LNM when Syria intervened in May 1976, the PSP fought Syrian troops and their allies. Kamal Jumblatt himself was assassinated on Syrian orders in 1977. And it was at the PSP’s expense that Syrian forces occupied West Beirut in February 1987. Walid Jumblatt came much closer to Asad than his father ever did, but still hedged his bets with strong links to Libya and the USSR. Even as the Syrian-sponsored anti-Aoun coalition developed between 1988 and 1990, Amal and the PSP continued to try to assert their interests independent of those of Syria. Along with Jumblatt, Berri openly disapproved of the Taif agreement, and boycotted Hrawi’s first cabinet meeting in protest at the appointment of the moderate Shia university professor appointed minister of finance.165 As 1990 progressed, Jumblatt took public umbrage at the Syrianbacked Hoss government, accusing elderly ministerial colleagues of holding ‘orgies’, denouncing one of his Maronite colleagues as a ‘pharaoh’, and claiming that Hoss was a ‘paid CIA agent’. Their talks never came to fruition, but as Syrian and Lebanese army troops prepared to attack Baabda, Jumblatt increasingly flirted with the idea of a link-up with Aoun, and openly opposed the blockade on Aoun’s enclave.166 But however much Berri and Jumblatt might protest at individual Syrian policies, by 1988 they had been absorbed within the Syrian orbit. Though Amal founder Musa al-Sadr had links with Asad

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based on friendship and Alawite-Shia ties well before 1976, the trigger for the Amal-Syrian alliance was Amin Gemayel’s decision to ignore Shia interests and base his links to the Muslim community on an alliance with the Beirut Sunni elite in late 1982.167 The 17 May agreement pushed Amal closer to Syria, with its threat of a semipermanent Israeli presence in the south of Lebanon, while Syrianinspired attacks on Israeli positions and the inevitable Israeli reprisals alienated the Shia population of South Lebanon from their Israeli visitors, and so lessened Amal’s need to maintain a moderate stance towards the Jewish state.168 By February 1984, as Amal emerged paramount among the groups vying for control of West Beirut, Syria was supplying Amal with weapons and training. Amal became the first major plank of the new Syrian policy of influence-by-proxy in the Lebanese civil war. Judged objectively, Amal’s bid for hegemony in Lebanon failed, and so did Asad’s attempt to benefit from it. After early successes against the PSP and the Sunni Murabitun, Amal failed to subdue the PLO in the Camps War despite massive Syrian material support, came under increasing pressure from Hizballah and the breakaway Islamic Amal of Hussein Mussawi, and required Syrian intervention to avoid defeat by the PSP in February 1987.169 The consequences for Syria, however, were less negative than for Amal, for with each reverse Berri found himself more and more dependent on Syrian support: Tantôt vainqueur, tantôt vaincu, il est constamment contraint d’avoir recours à la Syrie. Car tel est le paradoxe de ce dirigeant de la communauté la plus nombreuse du pays. Il est fort, mais d’une force illusoire.170 The PSP fared similarly. Walid Jumblatt had turned towards Syria in late 1982 as fighting broke out in the Shouf between the PSP and the Lebanese Forces, and had obliged his Syrian allies by his participation in the Tripartite agreement of 1985. He was prevented, however, from dealing with Syria on equal terms. The relationship is best illustrated by a tale, perhaps apocryphal, related by William Harris: Apparently, on one of Junblatt’s [sic] visits to Damascus, the Syrian president advised … [him] not to sit in a certain chair because his father had sat in that chair, and it might mean bad luck given what had happened to his father.171 The 1987 Syrian intervention in West Beirut cleared the PSP out of Ra’s Beirut, squeezed their access to the ports from which the PSP derived so much of its income (causing an almost complete cessation of traffic through Khalde port between March and May 1987), and pushed back the Druze canton as Syrian troops spread down the coast

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to the river Awali. In June 1987 Jumblatt was forced to purge his command structure in favour of party members acceptable to Damascus.172 By 1988 the Druzes were precariously positioned: overextended militarily, bitterly hated by their former Christian neighbours after the vicious fighting in the Shouf in 1983, and dependent upon Syria’s presence to protect them from their ‘friends’ in the PLO.173 When the crunch came in 1989-90, therefore, neither Amal nor the PSP could afford to oppose openly a peace deal whose terms failed to meet their demands or to prevent the end of the national anarchy from which they had profited so well. The Christian threat increased their dependence on Syria, a threat which increased when Iraq started supplying Aoun as well as the Lebanese Forces with equipment now surplus to Iraqi requirements after the end of the Iran-Iraq war.174 Amal, especially, dared not risk breaking with Syria while it fought a Hizballah that was not only making ground militarily but could also afford to pay its militiamen almost three times as much as Amal could offer.175 And so for every act or word of defiance against the Taif regime and its Syrian sponsors, many more reinforced the allegiance of Amal and the PSP to ‘brother Syria’.176 And when Syria announced the implementation of the ‘West Beirut security plan’ in February 1990 and demanded that the Muslim militias withdraw from the area, both Amal and the PSP obediently complied.177 If relations between Syria and Amal and the PSP respectively became strained after 1988, it was caused as much by a shift in Syrian policy to favour the traditional Sunni elite of West Beirut as by the actual terms of Taif. Of the principal communities in Lebanon, the Sunnis were the most weakened by 1988. Concentrated in the coastal cities of Beirut, Tripoli and Sidon, they never possessed a secure territorial base from which to project military power. Where the Maronite, the Druzes and eventually the Shiis developed disciplined communal militias, Sunni society splintered. They relied for military purposes mainly on their PLO co-religionists, and saw their influence consequently diminish as first the Israelis and then the Syrians pushed the PLO out of Lebanon between 1982 and 1985. Most minor Sunni militias in West Beirut were swept away in the Israeli invasion of 1982. The only major Sunni militia in Beirut was the Murabitun of Ibrahim Qulaylat, himself no friend of the traditional Sunni ruling class, and even it was crushed when its former allies in Amal and the PSP turned on it in March 1984 and finished it off one year later.178 Politically, a series of factors in the period leading up to 1988 had threatened to undermine Sunni influence in Lebanon: the Syrian decision embodied in the Tripartite agreement to turn to the militias

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after the failure of the Geneva-Lausanne process; the Muslim boycott of cabinet meetings, under Syrian pressure, between 1985 and 1988; and the assassination of prime minister Rashid Karami in 1987. The end of Amin Gemayel’s term of office in September 1988 opened fresh opportunities for the Sunni zu’ama, not all of which necessarily involved a turn towards Damascus. More sensitive than most to public opinion, prime minister Salim al-Hoss was well aware of proAoun sentiment in West Beirut, where, according to US ambassador John McCarthy, Aoun was considered ‘the cat’s meow among the Muslim working class’.179 As late as 1 March 1989 Hoss still considered that Aoun had a role to play in Lebanon, possibly as a future president.180 For the Sunni elite, a link-up with Aoun might allow them to ride the popularity of his nationalistic and anti-militia position, and free them from both Syria and the West Beirut militias. Thus when the government split in September 1988, Hoss refused to discount reconciliation (in contrast to Hrawi’s actions in late 1989) and delayed as long as possible in the face of Syrian demands for him to appoint Sami al-Khatib to command the non-Aounist section of the Lebanese army.181 By mid-March 1989, however, Aoun’s actions had thrust the Hoss government firmly into Syria’s arms. Aoun’s shelling of civilian neighbourhoods in West Beirut quickly lost him popular support there, while his moves against the Muslim militias before subduing the Lebanese Forces, and his refusal to discuss political reforms ahead of a Syrian withdrawal each raised the spectre of Christian chauvinism lurking behind the rhetoric of an inclusive Lebanese nationalism.182 All the while, the Syrian withdrawal which Aoun sought held few attractions for the Sunni political elite and the civilian population of West Beirut, who recalled only too clearly the depredations of the militias between 1984 and 1987. Indeed, Harris even argues that in late 1988 Syrian troops deliberately delayed before suppressing AmalHizballah clashes in Beirut in order to remind the Sunnis of their dependence on Damascus.183 Once integrated fully into the pro-Syrian alliance, it was increasingly these traditional political elites, rather than the militias, through whom Syria enacted policy in Lebanon, building up the army’s Muslim brigades at the direct expense of the militias.184 The most significant non-Christian challenge to Syria, however, came from the Islamist spectrum of Lebanese politics, particularly from Hizballah. Hizballah had little interest in an end to the civil war, especially while Taif offered few if any prospects for the establishment of an Islamic republic in Lebanon. As Arab diplomats prepared for the Taif conference, Hizballah commentators continued to stress their commitment to the ‘war option’.185 The possession of Western

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hostages by Hizballah (or shady organisations linked to it) jeopardised Syria’s attempts to improve relations with the West, while Hizballah’s conflict with Amal, though offering the Syrians a handle to keep Amal under control, still represented a battle against Syrian influence in Lebanon. Even over the liberation of South Lebanon, Hizballah came into conflict with Syria, for whom operations had to be conducted so as to take account of wider regional implications than Hizballah was prepared to allow for. Asad acknowledged the problem to US Assistant Secretary of State Richard Murphy in February 1988, when he gave assurances that Amal and the PSP would dissolve their militias if agreement was reached, but admitted that Hizballah would have to be dealt with by force.186 It was Hizballah’s strength in the late 1980s, though, that caused such problems for Syria. Since 1982 Iranian money, and the presence of Iranian revolutionary guards (Pasdaran) in the Bekaa, had enabled Hizballah to recruit and train about 5,000 militiamen in the Bekaa, the southern suburbs of Beirut and South Lebanon.187 Drawing in many places on the remnants of earlier Islamist groupings, Hizballah had benefited from the destitution of much of the Shia community, from Amal’s failure to confront the Israeli military presence effectively, and from the power vacuum left by the PLO defeat. Where in the early stages of the war, with no effective specifically Shia political presence, Shiis had provided the manpower for several organisations none of which actually represented Shia interest, Hizballah now offered the Shia community a disciplined organisation with a clearly defined and articulated political programme, backed up by a newspaper, television and radio propaganda network.188 As Syrian attention turned from extracting advantage from the chaos in Lebanon towards ending that chaos, a classic policy of carrot and stick brought Hizballah to heel. The stick was applied by direct and indirect means. Outright clashes occurred where Hizballah militiamen resisted Syrian troop deployments in Beirut, while Syrian support for Amal and their condoning of Fatah intervention in the Iqlim al-Tuffah effectively clipped Hizballah’s wings.189 Further, the complex nature of Iranian-Syrian relations and Syria’s position astride the supply route between Tehran and Lebanon enabled her to constrict Hizballah’s logistics. For example in January 1990 Hizballah’s opposition to Taif and the Hrawi regime led the Syrian authorities to stop a group of Iranian fighters and weapons from entering Lebanon from Syria.190 The carrot for Hizballah was provided by Syrian acceptance of an ongoing role for the Islamic resistance in the battle against the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon. The First Damascus agreement of January 1989 gave official

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status to Hizballah’s position in the south, and over the subsequent four years the movement developed semi-regular military units in place of its clandestine guerrillas, aided by Syrian supplies of weaponry and permission for the establishment of Pasdaran command posts in South Lebanon. As part of the process, Hizballah surrendered the Western hostages under its control.191 The result was not Hizballah support for, but rather sullen acquiescence at Syrian moves to end the war in Lebanon. Indeed, occasional street fighting between the two parties continued to erupt, for example in late March 1990 after Syrian troops fired at a car carrying Hizballah’s Sheikh Subhi Tufeili.192 In August 1989 Hizballah had joined the pro-Syrian Lebanese National Front formed in Damascus. And though they protested against Taif, where they were neither consulted nor represented, by November 1990 the head of Hizballah’s political office could state that, Nous pouvons traiter positivement Taëf, en ce qui concerne la réunification du pays, la restauration de la sécurité, l’allègement des souffrances du peuple.193 As Hizballah fighters regained a footing in South Lebanon and with Syrian sanction launched attacks on the Israeli-occupied zone, they were joined by Sunni Islamist militants. In September 1985 Syrian troops and pro-Syrian leftist militiamen had crushed the Sunni Islamist Tawheed militia after two years of vicious fighting in Tripoli.194 Amnesty International claimed that two hundred people were massacred, and hundreds were dragged off to prisons in Syria.195 The movement, though disarmed, did not die, re-emerging in Beirut, Sidon and South Lebanon. By 1988 Tawheed forces had joined the Islamic Resistance to fight the Israelis and the SLA, and by late 1989 Syria had released many of its members from prison to augment their numbers. This time, though, Tawheed leader Sheikh Said Shaban took care not to antagonise the Syrians, and even spoke in favour of the Syrian military presence in Lebanon as a framework for unified armed action against Israel.196 Building Syria’s Coalition (2): Lebanon’s Christians The most important pieces of the Syrian jigsaw, however, were the Lebanese Forces and the Christian political and religious establishment. As early as 1978 Syria had secured the allegiance of the Franjieh family’s Marada militia in the north of Lebanon and the sullen acquiescence of the Christian communities outside the Christian enclave of East Beirut and Mount Lebanon.197 In addition, since the failure of Bashir Gemayel’s bid for domination in Lebanon, almost all

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Christians in Lebanon had accepted that some sort of accommodation with Syria would be necessary.198 The big question, though, was whether the Christians could swallow Syria’s terms. As early as July 1988 Jaja had sent Zahi Boustany to Damascus to establish those terms, the dialogue continuing until the Syrian proposal of Suleiman Franjieh for the presidency in mid-August.199 However, there was no early accommodation between Syria and the Lebanese Forces. In 1986 the latter had concluded an alliance with Iraq, not only Syria’s direct opponent in the Baath cold war, but deadly enemy of Syria’s Iranian allies.200 With millions of dollars of weaponry flowing from Iraq to the Christian enclave in the second half of 1988, there was little need to capitulate to Syria.201 Instead a shaky alliance held between Jaja and Aoun. ‘As long as this Syrian logic is prevalent, the war could last 100 years’, stated a Lebanese Forces spokesman on the appointment of Sami al-Khatib as ‘commander’ of the Lebanese army, mirroring the Aounist line.202 Even Aounist moves to prevent the Lebanese Forces taxing petrol sales in the Christian zone in November 1988, and the actual Valentine’s Day clashes between the two in 1989 did not drive the parties apart completely: ‘From now on, whatever the price, we and General Awn [sic] are one hand because we have the same political plan and face the same dangers’, declared Jaja after the clashes.203 From March 1989, though, serious cracks appeared in the ‘one hand’. In its self-proclaimed role as defender of the Christian community, the Lebanese Forces deployed its artillery in support of Aoun’s during the War of Liberation, vowing to do so as long as Christian areas were being shelled.204 But Jaja remained deeply unhappy with Aoun for his attempt to subordinate the Lebanese Forces in the fighting (for example by posting an army officer to every militia battery), for his cutting in on the Iraqi supplies, for his antiAmerican rhetoric which pushed the US into withdrawing their embassy, and for his rising popularity amongst the Christian civilian population.205 Rather than force an official break, however, Jaja expressed his disapproval more subtly, principally by maintaining a complete media silence between March and September 1989.206 A more open rift emerged between Aoun and the Christian political establishment. This became apparent on 16 April 1989, when, unhappy at Aoun’s adventurism and fearing that his ‘temporary’ suspension of the constitutional political process might become more permanent, Ketaeb leader Georges Saadeh and Maronite patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir held direct cease-fire talks with prime minister Salim alHoss and speaker Hussein al-Husseini.207 Two days later, a meeting of Sfeir and twenty-three Christian MPs at the patriarchal seat of Bkirki demanded a cease-fire and the resumption of dialogue with West

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Beirut without demanding a Syrian retreat. In the words of Pakradouni, ‘L’affaire portait en germe le conflit entre le général d’une part, le patriarche et les députés chrétiens de l’autre’.208 In June 1989, on a trip to Rome, Sfeir met Husseini, who discussed with him the details of a plan which turned out to be a simplified version of what was later agreed at Taif.209 It is important, however, not to predate the final split within the Christian camp and the movement of Jaja and the Christian elite into the Syrian orbit. Taif certainly caused huge dissension, with the deputies not even daring to return to the enclave. But if they condemned Aoun’s ‘aventurisme’, they were grateful at his Christian military strength for enabling them to gain a compromise settlement.210 Indeed, it was not Aoun’s cause but his tactics that caused such dissension in East Beirut, and while it looked as though he might have some success, as when he pushed Hrawi into backing down from his proposed assault on Baabda in November 1989, he regained support amongst both the Lebanese Forces and the political notables.211 This fact was exacerbated by the weak position in which both groups found themselves. Aoun’s popularity amongst the Christian public endangered politician and militia leader alike, the latter’s problems exacerbated by financial difficulties and reports of troop defections. Lebanese Forces treasurer Roger Dib admitted that the Valentine’s Day clashes of 1989 between Aoun and the militia, and the subsequent battles between the Christians and the Syrians had led to the militia and its associated organs losing over half their revenues. Aoun had taken over the militia-controlled section of Beirut port, the Lebanese Forces’ real estate tax, and the tax on trucks entering or leaving the Christian enclave. In addition, shelling had forced the Casino at Jounieh to close (which previously accounted for 17% of Lebanese Forces income), and had interrupted the Larnaca-Jounieh ferry, on which the militia had imposed a $60 per person tax on each roundtrip.212 The result was not an alliance, but rather an uneasy truce. Jaja refused to condemn the Taif agreement but, along with Ketaeb representatives Georges Saadeh and Michel Sassin, refused to sit in Cabinet. Jaja publicly downplayed reports of ‘rifts’ with Aoun.213 Christian politicians such as Edmond Rizq declared their support for Taif, but subject to abjuration of the use of force to effect its provisions.214 But the balance was not stable, and three diplomatic initiatives between October 1989 and January 1990 failed to secure a rapprochement between Aoun and Jaja.215 Aoun came into conflict with the Ketaeb-controlled press for their designation of Hrawi and Hoss as president and prime minister.216 The political division was even visible in their television scheduling. Aoun’s Channel 5 showed

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World War Two action movies that involved allied soldiers attacking Germans, such as the Dirty Dozen and Where Eagles Dare. Jaja’s Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation, on the other hand, showed films of military resistance, such as the Battle of Britain, and Khartoum.217 Even with Jaja under direct attack from Aoun’s army, it was only slowly and partially that the Syrians reeled him in. In early April 1990 he publicly stated that ‘a solution in Lebanon lies in the recognition of the President as head of state and in considering the Taif agreement as a gateway to a solution’. But rumours persisted that the Syrians had banned Hrawi from making a deal with Jaja, fearing he might thereby win the intra-Christian civil war and become the Christian strongman.218 For months Jaja hedged over the dissolution of the militias, instead demanding guarantees of a future role in the Lebanese state and that Syrian troops would not deploy in positions captured from Aoun.219 Throughout this, the Syrians stood by, assisting now Aoun now the Lebanese Forces as they both wore themselves into the ground. Squeezed between Aoun and Syria, the Christian political elite was the first to crack, with Saadeh and Sassin joining the Hoss government in early June. The following month Saadeh visited Damascus, after which he declared that ‘it was not possible to resolve the Lebanese crisis without Syria’.220 Finally, Syrian overtures to Aoun through Elie Hubeiqa persuaded Jaja to join with Damascus, and in September 1990 a Lebanese Forces delegation including Nader Succar and Georges Kassab met the Syrian military intelligence chief in Lebanon General Ghazi Kanaan.221 When Syrian troops stormed the Baabda palace on 13 October 1990, it was with artillery support from the Lebanese Forces.222 The Dénouement: 13 October 1990 By October 1990, therefore, Syria had constructed a loose coalition of factions united by a public stance that the Taif agreement might provide at least the basis for a post-war political order and by either active support for, or mute acquiescence in, the removal of Michel Aoun. The details of how this coalition was constructed, however, should not obscure the tensions within it. First were those described in the realist analysis of an anarchical system. Actors tend to balance, not to bandwagon, as ‘it is the stronger side that threatens them’.223 Even before Taif there had been tentative moves towards the fragmentation of the pro-Syrian alliance: the PSP had sold weapons to the PLO to weaken Syria’s grip on the Druze enclave and the Amal presence near the Iqlim al-Kharrub; Jumblatt and Berri’s unhappiness with Taif had seen them strengthen their ties with Iran as insurance against a split with Syria; in the run-up to the assault on Baabda,

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Jumblatt had hosted an anti-Hrawi demonstration from residents of Jezzine and the ‘security zone’; and there had been some fraternisation between Aoun supporters and those of Hizballah.224 As a Le Monde correspondent noted at the end of September 1990, Syria feared the emergence of an anti-Syrian front led by Aoun and Hizballah with muffled support from the PSP and supplied by Iraq and the PLO.225 Secondly, many of the personalities in the pro-Syrian coalition made uncomfortable bedfellows. Suleiman Franjieh was a bitter enemy of Samir Jaja, after the latter’s involvement in his son Tony’s killing in 1978. The Lebanese Forces, too, were less than popular with the Druze community after the vicious intercommunal fighting in the Shouf in 1983. For Hizballah, meanwhile, support for Taif could only undermine their revolutionary credentials. Thirdly, though perhaps less fundamental than the first two difficulties, local problems continued to plague the Syrian in the areas they controlled. Thus Syrian moves into traditional Hizballah areas as they prepared to face down Aoun in late 1989 led to clashes between Amal and Hizballah as the latter sought new ‘home’ territory. In the Bekaa, for example, at various times fighting erupted between Amal and other smaller proSyrian militias, and between Syrian troops and Islamic Amal militiamen.226 Though usually localised and settled by the Syrian military presence, these disputes undoubtedly provided a ready supply of sparks if the wider tinderbox were ready to take them. Lastly, one should not ignore just how much all the factions in Lebanon had to lose from the establishment of peace. Only two of the militias relied almost solely on external financing: Hizballah and the SLA.227 The rest depended upon illegal taxes, arms trafficking, and the drugs trade. All this would be jeopardised by the re-establishment of a strong central state in Lebanon. However, the tensions within the anti-Aoun alliance were not enough to prevent his downfall. On 30 July 1990, the Hrawi government announced the imposition of an economic and diplomatic blockade against Aoun’s territory. On 21 August the deputies were convened to approve constitutional reforms based on the Taif agreement, thus beginning the timetable for Syrian withdrawal from areas of Lebanon. And at the start of September, Syrian troops again took up offensive positions on the edge of the Christian sector. On 13 October Syrian air and ground forces, and those of their allies, launched an assault. An estimated 800 were killed in the battle, about evenly divided between Aounists and the Syrian alliance. Of the former, a hundred or so were massacred by the Syrian army at Dahr el Wahash, possibly because they had mown down Syrian infantrymen after ignoring (or failing to hear) a cease-fire order.228 By nightfall Aoun had sought asylum in the French embassy in Beirut.

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By the end of the successful assault by Syrian and allied forces on Aoun’s positions around Baabda on 13 October 1990, it is safe to argue that the civil war components of the conflict in Lebanon were over. Certainly, Lebanon had not seen its last fighting. The IDF and their SLA proxies continued to occupy the ‘security zone’ in the face of Hizballah attacks, but ‘civil’ war this can no longer properly be called. North of the ‘security zone’ the 5,000 to 6,000 pro-Arafat Fatah guerrillas of the PLO openly resisted the post-Taif order that ran throughout Lebanon. Arafat had met with Asad both at the May 1989 Casablanca summit of the Arab League and in September 1989 in Tripoli, but relations failed to thaw.229 Now, isolated after Aoun’s fall, they waited uneasily in and around the refugee camps in Sidon and Tyre, neither reconciled to Taif nor in a position to take arms against it. Yet by 1990, neither the Hizballah-SLA-Israeli conflict, nor that between the PLO and the Lebanese state, could be described as ‘civil war’. Not only did neither conflict come close to broaching Small and Singer’s watershed of 1,000 battle deaths per annum for a conflict to be called a war, but in neither case was the structure of the state an issue between the warring parties. Instead, the actions of at least one side in each conflict were fundamentally dictated by external considerations. Whereas Hizballah had become increasingly Lebanonised since its foundation by Iranian officials in the mid-1980s, the SLA had by 1990 become no more than an Israeli appendage, despite its genuinely Lebanese origins.230 As for the Palestinians, by 1990 not only had the PLO lost the internal Lebanese allies that allowed her to have such a devastating impact on Lebanese politics in 1975, but as discussed in Chapter 5, Lebanon no longer had a significant role to play in the PLO’s regional strategy.

Comparison Superficially, the nature of the military confrontation in Rhodesia and Lebanon was quite different. In Rhodesia, the regular army of a state confronted lightly-armed insurgents infiltrating rural areas from neighbouring countries using classic guerrilla tactics. In Lebanon, meanwhile, not only did the national army split along confessional lines, it was also only one of a series of fighting forces – all equipped with tanks, artillery, and machine guns – competing on a battlefield that was mainly urban or mountainous, with clear front lines. Where external actors participated in the Rhodesian civil war, they did so principally by providing arms and shelter, in the case of Zambia and

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Mozambique. If they did send troops to fight alongside their allies, as did South Africa, they did so covertly. In Lebanon, however, Syrian and Israeli troops operated openly within Lebanon’s borders. On closer inspection, however, the differences between the two wars are narrower than they might appear. ZIPRA did possess a regular army, though it was not yet deployed inside Rhodesia in 1979, and the Rhodesian state employed its own ‘on-sides’ guerrillas in the shape of Muzorewa’s and Sithole’s SFA. While Rhodesia had no strict front lines, Patriotic Front forces talked of ‘green’, ‘yellow’ and ‘red’ zones to denote respectively guerrilla, contested and government control of an area.231 And though direct external military involvement was greater in Lebanon than in Rhodesia, Mozambican troops did confront Rhodesian raiding parties inside Mozambique, while by the late 1980s Syria and Israel were trying to obscure their direct military involvement and to hide behind Lebanese proxies. Most important of the military similarities between the two civil wars, however, is that they both highlight the limited utility of the concept of stalemate in understanding the success of negotiated settlement of civil war. There existed a mutually hurting stalemate neither in Rhodesia in late 1979 nor in Lebanon in late 1989. Mugabe wanted the war to continue and was confident, perhaps overconfident, in his guerrillas’ ability actually to defeat the regular forces of Zimbabwe Rhodesia. Objectively, the Rhodesians did face a hurting stalemate. Their counter-guerrilla strategy had failed to stem the continuing infiltration, they had lost control of the rural population, economic conditions were limiting their ability to retaliate, alliances with ‘moderate’ black nationalists had not borne fruit, the morale of white troops in the security forces was slipping, and attacks on guerrilla bases in Zambia and Mozambique had lost their earlier effectiveness. There is no evidence, however, that either Smith or Muzorewa truly feared the consequences of no agreement. Smith actually voted to reject the Lancaster House agreement, while Muzorewa admitted to Stedman in 1987 that he honestly believed that the Patriotic Front guerrillas were desperate and would abandon Mugabe and Nkomo if the war continued.232 Indeed, the notion that stalemate drives the warring parties to the negotiating table is belied by the Taif process in Lebanon. Isolated as they were in their communities, the parliamentarians who travelled to Saudi Arabia may have feared the consequences of continued war. The men who wielded the guns, however, felt no such pressure. The only militia leader who even tacitly supported the Taif negotiations, Samir Jaja, refused to commend them openly and apparently viewed the process as a means less of achieving peace than of ending the constitutional crisis in Lebanon and ridding himself of Aoun.233 Once

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the Taif agreement had been signed, it was implemented not through stalemate, but through the military defeat of its most outspoken opponent, General Michel Aoun, by a pro-Syrian coalition that had coalesced around the relatively secure banner that the agreement represented. The concept of a deadlock that keeps both parties from achieving their goals is not helpful here. As early as the mid-1970s in both Lebanon and Rhodesia the belligerents had recognised that their goals could not be imposed unilaterally. The series of negotiations in both countries showed not that compromise was impossible, but that the terms of the compromise were the sticking point. Neither the belligerents’ realisation that their maximal goals were unachievable, nor the many ‘turning points’ that came and went especially in Lebanon but also in Rhodesia pushed them into a settlement. Even when belligerents faced a downward spiral in military terms, they responded not by suing for peace but, as Morgenthau predicts will happen in a multipolar anarchical environment, by looking for allies both inside and outside the country to remedy their military weakness.234 Thus, Smith sought an alliance with Muzorewa, while Muzorewa then looked for British and American support. The phenomenon was taken to its apogee in Lebanon, where almost every internal alliance was built between partners who had previously fought each other, and both regional and global powers were almost inexorably drawn in. But perhaps the least helpful aspect of the concept of stalemate or deadlock is its implicit notion of standstill. Neither the Lancaster House nor the Taif talks came in the middle of a ‘plateau’, that ‘flat, unpleasant terrain stretching into the future, providing no later possibilities for decisive escalation or for graceful escape’.235 The fighting in Rhodesia in 1979 and in Lebanon in 1989 and 1990 was in each case hotter than for many years. Guerrillas were pouring over the Mozambican and Zambian borders into Rhodesia in ever-increasing numbers, while Rhodesian counter-strikes against Mozambique and Zambia had widened from their focus on the Zimbabwean refugee camps to target the economic infrastructure of the two countries. In Lebanon, Aoun’s War of Liberation reopened fighting across the ‘Green Line’ that divided the Muslim and Christian sectors of Beirut after a three-year lull. Civil wars within the Shia and Christian communities, the latter bringing the devastation of civil war to the Christian Mount Lebanon heartland for the first time, further added to the sense of crisis. If, as James Smith suggests, for a stalemate to end a war both sides must agree on their relative bargaining power, the intensity of the fighting leading up to Lancaster House and Taif should have prevented such an across-the-board assessment.236 Yet neither did the danger of current or past escalation bring the belligerents to

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compromise.237 For example, neither the mounting Rhodesian air campaign against economic targets in Zambia and Mozambique, nor Aoun’s efforts further to internationalise the Lebanese civil war suggest that the internal parties were shy to raise the stakes. As discussed in Chapter 5, the idea that fear of escalation can encourage settlement is perhaps of greater utility when applied to external actors. But if stalemate fails to capture adequately the relationship of military dynamics to political processes, that relationship is nevertheless of critical importance to an understanding of the course and end of the Rhodesian and Lebanese wars. For the warfare conducted in both countries was both limited and political. This is not to minimise the suffering inflicted on soldiers and civilians alike (the latter in particular). Nor is it to deny that military-strategic matters did not have a huge imprint on the conduct of the wars: the scale of Zimbabwean guerrilla infiltration in the late 1970s, Rhodesian counterstrikes against the guerrillas’ external bases, the assassination of Herbert Chitepo, the shooting down of the Air Rhodesia Viscount, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the Syrian assault on Aoun in 1990 (just to name a few) all exerted an immense impact on the military and political balance of power at critical points. At the same time, however, all these military developments had their causes or consequences in peculiarly political developments. Even the military defeat of Aoun was more a product of his political defeat in the recasting of factional alliances in 1988-90 than it was a function of military tactics or strategy. Throughout both wars, ostensibly military acts – the bombing of guerrilla training camps in Zambia and Mozambique, increased guerrilla infiltration into Rhodesia, Aoun’s War of Liberation – were often initiated for political and propaganda purposes rather than for their military benefits. All war may be an extension of politics, if Clausewitz’s dictum is accepted, but war in Rhodesia and Lebanon was particularly so. Some of the motivations for violence, it is true, were neither strategic, tactical or political. The fighting within the warring factions or between allies so common in both wars – for example between Muzorewa’s and Sithole’s auxiliaries, between the two wings of the Patriotic Front, and between Aoun and Jaja – showed that actors were frequently willing to sacrifice their strategic objectives in order to shore up their personal position within their own organisations or communities. The killing of civilians, too, often satisfied fighters’ desire for blood, plunder and honour, but by alienating the civilian population actually weakened their political and military position.238 The economic functions of violence played a significant role in the militia system of Lebanon, but in Rhodesia too fortunes were made and lost in state-sponsored sanctions-busting operations. This is not

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to say, though, that economic motivations lay at the heart of the civil war dynamic. Indeed, as Kalyvas forcefully observes, even the most ideologically-charged civil wars have witnessed looting and more formal systems of economic extraction: Rhodesia and Lebanon were no different.239 As will be addressed in the concluding chapter of this book, the political quest for the greatest share possible in the state lay at the heart of civil war in both countries. In what ways, then, did military developments contribute to the achievement of the Lancaster House and Taif agreements? Three present themselves. Firstly and most importantly, I have argued there existed in both Lebanon and Rhodesia a rough, but only rough, parity on the military front in the lead-up to these agreements. Certainly, the guerrillas in Rhodesia held the upper hand, as did the Syrians and their Muslim allies in Lebanon, but each certainly needed caution about their next move. As Hedley Bull notes, a balance of power that rests only on subjective foundations is likely to prove relatively short-lived. Sooner or later one side will test it and find it illusory.240 We can reverse his dictum here, and argue that an objective balance still has analytical relevance, however much the belligerents themselves might disavow it.241 The transition from guerrilla to mobile warfare in Rhodesia, and an assault on the urban and mountainous terrain of the Christian enclave in Lebanon, would be risky enough to make any military commander think twice. Failure could lead to the dissipation of their current advantage. This argument, though, falls well short of that of the mutually hurting stalemate. It does not explain why the parties came to the table (after all, in Lebanon they did not), but it does explain why most of them could accept a settlement that gave them less than they wanted. Secondly, once negotiations started, the military situation gave shape to the settlements that emerged. Few belligerents, in either country, greeted the terms of compromise with enthusiasm, but those terms did broadly reflect the military state of play. The introduction of genuine majority rule, the removal of the white blocking mechanism, and the removal from Rhodesian hands of ultimate authority over military and defence policy in the interim period before independence elections all reflected the military advances made by the Patriotic Front since 1972. Similarly, the continuing role in Lebanon granted to Syria in the Taif agreement, the transfer of many executive powers from the Maronite president to the Sunni prime minister, and the equalisation of Christian and Muslim seats in parliament all reflected the military gains made by Syria and the Lebanese Muslim parties. At the same time, the rejection of radical social or economic change implied by both the Lancaster House and Taif agreements, the placement of ground-level enforcement of law and order in the hands of the

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Rhodesian security forces, and the continued political role accorded to Lebanon’s Maronites in the Taif constitution all mirrored the fact that neither the Rhodesian security forces nor Lebanon’s Christian militia had been defeated. The Anglo-American initiative of 1977 and the Tripartite agreement of 1985 had both collapsed because they diverged too far from the prevailing military balance of power. The Lancaster House and Taif agreements far better reflected military realities. Moreover, the open-ended nature of the settlements meant that, as long as the parties had other reasons actively to accept them, they could justify their acceptance both to themselves and to others as a fair achievement, given their military position. Lastly, the prolonged, bitter and, in the case of Rhodesia, steadily escalating nature of the wars had by their latter stages pushed the warring factions into ever greater dependence on external powers. This was most obviously so in Lebanon where almost all the native militias had by 1990 weakened themselves so much that they could be picked off individually and drawn into the pro-Syrian coalition. But in Rhodesia, too, by 1979 the prolonged fighting had left the Patriotic Front dangerously dependent on the support of the Front-Line states and the Rhodesian regime on South Africa.242 The evidence of Rhodesia and Lebanon does support the idea that when belligerents find the military path to the achievement of their maximal goals blocked, they may be prepared to compromise. The question, though, is what turns ‘may’ into ‘will’, and what the terms of the compromise are that they will be prepared to accept. It appears from the above that the explanation is to be found outside of the military sphere: there is little in the internal military balance in Rhodesia in 1979 nor in Lebanon in 1989 that explains why peace settlements were negotiated and then enforced at that time rather than earlier, or indeed later. If external parties, who were increasingly able to dictate events in Lebanon and Rhodesia, decided that the civil wars there must be resolved, the internal military situation tells us little about why they did or the timing of their decision. If the splintering of the Christian political community in Lebanon, and Smith’s replacement by Muzorewa at the head of the Rhodesian executive played a significant role in the process of settlement, as they surely did, the military history of the wars gives us little clue as to how these phenomena happened. An analysis of the military situation does not explain why avowedly revolutionary leaders in Lebanon and Rhodesia were prepared to compromise on their ideals and refused to risk the promise of political gains for social revolution. Nor does it demonstrate why no new guerrilla or resistance groups emerged to fight for the causes on which their previous proponents had

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compromised. Nor, finally, does it explain why those who found themselves increasingly marginalised as the open-ended and vague paper settlements were put into effect did not plunge Lebanon or Rhodesia back into outright civil war.

3 MILITARY-CIVILIAN RELATIONS Much scholarly attention has been paid to the twin processes of negotiation and fighting in civil war. Less, however, has been given over to developments within belligerent factions and communities, and particularly to the consequences for peace-making of the relationship between leaderships and their followers. The core motivation for the outbreak of civil war is variously described as ideology, ethnicity or greed. In the first two categories, civilians are deeply implicated. Even though ideological or ethnic conflict may require political elites to stir up discontent, the populace must be prepared to be led. Whatever makes this so – antagonistic group histories, economic deprivation, communal psychology – it is generally held that fighting in civil war only entrenches further the divisions within society. As ethnic tension degenerates into civil war, so ethnic affiliations crowd out alternative sources of identity; the spilling of blood requires even greater commitment to the cause to justify past sacrifices; massacres of political opponents – as in Spain – make compromise all but impossible; and the destructive nature of civil war makes it extremely unlikely that it will mitigate economic sources of ethnic mobilisation.1 For those, meanwhile, who focus on greed rather than grievance as the primary motivation for civil war, civilians are the victims of internal conflict, preyed on by all sides. And as they are not responsible for the outbreak or conduct of civil war, their contribution to the achievement of peace can only be minimal.2 For understanding why civil wars end, however, none of these approaches is entirely helpful. Theories of ideological and ethnic conflict may usefully illustrate the role that social factors may play in the outbreak of civil war, and theories of greed and economic accumulation do demonstrate the role natural resources play in sustaining wars, but in aiming to present an essentially mono-causal explanation of civil war, all such theories play down the complexity of these wars, and the wide and overlapping motivations of those who participate in them. But even if they present a series of ideal-types of

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civilian involvement in internal war, they tell us little about the role civilians play once war has begun and in the achievement of a settlement. A more useful framework here is provided by the Cold War, and even pre-Cold War, literature on revolutionary wars and counterinsurgency. These two competing approaches place the search for civilian support at the heart of waging internal war. Their prescriptions are different: for revolutionaries such as Che Guevara and Mao Tse-Tung, active popular support for guerrillas is ‘indispensable’; for Mao, a revolution must fail ‘if its political objectives do not coincide with the aspirations of the people and their sympathy, co-operation and assistance cannot be gained’.3 Counterinsurgency writers challenge the need for active support. It is usually enough, they argue, for the guerrilla to gain the active participation of only a few, and the general apathy of the majority, usually suffices for the guerrilla. This leaves room for the government to try to win ‘the hearts and minds’ of the civilian population, ‘that nauseating phrase I think I invented’, as the British High Commissioner to Malaya Sir Gerald Templar called it.4 And while governments are unlikely actively to enamour hostile populations, they need to do enough at least to neutralise the non-combatant masses.5 The applicability of these two approaches in Rhodesia and Lebanon remains to be seen, but both revolutionary and counter-insurgency approaches have the merit of placing followers, more than just leaders, where they belong: firmly on the stage in the search for understanding why peace settlements are reached in civil war.

Rhodesia The Myth of Civilian-Military Unity The declarations of unity regularly made by the guerrillas and their Rhodesian opponents concealed more than they revealed.6 In particular, the nationalist rhetoric of majority rule and land redistribution, as though they were necessarily inseparable, obscured what was a complex coalition between the various elements of black Rhodesian society. Certainly, the land hunger of which the guerrillas complained was very real. The first fifty years of settler colonialism had impinged relatively little on the existing population compared to subsequently: many peasants stayed as tenants on white land, while the native-populated government-designated Reserves still offered enough land for cultivation. However, the evictions and alienations of the 1940s as white agriculture (especially ranching and tobacco

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production) boomed after World War Two laid the basis for deep peasant resentment of the colonial regime.7 The 1969 Land Tenure Act had divided land ‘equally’ between blacks and whites, but the massive disparity in population between the communities meant that each European farm averaged 2,290 hectares, a hundred times larger than the average farm in the Tribal Trust Lands.8 Moreover, much of the land allocated to Africans was low-grade, while the agricultural revolution that the state attempted to enforce, with its policies of destocking and contour ridging, was deeply unpopular.9 These problems were exacerbated by the massive black population growth addressed in Chapter 2 above. And so, although Southern Rhodesian GDP, and even per capita income, were increasing in the years leading up to 1965, UDI was declared during growing African unemployment and migration to the towns, later to provide a ready recruiting base for the nationalist guerrillas.10 The nationalist leadership, however, was drawn not from the rural peasantry, but from the African petit bourgeoisie of ‘lawyers, civil servants, trade union leaders, wealthier farmers, traders, clergymen, journalists’, which had been consolidating itself economically and politically for decades in much of the African continent.11 Robert Mugabe was a teacher with three academic degrees even before his ten-year detention began in 1964; Herbert Chitepo was Rhodesia’s first black lawyer; Abel Muzorewa and Ndabaningi Sithole were clergymen; and Joshua Nkomo records in his autobiography that by about 1930 his father, a farmer, owned 1,000 cattle, 2,000 goats and a large herd of sheep.12 They were products of a paternalist settler state which, responding to employers’ demands for a better educated workforce, and for its own administrative interests, had developed educational opportunities for Africans and increased expectations for those who took them. The state, though, eschewed the ‘Kenya-option’ of allying with a native land-owning class. Instead it strictly limited the pace and extent of African social and economic development, and insisted on treating the tribal chiefs and headmen as the political representatives of the African population, thereby driving the new African elite into nationalist politics. The early nationalist parties were not mass affairs: the membership of both the Southern Rhodesian African National Congress and the National Democratic Party, founded in 1959 and 1960, was heavily elite-dominated.13 Even ZANU, on its foundation in 1963, was labelled by its African critics as a ‘party of intellectuals cut off from the masses’.14 Its initial funding came mainly from abroad, from Zimbabwean businessmen who moved to Zambia in search of greater opportunities than existed inside Rhodesia.15 The interests of this African elite thus differed from those of the impoverished rural peasantry and the mass of unskilled and semi-

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skilled labour migrants. That the support-base of the nationalist movement was differentiated is hardly surprising. Quite apart from class differences, ethnic divisions within the nationalist camp, particularly between Shona and Ndebele, were to feature strongly. Even the small and supposedly close-knit European community contained many fault-lines, in particular that between the ‘small-town’ and white working class represented by the Rhodesian Front, and the mining, finance and major industrial concerns, together with the metropolitan intelligentsia which had ruled Southern Rhodesia until 1962.16 However, the significance of these fault-lines only emerged under the conditions of civil war. The following pages will demonstrate that the strains and stresses of civil war effectively fragmented the coalitions on each side. In the process, one of the most important obstacles to the successful conclusion of a peace settlement was rendered obsolete. With their civilian ‘constituencies’ stronger in their desire to see the war end than in their adherence to any particular political programme, supposedly radical leaders could afford to accept the socially and economically conservative solution proposed by Lord Carrington at Lancaster House without the risk of a popular backlash. Guerrilla-Civilian Relations Some of the unsubstantiated claims propounded about peasant attitudes to the nationalist guerrillas deserve extreme scepticism. Astrow, for example, sees the guerrilla leadership as having to keep up with a ‘more and more radicalised African population’.17 Meanwhile Josiah Tungamirai’s assertion that ZANLA’s propaganda machine, with its night-time pungwes, Zimbabwe News publication and broadcasts over Radio Mozambique, won support for the guerrillas, merits as much caution as Ian Smith’s repeated claims that the majority of the African population supported his government.18 However, a scholarly debate exists with important consequences for understanding how the Rhodesian civil war ended. On one side, Terence Ranger has argued from his research on Makoni District that the guerrillas’ arrival was facilitated by a pre-existing peasant radical nationalism: Peasants were engaged in direct competition with white farmers from the beginning of their experience with colonialism and their understanding of agrarian capitalism and of the ways in which the state supported it ultimately produced a consciousness which was highly conducive to mobilization for guerrilla war.19 David Lan broadly supports Ranger’s position, focusing on the role of mhondoro spirit mediums in legitimating the guerrillas and their

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upheaval of traditional tribal leaders in the Dande region in the north of Rhodesia. Land, he argues, provided the central rallying symbol for mediums, guerrillas, and their local support committees.20 Against that, Norma Kriger disagrees that the guerrilla-peasant relationship was an easy one. In Mutoko District, the area of her research, she argues that it was force that made peasants help the guerrillas, rather than a composite guerrilla-peasant ideology. The guerrillas’ failure to establish liberated zones meant that the ever-present threat of security force retaliation made it inevitable that mobilisation of the peasantry would require ongoing violence. Moreover, she argues, peasant cooperation with the guerrillas stemmed less from an eagerness to remove the racially discriminatory policies of the settler state and more from individual peasants’ desires to exploit the breakdown of law and order during the war to transform oppressive social structures within peasant society.21 Despite the polarised terms of this debate, there is some room for compromise. As Weitzer suggests, on first arriving in an area, the guerrillas would attempt to gain the political sympathies of the local population. It was when this failed, however, that they, like rebels elsewhere, turned to force to obtain co-operation.22 Geography and history too may have played a part in the different findings of Ranger, Lan and Kriger. Dande was a very isolated area, with poor communications and bordering Mozambique. ZANLA’s dominant position in this area alleviated the problems peasants faced of competing demands for co-operation from the nationalist guerrillas and the Rhodesian security forces. Mutoko, however, was connected with Salisbury by a wide tarred road, allowing troops to get there in only one hour. Similarly, whereas Makoni District represented a preeminent example of previously successful peasant production undermined by state interference and land alienation, thus lending itself to increased nationalist consciousness, in Mutoko the success of the Methodist Church had created a sizeable support base for Muzorewa and his United African National Council (UANC), so explaining the level of violence perpetrated by ZANLA against the local population.23 Indeed, the importance of geography in determining the tenor of guerrilla-civilian relations is illustrated by Heike Schmidt’s study of the Honde valley in eastern Rhodesia. Even within this small area, great differences emerged: in the north of the valley ZANLA guerrillas commanded mainly voluntaristic peasant support, while in the south the proximity of a Rhodesian military and police base, the lack of cover, and the use of this section of the valley as a guerrilla through-route all prevented the establishment of good guerrilla-civilian relations and so led to the sort of coercive relationship described by Kriger.24

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All sides of the debate, though, can help us understand why there was no immediate popular reaction against the Lancaster House compromise. In particular, what emerges is that although the guerrillas may have been recruited from, and were fighting for, the people, they were not necessarily ‘of the people’. In some ways this was literally so: ZANLA’s policy in particular was not to send guerrillas to fight in their own home districts, in case they had to deliver punishment to civilian ‘sell-outs’ whom they already knew. ‘Chimurenga’ noms de guerre, so-called after the 1896-97 uprising against colonial rule, concealed fighters’ ethnic and tribal origins, further placing them outside rural peasant society.25 It is of interest that many of the areas where the guerrillas first began to operate successfully, for example in the Hwange and in north-eastern Rhodesia, were among the least politically organised in the open nationalist period of the early 1960s.26 Even when not so, generation, party and even class usually divided the guerrillas from local peasants. While most guerrillas operating inside Rhodesia were young, ZANU and poor, their nationalist counterparts in the villages were frequently village elders, storekeepers, and teachers, loyal to ZAPU.27 The language of socialist revolution the guerrillas spoke in the camps was far removed from that of the peasantry. As ZIPRA political commissar Colin Matutu explained, ‘people did not understand all that political jargon. What we had to do, in fact, was to tell them the hard realities of life. … You don’t talk about the capitalist state or the socialist state to them’. The statements of senior guerrillas indicate that land shortage and the regime’s oppressiveness often had to be ‘pointed out’ to peasants to get their support.28 Even the close match between socialist-collectivist and traditional-communal forms of land-holding touted by the guerrilla leadership bore little relationship to the complex reality of pre- and early-colonial land tenure in rural Rhodesia – guerrillas were in this way as guilty as colonial administrators of ‘inventing’ pre-colonial tradition.29 David Lan found that the inhabitants of Dande had only the vaguest idea of what ‘colonialism, neo-colonialism and capitalism’ meant.30 At the start of 1978, ZANU’s propaganda newsletter Zimbabwe News proclaimed that: The roots of our Party are in our people. These roots must spread wide and solid in 1978. The Party and the People and the People and the Party must have one and the same meaning.31 The appeal’s self-consciousness is perhaps indicative of the mismatch between peasant and guerrilla ideologies.

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Shared culture and ethnicity, rather than a specific political programme, was what lay behind the guerrillas’ appeal to the African peasantry. For all the focus on mass meetings and pungwes as mobilising influences, they consisted primarily of repetitive speeches with much singing and slogan-chanting, their purpose more to rouse the inhabitants rather than delve deeply into their problems.32 The ‘politicisation of the masses’ involved little more than listening to peasant grievances and promising to alleviate them. The flexibility of guerrilla interaction with local culture is perhaps best illustrated by their dealings with religion. Officially Marxist-Leninist, in many areas the Patriotic Front guerrillas co-operated with local spirit mediums, invoking the memory of Nehanda and Chaminuka (spirit mediums who participated in the first Chimurenga against settler rule in 189697) to stress their attachment to recovering the lost lands.33 Despite this, however, the guerrillas usually also attempted to reach a working arrangement with Christian mission stations. As Hudson Kundai, ZANLA Provincial Political Commissar for Tete Province, stated in an interview in 1989: The official position was that we had to respect the culture of the community of which religion was also a part. … The official position of the Party was that we had to mobilize all the forces against the common enemy. … When you got into a new area, you would either approach the local mudzimu [spirit elder] or the Church that was most influential in the area.34 Despite communication problems between guerrilla bands, it was usually only when missions failed to establish a working relationship with them that massacres such as at Elim Mission occurred.35 By 1979, therefore, for all the talk of Chinese revolutionary strategies and the like, the relationship between the Patriotic Front and the peasantry was overwhelmingly focused on the guerrillas’ military needs. Villagers were persuaded or forced to form revolutionary committees, but they merely provided logistical and security support for the fighters, and were not designed to restructure village society.36 The sources of civilian support for the Zimbabwean guerrillas were thus complex and varied, and encompassed both coercion and voluntary participation. Indeed, the types of mobilisation used by the guerrillas and their outcome varied according not only to the ZANLAZIPRA strategic divide (the former adhering to a Maoist doctrine of peasant mobilisation, the latter employing more conventional tactics), but also to differences in time, place, tribe, ideology, religion, gender and generation.37 However, two general themes emerge from a study

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of guerrilla-civilian relations in the late 1970s. Firstly, whatever the causes of peasant support for the guerrillas, that support did not represent wholehearted backing of the Patriotic Front parties’ socialist programme. Everyday peasant resistance to the state, and the way this was used to further the guerrilla cause, should not be confused with socialist radicalism. Secondly, as the war intensified between 1976 and 1979, the cost of supporting the guerrilla cause became increasingly apparent to the rural African. Indeed, by 1979 fear was as significant a factor in rural Rhodesia as hope or political sacrifice. One of Kriger’s most valuable insights is her treatment of guerrilla violence towards African civilians as a product not of poor training, but of the structural constraints imposed by guerrilla war.38 Certainly, the difficulties of maintaining order in an exiled guerrilla army were legion. Mugabe himself acknowledged in 1977 that: ‘right from the Central Committee down to the smaller Party unit indiscipline pervades our entire structure’.39 But it was the stresses and strains of operating in a lethal environment where even one informant’s testimony to the state, however unwilling, would bring almost certain death, that led the guerrillas to kill more Africans than Europeans.40 Their regular interaction with the settler state meant that church leaders, chiefs and headmen, government agricultural advisers, Africans belonging to parties other than ZANU and ZAPU, farmworkers on white commercial farms, better-off farmers who marketed surpluses, councillors and African government employees (including teachers) were all suspect as potential informers.41 Separate guerrilla bands operating in the same area might give contradictory instructions as to whether schools should close, or the locals attend church. Failure to comply with either could be taken as a sign of disloyalty to the cause. Rhodesian infiltration of poisoned clothing and foodstuffs into the guerrilla supply line sowed distrust between guerrillas and civilians, leading in Dandane area for example to an increase in witchcraft accusations (with subsequent executions) by guerrillas towards peasant women.42 Two old men quoted in a report from the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Rhodesia best illustrate the peasant predicament: We are like maize pips being ground between two stones … If we report the terrorists, they come and kill us. If we do not report them, the soldiers come to torture us, and to destroy our homes and fields. But even if we report the terrorists, the soldiers torture us all the same, for they think we are trying to set them up. We just don’t know what to do.43 Importantly, this situation worsened in the last two years of the war, as guerrilla incursions intensified and with the entry into the war of

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Muzorewa’s Auxiliaries and the Guard Force. As a resident of Gokwe district recalled twenty years later of the situation in 1978: Ah! You see there were so many forces operating here. Sithole, from over there [pointing eastwards towards Sanyati], Muzorewa who was there at Nembudziya, ZAPU from there and there [indicating the North and West]. People were only afraid – not to support one party or another, but being afraid only.44 The Protected Villages may not have been popular, but opening them up, a politically necessary process begun in September 1978, exposed their inhabitants to threat from all sides. Ranger himself acknowledges that in 1978 and 1979 the guerrillas faced a crisis of legitimacy so severe and widespread that ‘observers with and outside the guerrilla movement began to fear a wholesale collapse of rural support’. The rapidly growing guerrilla numbers, all of whom had to live off the land in the absence of ‘liberated zones’ and secure supply routes, led to unbearable demands on the local population. Even in virtually liberated Katerere, in the far north-east, David Maxwell has found that in 1979 ZANLA forces’ impositions on local people led to severe strains in their relationship. The inexperience and indiscipline of the numerous new recruits saw them demand alcohol and access to young women in the areas they operated, placing a severe strain on guerrillapeasant relations. And the ‘black on black’ war that the Rhodesian civil war increasingly resembled following Muzorewa’s election in April 1979 started to assume some of the characteristics of a class war in African rural society.45 Indeed, Josephine Nhongo-Simbanegavi has used her privileged access to ZANU Party documents to show that the party itself recognised the widespread problems of guerrilla indiscipline in the late 1970s. As she observes: by 1979 things had deteriorated very badly in some areas. By then, some field commanders were desperately appealing to their leaders at the rear to send some ideologically equipped freedom fighters and teach not only the civilians but the guerrillas as well what the war was all about.46 Waning enthusiasm for the Patriotic Front guerrilla campaign, however, did not translate into support for the Salisbury regime. As discussed in Chapter 2, the counter-guerrilla tactics of the Rhodesian security forces failed to provide basic security for the rural peasantry. Indeed, the methods used by the troops to extract information about guerrilla movements and to deter civilian support for them, including the torture of civilians, the use of collective punishments and of propaganda showing the bodies of dead guerrillas, the shooting of curfew-breakers, and the indiscriminate shooting of civilians described

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as ‘running with terrorists’, actively alienated those in the rural hinterland.47 Moreover, the introduction of Muzorewa and Sithole’s paramilitaries exacerbated rather than eased the situation. Pockets of real support for Muzorewa did exist, for example in Gandanzara in Makoni District, but the recruitment for these forces from the urban poor rather than from the communities they were tasked to defend led to chronic indiscipline, looting, rape and intimidation of civilians.48 By 1979, therefore, the primary desire of most black Rhodesians was for peace, rather than for the victory of any particular African-led party, and it is this that best explains the large electoral turnout and the extent of the majorities achieved by first Muzorewa and then Mugabe in the April 1979 and February 1980 elections. Political considerations were not irrelevant in Muzorewa’s electoral defeat by Mugabe: for some, the nationalist Abel Muzorewa whose arrival in Salisbury in both July 1977 and March 1978 had been publicly greeted by anywhere between 100,000 and 250,000 black Rhodesians, had by signing the Internal Settlement agreement now sold out to white settler interests.49 Muzorewa’s performance especially in the interim government had done little to suggest that he would be able to act independently: discriminatory legislation, in particular the Land Tenure Act, was slow to be abolished; the Hove affair, where Muzorewa failed to support one of his nominated ministers who spoke out in favour of positive discrimination in the public services, further undermined his nationalist credentials; the four month delay in completing the Internal Settlement process beyond its supposed end in December 1978 further emphasised Muzorewa’s reliance on the goodwill of Smith and the Rhodesian Front; and the ‘surnaming’ of Zimbabwe as Zimbabwe Rhodesia only underscored that point. Even as prime minister, Muzorewa was unable to distinguish himself from his alleged white puppet-masters, most embarrassingly when he responded to Patriotic Front complaints during the post-Lancaster House election campaign about the presence of South African troops at Beit Bridge by openly supporting that presence and promising that a UANC government would expand and develop trade with South Africa.50 But it was military, not political, factors that were most significant in Muzorewa’s failure to win the 1980 elections. Put simply, Muzorewa had had his chance to end the war and he had failed. Muzorewa and Sithole complained of Patriotic Front intimidation of voters during the campaign period, but in reality the electoral successes of Nkomo and even more Mugabe were grounded in the advances on the ground that Patriotic Front guerrillas had made during the later 1970s.51 The Internal Settlement regime could air-

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drop pamphlets calling on the people to disown the guerrillas and support the new regime, but it was the Patriotic Front, with fighters on the ground, who could tell the people to do no such thing.52 The ZANU campaign slogan, ‘ZANU(PF) started the war of liberation, only ZANU(PF) can end the war’ left people in no doubt about the consequences of voting for Muzorewa, consequences which they were unwilling to stomach.53 By the time that the delegates convened at Lancaster House, therefore, relations between the Patriotic Front and the African civilian population were conducive to a settlement. On the one hand, the Patriotic Front could be reasonably confident of the civilian population’s loyalty, and if necessary they could enforce it with guerrillas who would stay away from the assembly points. On the other, it was a loyalty that stemmed more from organisational or ethnic allegiance, from the Patriotic Front’s military successes, and from a general desire to see the war end, than from attachment to a specific political programme. If the leaders of the Patriotic Front chose to accept a compromise at Lancaster House, even one that effectively ruled out sweeping land reform, they could do so without fear of a popular backlash. Civil War and the Rhodesian White Community Civilian political alienation, though, was not confined to the African population. The signing of the Lancaster House agreement was accompanied by legitimate concern over potential dissenting elements within the Rhodesian security forces, but there was no social base for continued active resistance to the new regime. Largely this stemmed from how white Rhodesia fought its war. For long, in fact, Rhodesian white society refused to accept that it was fighting a war at all. At least until 1975, government censorship effectively prevented understanding of developments on the Mozambican border from filtering into the towns, where most white Rhodesians lived. Even in the late 1970s, censorship effectively insulated the urban white population from what was happening in the bush.54 Anthony Chennells’ interesting study of Rhodesian novels discusses how for whites, the war, when it came, could not be a war; it could only be a rebellion which meant, in settler mythology, primitive space attempting to reabsorb civilian space, and it was as a battle against this reassertion of the primitive that the war was described and indeed fought.55

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The repulse of the ‘Communist Terrorists’ was thus an issue of public order, not politics, a job for the police as much as for the army. Both the military and diplomatic strategy adopted demanded that the civilian population trust their leaders and let them get on with it. The most glaring example of this was Ian Smith’s failure even to mention the Kissinger plan, outlined to him three days previously, at the Rhodesian Front annual congress in Umtali on 17 September 1976. ‘The continued development of Rhodesia depends on a stable government and a political environment which black majority rule cannot sustain’, declared the Statement of Government Policy adopted by the congress only one week before Smith’s public acceptance of majority rule.56 In 1975, however, the war and the surrounding political circumstances started to impinge heavily on white consciousness, most notably with the departure of the South Africa Police in August 1976 as relations between Vorster and Smith deteriorated, and the arrival of Russians and Cubans in southern Africa to defend Angola against the South African invasion of November 1975.57 Socially, this reflected itself partly in fear and unease, but mostly in a grim determination to resist ‘terrorism’ and preserve normality. Politically, white society increasingly consolidated behind the Rhodesian Front. Both the liberal ‘left’ (represented by Allan Savory’s National Unifying Force) and the advocates of ‘separate development’ on the white supremacist right (represented by the Rhodesian Action Party, which split from the Rhodesian Front in mid-1977) both saw their support base collapse. In the August 1977 general election, the Rhodesian Front took 85% of the vote, to the Rhodesian Action Party’s 9.3% and the National Unifying Force’s 4.5%.58 The 1969 Declaration of Rights was made non-justiciable to prevent the judiciary’s involvement in politics.59 Few dared challenge government orthodoxy: only the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace and the Catholic bishop of Umtali Donal Lamont were openly opposed. The former was periodically raided and censored, while the latter was sentenced to ten years of hard labour in September 1976 for ‘failing to report terrorists’.60 By the end of the war, opposition politics had collapsed. In the white elections held on 14 February 1980 under the provisions of Lancaster House, only six of the twenty seats were contested. The Rhodesian Front won all twenty.61 In his albeit reluctant negotiations with the internal nationalists and the Patriotic Front leadership, therefore, Ian Smith enjoyed a substantial freedom from popular constraints. ‘Good Old Smithy’ was the totem behind which white society rallied. But the price was collapsing morale and political disengagement, a fact which Smith himself observed in early 1977.62 To an extent, this flowed from the fragile nature of Rhodesian nationalism itself. As Godwin and

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Hancock note in perhaps their most telling observation, outsiders branded Rhodesians as racist colonialists, whereas in fact, most were ‘decent honourable folk’ who had come to Africa for a comfortable material existence. The 1969 census showed that whites born outside Rhodesia outnumbered those born inside by four to three. The hardships of war, which negated the material advantages of Rhodesianness, coupled with the relative weakness of Rhodesian tradition, made Rhodesia disintegrate rather easily.63 Most importantly, once Smith had conceded the principle of majority rule, white society began to question the point of fighting. Each government concession, first to talk to the guerrillas, then to enter the interim Internal Settlement government, and then to cede power to a black prime minister, and the subsequent failure of each to stop the war, instead of galvanising the white community into further defending their privileges, sapped their will to fight. This shows tellingly in the emigration statistics from the late 1970s. Rather than stay and fight to defend their country, increasing numbers of Rhodesians chose to leave, in spite of government restrictions preventing them from taking their capital with them.64 Castigated abroad as a sham designed to entrench white interests, the Internal Settlement was regarded with little fondness by the white community. The 85% ‘yes’ vote was rather a reflection of white desire to end the war and its tribulations.65 The about-turn of the Rhodesian Front leadership, from refusal to countenance majority rule, to handing over power to a black government which then accepted the Lancaster House agreement, failed to generate white resistance. Indeed, it could safely be argued that, by 1979 most Rhodesians were just hanging on in hope and, having discarded their ideological baggage, … were now the supreme pragmatists … prepared to “wait and see”.66

Lebanon Military-Civilian Relations: The ‘Civilians as Victims’ Thesis In the first part of the war, they [the militias] were the products of the group from which they emerged, and were objects of communal pride. This was especially pronounced in the Christian areas. In the second phase … [they] developed a more professional status, particularly under Bashir Gemayel. In the third phase …– around 1984-85 – the militias came to be

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rejected by the groups which had initially supported them. This phenomenon ultimately led to the Ta’if Agreement.67 A common theme of the scholarly and journalistic literature since the mid-1980s has been the alienation of the Lebanese civilian population from the militias.68 Occurring first in Muslim areas (particularly in West Beirut) and then in those controlled by the Christian militias, this was partly a consequence of militia greed and ill-discipline. Nabil Beyhum, in his study of the Yazbek quarter of West Beirut, describes how each time a new militia gained control of the quarter, ‘[elle] se pervertit peu à peu pour devenir l’instrument d’une oppression quasiabsolue’. Inhabitants were shot for opposing car thefts, shops blown up by racketeers, people kidnapped for ransom, and former members of other militias killed by booby-traps.69 Jaja might claim that ‘we as Lebanese Forces are responsible for every inch, every citizen, and every house in this area’, but even the once-disciplined Lebanese Forces earned themselves the sobriquet ‘the securitate’ in the Christian enclave by 1990.70 But partly, too, the militias’ alienation of their communities was caused by the nature of the war they were fighting. Penned each in their own cantons, the militias depended on tolls, taxes, confiscation of property, drug dealing and other nefarious activities to fund their activities, especially as outside funding declined. The failure of military offensives, whether by the Lebanese Forces in the Shouf in 1983 and in Sidon in 1985, or by Amal in the Camps War between 1985 and 1988, damaged the militias’ standing in their own communities.71 Moreover, the militias’ maintenance and attempted enforcement of communal cantons hardly resonated with those of their ‘constituents’, 40% of the population in East Beirut for example by 1990, whose homes lay elsewhere in Lebanon and who were living as refugees in often sub-standard accommodation.72 As a French reporter recorded on interviewing Sunni refugees around Sidon in 1989: ‘La politique ne les mobilise pas. Unanimes ils répondent: “On ne veut qu’une seule chose, retourner dans nos maisons et vivre en paix”’.73 And lastly, while the militias professedly subscribed to the notion of a Lebanese state (albeit one recast in their own favour), resonating well with popular sentiment, their real-life usurpation of that state belied their pronouncements. Popular disenchantment with the politics of civil war was increased by economic crisis. Despite the accompanying destruction, the war in its early years did not prove disastrous for the Lebanese economy. Certain areas of the economy suffered, especially those concerned with industry, tourism, transport, re-export, and educational and health services for visitors from elsewhere in the Arab world. But

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a series of factors kept the economy afloat: a considerable economic reserve amassed through ten years of strong economic growth prior to 1975; the oil boom after 1973, which brought demand for labour, goods and entrepreneurial skills, such that by 1980 remittances from the Gulf represented over 35% of Lebanese national income; the substantial ‘Palestinian economy’ of the quasi-state run by the PLO in Lebanon; and vast sums of political money poured into Lebanon by a large number of foreign powers to support the various militias.74 This was accentuated by an economic boost from the war itself: looting, confiscation and theft accentuated social mobility, providing an impetus to many sectors of the economy; the destruction of the centre of Beirut in 1975-76 allowed light industry and service operations to spring up in previously underdeveloped peripheral areas; and the breakdown of the state removed the nuisances of taxes and permits for the petty bourgeois entrepreneur.75 By 1990, however, the Lebanese economy had collapsed. The ‘parallel economy’ had grown to uncontainable limits; the end of the oil boom, the decline in oil prices, and the Iran-Iraq war had seen remittances drop from $2,254 million in 1980 to only $300 million in 1987; PLO headquarters had departed in 1982 along with much of their money; Syria and Israel had increasingly dominated Lebanese politics at the expense of wealthy regional actors such as Libya, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and their investments now came more as arms, training and political backing than as cash; and public and private economic reserves had been severely depleted.76 The result was a currency crisis that effectively destroyed the Lebanese middle class: from 2.35 Lebanese pounds to the US dollar in 1975, and still holding at 3.90 in 1982, the pound collapsed to 466 to the dollar in 1987, and to 850 by 1990.77 The consequence was popular revulsion against both militias and civil war. Throughout the war the population, 90% of whom after all took no part in the fighting, resisted the militias’ efforts to impose confessional conformity within their cantons.78 But the later 1980s saw a ‘remarkable and heroic resurgence of civil society’ against the oppression of the war system, and in November 1987 the nonsectarian General Confederation of Labour staged an anti-war demonstration in Beirut attended by 60,000 people from both sides of the divided city.79 Though unable to counter the military might of the armed factions, popular Lebanese discontent was reflected in surveys which demonstrated firm disillusionment with both militia and traditional leaders.80 Moreover, this was despite rather than because of the political settlements proposed at Taif and beforehand. Picard perceptively notes that the trauma of war had created an idealist image of the state that contrasted directly with that which had existed before

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1975, and indeed with that which emerged from Taif.81 Though antiSyrian invective was a much stronger feature of Christian rather than Lebanese Muslim political discourse, almost all Lebanese maintained a healthy distrust of Syria. As Jim Muir noted, not only was Michel Aoun’s nationalist message universally welcomed in Christian East Beirut, ‘he is also remarkably popular in West Beirut, where morale has probably never been lower. The Syrians are almost universally hated, and allied Lebanese leaders are despised’.82 Indeed, the Hoss government reached a low ebb of credibility in March 1990 with reports of widespread corruption and questionable contracts for the printing of Lebanese passports.83 According to Harik, the Syrian presence in Druze areas, too, was ‘greatly resented’.84 If there was a visible difference between Muslim and Christian attitudes towards Syria, it was that Christians often acted upon their opinions, while Muslims tended only to voice them in hushed tones. What mattered for the general populace by 1990, though, was not political principles but peace and stability. When Syrian troops entered West Beirut in 1987, they brought order. Prominent figures acknowledged that a Syrian withdrawal in 1989 would leave the population there open to the depredations of the militias.85 And when the Syrian army moved into East Beirut and cleared out the militias late in 1990, the shops and banks opened; schools, hospitals and universities went back to work; the rubbish began to be collected; and water and electricity started to flow, if not quite regularly. Military-Civilian Relations: A Reconsideration Care must be exercised, however, before accepting the previous analysis wholesale. For while the great majority of the Lebanese population was indeed tired of the war by the middle of 1990, this had not ever been so. Serious social and economic problems existed in Lebanon prior to the outbreak of war in 1975, and provided many of the militias with a popular support base. Those problems were not solved by the war. Moreover, the success of Michel Aoun and of Hizballah in mobilising popular support at the end of the 1980s, and indeed more generally the programmes of social services maintained by most of the Lebanese militias, casts doubt on some of the more uncritical assertions made by proponents of the ‘civilians as innocent victims’ thesis. Partly this is a question of sources. Much of the published material on the subject has been written by anti-militia proAounists, and the statements about public opinion made by Rondeau, Harris, Khazen and others must be treated carefully. Indeed, they suffer from a more general Lebanese predilection for blaming the war on outsiders, thereby absolving Lebanese society and politics from

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responsibility for its calamities.86 But more importantly the ‘classic’ analysis of popular disengagement from the war needs refinement and an injection of subtlety. Firstly, the social divisions that contributed to the outbreak of civil war in 1975 were deep and very real. The Lebanese economy had grown rapidly after 1950, first in agriculture and then in the early 1970s in industry and, especially, the service sector.87 The cost was severe social dislocation, primarily affecting the Muslim community. The shift towards cash-crops and the commercialisation of agriculture pushed tenant farmers and share-croppers off the land, especially in the Shia south, whence they migrated to the slums of southern Beirut.88 Inflation, rising rents and unemployment, all resulting from economic growth rather than decline, were exacerbated by political factors. Popular expectations had been raised by President Shihab’s reform programme in the early 1960s, but were then dashed by their abandonment when Suleiman Franjieh was elected president in 1970. Urbanisation not only raised expectations but also left migrants prey to the vagaries of Lebanon’s clientelist political system. Registered to vote in their home villages, they usually lacked a patron in Beirut and were thus more easily mobilised by radical organisations.89 The Sunni and Shia zu’ama, meanwhile, rather than press the social claims of their constituents in parliament, instead concentrated on deriving the considerable material and symbolic benefits that came from attaching themselves to the Lebanese establishment.90 Political ammunition was provided for Muslim radicals by demographic change. The National Pact of 1943 was founded on a slight Christian majority in Lebanon. By 1975 this had changed. Although no census had been conducted since 1932, the Christian population was now estimated as no more than 40% of the population, while the Shiis rather than the Sunnis now represented the largest Muslim sect.91 The Christian response came also at a popular level. With the state prevented by confessional vetoes from acting to contain the situation, the Ketaeb and the allied militias of the Lebanese Front drew numerous adherents to fight for the Christian community and Lebanese nationalism. The latter cause in particular was highlighted by the growing ‘state within a state’ run by the PLO in Lebanon, and the alliance between the PLO and the Lebanese Muslim LNM.92 Whether in Zahle, where the Lebanese Front gained local Christian adherents as frictions developed with Syria, or in South Lebanon, where the South Lebanon Army was formed by a core of Christian soldiers returning angrily home after their barracks were taken over by Ahmed Khatib’s Lebanese Arab Army in early 1976, ‘the people’ were as implicated in civil war as elites and outsiders.93

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Deprivation and dislocation, however, were necessary but not sufficient factors for the outbreak of civil war. Allied to their victims were the leaders and financial backers of the militias. Whether Christian or Muslim, they were men whom the confessional traditional politics of Lebanon had failed to accommodate. Some, especially Shiis, had prospered in the law, the professions, the civil service or abroad (especially in West Africa), but found hegemony over the industrial and commercial sectors exercised by Maronites and Sunnis, and, more importantly, political influence blocked by the stultifying system of neo-feudal Shia clan politics. Typical was Amal leader Nabih Berri: a lawyer, educated at the Lebanese University, born in Freetown in Sierra Leone, the son of a Shia émigré of no connections.94 Others came from historically powerful families: Kamal Jumblatt was leader of one of the two leading Druze families but was kept from high office by a confessional system that reserved the top three posts for Maronite, Sunni and Shia candidates. Bashir Gemayel was eldest son of the prominent Ketaeb leader Pierre, and like many of his senior lieutenants (whose age averaged only twentyseven in the early 1980s) it was generation rather than class that obstructed his ambitions.95 How the paths of these men diverged from those of their constituents is discussed later in this chapter, but in the early years of the war at least they spoke the same language. It was a language of ideology, whether of secularism and socialism in the case of the LNM or of social revolution within a Maronite national context. In both cases, it was a language that the style and content of Lebanese politics must change.96 That civilian-militia relations were sometimes cordial is illustrated by the social services operated by the militias in the areas they controlled.97 For example, after the collapse of central authority over the Christian areas, the Lebanese Forces ran a transport organisation, created public beaches, organised traffic management and security (including parking lots), imposed price controls to prevent profiteering, provided consumer protection, and sought to preserve public assets by taking inventories of public property. They also established social welfare policies. To organise these facilities, the militia assumed other attributes normally associated with nation-states. Apart from receiving money from abroad, the Lebanese Forces set up a system of mainly indirect taxation, and imposed customs duties at the ports it controlled. In addition, in Christian-held areas of the districts of Jbeil, Kisrawan, Metn, Baabda, Aley, Shouf and Beirut they operated a system of popular committees whose organisational structure at village level dealt with the provision of health, education, finance, environment control, civil defence, municipal services,

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planning, information, social affairs, government inspection, and sports and youth facilities.98 This was mirrored in the Druze Shouf, where in October 1983 the PSP created the Civil Administration of the Mountains (CAOM), whose revenue was derived mostly from road tolls, and which provided water, sewerage, transport, electricity, telephone, education, and housing services to the area’s inhabitants.99 Among the Shiis, Hizballah, with Iranian financial backing, provided extensive social services. Between 1985 and 1987, for example, Hizballah established two major hospitals, sixteen infirmaries, two dental clinics, three pharmacies and six civil defence centres in the Bekaa, the southern suburbs of Beirut, and South Lebanon.100 Amal did not provide social services as such, but instead used Berri’s presidency both of Amal and of the Superior Council (then Ministry) of the South – itself separated from the Ministry of Social Affairs in 1980 – to stamp South Lebanon as Amal’s virtual fiefdom.101 Military-Civilian Relations after the Israeli Withdrawal As civil war in Lebanon entered its second decade, however, the alliance between political protest and social deprivation that so contributed to the outbreak and early course of the war effectively dissolved. By 1990, the vast majority of the civilian population preferred an end to the fighting over and above any commitment they might have had to any particular political project. This is partially explained, as illustrated above, by the perversion of the militias from their stated objectives and the alienation of the civilian populace. The financial squeeze put on the militias in the late 1980s, and in particular in the Maronite community the death of Bashir Gemayel and the impact of the loss of his charismatic leadership on the mainly volunteer-serviced social programmes, all contributed to gradual alienation. But the other part of the explanation lies elsewhere, in the confessionalisation of the Lebanese civil war and the partial alleviation of the factors that caused the war. By 1990 the intensity of the Christian-Muslim and urban-rural socio-economic divides had softened. Civil war had lost Lebanon her position as middleman in the Middle Eastern, even global, capitalist system, with the sharp inequalities between the advanced service sector and backward agriculture that that position brought.102 The notable zu’ama class and the Christian middle class had been severely weakened, the former by urbanisation and the militias, the latter by the currency crisis of the late 1980s.103 The expulsion of many Shiis from Africa in the mid-1980s, meanwhile, brought them and their foreignacquired wealth back home, to the benefit of the economy in South Lebanon.104 Furthermore, central Beirut’s destruction and its political

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instability had led to both a relative repopulation of the countryside and the development of regional urban centres. Both saw a relative economic revival from the establishment of light industry, banks, insurance companies, shopping centres and branches of Beirut-based companies, assisted by the consequential construction boom.105 The Palestinian issue, too, had been remedied by 1990. Although the PLO maintained a presence in Lebanon, military action first by Israel, then by Syria, and then by Amal had effectively solved the problem of the PLO state within a state in Lebanon and had resolved the question of Lebanon’s position in the wider Middle Eastern conflict. By 1985 even the PLO’s former LNM allies were clearly opposed to a return to the pre-1982 Palestinian situation. The abrogation in May 1987 of both the 1969 Cairo agreement with the PLO and the May 1983 agreement with Israel represented a symbolic consensus between Lebanese Christians and Muslims on Lebanese policies towards Palestine and Israel.106 In the words of Kamal Salibi: In the continuing national quarrel … the central issue is no longer the question of the Lebanese national allegiance, but the terms of the political settlement which all the sides to the conflict, certainly at the popular level, generally desire.107 Any remaining social radicalism was stifled by the increasingly sectarian basis of the war. The cause of this is variously adduced: the mobilisation of the Maronite community along religious lines, forcing Shiis to follow suit; the combined forces of Maronitism and Shiism doing the same to Sunnis; and Muslims treating all Christians alike, pushing Greek Catholics and even Orthodox into the arms of political Maronitism.108 But in a process that began almost as soon as the war started and that drew on traditional Lebanese concepts of asabiya mixed with rather more modern forms of ethnic nationalism, the forces of Nasserism, socialism and communism that had seemed so prominent in the early 1970s gave way to a dynamic that privileged communal solidarity above all else.109 The reaction of leaders, parties and militias to this phenomenon is addressed below, but at a popular level the effect was to strip away even Shia support from parties like the Lebanese branch of the Syrian Baath Party, the Communist Action Organisation and the Lebanese Communist Party, and to confessionalise others.110 This last is illustrated by the fate of the PSP: founded in 1949 as a multisectarian party to seek social democratic secular change, it remained so until the 1980s. The multicommunal PSP leadership, though, fearing the loss of Druze support after Kamal Jumblatt’s assassination in 1977, elected his son Walid as president despite his relatively junior position. Walid, in turn, made rallying Druze support his top priority, undermining the party’s standing as a

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secular force.111 The consequence of ‘sectopolitics’, as Richani terms it, was not a simple abandonment of popular political commitment. Khashan’s surveys show the extent of the political divisions between members of the various communities, a fact reinforced by the more confessionally exclusive living patterns caused by the war.112 Amal, the PSP and the Lebanese Forces, among others, all benefited from the increasingly sectarian basis of the war. But as sect replaced political programme as the primary source of loyalty in Lebanese politics, it placed the traditional concerns of the Lebanese political game to the fore: the distribution of parliamentary seats, offices, and communal privileges. The more intractable problems of Lebanon’s social and economic structure were relegated to the back burner. The socially conservative solution of Taif could be enacted without fear of popular reaction. If one consequence of increasing sectarianism was that social radicalism was quelled, there were others too. For while sect became the central loyalty of most Lebanese, sect proved incapable of providing a basis for solidarity. With religion itself often almost incidental in sectopolitics – figures such as Maronite Patriarch Khuraysh and Sunni Mufti Sheikh Khaled did their utmost to prevent the war becoming sectarian – the propensity of all sects to splinter under the pressure of war was key to the decline of popular commitment to the militias.113 Indeed, sectarian infighting was in part responsible for the decline in popularity of two movements that did gain popular support in the midst of civil war: Hizballah, and that of Michel Aoun. Both had attracted mass followings, largely through the failings of the major existing politico-military organisations. Emerging in 1983 and given impetus by the Iranian revolution and the more general regional Islamist resurgence that followed the 1967 Six-Day War, Hizballah garnered support through its exploitation of central Shia symbols (such as the annual ashura processions), through discontent with Amal’s corruption and compromise with Syrian and even Israeli forces, and through its active resistance against the Israeli occupation.114 Reinforcing this with a well-resourced social programme that appealed in action as well as word to the deprived, victimised and displaced, Hizballah gained a substantial Shia following in the Bekaa, West Beirut and the southern suburbs, and in a few southern villages.115 Aoun, meanwhile, though not especially popular while army commander under Amin Gemayel, attracted huge public support when appointed temporary prime minister in September 1988, thanks to the power of his populist, anti-Syrian, anti-warlord and anti-establishment message. As former foreign minister Elie Salem put it:

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He was the David to an indefinite Goliath, and this image was well received by all the non-sophisticated in Lebanon, irrespective of religion and locale. … He identified the two most important idols – Syria and America – and attacked them both. At least this called for courage, and the people, longing for a hero of the “mission impossible” found in him a leader ready to assume the mantle.116 The role that public opinion could play in civil war is no better illustrated than by the demonstrations outside Baabda after the signing of the Taif agreement, forcing the Syrians and their Lebanese allies to back down from their forthcoming offensive. Hizballah and the Aoun phenomenon are important. They both demonstrate that popular political demobilisation in civil war is neither an inevitable nor a linear process. Charismatic movements or leaders can resuscitate popular engagement with belligerent factions. Equally, though, it is vital to note that neither Hizballah nor Aoun succeeded in maintaining widespread popular support. Partly, this stemmed from the nature of the movements themselves. Hizballah’s religious militancy, closing coffee shops and banning parties and loud music, appealed to some but alienated many more. Dependence on Iran did little for Hizballah’s credibility among a Shia community that regarded itself as distinctly Lebanese: ‘people today find it hard to be moved by the fact that in the sixteenth century shaykhs of Jebel Amal journeyed to Iran to serve the dynasty’, commented one astute observer.117 Aoun, meanwhile, attracted a following with more breadth than depth, ‘not so much support for one political figure over another as … a heady celebration of the common citizen’s involvement in politics’.118 But both Aoun and Hizballah also encountered the constraints inherent in civil war in Lebanon. High-handed behaviour in the south, unproductive provocation of Israel, and alliance with the PLO all damaged Hizballah’s standing in the area. Further, most Shiis disapproved of Hizballah’s holding of Western hostages and in particular resented the opprobrium heaped on the community as a whole. And, most damaging of all, the intra-Shii civil war of 19871990 split families, forcing thousands from their homes.119 Aoun faced similar problems. His reputation for incorruptibility blown when the French satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné revealed him holding £9.5 million in a French bank account, Aoun’s assault on the Lebanese Forces in January 1990 and the consequent prolonged intraChristian bloodletting profoundly shook the Christian community and led to disillusionment among his supporters. This only increased in

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1990 as Aoun’s army officers took up racketeering and extortion, while he himself edged closer to Syria. In November 1989, thousands of civilian demonstrators crowded round the presidential palace at Baabda to prevent a direct Syrian assault on Aoun. In October 1990 they were nowhere to be seen. 120

Comparison Ground-level socio-economic factors, affecting wide swathes of the civilian populations, played a critical role in the outbreak of civil war in Rhodesia and Lebanon. The preceding twenty-five years in Rhodesia had seen the average amount of land available to the black peasant decline substantively in the face of evictions and population growth. The state, meanwhile, had become increasingly obtrusive in rural areas, its agricultural conservation policies proving extremely unpopular. Lebanon too saw farmers pushed off the land, not by the state but by the steady mechanisation and industrialisation of farming in the 1960s. The common threads are that of uneven development and of population growth amongst poorer communities: both countries saw their GDP rise in the years prior to civil war, but a by-product of that rise was the creation of large marginalised communities, who responded readily to the call to arms. Were it not for these developments, and for the determination of Rhodesian whites and Lebanese Christians alike to respond both to them and to the external forces of ‘international communism’ and Palestinian radicalism, civil war could not have broken out in Rhodesia or Lebanon. The settlements that brought both wars to an end, though, were markedly socially conservative. As discussed in Chapter 1, despite the socially transformative rhetoric employed by the guerrilla leadership, the Lancaster House agreement paved the way for a blackdominated parliament, but did not provide for effective land reform, let alone socialism. The Taif agreement provided for a readjustment of Lebanon’s sectarian balance in the Assembly, but maintained the confessional political system and did nothing to address the agenda of social radicals, whether leftist or Islamist. How could this have happened? If ordinary people had contributed so much to the outbreak of war, if during the war they had provided manpower and supplies for regular armies, for militias, and for guerrilla movements, why did they not react forcefully against being ‘sold out’ by their political leaderships? For however much the settlements disappointed both status quo and radical sections of public opinion in both countries, there was little or no popular resistance to the Syrian yoke

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or the ‘anachronistic’ National Pact in Lebanon, the ‘Communist Terrorists’ or the unjust distribution of land in Rhodesia. The clear answer that emerges from role played by civilians in both wars is that after seven and fifteen years of war, the costs of civil war in Rhodesia and Lebanon respectively had all but neutralised the civilian population as a political factor, reducing the importance of the grievances that helped cause civil war in the first place. Right from the start, the belligerent communities of both countries were composed of complex coalitions. Peasant discontentment with colonial agricultural policies in Rhodesia may have led many to make common cause with an emerging black middle class hankering after greater political and economic influence, but it did not make their interests identical. Nabih Berri and his colleagues could use Shia relative deprivation to advance their political cause, but it did not mean that they would put their constituents’ causes above their own when tough choices had to be made. In Rhodesia and Lebanon, the process of fighing a civil war drove a wedge between leaders and their supposed civilian constituents. Throughout both wars, civilians were directly targeted by armies, militias and guerrillas. Black Rhodesian peasants were forced to provide shelter and supplies for infiltrating guerrillas, while those with links to the Rhodesian state were frequently summarily executed. The Rhodesian security forces, meanwhile, imposed harsh collective punishments on villages suspected of giving willing or even unwilling support to the Zimbabwean guerrillas. White Rhodesian civilians often fared little better: attacks on white farms were part of guerrilla strategy, and the Agricalert system employed by the embattled farmers and their families could not prevent a large number being killed. In Lebanon, civilians were as much victims of their ‘own’ communal militias as they were of their opponents’. The militia system was sustained by corruption, racketeering, kidnapping, informal taxation and theft, with civilians its main targets. Where military campaigns took place, they often – as in the case of Aoun’s ‘War of Liberation’ – claimed far more civilian lives than military. In both countries, the result was disempowerment and disillusionment of civilian communities with the grand motives for civil war. Those who could chose exile. The majority sat still, their disillusionment only increased by economic decline and factional infighting within their own communities, and hoped more for the end of hostilities than for the achievement of any specific political goals. Two further features, though, are also apparent. Firstly, civilian suffering was as much a product of the structure of civil war as it was of indiscipline or freely chosen policy of the fighting forces. Strategically and tactically, civil war in Rhodesia and Lebanon was

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quite different, but both wars almost forced the belligerents to target civilians. In Lebanon the targeting was primarily financial: with the front-lines largely static, extracting money from their ‘constituents’ was the most obvious method for the militias to fund their activities. In Rhodesia, meanwhile, the inability of either belligerent to exert sole control over rural areas led both to use force to gain the compliance of the civilian population. As in Algeria in the 1990s, it became rational for both sides to kill civilians.121 The second feature is that in both countries, the problems facing civilians seem to have been getting significantly worse in the period leading up to the conclusion of a peace settlement. In Rhodesia the years 1978 and 1979 threatened a crisis in rural African society, as increasing guerrilla numbers, widespread indiscipline, and the Rhodesian security forces’ employment of ‘on-sides’ guerrillas in the shape of Muzorewa’s and Sithole’s private armies began to overwhelm rural communities. This same period also saw a peak in white resignation, emigration and demoralisation. In Lebanon, the currency plumbed new depths in the late 1980s, while fighting between Amal and Hizballah, and between Aoun and the Lebanese Forces, not only brought the ravages of civil war to new areas of Lebanon, but also emphasised the nakedly power-political motives of the protagonists. Taif and Lancaster House failed to address the social and especially economic problems that affected non-combatants at a day-to-day level, but at least they promised to end the fighting. The comparisons evident here are interesting and important, but they need to be treated with caution if they are to be used to help us understand the ending of the Rhodesian and Lebanese civil wars, and civil wars more generally. For a start, the path to civilian political demobilisation was neither simple nor linear. Figures such as Ian Smith, Joshua Nkomo, Kamal Jumblatt and Bashir Gemayel commanded immense popular respect. The Lebanese militias with their social services, the Zimbabwean guerrillas by freeing the peasantry from hated state agricultural programmes, and the Rhodesian state with its built-in reservoir of popular legitimacy amongst its white electorate all inhibited the process of civilian disillusionment. Thousands turned out to defend Michel Aoun in a human shield, Hizballah gained a sizeable popular following its emergence eight years after the civil war started, and Mugabe swept the February 1980 elections. In the end, though, these displays of public support were broader than they were deep. The vote for Mugabe was as much in favour of ending the war as it was of his political programme. Hizballah’s support derived significantly from its

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financial clout. And Michel Aoun’s civilian support virtually evaporated after his campaign against the Lebanese Forces. More importantly, while civilian disempowerment and disengagement may have allowed the socially conservative settlements of Lancaster House and Taif to emerge without challenge, there is little direct evidence that developments in military-civilian relations actually propelled a settlement forwards. Even if the conditions for civilians were worsening in the last months of the two wars, there is no evidence that most belligerent leaders took this into consideration when formulating their bargaining positions. The only one to do so was Ian Smith, who feared the consequences of increasing white Rhodesian emigration – ‘gapping it’ – in the late 1970s, but it did not propel him to compromise: in late 1979 not only did he vote to reject the Lancaster House settlement but he was also out of power. Like events on the battlefield, the state of civilian-military relations objectively favoured peace, but this did not necessarily translate into the subjective positions of the belligerent leaderships. This is not to undermine the importance of developments here: on the contrary, a stable compromise peace would have been very difficult to achieve in the early stages of war when the civilian population was highly politicised. In both wars the depoliticisation of civilians provided a key ingredient for the success of their respective peace settlement. But if are to understand why factional leaders themselves were prepared to accept the Lancaster House and Taif agreements, we must investigate political developments with the belligerent elites.

4 INTRA-FACTIONAL POLITICS One of the principal weaknesses of theroetical approaches to civil war that focus on peace negotiations and military developments is their tendency to view belligerent factions as unitary rational actors akin to states in the realist conception of international relations. Like states, though, and perhaps even more so, such factions are far from monolithic entities. Cleavages within leaderships can have multiple sources, most obviously the power struggle.1 But power struggles are often overlaid with other cleavages within leaderships. One source is that of organisational tension: all wars, civil wars included, tend to give more influence to military figures in the decision-making structure.2 Among guerrilla and militia groups, this is exacerbated by the series of stages through which such movements must pass: articulation, mobilisation, insurgency, and warfare. With each stage requiring different characteristics on the part of the groups’ leaders, the passage from one stage to another is often marked by leadership change, as seen in Algeria in 1992 (aided by the regime’s imprisonment of most of the Islamist leadership) and in Oman in the 1960s. These tensions are often reflected in power struggles between different generations within the leadership. Debates and power struggles also emerge over long-term goals and the tactics to achieve them. Although many see polarisation as occurring within the leaderships as conflict continues, this polarisation does not necessarily occur evenly across the leadership of a particular group. Differences from ideological, regional and sub-ethnic divides can play a significant role in deconstructing the monolithic nature of belligerent units. Further, all these factors tend to be exacerbated by the process of peacemaking: In preparing a military campaign, military leaders and civilian officials can effectively work together in large teams to create a well-meshed, integrated plan. This holds true, almost regardless of how well or how badly the war is going. By contrast, planning to end a war where victory seems out of reach is not a task on which men can easily collaborate.3

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What, then, are the consequences of the heterogeneous nature of belligerent leaderships? It is generally agreed that internal dissent and, particularly, leadership change can contribute to the success of peace negotiations.4 As Stedman observes, ‘the mere fact of leadership change or strife adds fluidity to what may have been a logjammed conflict; possibilities for settlement are created that did not exist before’. Thus King suggests that Joaquim Chissano’s accession to power in Mozambique after the death of Samora Machel in 1986 allowed talks to begin with RENAMO in Nairobi three years later, while the death of Chechen leader Dudayev in April 1996 allowed talks between Russia and his successors Yandarbiyev and Maskhadov. An obdurate leader’s replacement can open the road to meaningful negotiation, even where his successor is a purported revolutionary. For while the rhetoric of revolutionary leaders almost always seeks complete transformation of the political system, they may prove much more pragmatic in a negotiating situation.5 And while war will accentuate the role of the military in decision-making, that does not necessarily make peace less likely. As Craig and George point out, ‘in many crises, military leaders have been more reluctant to resort to force than civilian leaders, and in some wars military leaders have taken the initiative for terminating hostilities’.6 However, internal diversity and leadership change can hinder as well as enhance the prospects for settlement, as indicated by the role of splinter groups. For while a definitive split within a faction can undercut the power of those remaining committed to the struggle, splinter groups can so split and enfeeble factions that the movement reverts to mobilisation, where the primary focus of those vying for internal power is to cement a reputation as a reliable defender of group interests, with the attendant disastrous consequences for the prospects of a compromise settlement, as with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army in 1991.7 This problem illustrates a wider difficulty for those trying to compromise to make peace, that they consistently face charges of betrayal from hard-liners. Where leaders are engaged in an internal power struggle, they may well be unable to make the compromises required of them. When they do attempt to make compromise, they may be forced out, as Armenian president Levon Ter-Petrossian discovered to his cost in 1998 when attempting to reach a compromise with Azerbaijann over Nagorno-Karabakh.8 Additionally, as peace rarely favours or harms all of a group’s components equally, leaders may come under attack from those who feel they may lose out from a settlement. Thus Horowitz argues that the intransigence of the mainly non-Vellala caste Tamil Tiger leadership in Sri Lanka stemmed not just from the state of TamilSinhalese relations, but also from the fact that for them, settlement

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raised the spectre of renewed Vellala dominance within the Tamil community.9 How, then, did such or similar developments impact on the dynamics of peace-making in Rhodesia and Lebanon? It is well known that the process of fighting a war leads to changes in combatants’ war aims, but what were those changes wrought in Rhodesia and Lebanon? In particular, what was it that led status quo elites to compromise on their hegemonic visions, and insurgent leaderships to all but jettison their commitment to social radicalism? An investigation of the internal politics of the belligerent factions offers a great many clues.

Rhodesia Leadership Struggle and Ideology in the African Nationalist Movement If, as discussed in Chapter 3, both leaderships came to Lancaster House relatively free of popular constraints on compromise, what were the processes within those political elites that allowed them to sign up to an agreement? On the nationalist side, what emerges most clearly is on the one hand the strong positions that both Mugabe and Nkomo enjoyed within their own organisations at Lancaster House after several years of intense internecine strife, but on the other the frosty relations between them. Their pre-eminent position within the nationalist movement was by no means preordained. For all the condemnation heaped upon them for participating in the Internal Settlement, Sithole and Muzorewa held much sway in the early 1970s, the former as leader of ZANU, the latter as the head of the ANC. Their entry into the political cul-de-sac that led to the Internal Settlement resulted not from a lack of nationalist credentials, but rather from a combination of misjudgement and misfortune.10 By aligning themselves too closely to their Front-Line sponsors at the expense of relations with their own fighters, for example in defending Kaunda’s interpretation of the assassination of Herbert Chitepo as the product of inter-tribal rivalry within ZANU, and in failing to defend their own fighters after a clash between Zambian troops and ZANLA guerrillas at Mboroma camp in September 1975 that left eleven guerrillas dead, Muzorewa and Sithole left themselves too dependent on Front-Line goodwill.11 When the Front-Line states needed warmongering instead of peacemaking from the Zimbabwean nationalists after the failure of détente, neither Muzorewa nor Sithole could deliver.

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Even then, it took further mistakes to sideline them completely. Sithole’s final error came in September 1975 with his choice of appointments to the Zimbabwe Liberation Army, the armed wing of the Zimbabwe Liberation Council that he had just established as the external wing of the umbrella ANC organisation. Though the guerrillas did not in principle object to the Zimbabwe Liberation Council or Zimbabwe Liberation Army as vehicles for continuing the struggle after the disastrous Victoria Falls conference, Sithole decisively alienated them by marginalising the ZANLA high command and instead appointing his nephew John Gwindingwi as commander and giving prominence to Noel Mukono and Simpson Mutambanengwe, both implicated in the Rhodesian-supported Nhari rebellion within ZANU in December 1974.12 Muzorewa’s critical mistake came one year later. Obviously weakened by the renewed emphasis on guerrilla struggle, Muzorewa had nevertheless managed to stay among the nationalist leadership after Victoria Falls, from where he conducted a bitter struggle with Nkomo for leadership of the ANC.13 Then, in September 1976, Nkomo approached Muzorewa in Gaborone with an offer to form a united front. Seeing in Nkomo a man who had recently damaged his reputation by talking directly to Ian Smith, and who could offer Muzorewa only a small active guerrilla force, Muzorewa unwisely overplayed his hand, and declined the offer. By doing so he facilitated the formation of the Patriotic Front between ZANU and ZAPU the following month, and so left himself with no way out other than into the arms of the Rhodesian Front.14 The leadership configuration that filled the gap left by Muzorewa and Sithole was far from automatic. Imprisoned by the Rhodesian authorities between 1964 and the end of 1974, it was only gradually between 1975 and 1977 that Mugabe established his leadership of ZANU. His title of ‘secretary-general’ of ZANU at its founding disguises that he was just one of many prominent figures in the organisation, each with their own grand-sounding title.15 That he did achieve overall leadership was primarily as a result of the assassination, probably by Rhodesian agents, of Herbert Chitepo, the leader of ZANU’s external wing, in Lusaka on 18 March 1975.16 Intending to foster nationalist unity under moderates who would actively co-operate in the détente process, the Zambian authorities interpreted the assassination as the result of inter-tribal rivalries within ZANU and within the week, with Mozambican assistance, they imprisoned almost the entire ZANU leadership. Mugabe, however, was confined with Edgar Tekere under loose house arrest at Quelimane on the Mozambican coast. Allowed to travel to the guerrilla camps in Mozambique, he built a support base with his condemnation of the détente process, thereby winning the approval of

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the imprisoned ZANU leadership, expressed in the Mgagao Declaration of October 1975: An Executive Member who has been outstanding is Robert Mugabe. He has demonstrated this by defying the rigours of guerrilla life in the jungles of Mozambique. Since we respect him most, in all our dealings with the ANC leadership, he is the only person who can act as a middle man.17 Despite a subsequent declaration of Mugabe’s leadership from the ZANU war council, the Dare re Chimurenga, in January 1976, Mugabe still had far to go to achieve overall control.18 By 1976, three strata had emerged within the ZANU leadership: the founding ‘old guard’ (including Mugabe, Tekere, Enos Nkala, Edison Zvobgo and Maurice Nyagumbo); those such as Tongogara, Rugare Gumbo, Mukute Hamadziripi and Kumbirai Kangai, who had emerged in exile as leaders of the armed struggle; and the young Marxist guerrillas of the Zimbabwe People’s Army (ZIPA) under Dzinashe Machingura and Rex Nhongo, the ‘Third Force’ sponsored by the Front-Line states in 1976 as a military alternative to the squabbling nationalist politicians. With the first group imprisoned in Rhodesia until December 1974, and the second imprisoned in Zambia until October 1976, the showdown for ZANU leadership was deferred until the three groups confronted each other in Mozambique in late 1976.19 Mugabe’s victory was substantially attributable to his alliance with Tongogara. The political-military axis that this represented, coupled with Front-Line state support, enabled them to have the entire ZIPA leadership arrested and imprisoned in Mozambique in early 1977, with the exception of Nhongo, who defected to Mugabe.20 Mugabe’s constitutional position was secured at a nine-day meeting of the ZANU Central Committee at Chimoio starting on 31 August 1977, where he was pronounced president of both the party and army of ZANU.21 Even this did not insure him against further dissent, and another wave of arrests, most notably including Gumbo and Hamadziripi, followed in early 1978 after a rebellion sparked by the Rhodesian attack on Chimoio in November 1977.22 By early 1979, therefore, Mugabe and Tongogara were as predominant within ZANU as they could realistically hope. Successive waves of dissent had been quashed, and the military was now answerable to the political wing. In contrast to Mugabe within ZANU, Nkomo was predominant within ZAPU from its founding in 1963, despite his detention by the Rhodesian authorities between 1964 and 1974. This was, though, at the cost of repeated break-aways, most notably by ZANU in 1964, but also by James Chikerema and George Nyandoro,

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who formed FROLIZI (Front for the Liberation of Zimbabwe) in October 1971 after their failed putsch within ZAPU, and by Walter Mthimkhulu’s ‘March 11th Movement’ also in 1971. Most importantly of all, ZAPU’s disarray in 1971 caused it to decline FRELIMO’s offer of operational bases inside Mozambique. This led FRELIMO to make the same offer to ZANU, which in turn not only led to the defection to ZANU of senior ZAPU military figures such as Rex Nhongo and Robson Manyika, but also facilitated ZANU’s predominant role in the guerrilla war against the Rhodesian state.23 Released to participate in the détente process, Nkomo faced a series of challenges that originated in the conflicts between the political wing of ZAPU and ZIPRA, its military counterpart, between Kalanga and Ndebele tribal factions, and between ideological radicals (mostly based outside Rhodesia) and the internal ‘moderates’ who supported Nkomo in his repeated but controversial negotiations with Ian Smith. Nkomo’s success in overcoming these divisions was largely due to his relationship with Jason Moyo, military commander and political leader of the exiled ZAPU militants. Moyo’s killing in early 1977 by a Rhodesian parcel bomb left Nkomo exposed, and in 1978 he had to suppress a rebellion by the new ZIPRA military commander Nikita Mangena. By mid-1978, though, Nkomo and most of the ‘centrists’ interned with him in Rhodesia (including Josiah Chinamano, Joseph Msika and Willie Musarurwa) had firmly established themselves in Zambia at the expense of the ‘militants’, and kept ZIPRA under the control of the ZAPU political machine.24 By 1979, then, Mugabe and Nkomo were relatively secure at the head of ZANU and ZAPU respectively, and had asserted political control over the ZANLA and ZIPRA guerrillas. Relations between these two wings of the Patriotic Front, though, were complex and often tense. Much of this stemmed from antipathy at troop level. With ZANU and ZAPU increasingly drawing on Shona and Ndebele recruits respectively, ethnic overtones were added to organisational rivalries, which often spilled over into violence. This happened most clearly in the ZIPA experiment, the effort by the Front-Line states in 1975-76 to bypass the existing political hierarchies and unify the two guerrilla movements. ZIPRA elements within ZIPA justly accused ZANLA elements of massacring their comrades at the Morogoro and Iringa training camps in Tanzania, and as the newly-created ZIPA squads each comprising eight ex-ZANLA guerrillas and two exZIPRA guerrillas began to infiltrate Rhodesia from Mozambique in early 1976, many of the ex-ZIPRA men drifted back to Matabeleland or Zambia.25 Even under the looser umbrella of the Patriotic Front, with ZIPRA operating from Zambia and ZANLA from Mozambique,

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clashes occurred when the two met. Hundreds were reported killed in further clashes at training camps in Tanzania in 1978; senior Patriotic Front commanders openly admitted in 1979 that their troops sometimes fought each other in the bush in Rhodesia; and even after Lancaster House, mortar fire was exchanged between ZANLA and ZIPRA troops at the only mixed ZANLA/ZIPRA assembly point.26 Before the Patriotic Front was founded in October 1976, unity at commander level between ZANU and ZAPU had proved equally elusive. ZANU itself was a break-away from ZAPU, and efforts by the Front-Line states to reunite the two in the shape of the Joint Military Command in 1967 and the Zimbabwe Liberation Council in 1973 were sabotaged by ZAPU and ZANU respectively, neither wanting to compromise while it held the upper hand in the nationalist movement.27 Even the Patriotic Front, set up at Front-Line state insistence in October 1976 as Nkomo rebounded from being rebuffed by Muzorewa and as Mugabe sought to curry favour with the FrontLine states and re-establish his control over the ZANLA guerrillas in ZIPA, began life merely as an agreement to send a joint delegation to the Geneva conference. It was essentially a tactical alliance, and did not involve the merging of political or military structures.28 Though the Patriotic Front was to last just over three years, and in fact solidified somewhat in the face of the Internal Settlement, problems continued to dog it. Discussions were continued about forging deeper unity at both military and political levels, but were frustrated by ZIPRA’s fear of being swamped by a purely military integration, and ZANU’s fear that Nkomo’s position as the father-figure of Zimbabwean nationalism would lead to his elevation to the leadership of a politically united Patriotic Front. Mistrust was preserved by disagreements over the desirability of an all-party peace conference and of the need for independence elections, over the Chinese-supplied ZANU’s jealousy of ZAPU’s access to superior Soviet weaponry, over ZAPU’s perceived inactivity, and most importantly over Nkomo’s diplomatic advances to Smith in 1978.29 And on 2 January 1980, after Lancaster House, the Patriotic Front disintegrated with the decision by the ZANU Central Committee to stand alone in the February 1980 elections, and not as the Patriotic Front.30 Two consequences conducive to the war’s settlement emerged both from the personalities of the victorious elements in the intranationalist power struggle and from the process of their victory: the downgrading of ideology and increased dependence on external actors. Ideological pronouncements regarding the means of armed struggle and the ends of socialist transformation certainly played heavily in Patriotic Front rhetoric, particularly in that of ZANU. In public the

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guerrillas constantly abjured the negotiating process: ‘a system sustained by violence can only be overthrown by violence. War can only be defeated by war’, stated Mugabe in 1978.31 From their explicit adoption of scientific socialism in 1972-73 articulated in their ‘Mwenje No. 2’ political programme, ZANU speeches and propaganda literature repeatedly stressed their opposition to capitalism and neocolonialism.32 But as Chingono observes, the defeat and detention of the radical elements within ZANU in 1977 led not only to an increasingly commandist and authoritarian style of leadership by Mugabe and his followers, but also to the depoliticisation of the movement itself.33 In truth, in contrast to the younger Soviet- and Chinese-trained radicals of ZIPA, formal Marxist-Leninist ideology always sat uneasily with Mugabe’s and Nkomo’s generation, whose formative political experiences had occurred in the heyday of nationalist African anti-colonialism in the 1950s and early 1960s, rather than in the more explicitly Marxist-Leninist atmosphere of anticolonialism in the 1970s.34 Despite their public allegiance to MarxismLeninism, Mugabe and the ‘old guard’ closed down Wampoa College, established by the ZIPA leadership to train the military elite in ideology, in July 1977. Mere possession of the Wampoa syllabus by ZANLA cadres became a serious offence.35 Nhongo-Simbanegavi’s study of women in ZANLA shows how, despite ZANU’s socialistinspired rhetoric of women’s emancipation and its creation of a Department of Women’s Affairs, in practice the organisation remained staunchly traditional in its assumptions about women and the appropriate roles for them.36 The tenor of Mugabe’s pronouncements varied according to his audience. In Mozambique and Ethiopia, and not least to his Chinese benefactors, he stressed his Marxist-Leninist commitment. To a French magazine interviewer he emphasised his Catholic upbringing and declared that, ‘j’ai été élevé chez les catholiques. … Je ne trouve d’ailleurs aucune différence entre l’idéal du christianisme et la praxis marxiste’. And to the World Conference against Apartheid, Racism and Colonialism in Southern Africa he placed land hunger at the top of the nationalist grievance list.37 Nkomo too proclaimed his party’s ‘revolutionary’ status, but with even less emphasis on formal ideology and on what ‘revolutionary’ meant.38 Though many have written denying that ethnicity lay behind the original ZANU-ZAPU split and downplaying its role in the frictions between the two parties, recruitment patterns and areas of operation did increasingly define the two parties in ethnic rather than ideological terms, ZANU as Shona, ZAPU as Ndebele (and Kalanga).39 The difficulty of distinguishing ideological and power motives behind policy is well known, and the two are often intertwined. Yet, as Gould-Davies points out:

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The pursuit of power and implementation of principle may be compatible to a degree, but there must be a point at which the two pull in different directions and imply alternative policies.40 Retrospectively, one can identify a trend in Patriotic Front discourse that gave priority to majority rule over and above socialist transformation and even land reform. Publicly this was phrased in terms of time: the acquisition of power would enable a new government to enact land, educational and economic reforms as soon as they became practical. Socialism in Zimbabwe must necessarily proceed differently than in the USSR, China or even Mozambique.41 Despite contemporary assumptions to the contrary (most notably of Kissinger), Mugabe proved himself a pragmatist rather than an ideologue.42 With even Machel admitting by late 1979 that the Mozambican revolutionary socialist experiment had gone dangerously wrong and encouraging the ZANU Central Committee not to scare the Rhodesian white community into precipitate flight, the Patriotic Front leaders could accept an agreement that offered them a good shot at gaining power but which limited the prospects for social radicalism, much less socialism.43 The processes of fighting a guerrilla war and factional infighting, therefore, had by 1979 left the leaders of the Patriotic Front relatively free of popular, élite and ideological constraints inhibiting them from accepting a compromise that was politically radical but socially conservative. However, these same processes increased their dependence on the Front-Line states. Zambia and Mozambique could use their position as host-neighbours to control the flow of recruits to the guerrillas, to provide instructors and training bases in varying quantities, and to give or remove permission for the guerrillas to infiltrate Rhodesia.44 But they could also use that position to influence the course of the nationalist leadership struggles, both to maintain nationalist unity and to ensure that the Zimbabwean nationalist movement’s actions fitted in with the wider regional strategy of the Front-Line states.45 Never was this plainer than in 1975-76. Attempting to deliver the nationalist movement in their pursuit of détente, the Front-Line states were obstructed by ZANLA’s continued refusal to observe a cease-fire in the lead-up to the Victoria Falls conference. The Chitepo assassination gave Zambia the excuse it needed to rein in the guerrillas, and in April 1975 ZANU, ZAPU and FROLIZI were banned in Zambia, with Tanzania following in May. The ANC was now to be the vehicle of choice for the ‘unified’ nationalist leadership.46

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The failure of détente and the Smith-Nkomo talks, and the war-option now adopted by the Front-Line states, saw a change of emphasis. The Front-Line states were instrumental in the creation of ZIPA, much to the chagrin of Muzorewa and his fellow political leaders in the ANC, who found themselves prevented even from visiting the guerrilla camps: Some of the front-line states, they wrote, have taken it upon themselves to be the decision-makers, the planners, the organizers and the spokesmen of the Zimbabwean liberation struggle … to decide when, where, how and what for talks or armed struggle should be organized, launched and prosecuted.47 The ZIPA leadership, though, proved unwilling to follow the FrontLine dual strategy of war and negotiation, and their rejection of the Geneva conference in October 1976 led to confrontation with their regional sponsors. Machel was particularly angered, and sent the entire ZIPA leadership to Geneva to send a message of solidarity to the newly created Patriotic Front. When the conference was adjourned in December, all the ZIPA commanders but Nhongo were sent on missions overseas, allowing Tongogara and Mugabe to return to Mozambique and take control of the guerrilla forces.48 In February 1977 the Liberation Committee of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) agreed to back the Patriotic Front, and called for all other nationalists to unite behind the Patriotic Front, and in July 1977 the full OAU gave exclusive recognition to the Patriotic Front at its 14th Summit conference in Libreville.49 Useful though Front-Line assistance was to Mugabe and Nkomo in securing their positions in the nationalist movement, it also accentuated their dependence on their regional patrons. When the costs of the Rhodesian war became too much for those patrons to bear, as discussed in Chapter 5 below, both Mugabe and Nkomo had little choice but to accept the compromises demanded of them. The Rhodesian Government and the Sidelining of Ian Smith For the first time since I started negotiating with the British, I was no longer in control. Had I been in control we would never have accepted Lancaster House.50 As Ian Smith’s statement made in the late 1980s shows, his loss of paramount influence over white politics was clearly critical to the success of the Lancaster House negotiations, more so even than the outcome of the nationalist leadership struggles. As Stedman argues, Smith’s objections to genuine majority rule were philosophical rather

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than practical. Smith’s approach allowed him to see only matters of principle requiring a stand, not competing interests capable of reconciliation by compromise. This was exemplified by his negotiating style of presenting his terms up front and refusing to budge an inch.51 Kissinger, Stedman rightly argues, was correct in attempting to isolate the ‘ideological radicals’ in 1976; his mistake was failing to recognise that it was Smith, not Mugabe or Nkomo, who was the ideological radical.52 This does not tell the whole story, however, for it was Smith who negotiated himself out of power, not from any ideological shift – ten years after the Internal Settlement he still likened majority rule to the ‘counting of sheep’ – but because he believed that only by transferring the symbols of political power to figures from the black community could he lift the sanctions he believed were crippling the Rhodesian war effort.53 He was caught between two stools, though. For while criticising right-wingers for failing to ‘be realistic and live with the times’, he himself failed to give the Internal Settlement a decent chance of international recognition.54 Instead, his treatment of Muzorewa (especially over the Hove affair), his refusal to hold a black referendum on the Internal Settlement constitution and his efforts instead to ensure victory in the white referendum by downplaying the changes being instituted, and his stubborn refusal to withdraw from the political scene (notwithstanding a public statement to the contrary in December 1978), all lessened the incentive for the British or American governments to brave international condemnation and lift sanctions.55 It was not just the removal of the Smith veto, however, that contributed to the acceptance of Lancaster House by the Salisbury regime – there were many on the right of Smith in the Rhodesian political elite, some of whom might have resisted majority rule more vigorously. By the end of 1977, though, the Smith loyalists in the Rhodesian Front had effectively destroyed opposition politics in Rhodesia. Within his own party, Smith had faced significant opposition to any compromise with black nationalism, and even pressure to pursue a policy of ‘provincialisation’ that would effectively mirror South African apartheid.56 Party chairman Des Frost had severely censured Smith at the Rhodesian Front Congress in September 1975 for his press comment that power-sharing between blacks and whites in Rhodesia was ‘absolutely logical’.57 Indeed, turmoil within the Rhodesian Front led to a break-away by 12 MPs (including Ted Sutton-Pryce, Reg Cowper, Ian Sandeman and eventually Frost too) in May 1977 to form the Rhodesian Action Party. Public support, and the political initiative, remained with Smith, however, and by calling and decisively winning a general election in

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August 1977 he eliminated the right-wing challenge both inside and outside the Rhodesian Front. The same election dealt a final blow to opposition from the left. The crushing defeat of the National Unifying Force, itself the latest minority moderate party in Rhodesia (whose many predecessors included Todd’s United Rhodesia Party, Whitehead’s United Federal Party, two Rhodesia Parties, and the Centre Party) spelled the end for left-wing politics in white Rhodesia, with many supporters abandoning the left and now openly supporting Smith as the only leader capable of engineering change.58 The cost of eliminating its opposition, though, was that ‘the Rhodesian Front, which once had stood for something, now appeared to believe in almost everything’.59 The pursuit of the Internal Settlement effectively precluded progress towards an overall agreement in Rhodesia, as emphasised by the Patriotic Front’s refusal to cease guerrilla operations and the reimposition in September 1978 of the ban on ZANU and ZAPU lifted four months earlier. With the Internal Settlement failing to achieve international recognition, however, the new leadership faced the same problems as its Rhodesian Front predecessors, a leadership both more diffused and less resistant to compromise than those predecessors. Muzorewa’s decision to stand down as prime minister and stand for election under the terms of Lancaster House stemmed from a combination of moral scruple and political naivety. As a clergyman opposed in principle to the use of violence if at all possible, Muzorewa was reluctant to be an obstacle to a peaceful solution.60 He also, though, believed that he would win the independence elections, failing to see the political damage he had inflicted on himself by failing to confront Ian Smith or end the war.61 Moreover, Muzorewa was more constrained in his decisionmaking than Smith had been. Far more so than on Sithole, who though a member of the Salisbury delegation was eager for fresh elections after his humiliation in those following the Internal Settlement, Muzorewa was dependent on the white security and economic elite. Partly as an outgrowth of the process of war-fighting, and partly because the Rhodesian Front had deliberately passed as much policy-making as possible to the military ahead of their own ‘surrender’ of political influence to a majority government, the Rhodesian military had by the late 1970s become an important political player in its own right.62 By 1979, though, the military high command was in as much turmoil as its political counterpart. Army commander John Hickman was dismissed in March 1979, allegedly because of personal conduct but also because he had a record of opposition to Combined Operations commander Peter Walls. Commander of the Selous Scouts Ron Reid Daly was court martialled and resigned his

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commission in August 1979 after a dispute over alleged gun-running and ivory-poaching by the Selous Scouts.63 Accusations even circulated that Ken Flower, head of the CIO (itself an organisation divided between moderates and hard-liners), was in fact an MI6 mole.64 The leaders of the military hierarchy were much less opposed to Lancaster House than Smith. Flower had since 1977 increasingly favoured a political solution. Air Vice-Marshal Harold Hawkins, Muzorewa’s foreign affairs adviser at Lancaster House, actively welcomed the chance for another round of negotiations under British auspices, or at least he claimed so afterwards. And it was Walls who made the decisive move of informing Smith that he intended to support Muzorewa, as Smith prepared to depart for Salisbury to rally support against the proposed constitution.65 Deprived of political support within the white establishment, by 8 November 1979 even Smith saw the writing on the wall, announcing that: the time has come to tell our people back home that to continue the fight would now be sterile, even counter-productive.66

Lebanon Leadership Struggle and Ideology in the Lebanese Christian Elite The collapse of Christian resistance, whether military or political, to the Syrian embrace – so critical to the success of the Taif agreement – was largely the consequence of the gradual collapse of their relatively unified front during the first half of the war. That unity, though, personified in Bashir Gemayel, had never been simple or amicable. The single unified directorate of the Lebanese Front (comprising the Christian political parties, and headed by Pierre Gemayel, Camille Chamoun, Suleiman Franjieh and Abbot Sharbel Kassis of the Maronite Monks) and the Lebanese Forces (consisting of the leaders of the various Christian militias) had swiftly given way to a dynamic that favoured its younger military leaders over the older political ones. The first clear evidence of this emerged in the siege of the Palestinian refugee camp Tel al-Zaatar in 1976, where the decision to undertake the operation was made by militia commanders and elements of the Lebanese army independent of the party leaders. The primacy of the military over the political leaders was firmly established in early 1977, when the Lebanese Front directorate was separated from the Lebanese Forces. The former expected to retain real power by this move. Instead, power flowed to the Lebanese Forces and its Joint Command

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Council, formed in August 1976 with Bashir Gemayel as its first elected head.67 Now with his own power base outside the Ketaeb Party dominated by his father, Bashir imposed his superiority over his rivals in the Christian militia camp. Attacking the Franjieh family Marada headquarters at Ihden in June 1978 (in the process killing Tony Franjieh and earning his father Suleiman’s undying enmity), and the headquarters of the Chamoun family Tigers militia at Safra in July 1980, Bashir established himself as the pre-eminent Christian leader.68 Bashir Gemayel’s violent death in September 1982, the subsequent failure in 1983-84 of military operations in West Beirut and the Shouf mountains, and Pierre Gemayel’s death in August 1984 prompted a disintegration that saw the Christian camp split into five: the groups of Amin Gemayel, George Saadeh, Samir Jaja, Elie Hubeiqa and Michel Aoun. Using the state presidency as his power base, Amin Gemayel attempted to bring the Ketaeb and the Lebanese Forces under his control, getting Elie Karameh elected party president. On 11 March 1985 they expelled from the Ketaeb two of the Lebanese Forces’ major figures: military commander Samir Jaja and chief of intelligence Elie Hubeiqa. Though not previously close, Amin Gemayel’s actions brought Jaja and Hubeiqa together, and two days later they launched the so-called ‘first intifada’, taking control of the northern parts of the Christian sector from Jbeil to the Dog River.69 With Amin Gemayel’s influence over the militia neutralised, and with dissatisfaction within the militia growing over Jaja’s disastrous military operation in the Sidon region in April 1985, Hubeiqa overthrew Jaja the following month and almost immediately announced a rapprochement with Syria, leading directly to his signing of the Tripartite agreement in December 1985. Hubeiqa’s turn to Damascus pushed Gemayel and Jaja back together, though, and on 15 January they launched a counter-coup against Hubeiqa, leaving the agreement dead in the water.70 As 1986 progressed, Jaja solidified his control of the Lebanese Forces, rebuffing a short mutiny by Amin Gemayel loyalists in August and a more serious Syrian-supported attempt by Hubeiqa to regain control in September. As the admittedly anti-Jaja Walid Phares analyses: The power struggle had ended with the reorganization of the militia through the nomination of a new class of officers, totally loyal to the commander, and by the establishment of multiple efficient “security services”, capable of ensuring tight control of the organization.71 In the Ketaeb, meanwhile, George Saadeh was elected leader with Lebanese Forces support in June 1986 – while interpreted as a defeat

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for Amin Gemayel, Saadeh proved resistant to Jaja’s aspirations to coordinate party and militia.72 With divisions inside the Lebanese Forces relatively muted for the first time in years, especially after Jaja’s elimination of Amin Gemayel’s personal militia in the Metn in October 1988, the ultimately fatal rift within the Christian camp occurred between the militia and the Lebanese army.73 Long paralysed by political deadlock and by defections to the militias, the army had been built up with US assistance by Amin Gemayel in the mid-1980s as a counter-weight to the Lebanese Forces. Though the two co-operated periodically, notably in repelling Hubeiqa’s counter-thrust into East Beirut in September 1986, a series of incidents on the ground in the days following that incident led to the assassination of 5th Brigade commander Colonel Khalil Kanaan, a personal friend of Aoun. Aoun blamed the Lebanese Forces, and two years passed without Aoun and Jaja even meeting. By 1988, Syrian efforts to have first Suleiman Franjieh and then Michel Daher nominated for the presidency pushed Aoun and Jaja together temporarily, and Jaja even accepted Amin Gemayel’s nomination of Aoun as temporary prime minister, but little could disguise the fact that there were now two separate organisations within the Christian sector each determined to be the sole authentic voice of the community.74 The manner in which Syria exploited the divisions within the Christian camp has been addressed in Chapter 2. They could only do so, however, because of the deep ideological malaise that had spread through the Christian political elite. In 1975, the young Christian militia commanders who went to war, particularly those who flocked to Bashir Gemayel’s charismatic leadership, represented a strand of political thinking that was more ideological, more nationalist, more ‘modern’ than that of the traditional semi-feudal Lebanese leaders they aimed to usurp.75 By the late 1980s, however, a deep sense of ideological rudderlessness pervaded the leading Christian factions. They had lost almost all sense of the political aims for which they were fighting, beyond the perpetuation of their own parochial organisations. The process of civil war was partly to blame. The defeat the Christians almost suffered from the Palestinians and Lebanese Muslims in 197576 had led Bashir Gemayel to pursue an undeclared project of creating a mainly Christian pseudo-state, stretching from the mountains of Ehden and Bsharreh, through the Koura, Batroun, Jubayl, Kisirwan, and Metn districts, across the Aley and Shouf mountains, down to the Jizzin and Marja’youn regions (including a wing-tip in Zahleh).76

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Even this task proved impossible, against resistance from the Franjieh family in North Lebanon and the Syrians in the east. Most importantly, Bashir’s assassination just before his inauguration as president robbed the ‘Movement of July 7, 1980’ of its leader, a particularly devastating blow in a country where personality rather than party traditionally played the more prominent role in politics.77 And as Helmick observes, the Lebanses Forces’ military reverses in the Shouf in September 1983 stripped away any remaining expectation that they could control Lebanon by force.78 But what made military setback so dangerous was that it punctured a political programme that had become increasingly radical and wide-ranging. The later 1970s saw an increase in prominence of figures such as Charles Malik, Fuad Bustani and Abbot Boulos Naaman of the Maronite Monks, who rejected the traditionalist thesis of Christian-Muslim co-operation promoted by Michel Chiha in the 1920s and pursued still by Pierre Gemayel and Camille Chamoun. Focusing instead on Lebanon’s role as the only Christian ‘refuge’ in the Middle East, they harked back to Lebanon’s Phoenician roots. At the same time, though, almost all remained strongly attached to the borders of Lebanon established in 1920 (‘Grand Liban’), rejecting a Christian separatist Petit Liban.79 August and September 1982, however, were two pivotal months: Bashir’s presidential bid promised to achieve the radical Maronites’ ambition of leadership of Lebanon by a Christian communal leader who could at the same time satisfy (or at least dampen) the aspirations of their Muslim co-nationalists. Bashir’s death, and the election of his more traditionalist pro-Arabist brother Amin, effectively signalled the end of those ambitions. Unable to achieve their maximalist goals, the inheritors of Bashir Gemayel’s anti-National Pact mantle failed to develop a political programme to guide them through the labyrinth of negotiation and compromise that lay ahead. Though often accused by Syria of separatist ambitions, they refrained from following the secessionist option. Too long an object of elite scorn, as seen for example in the Lebanese Front’s 1980 manifesto The Lebanon We Want to Build, ‘la tentation séparatiste ne fut cependant jamais traduite en termes de projet cohérent, appuyé par des groupes suffisamment représentatifs’.80 Instead, the Lebanese Forces in particular pushed the notion of federalism. Jaja thus stated that ‘we oppose the 1943 covenant and support a formula of decentralisation and complete rather than partial federalism’. Even in the run-up to Taif (where their position was half-heartedly recognised), Lebanese Forces General Fuad Malik stated of the militia’s project that it ‘se base sur la pluralité communautaire, le décentralisation politique et le fédéralisme dans son sens scientifique véritable’.81 Yet in reality, the federalist position was

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a mere fig-leaf to cover the absence of a political project. It generated no serious political thought, aroused little public enthusiasm, and seemed to be pursued only as an afterthought by the Lebanese Forces themselves. As Elie Salem commented on the papal foreign minister Achille Silvestrini’s visit to Lebanon in 1986, He hoped to convince Maronite leaders to work in unison, but he found that each had his own plan. He was surprised that Maronite leaders had no unified vision. They uttered generalities, opinions, ideas, and they often said one thing while meaning the exact opposite. … The Maronites, Silvestrini said, were steeped in medievalism. He found the Christian community in a state of paralysis. His sense was that the Christian community was heading towards a catastrophe.82 Leadership Struggle and Ideology in the Lebanese Muslim Elite The processes of leadership struggle and the downplaying of political programmes was not a Christian prerogative. Indeed, the Sunni leadership displayed the former tendency in abundance: where Bashir Gemayel succeeded in unifying most of the Christian militias, the struggles for power in West Beirut produced no clear winner, effectively neutering the Sunnis as a significant military force by the late 1970s. But to analyse the albeit belated success of the Taif agreement, we must look at the three Muslim organisations capable (at least in theory) of disrupting it: Amal, the PSP and Hizballah. Amal Within Amal, the most significant development was the rise to power and consolidation thereof of Nabih Berri.83 The disappearance and presumed killing of Amal founder Imam Musa al-Sadr in Libya in 1978 ignited a leadership struggle within the Shia movement. Where Sadr had dominated both the Movement of the Deprived (with its militia offshoot Amal) and the Supreme Islamic Shia Council (the chief religious organisation of Lebanese Shiis), the leadership of the former now devolved to the MP Hussein al-Husseini, the latter to Sadr’s hand-picked deputy Sheikh Muhammad Shams al-Din. Neither, though, proved particularly effective. Shams al-Din’s bureaucratic approach and Husseini’s desire to continue Amal’s close co-ordination with and even subordination to the Supreme Islamic Shia Council allowed the more aggressive Berri to bid successfully for the leadership of Amal on 4 April 1980. Within the largest mainstream Shia movement, the military had triumphed over the political, a fact then

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buttressed in February 1984 by the emergence of Berri and Amal as paramount among those repelling the Lebanese Army’s attempted incursions into West Beirut. Berri’s position, however, was still not secure. In general terms, Amal’s often abject performance against its rivals in West Beirut offered opportunities for Berri’s competitors – while under intense pressure from the PSP and Lebanese Communist Party militias between November 1986 and February 1987 Berri was not even in Lebanon, returning from Damascus only when the Syrian army had stabilised the situation. There were also specific challenges: firstly from the Husseini-Shams al-Din pairing which could undermine Berri’s standing within the wider Shia community and which was neutralised in part by the support offered to Berri by the leading Shia mufti in Lebanon, Sheikh Abd al-Amir Qabalan; and secondly, and more importantly, from the powerful regional bosses within Amal. Divided as Amal was between West Beirut, South Lebanon and the Bekaa, figures such as Dawud Dawud, Mahmud Faqi, Hassan Hashim, Aql Hamiya and Mustafa Dirani wielded extensive influence. But by the late 1980s Berri had consolidated his position. A rebellion by the dismissed Hassan Hashim in March 1987, who seized control of Amal positions between Sidon and Tyre, was crushed, and Berri subsequently used strong-arm tactics to restore discipline, dismissing several Amal commanders and imprisoning others.84 Aided by the fact that within Amal the actual military leaders were kept in a relatively subordinate position, not for example part of the voting group that elected to Amal’s two controlling bodies, the Politburo and the Executive Committee, by 1989 Robert Fisk could note that Berri faced no serious opposition within Amal.85 Two notable consequences flowed from the dominance of Berri and his followers. The first was dependence on Syria. Syria’s role in arming Amal is discussed in Chapter 2 above, but the Syrians also took advantage of Berri’s relative political weakness in Lebanon (unlike many communal leaders, for example, he lacked allies outside his own sect) to consolidate their control of one of the major Lebanese militias, notably in the April 1986 Politburo elections where Syrian pressure on the 432 delegates helped ensure his victory over Hassan Hashim.86 The second consequence was a distinct lessening of the revolutionary fervour which gave birth to the movement. The rhetoric of radical secular reform remained, of course, but as Kamal Salibi astutely observed, ‘the call for secularism, rather than being sincere, came to be acted out as just another confidence game between the parties concerned’.87 As Berri himself stated on the eve of Taif:

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Nous avons clairement fait savoir ce que nous accepterons: ou bien l’abolition du confessionalisme politique; ou alors, pour une période transitoire limitée, un système de rotation (entre les trois communautés principales, pour les trois présidences).88 Revolution had been replaced as a call by readjustment, and as the supposedly transitory National Pact had shown, interim arrangements in Lebanon had a way of lasting. In many ways ideological developments under Berri drew on Sadr’s own beliefs. For all his radicalism, Sadr had remained committed to the Lebanese state and to a sectarian contract among the country’s principal sects. Amal’s own charter stridently affirmed its commitment to Lebanon, and its actions in the war reaffirmed this, approving the Constitutional Document in 1976 and agreeing to participate in the Committee of Public Salvation with Bashir Gemayel in 1982.89 But Berri’s victory in the leadership struggles also represented victory for the bourgeois over the peasant, the secular over the religious, the Politburo over the Executive Committee. Cabinet members after 1984, and controlling the millions of dollars spent by the Superior Council of the South, Berri, Council head Muhammad Baydun and their followers effectively transformed Amal from a revolutionary organisation into a patronage system, in which distribution of resources mattered far more than influence on policy-making.90 The PSP The PSP, and the Druze community in general, avoided the internal divisions of other factions. Elected president of the PSP in 1977 after the assassination of his father Kamal, Walid Jumblatt consolidated his hegemony. By 1985 the Druze community could be fairly described as more united behind Walid Jumblatt than ever before.91 Firm PSP resistance against the Lebanese Forces’ attempted push into the Shouf in 1983 established the militia’s role as communal defender, while Jumblatt’s own status was reinforced by his hereditary position as scion of one of the two leading Druze families, the Jumblatts and the Arslans. Indeed, the death of the za’im of the Arslan faction Majid Arslan in 1982, the disgrace brought on the family by his son Faysal’s close association with Bashir Gemayel, and Jumblatt’s creation of the CAOM in 1983 (strengthening and extending his network of clients) all contributed to Jumblatt’s dominance. Some conflicts did occur within PSP ranks between those from Aley and those from the Shouf on several occasions between 1984 and 1989, but they were contained and never matched the intensity of the tribulations faced by other factions in Lebanon.92

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Internal solidarity, though, did not save the PSP from ideological anomie. One of the major parties of the Lebanese left, the PSP was particularly affected by sectarianism, by the death of its founder Kamal Jumblatt (the only really serious thinker of the left in Lebanon), and by its fighting with other leftist parties in the late 1970s and 1980s. Attracted neither by Lebanese particularism, whose Christian-Maronite component was too great, nor by Arab nationalism, especially after the LNM’s clashes with Syria in 1976, the Druzes entered an ‘ideological vacuum’.93 Socialism took a back seat even in Druze-controlled areas, as the CAOM operated firmly within traditional Lebanese patron-client relations, and as the PSP leadership turned for financial support towards the Druze economic elite.94 Hizballah Hizballah’s case differs somewhat from that of its non-Islamist competitors. On the one hand Hizballah’s diffuse leadership structure placed power in a number of different hands, rendering impractical the firm control over their organisations exercised by Jaja, Berri and Jumblatt. On the other, its continued role in the fight against the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon under the Second Damascus agreement vindicated one of Hizballah’s major ideological positions, in contrast to the ideological compromises forced on the other militias described above. Nonetheless, by the early 1990s Hizballah had undergone a significant ideological transformation, emphasising its role as a Lebanese organisation rather than merely as an Iranian appendage, restraining its calls for the establishment of an Islamic state in Lebanon, and by 1992 even participating in parliamentary elections under a confessional system which it professed to despise. Never a party in the conventional sense, at its emergence in the early 1980s Hizballah represented an umbrella organisation for such groups as Islamic Jihad, Islamic Amal, the Rally of Muslim Clergymen, the Islamic Call and the Association of Muslim Students. Though Hizballah’s Iranian sponsors encouraged a more organised structure as the 1980s progressed, rivalries between the followers of the various clerics who headed Hizballah, as well as those based on region and clan, continued to divide it. Rather than one dominant leader, therefore, Hizballah had several, the most important being Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Ibrahim Amin, Subhi Tufeili, Abbas Mussawi, Hussein Mussawi and Hassan Nasrallah.95 Probably the most important was Fadlallah, a noted Islamic scholar born in South Lebanon who had studied in Shia religious schools in Iraq. Though constantly denying any formal links to Hizballah, Fadlallah’s influence

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as a marji’ (an eminent religio-legal authority) was extremely significant.96 While Hizballah’s stated objective, as enunciated for example in its programme of February 1985, was to establish an Islamic state in Lebanon on the basis of ‘governance of the religious jurist’ (wilayat alfaqih), during the later 1980s the pronouncements of Fadlallah in particular began to play down the centrality of this objective. Fadlallah called for dialogue with Lebanon’s Christians, especially to find shared values in the fight against communism and secularism. The goal of an Islamic state would remain, but as a long-term objective awaiting more suitable circumstances. At the same time, Hizballah began to depart from its stated programme in its policies towards Israel. Though the Israelis themselves remained sceptical, Hizballah statements declared that the liberation of southern Lebanon and of Jerusalem were two separate enterprises, the first an undertaking for the Islamic resistance in Lebanon, the second a matter for the Palestinians alone.97 That this more pragmatic than revolutionary trend was to emerge victorious within Hizballah was by no means preordained: many of the positions advocated by Fadlallah and his supporters (including Tufeili, Abbas Mussawi and Hussein Mussawi) conflicted with those of its sponsors in Khomeini’s Iran and of many of the movement’s own leaders (including Nasrallah and Amin) and followers. But prevail it did, with Nasrallah fleeing Lebanon in August 1989, Tufeili elected secretarygeneral of Hizballah in Tehran two months later, and Abbas Mussawi elected to succeed Tufeili in May 1991.98 By the end of the civil war, therefore, Hizballah still stood for radical aims but had normalised its practices, publicly rejecting the establishment of an Islamic state without a prior referendum, abjuring its policies of kidnapping and hostage-taking, and openly calling for the state it had vilified to fulfil its social responsibilities to its citizens in South Beirut.99 By 1990, therefore, the leaders of the four largest militias in Lebanon – the Lebanese Forces, Amal, Hizballah and the PSP – had all consolidated their positions at the head of their own organisations, but at great cost. Organisational unity may have been achieved, but confessional solidarity remained elusive, as Amal fought Hizballah, and the Lebanese Forces fought Michel Aoun’s army. The fault-lines between the organisations, especially those of the same sect, allowed Syria to employ the divide-and-rule strategy analysed in Chapter 2. This process was assisted firstly by the fact that most of the militias had forfeited popular support, and secondly by the ideological rudderlessness experienced by almost all the fighting factions in Lebanon. The compromise of Taif could never have worked in the Lebanon of the mid or late 1970s. At that time too many opposing

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political programmes prevailed – of secularism and socialism, of Maronitism and Lebanese nationalism – for such a pragmatic and cautious settlement to have won acceptance. By the late 1980s, however, the slogans of the 1970s had mostly been reduced to empty rhetoric. Internal and ideological developments within the belligerent groups had not made peace inevitable, but it had made it possible.

Comparison Leadership change, commentators agree, can make peace-makers’ job easier. Civil war in Lebanon and Rhodesia provided such changes on a regular basis: power struggles in guerrilla and militia organisations removed Sithole from ZANU, Hubeiqa from the Lebanese Forces, and Husseini from Amal; electoral processes removed Ian Smith and Amin Gemayel; death from natural or accidental causes removed Josiah Tongogara, Pierre Gemayel and SLA founder-commander Saad Haddad; and, most significantly, assassination removed such pivotal figures as Herbert Chitepo, Jason Moyo, Kamal Jumblatt and Bashir Gemayel. Indeed, the notion that stalemate in civil war often is stable and bearable is belied by the almost constant struggle for power within the belligerent factions. What, then, were the consequences of such leadership changes? Stedman and King are right to note that the mere fact of leadership change introduces fluidity into a possibly logjammed conflict, but Muzorewa’s replacement by Mugabe at the head of the nationalist movement in 1975-76, and Hubeiqa’s by Jaja in the Lebanese Forces in 1986 shows that such fluidity may hinder rather than help the achievement of a settlement. In each case, the new leadership rejected compromise: Mugabe refused a deal at Geneva in 1976, and Jaja rejected the Tripartite agreement of 1985. Where Stedman and King’s analysis is strongest is when talking of the need to isolate ‘ideological radicals’, in our cases Ian Smith (isolated politically) and Michel Aoun (isolated militarily). Not that either’s political programmes were in themselves particularly radical, but the psychological attachment to them that their leading proponents displayed brooked neither argument nor compromise. It is interesting to note here that for all the supposedly uncompromising revolutionary noises of ZANU and Hizballah, it was men who yearned for pre-war realities, of a white-dominated Rhodesia or a Syria-free Lebanon, who rejected pragmatism and compromise. Even leaving Aoun and Smith aside, personalities were still crucial. We cannot understand the ending of civil war in Lebanon and Rhodesia without considering Jaja’s willingness to ally with Syria rather than subordinate himself to Aoun, Fadlallah’s sensitivity to the needs

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of Lebanon’s non-Muslim population, Muzorewa’s political misjudgement and decision to step down as prime minister of Zimbabwe Rhodesia, and Mugabe’s pragmatism beneath his fiery rhetoric. The path that each took to achieve pre-eminence in his own organisation was neither easy nor automatic. It is dangerous to claim that only the specific leaders in power at the time of Taif and of Lancaster House could have ensured their success, but one can easily envisage a different outcome from different leadership configurations within the major factions. Had the ZIPA leadership retained their dominance in the Zimbabwean nationalist movement, or had Hassan Nasrallah achieved the leadership of Hizballah in 1989, it is unlikely that the British-sponsored mediation effort in Rhodesia or that of the Arab League in Lebanon could have succeeded. The significance of individual leaders and decision-makers was in each case magnified by the important role played by miscalculation in the Rhodesian and Lebanese civil wars. Each conflict was punctuated by mistakes and faulty predictions. Ian Smith erred badly in deciding to close the Rhodesian border with Zambia in 1973, and later in presuming that the Internal Settlement elections would end international sanctions. Lebanese factions often launched military offensives they could not sustain: Amin Gemayel in West Beirut in 1984, Jaja around Sidon in 1985, and Amal in the Camps War against the Palestinians. Abel Muzorewa and Ndabaningi Sithole spent too much time cultivating relations with the Front-Line states and playing at high politics, instead of concentrating on securing the loyalty of the guerrillas in the camps. And Michel Aoun erroneously believed that by escalating the latent Lebanese-Syrian conflict through his ‘War of Liberation’, he could draw in external powers to counter the threat of Syrian hegemony in Lebanon. Foreign powers, too, made miscalculations on a frequent basis. Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon believed that by installing Bashir Gemayel as president of Lebanon they could force a stable peace settlement out of Lebanon. An assassin and a firm Syrian reaction proved the Israelis wrong. Kaunda and Vorster assumed that merely by bringing the Rhodesian government and the Zimbabwean nationalists to the table at Victoria Falls, a settlement would ensue. The conference broke up acrimoniously after only one day. This tendency to make faulty decisions was critical to the success of the Lancaster House and the Taif agreements. As argued in Chapter 1, crucial to the success of each was the belief of all participants that the settlements could be made to work to their relative advantage. Had Muzorewa realised that he would win only three seats in the February 1980 independence elections, or had Jaja foreseen that within five years Syria would be effectively running Lebanon and that he would be in prison facing a

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life sentence, probably neither would have co-operated in the signing and the implementation of the Lancaster House and Taif agreements. Organisational factors, as well as the personal ones outlined above, also contributed to the prospects for settlement. They did so in two distinct ways, and applied in particular to the guerrilla, militia and other non-state actors involved in the Rhodesian and Lebanese wars. The first such factor was that, in both countries, by the time of settlement almost all the belligerent leaders had consolidated control over their own organisations. Amongst the leadership of the Rhodesian (and the Zimbabwe Rhodesian) state, this was not remarkable: for all the many disagreements within the Rhodesian policy-making elite, the institutions of the state and the reserves of white public loyalty towards the Rhodesian Front minimised the prospects of an actual coup d’état by elements disaffected with current policy. Amongst the ever-fractious militias and guerrilla movements, this consolidation of leadership was noteworthy and significant. Concentration on internal politicking amongst the Patriotic Front leadership in 1976, amongst the Rhodesian leadership and their Internal Settlement partners in 1977-78, and between Hubeiqa and Jaja in the Lebanese Forces in 1985-86 had fatally damaged the Geneva conference, the Anglo-American initiative, and the Tripartite agreement respectively. By 1979-80 in Rhodesia, and by 1989-90 in Lebanon, however, the leaders of the major factions had established control over their own organisations, expelling and imprisoning their opponents and filling subordinate positions with their own placemen. Peacemaking was still dangerous: charges of betrayal could come from political opponents and from the civilian populace, but Mugabe, Nkomo, Berri, Jaja and the like had all minimised the chances of a palace coup. As a subsidiary to this consolidation of leadership, as the theoretical literature notes, civil war did increase the influence of military over purely political figures and organisations. The relative impotence of Hoss and Muzorewa (before the Internal Settlement) paralleled the declining influence of the Lebanese Front vis-à-vis the Lebanese Forces, and the government of Zimbabwe Rhodesia vis-à-vis the white Rhodesian military high command. To see the figures that emerged on top as purely military, though, is misleading. The leadership of many factions (most notably Amal and ZANU) consisted of men who commanded the allegiance of their fighters but who were not themselves military. Berri and Mugabe were thus perhaps more adept than Jaja and Walls at the political manoeuvring necessary at the close of civil war, but their dependence on Dawud Dawud and Josiah

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Tongogara left them partially vulnerable when the two were killed in September 1988 and December 1979 respectively. If internal consolidation of leadership was the first major organisational feature common to Rhodesia and Lebanon in the late 1970s and late 1980s respectively, the second was deep divisions between organisations claiming to represent the same popular constituency. Sect, race and ethnicity in each country assumed precedence over political programme as a focus of loyalty, but in neither country could these factors form a basis for solidarity. Attempts by Bashir Gemayel and the Front-Line states to forge organisational unity amongst Lebanon’s Christians and the Zimbabwean nationalist factions respectively foundered against leaders’ and troops’ fear of subordination and victimisation. The African Internal Settlement participants spent as much time arguing amongst themselves as trying to wring concessions out of the Rhodesian government; the Shia resurgence in Lebanon spawned two rival militias in Amal and Hizballah; and even the supposedly coordinated Rhodesian security forces were plagued by internal rivalries and non-cooperation. In the multipolar environment of civil war in Rhodesia and Lebanon that this organisational fission generated, alliances defined the political landscape, whether based on shared values and objectives, or on temporary tactical considerations. But as important as the military and political contest between alliances was that within alliances. In the latter stages of the war in Rhodesia, ZANU and ZAPU guerrillas fought each other in the bush, while the regular forces of the Zimbabwe Rhodesian army fought a pitched battle with Sithole auxiliaries. The battles between Aoun’s army and the Lebanese Forces, and between Amal and Hizballah, were merely the most intense of a series of intra-communal and intra-alliance clashes. On its own, this tendency to divide rather than to unite would probably have impeded the prospects for peace. However, in the context of Rhodesia in 1979 and Lebanon in 1989-90, it induced in almost all bar Michel Aoun the fear of fighting on without (or even against) previous allies and so of facing unfavourable military odds. Issues of leadership structure, both personal and organisational, were important in the preparedness and ability of factional leaders to sign and implement a compromise settlement. But so too were ideologies and political programmes. Far from remaining constant, and in contrast to the theoretical literature’s assumptions about upward re-evaluation of objectives, almost all parties in Lebanon and Rhodesia abandoned deeply held ideological positions in the face of protracted war and the failure of unilateral solutions. Peceny and

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Stanley, in their study of conflict resolution in Central America, claim that settlement emerged in large part because of the adoption of liberal democratic norms by belligerents, particularly in Guatemala and El Salvador.100 Rhodesia and Lebanon saw comparable normative or ideological change, but the direction of that change was entirely different, towards the selfish and power-hungry rather than the liberal and democratic. Increasingly, in both countries, the belligerents’ political causes became submerged under the ties of sect and ethnicity, under debates over tactics, and under struggles for power within religious and ethnic communities. How ideologies were thus relegated differed according to the faction’s attitude towards the status quo. Revolutionary or radical parties settled for a partial achievement of their aims, which usually gave them political gains at the expense of their social programme. They continued to pay lip service to their social objectives, and often talked of political power as a stepping stone to social change, but Chapter 6 shows how rarely they fulfilled these claims. In great part this stemmed from the social make-up of radical leaderships in Rhodesia and Lebanon. Though their language was that of solidarity with the urban and rural poor, Robert Mugabe, Joshua Nkomo, Nabih Berri and Walid Jumblatt (among others) were each representatives of a politically, socially and/or economically aspiring upwardly mobile (or even wealthy) class who found the conventional path to power and influence blocked, and who turned to revolutionary politics to achieve their aims. The common cause they professed with the destitute and the disenfranchised may have been sincere or not, but in line with Amílcar Cabral’s warning to revolutionary movements and under the pressure of civil war and the need to find areas of compromise, all chose to enhance their own and their parties’ power at the expense of the social and economic demands of their followers.101 Thus the Patriotic Front achieved the chance to compete for political power in elections they believed they would win, but accepted an independence constitution which intrinsically restricted their ability to achieve socialism or even carry out major land reform. Amal and the PSP won Syrian patronage and access to power, but compromised on their vision of secularism and socialism. Hizballah, meanwhile, ensured a significant place for itself in post-war Lebanon as the leading combatant against the Israeli occupation, but toned down its rhetoric of Islamic revolution. Parties essentially content with the status quo reacted quite similarly to their inability to defend it. The most important comparison here is between the Rhodesian Front and the Lebanese Forces. Each went to war convinced of its communal right to rule ‘its’ country. Each long adhered to its political totems: a qualified

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franchise in Rhodesia, the Maronite presidency in Lebanon. In each case, though, a pivotal moment occurred when each realised the need for serious compromise: in September 1976, when Ian Smith publicly acknowledged the inevitability of majority rule; and in September 1982, with Bashir Gemayel’s assassination. Encountering such a setback, neither the Rhodesian Front nor the Lebanese Forces were able to develop a realistic ideological road-map to help them through the years of compromise and negotiation that lay ahead. Ian Smith pursued an internal solution, forcing his ‘partners’ into such a humiliating settlement that they lost all hope of achieving popular or international legitimacy. Samir Jaja and his colleagues talked of federalism, decentralisation and freedom from Syria, but soon engaged themselves in a brutal civil war within their own community. Their political projects in tatters, all the Rhodesian Front and the Lebanese Forces (together with the traditional Maronite political elite) could still salvage were guarantees of security of property and of continued economic pre-eminence for their community in the new Zimbabwe and the Lebanese Second Republic. They were able, too, to preserve a continued if much diminished political role in the post-war order. But shorn of their previous certainties, they were unable to develop a fallback ideological position as a basis for rejection of compromise and for continued resistance. Clearly, then, the realist paradigm with its unitary rational actors is of only limited utility in explaining the end of the Lebanese and Rhodesian civil wars. But in what ways do the processes that went on within factions actually contribute to an explanation of settlement? They help us above all because, together with the increasingly strained relations between military factions and their civilian ‘constituents’, they address many of the questions left unanswered by a study of peace negotiations and military confrontation in civil war. Changes in leadership, most notably the replacement of Smith with Muzorewa as prime minister in Salisbury, but also the rise to political prominence of Michel Aoun, explain many of the contours of Rhodesian and Lebanese politics in the run-up to settlement. Consolidation of leadership explains why leaders such as Mugabe, Jaja and Berri could risk adhering to settlements that compromised their stated objectives. And the fissile tendencies exhibited by communities in civil war explains why war in Rhodesia and Lebanon resisted resolution into simple bipolar conflict, and instead generated a number of organisations and factions whose divisions could be exploited by external powers to engineer a settlement. There are two major reasons, however, for not exaggerating the contribution to settlement of these intra-factional politics. The first is

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the danger of circularity. Did political leaders really enjoy more secure leadership in Lebanon in the late 1980s and in Rhodesia in the late 1970s, or are we merely assuming that they did because they avoided successful challenges to their position after they signed or co-operated with the agreements? Secondly, by studying intra-group politics we can perhaps understand why it became possible to achieve a settlement, but there is nothing in this chapter that explains why successful peace-making occurred exactly when it did. We may accept that leadership change within belligerent organisations was more consolidated as Lancaster House and Taif approached than for some time; that divisions within alliances made individual factions wary of fighting on alone; and that leaders had allowed their radical and revolutionary slogans to become merely empty rhetoric. But there is no evidence that these factors were responsible for the launching of the British government’s peace initiative at the Lusaka Commonwealth summit in August 1979 or the formation of the Arab League Tripartite Committee on Lebanon in 1989. Consolidated leadership, divisions within alliances, and elite ideological demobilisation were all important factors in the success of Lancaster House and Taif, but they were necessary but not sufficient causes. Allusion has been made both in this chapter and earlier that the process of fighting a civil war made factions and their leaders increasingly dependent on external actors. It is to those external actors that we must turn if we are to understand the timing of peace.

5 INTERVENTION AND MEDIATION ‘It became a natural thing for anyone who wanted a change of government to call in help from outside’, wrote Thucydides of the Peloponnesian War.1 Rhodesians, Zimbabweans and Lebanese behaved little differently almost two and half thousand years later. The previous chapters have alluded to some of the methods used by outside powers to involve themselves in the two wars, including direct military intervention, material support for one party or another, involvement in leadership struggles within belligerent parties, and attempted mediation. Through varying combinations of these factors, a series of regional and global powers became involved in the two wars: Britain, the superpowers, China, Cuba, the ‘Front-Line’ states (principally Zambia, Mozambique and Tanzania), and South Africa in Rhodesia; and Syria, Israel, the PLO, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the US (amongst others) in Lebanon. Generally, the theoretical literature on civil war termination distinguishes between external intervention, which is broadly held to impede the process of settlement, and third party mediation, which assists settlement. Whatever form intervention takes, be it humanitarian, defensive, protective or opportunistic, it is claimed to act as a barrier to peace. This need not be the result of deliberate obstructionism from the intervener, though that in itself is obviously damaging. The mere presence of an outside intervener is held to stimulate hopes on the part of one belligerent or other that a better outcome may become available in the future. Interveners thus profoundly affect the power relations between the internal parties, preventing a mutually hurting stalemate from emerging. Similarly, for those theories that suggest that the necessary condition for settlement is that all sides agree on their respective bargaining power, external intervention will make settlement less likely because it will tend to be valued differently by both sides. And, lastly, because external intervention adds to the already complex relations between the internal warring parties the additional raft of issues between the intervening

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state and the state undergoing civil war, it makes the construction of an acceptable peace deal even more difficult.2 If there is some consensus about the difficulties for peacemaking posed by intervention, questions remain about how these are best overcome. For example, must external intervention cease before a settlement can be reached, or must the intervener’s cost-benefit analysis merely dictate in favour of ending the war but without their prior withdrawal? If the latter, do ‘hurting stalemates’ apply to external interveners as well as internal belligerents, or are the costs of intervention in civil war usually too low to make stalemate hurt? Indeed, if external patrons have sufficient leverage over their internal partners in civil war, can a hurting stalemate at the patron (i.e. external) level can actually substitute for an internal stalemate? To complicate matters further, some have suggested a way in which intervening external powers can contribute to settlement, by ‘endorsing’ the peace process, legitimising both the process itself and also its implementation, and by ‘lending’ leverage to outside mediators.3 On the whole, though, most commentators suggest that if outside powers are actively to contribute to peace, they must do so through mediation rather than intervention. Though mediation is never, it is clear, a policy tool that can substitute for the underlying preparedness of the belligerents to accept a settlement, it is argued that as long as the mediators themselves are able to present a united front, they can overcome many of the barriers in the way of peace. Where belligerents may refuse to acknowledge the reality of a stalemate, outsiders can persuade them of it. Where one belligerent does perceive the battlefield situation as a hurting stalemate, a mediator can maintain that side’s perception while the other develops its own change of heart. Because they are less subject to emotional considerations than the belligerents, mediators can construct the imaginative settlement proposals sometimes required. And, by providing security guarantees during the negotiation and implementation phases of settlement, mediators can overcome the security dilemmas that combatants face in moving from war to peace.4 Importantly, however, the mediation of theorists of civil war termination is very much more than the exercise of conciliation and good offices with which conflict resolution theory has traditionally concerned itself.5 As well as performing the traditional functions of communication and formulation, the ‘mediator-manipulator’ uses leverage to alter the conflict environment itself. Though this may be done positively, by promising side-payments to belligerents if they agree to settle, coercion is more usually used. And the types of coercion range from the indirect (for example making optimistic public pronouncements so that parties risk losing face if they abandon

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the negotiations) to the most direct of all, forcible military action. At this extreme, one may question whether this is mediation or intervention, and it may indeed be wrong to see the two as mutually exclusive. Many states that intervene in civil wars, like the US in Bosnia in 1995, resort consecutively both to military intervention and to mediation. Since all leveraged mediation effectively creates a coercive relationship between mediator and belligerents, the difference between ‘force’ and ‘diplomacy’ may lie only in the degree and form of coercion employed.6 A corollary of this is that mediation may be best done by states, and that the mediators do not need to be unbiased. Only states are likely to possess the financial, military and political resources necessary for effective leveraged mediation. Equally, however, states are likely to have interests related to a civil war that private citizens or non-governmental organisations do not. On some occasions the mediating state(s) will decide that the only possible resolving settlement is actually against their interests and they will therefore prevent that settlement. But generally, as long as the mediator-manipulator does not try to push through an agreement biased in favour of their friends or allies, it is suggested that the mediator’s bias is unlikely to prevent a settlement.7 An interesting side question on mediation is whether mediators should restrict their efforts to when the belligerents are seriously prepared to consider compromise. Stedman puts it most succinctly: Mediation efforts should not be like buses that come along every fifteen minutes. Instead, they should be like the Lake Victoria ferry – one never knows if and when it is likely to pass by again. Not only is mediation in unfavourable circumstances likely to be fruitless, it is argued, but it can actually do harm, damaging the credibility of both the mediator and the proposal, and leading the belligerents to avoid facing reality and taking tough but necessary decisions.8 Others, however, principally former policymakers, suggest that even unsuccessful negotiation can assist in the learning process, and that in the absence of reliable indicators of readiness to compromise, it is always better to have a peace-making initiative in train for when that readiness appears.9 Nevertheless, all agree that however much mediation may contribute to a successful settlement, it is by no means a sufficient condition for peace, a suggestion whose applicability, as shall be seen, seems valid in both Rhodesia and Lebanon.

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Rhodesia Britain: Mediation and Arbitration Of all those involved in the ending of the Rhodesian war, it was Britain which took the most public role. As pointed out by Robin Renwick, head of the Rhodesian Department in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office from 1978 to 1980, ‘Rhodesia posed in an acute form the problem of responsibility without power’.10 By successfully mediating the Lancaster House settlement, Britain removed a diplomatic thorn that for fourteen years since UDI had jeopardised relations with her former colonies and undermined her position in the UN and the Commonwealth. Despite the acceptance by the Labour Party’s national executive committee in December 1973 of a resolution recommending financial and diplomatic support for liberation movements in southern Africa, British policy towards Rhodesia between the failure of the Smith-Home agreement of 1971 and Margaret Thatcher’s election victory in May 1979 was essentially to sit back and allow the Rhodesians themselves to come to an agreement.11 The only initiative of substance pursued in this period was that by foreign secretary David Owen, in partnership with his American counterpart Cyrus Vance, in 1977-78. On his appointment in February 1977, Owen was convinced that both moral principle and British interest would be served by the speedy advancement of majority rule in Rhodesia. Yet facing a cabinet majority opposed to military involvement and with British relations with South Africa too poor to persuade them to put pressure on their northern neighbours, Owen lacked the leverage required to push the parties to a settlement. Without leverage, Owen’s plan was ultimately to swing too far in favour of the Patriotic Front, with its declaration that in the interim period between agreement and elections, security in Rhodesia would be handled by the guerrilla forces.12 Yet for all Owen’s inability to broker a settlement, of which he himself became convinced by November 1978, at no stage did the Labour government offer encouragement to Ian Smith’s pursuit of an internal settlement. Though slightly more equivocal in his condemnation of the Internal Settlement than US representative to the UN Andrew Young, Owen rejected that settlement, citing the unbalanced nature of the constitution, the lack of a referendum on acceptance of that constitution, and the conditions under which the Internal Settlement elections were held.13 Smith’s gamble, presuming that a successful

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internal settlement would force Britain (amongst others) to lift sanctions, was doomed to fail while Labour remained in power. The critical factor in the British contribution to peace in Rhodesia was the Conservative election victory of May 1979 – not for any reversal of policy, but for its continuity. In the months leading up to the general election, opposition foreign affairs spokesman Francis Pym repeatedly attacked the Labour government for refusing to accept the Internal Settlement process, and promised to do so if elected provided that the Internal Settlement elections were ‘free and fair’, a condition effectively met with the publication of a report on the elections by Conservative Party representative Lord Boyd.14 Once in office, however, Margaret Thatcher reversed this position. Rhodesia had never been a high priority for Thatcher and the policy of recognising Muzorewa was not strongly held, at least by her. A series of factors lay behind the reversal, including the threat of a trade boycott by black African states, the insistence of the Carter administration that the Patriotic Front must be included in any political settlement, and Australian prime minister Malcolm Fraser’s insistence at a meeting with Thatcher in Canberra on 1 July 1979 that on Rhodesia he would side with the presidents of the Front-Line states at the forthcoming Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Lusaka.15 Most important of all, though, was the attitude of Thatcher’s foreign secretary, Lord Carrington. As Carrington recorded in his memoirs, on his appointment, I was already convinced that the “internal settlement” was probably a fudge, in terms of the domestic support it really commanded. … To have recognized the “internal settlement” at that time would have led to embargoes on British goods around the world, rejection of British counsel and influence “because of Rhodesia”; and within Rhodesia Nkomo and Mugabe would have done all in their considerable power to step up the insurrection – with Soviet and Chinese assistance respectively.16 In this stance he had to overcome serious opponents within the Conservative Party, particularly within the Suez group, but peace was Carrington’s overriding objective in Rhodesia. To achieve it, he was prepared to lay down only the minimum of conditions: that political power be allocated through the ballot box, that the British parliament approve the independence constitution, and that the constitution be comparable to those established in other cases of British decolonisation. Both Thatcher and Carrington later publicly admitted that they regarded an election victory for Mugabe as far from desirable, but they regarded peace as more important than the prevention of such an eventuality.17

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When Margaret Thatcher surprised delegates at Lusaka by declaring British commitment to ‘genuine’ majority rule, she kicked away one of the last remaining props underpinning Ian Smith’s intransigence: the hope that the Conservative government would prove more amenable to Rhodesian interests than its Labour predecessor.18 In return, in a move with which Donald Rothchild illustrates the importance of ‘prenegotiations’ (or ‘the process of framing the subsequent negotiations’), Britain received a Commonwealth mandate to negotiate a settlement free from external interference. Only a brief contretemps in mid-October in which Commonwealth secretary-general Shridath Ramphal publicly rebuked Carrington for threatening to continue negotiations with or without the Patriotic Front threatened to undermine the centrality of Carrington and the British mediation team at Lancaster House.19 Carrington used his freedom of manoeuvre to pursue a conference strategy that was more arbitration than mediation. The threat of the ‘second-class solution’ – to recognise Muzorewa and lift sanctions if the Salisbury delegation, but not the Patriotic Front, accepted Carrington’s proposals – encouraged Muzorewa to agree early and the Patriotic Front to respond similarly. At the tactical level, a series of skilful measures were adopted. A step-by-step approach of dealing first with the constitution, then the transitional period, and then the cease-fire – or in Lord Soames’ words ‘to decide first whether the Sunday School treat was going to Bognor or Bournemouth … [and] discuss later whether it should go by train or coach’ – prevented the problems of the transition from undermining the final constitutional settlement. Insistence on Carrington’s centrality circumvented the danger of the parties exploiting splits within the mediating team. What Davidow calls ‘huff and puff and fudge’, especially in the issuing (and subsequent ignoring, if necessary) of ultimata increased the sense of urgency. Tacit as well as overt bargaining was used, as in the introduction of an Enabling Bill to enact the agreed provisions on the constitution and the transitional period even before the Patriotic Front had agreed to the cease-fire proposals. And promises, especially vague ones to Muzorewa ‘confirming’ Britain’s unwillingness to see an election victory for Mugabe, papered over many of the remaining cracks.20 United States: Kissinger, Vance and Carter British handling of the Lancaster House conference was undoubtedly skilful and effective, if abrasive. The question of its contribution to the end of the Rhodesian civil war is difficult and will be addressed in due course, but at this stage it is vital to note the relative freedom from

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external interference enjoyed by the British government in carrying out its mediation. At the global level, Rhodesia escaped the fate of Angola or the Horn of Africa, areas which became cockpits for SovietAmerican competition in the later 1970s as superpower détente deteriorated. In February 1977 Ian Smith appealed to the US to help us ensure that the settlement we seek will not put into power terrorists, who, without any shadow of a doubt, are the tools of Russian imperialism.21 The US, however, refused to be drawn in in support of the Rhodesian Front. Already in April 1976 Kissinger had unequivocally committed to African majority rule, partly to stabilise the region after Cuban intervention in Angola the previous year, and Smith openly admitted that it was US pressure that had led him to his own public acceptance of majority rule in September 1976.22 But whereas Kissinger was prepared to devise a settlement that excluded the Patriotic Front, the incoming 1977 Carter Administration offered no such respite to the Rhodesian government.23 Actively encouraged by David Owen to take a stronger lead over Rhodesia, Carter helped launch the Anglo-American initiative that ran from March 1977 until April 1978. Again, though, where Kissinger’s global concerns had driven him too far in favour of a reluctant Rhodesian government, Carter’s regional and human rights focus saw him lean too far in favour of an equally reluctant Patriotic Front. In March 1977 he signed House Resolution 1746 repealing the 1971 Byrd Amendment, under which the US unilaterally exempted itself from UN sanctions on the purchase of Rhodesian chrome ore. In May 1977 Vice-President Mondale’s demand to South Africa that South Africa as well as Rhodesia adopt one-man one-vote majority rule cost the US any chance of persuading South Africa to pressure Rhodesia into concessions. In August, Carter fatefully accepted Julius Nyerere’s demand that the guerrillas constitute the national army in the transitional period. Over the following months, the US repeatedly pressed Britain to amend the Anglo-American proposals even further in favour of the Patriotic Front. And in March 1978, the US and Britain abstained while Resolution 423 was passed in the UN Security Council, which: Condemn[ed] all attempts and manoeuvres by the illegal régime aimed at the retention of power by a racist minority and at preventing the achievement of independence by Zimbabwe; [and] declare[d] as illegal and unacceptable any internal settlement concluded under the auspices of the illegal régime.24

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The Anglo-American initiative’s failure heralded a lower-key, but ultimately more successful, US policy towards Rhodesia. The restraint shown by the Carter administration in 1978 and 1979 was not without its difficulties. On the one hand, Soviet involvement in the ‘second Shaba invasion’ in Zaire in May 1978 and in the violent dispute between Ethiopia and Somalia seemed to threaten direct Soviet or Cuban intervention in Rhodesia, a fear explicitly raised by Assistant for National Security Affairs Zbigniew Brzezinski at a US Special Coordination Committee meeting on the Horn of Africa on 2 March 1978. This, combined with the belief of many US officials that a Patriotic Front victory in Rhodesia was inevitable, and with the Carter administration’s desire to keep on good terms with the black caucus in Congress, argued for a policy more favourable to the Patriotic Front.25 On the other hand, the Internal Settlement, and guerrilla massacres, for example at the Elim Mission, increased public sympathy for Rhodesia’s position and strengthened the hand of those in Congress pushing for the abandonment of sanctions. In July 1978, therefore, Republican Jesse Helms scheduled a Senate motion to lift US sanctions on Rhodesia. Three months later, to the chagrin of the State Department, Ian Smith himself visited the US at the invitation of twenty seven senators to put the case for the Internal Settlement. And in May and June 1979 both houses of Congress passed non-binding resolutions on the president to lift sanctions on Rhodesia in the light of the Internal Settlement elections.26 President Carter, however, deftly side-stepped these pressures. Jesse Helms’ motion was never debated. Instead, senators Case and Javits introduced a compromise bill calling for the continuation of sanctions and their removal if Salisbury entered into negotiations with the Patriotic Front and held elections thereafter. Its passage by fifty-nine votes to thirty-six dealt a hard blow to the Internal Settlement. Carter proved equally firm to Congress in 1979, rejecting calls to lift sanctions.27 Instead, after two days of talks between Lord Carrington and Cyrus Vance in London, the US administration agreed to stand back while the British pursued their renewed diplomatic initiative. Throughout the Lancaster House conference, the US took care not to hinder Carrington’s efforts, and, at Britain’s request, made occasional helpful interventions, particularly in mid-October when they gave ambiguous support for the landredistribution fund which overcame Patriotic Front objections to the constitutional proposals, and in mid-December when they joined Britain in revoking sanctions on Rhodesia before the Patriotic Front’s final agreement to Carrington’s cease-fire proposals.28

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USSR, China and Cuba: Half-hearted Communist Involvement Ironically, given the emphasis placed by US policymakers on forestalling Communist intervention in Rhodesia, the interest shown by the USSR in Rhodesia was minimal. Firstly, Soviet policymakers had already recognised Rhodesia and Namibia as primarily a Western sphere of influence, a fact alluded to by Foreign Minister Gromyko at a meeting with President Carter at the White House in May 1978.29 Training and arming anti-colonial forces was the USSR’s limit: it wanted to avoid inflaming international tensions further. Indeed, a ZAPU report on a visit to the Soviet embassy in Dar es Salaam in December 1978, captured by Rhodesian troops from ZAPU intelligence headquarters in Lusaka, reported a Soviet representative trying to dissuade ZAPU from shifting from guerrilla to conventional strategy, on the grounds that a conventional attack might lead Britain and the US to intervene militarily.30 Secondly, for all the guerrilla leaders’ Marxist-Leninist rhetoric, the southern African setting did not meet Soviet doctrinal conditions for genuine revolution. Ideological considerations were not strong enough to override strategic priorities. But thirdly, too, Soviet influence was limited by their sponsorship of ZAPU, and ZIPRA’s relative military inactivity when compared to their ZANLA counterparts. When southern African détente collapsed in 1975-76 it was Yugoslavia, Romania and China that provided training facilities to ZANU, all Communist states whose foreign policy was to varying degrees independent of Soviet control. In 1978 Mugabe’s efforts to secure active Soviet support largely failed, and even when the Soviets started channelling some weapons to ZANU through Ethiopia, Mugabe remained cold, most publicly by refusing to invite delegations from the USSR’s closest Eastern-bloc allies to Zimbabwe’s independence celebrations.31 Chinese commitment to the Zimbabwean cause was reflected in its support for ZANU. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, senior Chinese figures expressed their belief that Africa was duplicating the Chinese experience of thirty to sixty years previously. Military, diplomatic and economic aid was given to support the southern African liberation struggle, seen for example in extensive small arms transfers to ZANU, in Mugabe and Tongogara’s visit to Beijing in June 1977, and in the building of the Tanzam railway between 1970 and 1975.32 Yet in reality, Chinese engagement in Africa was always somewhat half-hearted: its choice of strategic allies in Africa was determined as much by the Sino-Soviet conflict as by commitment to anti-colonialism; China appeared disinterested in its African allies’ domestic political evolution; and for African liberation

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movements themselves a Chinese alliance was only seriously considered when the Soviet option proved unavailable.33 The failure of the Chinese-backed FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola) against the Soviet- and Cuban-supported MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) in 1975, and the death of Mao in 1976, provoked a rethinking of Chinese policy in southern Africa. Arms supplies to ZANU dwindled, some interest was reportedly shown in the Internal Settlement process, and although China did maintain links with ZANU, in 1981 Deng Xiaoping bluntly informed Mugabe not to anticipate any further large-scale aid from China.34 It does not appear, though, that this rethinking actively contributed to ending the Rhodesian war. ZANU balanced the decline in Chinese arms supplies by improving their military (though not political) ties with Moscow, and there is no evidence of Chinese pressure on ZANU delegates at Lancaster House. If anything, the Communist state most involved in Rhodesia was Cuba. In November 1976, for example, Cuba signed a security pact with Mozambique. In June 1977 Cuban foreign minister Isidoro Malmerca offered direct Cuban military assistance to the Front-Line states and the Patriotic Front. And in October 1978 Mugabe made his first visit to Cuba, securing Castro’s appointment of an official to liaise with ZANU in southern Africa.35 Even then, though, Cuban influence was limited by the reluctance of the Front-Line states and the Patriotic Front guerrillas to surrender their political independence, as amply demonstrated in June 1979, when Castro’s African envoy Raul Vivo proposed that the Patriotic Front declare a provisional government of Zimbabwe in a liberated area of Rhodesia, supported by a full battalion of Mozambican troops. In desperation, according to Jaster at least, at the seemingly imminent success of the Internal Settlement, the FrontLine states accepted the Vivo plan, but the Patriotic Front rejected it, Nkomo because it would mean moving ZIPRA’s troops to ZANLA’s area of operations near Mozambique, and Mugabe because the plan called for Nkomo to be president of the provisional government.36 The Sources and Costs of Support for the Zimbabwean Cause: Zambia, Mozambique and Tanzania Far more important than the superpowers and their clients in ending civil war in Rhodesia were the regional powers in southern Africa: the Front-Line states (particularly Zambia, Mozambique and Tanzania) on one side, South Africa on the other. Though the Front-Line states had varying motivations, though their differences threatened at times to jeopardise their relationship, and though their organisation was loose and informal, Zambia, Mozambique and Tanzania lent critical support

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to the Zimbabwean guerrillas. In particular, by providing training and base facilities, by variously granting and withholding arms shipments to guerrilla movements, and pressuring those guerrillas to attend peace negotiations (most notably at Geneva in 1976), the Front-Line states had a profound impact on the conduct of the war in Rhodesia.37 By the end of 1979, however, Zambia, Mozambique and Tanzania were prepared to accept a negotiated settlement in Rhodesia, and to pressure the Zimbabwean guerrillas to accept it too.38 Zambian support for the Zimbabwean guerrillas stemmed from ideological and security considerations. As a senior African nationalist figure, Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda regarded the apparent halting of decolonisation in southern Africa as a direct challenge. Though no fan of ZANU’s Marxist rhetoric, after Zambian independence in 1964 Kaunda showed a consistent determination to see genuine majority rule in Rhodesia free from South African domination. The presence of a white Zambian community of 75,000 that Kaunda feared could be used by Rhodesia to topple his regime, allied to Zambia’s dependency on Rhodesia for the oil, electricity and coke needed by her vital copper industry underlined Zambia’s desire to see a friendly black nationalist regime in Rhodesia.39 However, Kaunda’s support for the guerrilla campaign in Rhodesia was tempered by two factors: his continued attachment to negotiation, and his support for Joshua Nkomo. ‘We have always declared our readiness’, stated Kaunda to the OAU Liberation Committee in Lusaka in January 1977, ‘for meaningful resolutions to achieve Africa’s objectives. … But we also affirm unequivocally that if negotiations fail, then we shall achieve our objectives by armed struggle’.40 Having achieved Zambian decolonisation peacefully, and ruling the state most vulnerable to Rhodesian counter-strikes, Kaunda never took the overtly militarist stance exhibited by Machel in Mozambique, and the Zambian defence forces never developed with ZIPRA forces in Zambia the strong links enjoyed by ZANLA forces with the Mozambican army. Indeed, Zambian reluctance to commit fully to armed struggle is best illustrated by the political risks Kaunda took in sponsoring negotiations in Rhodesia, not only in the southern African détente process of 1974-75 (where at least he had the albeit sceptical backing of his Front-Line colleagues), but also between Ian Smith and Joshua Nkomo first in 1975-76 and then in 1978, when he braved accusations from ZANU and the other Front-Line states of negotiating away an acceptable settlement in order to secure Nkomo’s leadership of an independent Zimbabwe.41 Nevertheless, Zambia’s loyalty to the Zimbabwean cause should not be underestimated. In January 1973 Ian Smith had announced the closing of the Rhodesia-Zambia border for all

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products except copper in retaliation for Zambian support for guerrilla attacks on Rhodesia. When Smith reopened the border after three weeks, Kaunda closed it himself, effectively tightening the UN sanctions net around Rhodesia, despite Zambia’s specific exemption from enforcing those sanctions. Moreover, the failure in 1976 of the first Smith-Nkomo talks and of the Geneva conference led Kaunda publicly to reaffirm his commitment to the liberation of Zimbabwe by armed struggle in the face of Rhodesian intransigence.42 By late 1979, however, Zambia could no longer afford to support the Zimbabwean guerrillas. With the UN calculating that the border closure had forced landlocked Zambia to reroute 68% of her imports and 55% of her exports between 1973 and 1978, the cumulative cost to Zambia of implementing sanctions was estimated at $750 million between 1969 and 1977. Moreover, as indicated by her colonial name of Northern Rhodesia, Zambia’s infrastructural links were heavily with southern Africa, and her more northerly neighbours were ill-equipped to take the strain of transporting Zambian imports and exports. The Tanzam railway opened in 1975 to link Zambia with Dar es Salaam disappointed expectations, the road link to the ports of Mozambique had a limited capacity, while civil war in Angola and control by UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) of part of the line decreased the utility to Zambia of the Benguela railway to Lobito on the Atlantic coast. By mid-1978, 100,000 tons of Zambian copper were waiting to be exported through Dar es Salaam, with 90,000 tons of Zambian imports stacked at the docks there. Not all Zambia’s economic problems could be blamed on Rhodesia: chronic blockages were already endemic to her economy, but coupled with rising oil prices and declining copper prices, the costs of supporting war in Rhodesia threatened to turn those blockages into regime-threatening shortages.43 In October 1978, therefore, in a major blow to the unity of the Front-Line states, Kaunda re-opened Zambia’s border with Rhodesia.44 Even this, though, failed to solve the problems. Transport bottlenecks continued despite the opening of the southern rail route through Rhodesia to South Africa, as 75,000 tons of imported grain stacked up in South African ports waiting for transport to Zambia. Moreover, a sharp drop in maize production that year left Zambia’s 40% urban population particularly dependent on imports, a fact which the Muzorewa government exploited in November 1979 with a ban on the transport of maize supplies to Zambia. Zambian relations with ZIPRA guerrillas based in Zambia, meanwhile, became increasingly strained, as the easy availability of weapons and ZIPRA indiscipline led to an alarming wave of violent crime that reached Lusaka itself. Domestic opposition, too, was growing against

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Zambia’s support for ZIPRA.45 But most seriously of all, in October and November 1979 the Rhodesian security forces began to fulfil Ian Smith’s 1978 threat to target not just guerrilla bases in the Front-Line states, but economic targets too. Despite mobilising his armed forces, Kaunda’s ill-equipped 13,000 troops did not even attempt to prevent Rhodesian forces destroying ten vital road bridges either side of Lusaka and the major railway bridge across the Chambeshi river that was Zambia’s last major link with the outside world which did not go through Rhodesia itself.46 Mozambique too had to qualify its support for the Patriotic Front in the late 1970s. Even during its ten-year war against the Portuguese colonial authorities, which contributed to the Caetano regime’s fall and its successor’s offer of independence to Portugal’s African colonies in 1974, Samora Machel’s FRELIMO lent valuable support first to ZAPU and then to ZANU. For Machel, the liberation of Mozambique and of Rhodesia were inextricably linked, and unlike Kaunda he placed much emphasis on the socialist nature of the Zimbabwean struggle, declaring in 1976 for example that: It will allow Zimbabweans to transform the present nationalist struggle into a revolutionary struggle that implies profound changes in the society. This will allow the people of Zimbabwe a complete divorce from capitalism.47 Mozambican support for the guerrillas took many forms: FRELIMO provided bases for ZANU on Mozambican soil, even before achieving their own independence; in March 1976 Mozambique announced the closure of its border with Rhodesia; and by 1978-79 approximately five hundred Mozambican regular troops were operating with ZANLA on a rotating basis inside Rhodesia.48 Like Zambia, however, Mozambique found active support for the Patriotic Front far from cost-free. The Mozambican economy was already precarious in the mid-1970s, suffering from the after-effects of its war of independence and of the exodus of 120,000 Portuguese settlers. The closure of the Rhodesian border deprived Mozambique of transit revenues from the 80% of Rhodesian exports that had previously flowed through the ports of Beira and Maputo. Income was also cut off from the 37,000 Mozambicans in the border area who previously travelled to work in Rhodesia, as were remittances from 80,000 Mozambicans employed full-time in Rhodesia. By 1979 it was estimated that the cumulative cost to Mozambique had exceeded $500 million, a figure far exceeding the international compensation she received. In areas of Mozambique bordering on Rhodesia, moreover, tensions were developing between ZANLA and FRELIMO personnel,

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particularly over the issue of sexual relations between Zimbabwean fighters and Mozambican women.49 In 1979 military costs were added to economic and social ones. Three years previously, the Rhodesian CIO had played a major role in the formation of RENAMO, an anti-FRELIMO guerrilla movement that waged a civil war in Mozambique until 1993. By 1979 RENAMO was strong enough to co-operate with the Rhodesian SAS and the Rhodesian Light Infantry in a series of high-profile raids on Mozambican targets, most notably destroying the Mavuze hydroelectric power station early in 1979 and burning the Beira oil depot in March.50 Despite the concentration of Rhodesian vital economic areas in eastern Rhodesia and the consequent need for Rhodesian eastern area commanders to commit much of their forces to defence in depth, the opening of the Lancaster House conference coincided with a shattering increase in the intensity of Rhodesian attacks on Mozambican economic targets. In December 1979 Machel wrote to Robert Mugabe advising that ‘we will not be in a position to resist’ further Rhodesian attacks, and predicting the fall of his own regime by about July 1980.51 More so than in Zambia, however, Mozambican reconsideration of its open-ended commitment to armed struggle in Rhodesia was influenced by officials’ confidence in the outcome of the independence elections proposed at Lancaster House. Intelligence gathering by Mozambican troops in eastern Rhodesia confirmed popular support, albeit unsophisticated, for ZANU, and alone of the non-Rhodesian politicians at Lancaster House, it was Machel’s personal representative Fernando Honwana who openly predicted an outright electoral victory for ZANU.52 As the Lancaster House conference unfolded, therefore, the two Front-Line states supporting the Zimbabwean guerrillas were effectively unable to continue the war. Even Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere was forced to reconsider his position. Tanzania’s distance from the sharp end of the Rhodesian war had allowed him to adopt hard-line positions, for example declaring in September 1976 that guerrilla fighting would continue ‘until the establishment of a transitional government, which would have to be a black majority’. Indeed, it was Nyerere’s firm stance over the composition of the armed forces during the proposed interim period that had effectively scuppered the AngloAmerican initiative. Now, however, he was influenced by the hardship of his Zambian and Mozambican partners and by the financial costs of his overthrow of Idi Amin in Uganda in April 1979 to take a more conciliatory line.53

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At various key points in the Lancaster House process, therefore, the Front-Line states exerted severe pressure on a reluctant Patriotic Front. As Mugabe commented ten years later: The front-line states said we had to negotiate, we had to go to this conference. There we were, we thought we were on top of the situation back home, we were moving forward all the time, and why should we be denied the ultimate joy of having militarily overthrown the regime here?54 The Front-Line states insisted on the centrality of the British mediation process. At the Havana summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in early September 1979 they reacted angrily to Patriotic Front attempts to have the Lusaka summit agreements repudiated, reportedly threatening to stop supporting the guerrillas if they boycotted Lancaster House. And when, during the conference itself, they learned in mid-December that Mugabe and Nkomo were making one last effort to wriggle out of the Lancaster House process and get UN support for their position, Machel personally intervened to prevent Mugabe leaving London, while Nkomo was pressured into staying by officials from the US, Britain, Zambia and the Commonwealth Secretariat.55 Throughout the conference itself, too, the Front-Line states made their pressure felt. They rejected Patriotic Front demands to discuss the transitional arrangements before the constitution. They publicly supported the British proposal for a block of reserved seats for the white minority. They pressured the Patriotic Front strongly to accept the tabled plans on land ownership and compensation, Machel himself reminding Mugabe that ‘revolutionary’ Mozambique was still paying compensation to the Portuguese. And, most decisively of all, as Mugabe shied away from signing the agreement in mid-December, Fernando Honwana arrived with a letter from Machel instructing Mugabe to sign and informing him that if he refused, he personally would be offered asylum in Mozambique but ZANLA’s bases would be removed.56 South Africa: The Limits of White Solidarity The Patriotic Front guerrillas, however, were not the only belligerents with close links to neighbouring states. Throughout the war, the Rhodesian regime leaned heavily on South Africa for support. As early as 1967 a military relationship between the two was established as clashes between Rhodesian forces and ZIPRA guerrillas near the South African border, and infiltration by the South African ANC into South Africa itself, led South Africa to provide Rhodesia with 2,000 paramilitary police, as well as helicopters and pilots.57 By 1975 South

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African involvement in the Rhodesian war was estimated to have cost her $300 million, as she ferried money, arms, ammunition, spare parts and petrol to her fellow white settlers. Equally significantly, South African refusal to implement sanctions safeguarded Rhodesia’s main export route. Despite political difficulties in 1975-76 between the two that saw South African assistance abruptly curtailed and almost £50 million of Rhodesian goods pile up in the South African transport system, these were overcome in late 1976, and South African supplies began to flow even more plentifully northwards over the Limpopo, with Rhodesian exports making the return journey. Indeed, as Ellert notes, the South African ‘V Troop’ signals and code-breaking detachment operated continuously in Rhodesia from 1968 to 1980, unaffected by political difficulties between Salisbury and Pretoria. By 1979, South Africa was reportedly spending £1 million per day helping Rhodesia, and in early December Pretoria officially admitted that its troops were regularly operating inside Zimbabwe Rhodesia.58 Despite this apparent closeness, relations between the South African and Rhodesian governments were often tense. Historical factors played their part. Rhodesia had chosen to remain independent of South Africa in her 1923 referendum; property, not race, was the keystone of the Rhodesian franchise; and the pride that South African prime minister John Vorster and his intelligence chief Hendrik van den Bergh showed at having been interned by the British at Koffiefontein during World War Two for their refusal to fight against Germany contrasted with the loyal service given by Rhodesians such as Ian Smith. More recently, Vorster’s predecessor Hendrik Verwoerd had counselled strongly against UDI – Ken Flower’s South African contacts assured him that ‘any support they might offer would come reluctantly and only because of the accident of geography’ – because it threatened both to destabilise the region and to imperil South Africa’s ability to maintain apartheid both at home and in South-West Africa.59 The critical point in South African-Rhodesian relations came with the collapse of Portuguese authority in Angola and Mozambique in 1974. To Vorster and his partisans in the South African Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Rhodesia was suddenly no longer a keystone in the buffer zone for South Africa, and was now an obstacle to rapprochement with the African nationalist states to the north. Vorster believed that by helping establish a moderate black majority regime in Rhodesia he could forestall international, and particularly Communist, pressure on South Africa itself.60 In this, Vorster was not without internal opposition. Both South African public opinion and the military were much more sympathetic to Rhodesia, and the traditional South African mantra of non-interference in other countries’ affairs prevented Vorster from exerting public pressure on Smith. Despite

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this, though, it was with South Africa’s benefit in mind rather than Rhodesia’s that Vorster dragged an unwilling Ian Smith to the negotiating table at Victoria Falls in August 1975 and applied pressure on Rhodesia’s economic lifeline to force him to accept the Kissinger plan in September 1976. Smith made no attempt to conceal his disgust at having to negotiate with ‘terrorists’ under South African pressure, nor to scale down attacks on guerrilla targets in Zambia and Mozambique.61 September 1976 represented the high-point of South African pressure on Rhodesia. Thereafter, three interlinked phenomena intervened to lessen it. First was the failure of the Kissinger initiative. Vorster had supported it because it might introduce a moderate black government in Rhodesia. Pushing Smith to agree to a settlement acceptable to the Front-Line states and the Patriotic Front would run the risk of seeing a Marxist victory, the very thing South African pressure on Smith was intended to forestall. Secondly, Gerald Ford’s defeat in the US presidential election on 3 November 1976 and Jimmy Carter’s subsequent southern African policy removed the international incentive for South Africa to co-operate. Where Kissinger had baited South Africa with a promise to leave her alone domestically if she cooperated over Rhodesia, Carter demanded additional concessions from her. This culminated in Vice-President Mondale’s disastrous meeting with Vorster in Vienna in May 1977, where he simultaneously explained the US objective of one-man one-vote rule in South Africa and attempted to browbeat Vorster over Rhodesia.62 And thirdly, after 1976 the military began to dominate South African foreign policymaking. A 1977 Defence White Paper expounded a new ‘total strategy’ arguing for a build-up of South Africa’s ability to intervene militarily in southern Africa, a policy adopted by former defence minister P.W. Botha on his election as prime minister in 1978. Rather than pursue détente with black nationalist states, Pretoria was now to focus on creating a Constellation of Southern African States at whose heart would lie an economically and militarily dominant South Africa.63 The result was that as early as October 1976, aid to Rhodesia was increased, permission given for Rhodesian forces to launch massive raids on guerrilla targets in Zambia and Mozambique, the Patriotic Front explicitly condemned, and diplomatic support given to Rhodesia over her rejection of Vance and Owen’s Anglo-American initiative.64 Yet South African refusal to yield to British and American entreaties to bring Ian Smith to heel did not imply unlimited support for Rhodesia. In particular, it did not mean that direct military intervention on the scale undertaken in Angola in 1975 was envisaged for Rhodesia. Pressure to forge ahead with an internal settlement was maintained on Smith throughout 1977 and 1978, and restraints on

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Rhodesia’s external operations were still employed, especially over Mozambique’s southern Gaza province. Even when the internal elections were held and Muzorewa became prime minister, South African foreign minister Pik Botha stalled on the issue of whether to recognise Zimbabwe Rhodesia.65 South African ministers made clear pronouncements warning external states not to launch a conventional assault on Rhodesia, and on 16 November 1979 South Africa directly announced that she would not accept ‘chaos’ in Rhodesia. At the same time, though, Pik Botha declared his country’s commitment to accept whatever result in Rhodesia a fair democratic process might throw up, and supported Rhodesian commander General Walls’ refusal to go along with Ian Smith’s attempt to reject the white parliamentary blocking mechanism at Lancaster House. With no official role at the conference, South Africa might dread the prospect of a Patriotic Front election victory, but it could only frustrate the conference by direct military intervention. But as Pik Botha admitted in 1990: It became clear to us that although the struggle could have gone on, it would spill over into the region – that is to say, our region. We are interested in stability in this region. … We could not take the war over then because Britain claimed sovereignty, and that would have brought us into a direct clash with Britain. A direct conflict with Britain …, in my opinion, this country could not afford.66

Lebanon Syria: The Motivation for Hegemony Paradoxically, the belligerent that gained most from the Taif agreement and the end of the Lebanese civil war was not even Lebanese: it was Syria. The modalities of Syrian policy in Lebanon are hard to investigate. The regime itself hardly helped here, with regular blandishments such as: ‘What Syria wants for Lebanon is that which meets the national interests of all Lebanese. Syria has never harboured any designs on Lebanon and can never have such ambitions in the sisterly country’.67 Denials of self-interest were coupled constantly with restatements of the ‘one people in two countries’ formula that recalled a history of Syrian ambivalence and even hostility towards Lebanon’s existence as an independent entity.68 With no archival evidence or open political debate in Syria, much writing on Syrian policy in Lebanon has veered towards the uncritical or the virulently

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anti-Syrian.69 Yet whichever paradigm of Syrian foreign policy-making one accepts – Abu-Khalil presents three, those of ‘Greater Syria’, ‘raison d’état’, and ‘raison du régime’ – involvement in Lebanon clearly served Syrian interests, whether ideological, security related or personal.70 Firstly, Beirut was effectively neutralised as a base for undermining Asad’s regime. Secondly, the Bekaa had always been an Achilles heel in Syria’s strategic position towards Israel, allowing Israel to outflank the Golan Heights and strike either towards Damascus (which lies only fifty kilometres from Zahle) or towards the industrial centres in northern Syria. The Syrian military positions in the Bekaa, held almost throughout the civil war, countered this threat.71 The importance of these was implicitly recognised by Asad in his adoption in 1985 of a policy of seeking strategic parity with Israel, which saw Lebanon becoming both a buffer and a front. Asad repeatedly stated that any Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon could only occur after an Israeli retreat.72 Thirdly, Lebanon offered economic advantages to Syria, especially to those linked with the regime, particularly in the export of narcotics. Although Asad ordered occasional crackdowns, it has been estimated that during the civil war Lebanon earned Syria over $2 billion per annum from the drug plantations in the Bekaa, a sum purportedly greater than the entire Syrian civil budget.73 Lastly, influence over Lebanon meant influence over the Palestinian movement. From 1971 until 1983 Lebanon was the PLO’s main base, and even after then the large size of the Palestinian refugee population in Lebanon gave Asad considerable leverage over the PLO. But Lebanon was more than a field of opportunity to Syria. Failure to intervene might have presented several dangers. The Syrian crackdown on the Sunni Islamist Tawheed in Tripoli between 1983 and 1985, for example, should be seen in the light of Asad’s crackdown on similar Syrian groups in Hama in 1982. But Asad always viewed Lebanon in relation not only to his own security, but also to the Arab-Israeli conflict.74 A civil war in Lebanon from which Syria remained aloof could have thrown up a new political configuration extremely dangerous to Syria. Too free a hand for the PLO in Lebanon could draw Syria into a conflict with Israel on terms other than Asad’s own. A Maronite state allied with Israel would be even worse. Above all, Syria feared partition of Lebanon. Not only would this have accentuated the dangers, it would also have presented a worrying example for Asad’s own minority regime in Damascus.75

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Arab League Mediation However, if Syria’s desire to end the Lebanese war on terms favourable to itself was a constant in the period 1976-1990, Syrian policies alone do not explain the signing of the Taif agreement in 1989 nor the implementation of its main provisions in 1990. The Syrianengineered Tripartite agreement had, after all, failed abjectly in 1986. In theory at least, Syria was merely an interested observer in the Taif mediation process. And most importantly, bilateral Syrian-Lebanese relations do not explain the free hand offered to Syria in Lebanon in 1989-90 by actors both regional and international. Ostensibly, what ended the civil war was an Arab League mediation process that prima facie appears a classic example of good offices by a regional organisation. In response to the crisis that escalated in Lebanon after Amin Gemayel’s departure from office, the Council of Ministers of the Arab League appointed a six-nation commission on Lebanon which sought a cease-fire to Aoun’s ‘War of Liberation’ and to introduce an Arab League peacekeeping contingent.76 As fighting intensified despite the commission’s efforts, at its Casablanca summit in May 1989 the League appointed a ‘troika’ of the kings of Saudi Arabia and Morocco and the president of Algeria to deal with Lebanon, with the specific objective of restoring Lebanese sovereignty. Over the next seventeen months, the troika, their foreign ministers, and especially their special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi shuttled across the Arab world, working often in secret, offering one deal then another, searching first for a cease-fire and then for a peace agreement. Even throughout 1990, after Taif, Brahimi continued to work on Lebanon, meeting repeatedly with Syria, the Saudis, Hoss, Husseini, Saadeh, Sfeir and Jaja, among others. Aoun too was included in the schedule, only his insistence on amending the Taif agreement dooming Brahimi’s entreaties.77 However, there is little in the Arab League mediation to suggest that great importance should be attached to it. As observed in Chapter 1, the Taif proposals were far from creative or imaginative insofar as they affected Lebanon’s internal political framework. On Lebanon’s external relations, meanwhile, the diametrically opposed statements on Syria’s role in Lebanon issued by the Arab League troika in the summer of 1989 indicate less a genuine problem-solving attempt to square the differences between the various interested parties than the extent to which the mediatory effort played second fiddle to the forces of Middle Eastern regional politics. Far more important were developments in the wider Middle Eastern region. Three actors in particular, Israel, the PLO and Iran, had competed with Syria over

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Lebanon at various stages since 1975. By 1990 all had conceded Syrian dominance. The Aftermath of the 1982 Invasion (1): Israel and the ‘Security Zone’ Israeli involvement in Lebanon escalated during the first half of the civil war, from informal links with the Maronites until 1977, through increasing military intervention and a direct, overt alliance with Bashir Gemayel and Camille Chamoun under the Likud administration elected in 1977, all the way to a full-scale invasion in June 1982.78 Initially the invasion seemed successful: the PLO was expelled from Lebanon, the Syrian forces engaged (especially in the air) suffered serious losses, and under Israeli guns Bashir Gemayel was elected president.79 But both public opinion and the political élite had been divided. What many thought was an incursion limited to forty miles from the Israeli border to safeguard northern Israel from guerrilla attack became a bid to exert Israeli hegemony in Lebanon through the Lebanese Forces. Many causes have been suggested for the invasion: Zionist expansionism, coveting Lebanese water resources; a PLO-led pan-Arab drive for hegemony in the Middle East; psychologicalcultural factors, focusing on prime minister Begin’s ‘holocaust obsession’ about the Maronite community and on defence minister Ariel Sharon’s and military chief Rafael Eitan’s Arab-phobia; domestic political considerations in the form of the Likud Party’s victory in the 1981 elections; a security problem in dealing with PLO attacks out of ‘Fatahland’ in the south of Lebanon.80 In many ways, the plausibility of these various explanations is less important than what is indicated by their range:: no political consensus existed in Israel in favour of the 1982 invasion. Few in Israel expected resistance from Lebanese organisations independent of the PLO, and the IDF was initially welcomed by the villagers of the south. But from Bashir Gemayel’s death on 14 September 1982 onwards, the IDF faced a series of such attacks, estimated by the UN at two per day in early 1984 and increasing thereafter.81 The massacre of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, which the IDF had failed to prevent and had perhaps even encouraged, and the ensuing international and domestic outcry put further pressure on Israel to withdraw. When it became clear that the agreement reached between Israel and Amin Gemayel on 17 May 1983 was not going to hold, the question was no longer whether to withdraw, but how, when, and how far. In September 1983 Israeli troops withdrew to the line of the River Awali, and on 6 June 1985 they fell back further to a small ‘security zone’ in the extreme south.82

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By 1985 the Israeli bid for hegemony, or even for overt involvement in Lebanon surplus to border defence, was unquestionably dead. But withdrawal did not mean complete defeat for Israel. A far greater threat than from the PLO or Lebanese groups was the prospect of Syria using Lebanon as a military base for attacks on Israel. To recap historically, in 1976 this issue had been neutralised by the creation of a tacit system of deterrence between Syria and Israel known as the ‘Red Line agreement’. Conducted through Washington and public posturing, this ensured that Israel would tolerate a Syrian presence in Lebanon if: Syrian troops did not advance south of a line drawn from Sidon in the west, through Jezzine, to Rashaya in the Bekaa; no Syrian aircraft or surface-to-air missiles were installed or used in Lebanon; and, it was later added, Syria did not launch a major attack on the Maronite forces. This deterrence system gradually eroded from 1978 to 1982, and its existence was threatened by the Israeli invasion. But despite jockeying on both sides in 1985, it survived. Upheld by a balance between Israel’s greater military potential and Syria’s greater determination to retain a stake in Lebanon, the Red Line agreement’s specific deterrence system divorced Lebanon from other areas of Israeli-Syrian tension. Eventually, Israel was prepared to cede Syria political hegemony in Lebanon, if Syria refrained from using Lebanon for strategic-military purposes.83 Israeli withdrawal did not end Israeli involvement in the civil war. Covert supplies were sent to anti-Syrian groups; ships suspected of carrying PLO personnel and supplies were regularly intercepted and searched; periodic attacks were launched against Palestinian military installations.84 Israeli troops still occupied their ‘security zone’. Contrary to the views of some observers,85 this proved a relative success: in 1987 an estimated 750 attacks were launched against the zone; in 1990 the number was a third of this. The SLA was upgraded through training, economic incentives and periodic coercion; a few Israeli Druzes were integrated in key positions of authority.86 But even though violent, an equilibrium did indeed reign in the south. The prospect of a Syrian-imposed peace in Lebanon threatened this equilibrium. At times between 1989 and 1991 Israeli officials displayed their displeasure over events. Continuing Syrian artillery bombardments against areas held by Aoun in August 1989 drew public Israeli condemnations. When Syria threatened to attack Aoun at Baabda three months later, defence minister Yitzhak Rabin warned that Israel would intervene if she considered her interests threatened.87 Less than twenty-four hours before the Syrian assault on Baabda on 13 October 1990, Israeli fighter plans overflew Beirut in response to a request from Aoun through Dany Chamoun for a show of strength.88

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Nevertheless, Israeli policy overall favoured accepting Syrian hegemony, as long as Israel’s northern border remained secure. Indeed, as fighting escalated between Aoun and Syria (and her allies) and between Amal and Hizballah, the ‘security zone’ performed its function. With Arafat’s Fatah publicly ending operations on the Israeli-Lebanese border in December 1988, the twelve months to the end of March 1990 saw fighting decrease in the zone from the previous twelve month period, with three Israelis killed against seventeen, 370 guerrilla attacks against 560, and fifteen attempted guerrilla border infiltrations against thirty-seven.89 Aoun himself elicited little sympathy from Israel, where decision-makers were not only preoccupied with the Palestinian intifada, but also regarded Aoun as unpredictable and a poor political operator.90 As early as April 1989 it was reported that ‘well placed Christian sources say the Israelis have been advising [Aoun] that Beirut “is a Syrian affair”’.91 Uri Lubrani’s public statements are instructive: in November 1989 he stated that Israel viewed the post-Taif presidential election of René Moawad as a positive step; in July 1990 he launched Israel’s first public attack on Aoun, accusing him of digging his own grave, caught in the trap of personal ambition; after Aoun’s fall he restated Israel’s position: The Syrians are very familiar with Israel’s red lines. I do not think they broke any of them. It is true that they deployed aircraft, but I think that from a broader outlook this force was used to effect something in Lebanon. We firmly adhere to our position that anything that is unrelated to our security or the well-being of our northern border does not require our intervention.92 The Aftermath of the 1982 Invasion (2): The PLO By 1989 the PLO, too, no longer had a serious interest in preventing peace in Lebanon.93 In the early 1970s Lebanon was the focus of PLO activity, with cross-border attacks the centrepiece of Fatah activity. In the mid 1970s, however, mainstream Palestinian strategy changed. In 1974 the twelfth session of the Palestine National Council called for the establishment of a ‘national authority’ in any portion of liberated land. From 1977 onwards, this crystallised into a policy to establish an independent Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank. With the Occupied Territories now the immediate target for liberation, crossborder attacks became much less important, and so did Lebanon itself. For the Arafat-controlled sections of the PLO, Lebanon’s value was now more as a diplomatic headquarters than a military base. The attacks did not stop: many groups under the PLO umbrella rejected

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the two-state solution, and for them cross-border attacks became significant not just in themselves but also as a sign of their instigators’ rejectionist credentials. The Israeli invasion in 1982 dealt a huge blow even to the PLO’s diplomatic activities in Lebanon. Expelled first from Beirut by the Israelis and then from Tripoli by the Syrians, PLO guerrillas were scattered to Algeria, Tunisia, Sudan, North and South Yemen, Iraq, Jordan and Syria. Whatever their previous attitude, by 1985 no Lebanese community wanted the PLO to return. Meanwhile, the PLO was further weakened by the split within Fatah between Arafat and Abu Musa. Syria’s rout of the PLO in Tripoli pushed Arafat closer to Egypt, and in December 1983 Arafat met with Hosni Mubarak, his first meeting with an Egyptian leader since the Camp David accords of 1978. With Arafat aligned with Egypt, and Syria tightening its grip on Lebanon, Lebanon’s significance for the mainstream PLO continued to decline. The process was accelerated in the late 1980s. Launched in December 1987, the intifada, an initially spontaneous outbreak of civil unrest in the Occupied Territories, acquired a measure of coherent organisation, diverting funds and attention from the PLO in Lebanon. In July 1988 Jordan severed administrative and legal ties with the West Bank. And in November, the Palestinian National Council proclaimed an independent state in the Occupied Territories, and its preparedness to talk with Israel, formalising a process begun over ten years earlier. Fatah military actions against Israel were suspended.94 The PLO in Lebanon did not go quietly. Aligned over Lebanon with Saddam Hussein and Michel Aoun, Arafat continued to denounce Syrian intervention in Lebanon.95 Refusing to disarm, the PLO was brought to heel by the Lebanese Army in July 1991. But why the defeat was so swift and resistance so half-hearted can be answered at the regional level. Hounded by Israel and Syria, and with changed priorities, the PLO no longer needed the ‘minor sideshow’ of Lebanon.96 Iran: The Alliance with Syria and the Link with Hizballah Iran’s involvement in Lebanon derived from the Iranian-Syrian alliance that officially emerged in 1982, and was conducted through Hizballah, the Shia Islamist group founded by Iran, and by the direct involvement of a contingent of Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Baalbek. Lebanon offered Iran several opportunities: with the largest Shia population west of the Gulf, Lebanon could compensate for the failure of Iran’s revolutionary message to penetrate Iraq and the Gulf states; it involved Iran in the Arab-Israeli dispute, from which her political radicalism and non-Arab status seemed to preclude her; and hostage-taking by

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pro-Iranian groups gave her some leverage with Western powers. There seems to have been no direct connection between Iran’s involvement in Lebanon and the course of the Iran-Iraq war, which began in 1980, other than Iran’s alliance with Syria that permitted this involvement.97 At this time, both Iran and Syria were out on a political limb: the former after her 1979 revolution, the latter after Egypt’s defection at Camp David and with domestic unrest. An alliance made sense for both: Iran gained her only Arab supporter in her war against Iraq; Syria not only ensured the encirclement of her old antagonist Iraq, but also gained influence as the only intermediary between Iran and the Arab world. Despite difficulties between 1986 and 1991 (over Lebanon, economic issues, tentative Syrian moves towards Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and Western action against Iraq) the alliance continued to hold.98 During the second half of the 1980s, Iranian involvement in Lebanon was conducted on a large scale. Of the $150 to $200 million entering the country from external political sources, half was estimated to come from Iran.99 Money went not only on arms and supplies, but was also poured into the economic and social infrastructure of the south. By early 1989 Iran had 2,000 of its own Revolutionary Guards stationed in Lebanon.100 As Agha and Khalidi note, ‘Hizballah’s challenge to Syrian dominance among the Shia in Lebanon thus went beyond operational differences over the Palestinians and the war in the south, and had begun to strike at the very foundation of Syrian influence and prestige’.101 By mid-1991, however, Iran had reduced her involvement in Lebanon. The process was not straightforward. Failure in the war against Iraq in 1988 left Lebanon as Iran’s almost only outlet in the Arab world, so increasing her interest there. Deputy foreign minister Muhammad Ali Besharati pushed (albeit unsuccessfully) for Iranian involvement in the policing of South Beirut as Syrian troops deployed there in May 1988.102 Meetings were held in Tehran not only with Hizballah, but also with rejectionist Palestinian groups. Elected president in July 1989 after Khomeini’s death, Rafsanjani sought to develop links with Amal in order to broaden Iran’s client base in Lebanon.103 The Taif agreement and the Middle East peace process were both opposed. However, Iranian opposition to Syrian dominance in Lebanon in 1989-90 was half-hearted. Sources in Damascus confirmed that Iran had promised not to encourage its Lebanese allies to go beyond words in their opposition to Taif.104 And in November 1990 the Iranian vice-president Hassan Habibi and his Syrian counterpart Abdel Halim Khaddam supervised an agreement ending hostilities between Hizballah and Amal and giving the Lebanese Army authority throughout southern Lebanon. Unlike the

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PLO, Hizballah was privileged in post-war Lebanon, being permitted to continue low-level military activity against the Israeli security zone. But its influence was severely curtailed. To an extent, this derived from the nature of the alliance itself, which, according to Agha and Khalidi, was characterised by ‘a recognition by each side that its freedom to act in the other’s sphere of vital interest must remain within limits and subject to the other’s final discretion’.105 Thus as Syria became more determined to impose peace on Lebanon, Iranian influence declined correspondingly. Iran was also somewhat handicapped by her limited appeal even to the Lebanese Muslim communities. The Sunni establishment’s traditional links with Egypt and Saudi Arabia left it at odds with Iran. Iraq, not Iran, had the greater natural connections with South Lebanon’s Shiis. And Amal in particular resented Iran’s good relations with Libya in the light of their founder Musa al-Sadr’s mysterious disappearance there in 1978.106 But the process was also affected by a power struggle within Iran itself. On 3 June 1989 the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini died, and although not violent, a struggle ensued between the ‘pragmatists’ led by Majlis speaker Hashemi Rafsanjani and President Khamenei and the ‘radicals’ led by interior minister (and founder of Hizballah) Ali Mohtashemi. Concurrent with his attempted rapprochement with Amal, Rafsanjani moved quickly to curb Hizballah’s power, encouraging those in its leadership who were downplaying the prospects of Islamic Revolution in Lebanon.107 In October 1989 it was reported that Imad Mugnieh, radical chief architect of the kidnapping of the Western hostages in Lebanon, was under house arrest in Tehran.108 Though Mohtashemi’s Lebanese supporters were boosted when he visited Lebanon in late 1989, the struggle climaxed with a palace coup by the pragmatists in late October 1990, shortly before the Amal-Hizballah peace deal. Hizballah’s links were strongly with Mohtashemi, while Rafsanjani’s attitude was to blame both sides for dividing the Shia community. His victory against the radicals was followed by large cuts in supplies to Hizballah.109 In 1998 Iranian Revolutionary Guards were finally withdrawn from Lebanon.110 Inter-Arab Politics: Iraq’s Drive for Middle Eastern Hegemony and its Effects on Lebanon The acceptance of Syrian hegemony in Lebanon by Israel, Iran and the PLO was certainly crucial, but the precipitating international factors for that hegemony lie elsewhere, in the byzantine machinations of inter-state Arab politics. Almost since the civil war began in 1975, Lebanese politics had been closely intertwined with inter-Arab politics.

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Through mechanisms multilateral and formal, as in the Arab League’s Arab Deterrent Force established in October 1976, or unilateral and secret, as in the regular cash and armament grants from various Arab states to ‘their’ various Lebanese militias, for fifteen years Lebanon constituted one of the principal stages on which inter-Arab rivalries were played out. This aspect of the war was magnified in the late 1980s. For long, Egypt’s isolation from the Arab world following its peace with Israel, Iraq’s preoccupation with its war against Iran, and Saudi failure to broker a Lebanese settlement against ongoing regional dissension had all benefited Syria.111 In 1988-89, however, a series of regional factors intensified the spotlight on Syria’s activities in Lebanon: the defeat of Syria’s ally Iran in the Iran-Iraq war; Egypt’s reintegration into the Arab mainstream and Syria’s exclusion from the Arab Co-operation Council; Syria’s failure to capture the ‘Palestinian card’, as the intifada in Gaza and the West Bank, Arafat’s acceptance of UN resolutions 181 and 242, Jordan’s severance of administrative and legal ties to the West Bank, and the political failure of the Syriansponsored Abu Musa rebellion within Fatah combined to reduce Syrian leverage over the PLO; and Saudi determination to achieve Arab unity ahead of an Arab-Israeli peace conference.112 Militarily, Arab pressure on Syria consisted of massive Iraqi arms supplies to Aoun and the Lebanese Forces. Politically, and thus more ominously for Syria as it threatened to undermine her very presence in Lebanon, it came in the shape of the Arab League mediation process. At odds with Syria since the Baath-Baath split of 1963 and the failure of a reconciliation attempt in 1978-79, Iraq was the impetus behind the pressure. Iraqi leaders demanded unconditional withdrawal of Syrian and other foreign troops from Lebanon at the Arab League summit in September 1986, officially recognised Aoun’s government in September 1988, and successfully sought the appointment of a commission to investigate the Lebanese crisis at the Arab League Council of Ministers meeting in January 1989.113 Throughout the first nine months of 1989 Iraq launched a verbal onslaught against Syria, accusing Syria of acting as a Zionist pawn and calling on the Arab states to join in the condemnation.114 The response was initially circumspect, only Libya joining Iraq in open condemnation.115 By May 1989, though, facing Syrian intransigence at the Arab League Casablanca summit, a more overtly hostile approach was detectable. King Hussein of Jordan proposed replacing Syrian forces in Lebanon with a joint Arab force. In June first Jordan and then Egypt rejected Syrian requests to intercept a shipment of Iraqi Frog-7 surface-to-surface missiles bound for Aoun as they were loaded in Aqaba and then transported through the Suez canal. And in August, following the Arab tripartite committee report

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that heavily criticised Syria, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak openly stated that Lebanese sovereignty, can only be achieved through the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Lebanon, and by foreign troops I mean all nonLebanese troops: the Syrians, the Iranians and the Israelis.116 By the end of October 1989, however, the Arab states had sponsored a peace conference at Taif that effectively legitimised Syrian dominance over Lebanon. And when Syrian forces successfully assaulted Aoun’s defensive positions on 13 October 1990 there was almost no dissent from the Arab world. What caused this change in policy towards Syria? The answer lies in Iraq’s drive for hegemony in the Arab world, Saudi Arabia’s response to that drive, and Egypt’s need for Syria to accept her readmission to the Arab League. Dans un monde où chacun ne consulte que ses intérêts’, Saddam Hussein reportedly stated in a message to Karim Pakradouni in June 1988, ‘nous ne cherchons rien d’autre que de mettre un terme aux souffrances d’un peuple et de libérer le Liban des Israéliens, des Syriens et des Iraniens. Nous ne voulons pas nous mêler des affaires intérieures libanaises.117 However disingenuous, this claim alluded to an important point: that Iraq had no intrinsic interests in Lebanon and that Iraqi policies towards Lebanon were fully subordinate to her wider regional policies. As Iraq’s focus shifted westwards after Iran’s acceptance of UN Security Council resolution 598 in July 1988, heading the states pressuring Syria over Lebanon became one way for Iraq to assert her leadership in Arab politics. Throughout summer 1989, therefore, Iraq deliberately supported the Arab tripartite committee, promising to stop supplying weapons to her allies in Lebanon if so requested by the committee.118 When the committee performed its about-turn in September 1989, calling a cease-fire that effectively ceded Lebanon to Syria, Saddam Hussein followed the Arab mainstream. With the Taif conference successful, Baghdad maintained a careful silence, and the Iraqi envoy was one of the fifty diplomats received by René Moawad in the week following his election.119 Though Iraq briefly renewed her interest in Lebanon before the Arab League Baghdad summit in May 1990, Saddam Hussein despaired of the fighting between his two allies in Lebanon, Aoun and the Lebanese Forces.120 If Saddam Hussein was to take decisive action in his bid for Arab leadership, he would do so somewhere more suitable than Lebanon – he chose Kuwait.

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As Iraq’s attention drifted away from Lebanon in the latter part of 1989, the impetus for the Arab League about-turn and the acceptance of Syrian hegemony in Lebanon came from Riyadh. Throughout the Lebanese civil war, Saudi Arabia had followed a twintrack policy of seeking a peaceful settlement, and, more generally, a regional consensus. Saudi Arabia had been pivotal in the Riyadh summit of 1976, had contributed troops to the original Arab Deterrent Force, and was a member of the Arab Vigilance Committee formed in Tunis in November 1979 to implement Arab League resolutions on Lebanon.121 By 1984, however, Saudi influence in Lebanon had plummeted: her PLO allies had been expelled; the Druze and Shia take-over of West Beirut had nullified the effectiveness of Saudi links with Beirut’s traditional Sunni elite; and in August 1984 the Saudi embassy itself was attacked and set on fire by followers of Hizballah. Saudi-Iranian hostility and Syria’s close ties with Iran forced Saudi Arabia to stand back, a point underlined in 1989 by the Beirut killing of a former Saudi diplomat by the pro-Iranian Islamic Jihad.122 Despite this loss of influence, the Arab Tripartite Committee’s creation offered Saudi Arabia fresh opportunities to pursue her traditional goals in Lebanon, and it is in this context that the initial report of 31 July 1989 so critical of Syria, and its effective retraction on 16 September must be understood. Partisan observers, with the classic Lebanese tendency to see the superpowers behind everything, have seen Washington’s influence in the shifts in Saudi policy.123 In truth, regional politics were far more important. Certainly, Saudi Arabia did not want Lebanon dominated by Syria, and frustration at Asad’s intransigence during the Arab League mediation process during 1989 may partially explain the first report’s unusually blunt wording. Yet this report, overtly criticising Syria, was untypical of the style of Saudi foreign policy in general and specifically towards Lebanon in 1989.124 Throughout the summer, Saudi public statements generally steered clear of commitment either to Aoun or to Syria, and remained studiously cryptic in their content.125 For whatever their doubts over Syria’s policy in Lebanon, Saudi policymakers did not want Syria humiliated in Lebanon. Not only did Crown Prince Abdallah have marriage links with the Syrian regime, but Syria had a continuing role in the Arab-Israeli conflict and had value for Saudi Arabia as a counterweight to Iraqi ambitions in the Gulf. As Saddam Hussein pushed his case against Syria, Saudi Arabia responded by granting Syria additional economic and financial aid. And at Taif itself, Saudi policymakers played a critical role, rejecting Christian demands to pressure Syria for specific commitments on a withdrawal from Lebanon. Moral guarantees, they reported, would have to suffice.126

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Between August 1989 and October 1990 the anti-Syrian Arab front continued to crack in the face of Asad’s firmness. Mubarak of Egypt had been one of the first to seek a regional mediation process, doing so publicly as early as October 1988.127 Egyptian freedom to press Syria, however, was restricted by the need for Syria’s agreement to reintegrate Egypt into mainstream Arab politics after her separate peace treaty with Israel. The process had begun in earnest at the Arab League summit in Amman in November 1987, but the critical period coincided with the 1988-90 constitutional crisis in Lebanon. In January 1989 Asad himself oversaw a meeting to readmit Egypt to membership of the pan-Arab Organisation for Agricultural Development in Damascus. On 21 May, just prior to the Casablanca summit, Egypt was readmitted to the Arab League. And on 27 December 1989 Syria resumed diplomatic relations with Egypt.128 In Jordan, too, the incentive to antagonise Syria declined, as economic problems and food riots threatened internal stability. Baghdad’s supply route to Aoun through Jordan dried up accordingly.129 Towards autumn 1989, Aoun’s Arab sympathisers effectively deserted him. He waited over a week to accept the Arab cease-fire plan of 16 September, hoping that they might share his reservations about the tripartite committee’s proposals. Instead they urged acceptance.130 In May 1990, the Arab League Baghdad summit officially confirmed the Taif process, despite the absence of Syria and the Hrawi government. And three months later came the final Arab nail in Aoun’s political coffin. On 2 August 1990 Saddam Hussein launched a full-scale invasion of Kuwait. Kuwait, he claimed, was stealing Iraqi oil by extracting more than its share from the shared Rumaila oilfield, and was inflicting massive losses on Iraq by exceeding its OPEC (Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries) quota.131 Very shortly, a coalition was built up of Western and Arab powers, including Syria, with the aim first of defending Saudi Arabia and then of liberating Kuwait. In Lebanon, meanwhile, Aoun and the PLO expressly supported Iraq, hoping that the Iraqi challenge to US and Saudi influence would weaken the international and regional consensus behind Taif. The opposite happened. The coalition held, and Asad was thus gifted the opportunity to attack Aoun without the fear of external interference. In November 1989, a permanent pro-Aoun civilian demonstration outside his headquarters had prevented a Syrian assault, for fear of bad publicity. In October 1990, the world’s eyes were focused on the Gulf, not Beirut. As Freedman and Karsh put it: ‘As a reward for its support to end the occupation of one country, Syria received a blank cheque to complete the satellization of Lebanon’.132

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The Superpowers and the End of the Cold War Compared with the regional powers’, the superpowers’ role was peripheral – the Cold War’s end played little appreciable part in the ending of the Lebanese civil war. The spirit of superpower cooperation that at its best contributed to peace in Namibia, El Salvador and Cambodia was indeed evident in Lebanon. Joint declarations in favour of a peaceful Lebanese settlement were issued in the UN Security Council in May and October 1989; Bush and Gorbachev made complementary declarations in favour of the Tripartite Committee at the press conference after their Malta meeting in December 1989; and the USSR joined the US in pressing Baghdad to recall its shipment of missiles to Aoun.133 In truth, though, despite her alliance with Syria that had been formalised with a Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation signed in October 1980, the Soviet Union had little influence in Lebanon by the late 1980s. In April 1987 Gorbachev told Asad in Moscow that Syria’s policy of achieving ‘strategic parity’ in military terms with Israel was a chimera, and that the continued severance of Israeli-Soviet diplomatic ties was ‘abnormal’.134 The relationship was further soured by Syria’s inability to repay her $15 billion military debt to the USSR, and in 1988 the USSR refused to sell arms to Syria.135 The sole identifiable Soviet initiative on Lebanon in 1988-90 was undertaken with a French administration under popular pressure to preserve Lebanese sovereignty and independence. The FrancoSoviet mission led by Gennady Tarasov and François Scheer attempted in late August and early September 1989 to break the diplomatic deadlock after publication of the first Tripartite committee report by proposing a formula under which national reconciliation talks would take place while Syria, Iraq and Jordan refrained from supplying arms to the Lebanese factions, the French navy would help to prevent arms smuggling, and Syrian troops would start withdrawing from Lebanon.136 The proposal, however, found no more favour in Damascus than the Arab report had done, and the ill-judged French naval build-up in the eastern Mediterranean brought threats from radical Islamist groups to use the remaining American hostages as a ‘lever’ in case of French intervention in Lebanon.137 The half-hearted Soviet involvement, meanwhile, was quickly overtaken by events in Europe. The US became directly involved in the war in 1982. It was Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s ‘green light’ to Israel that permitted the 1982 invasion. When the crisis seemed about to escalate US troops were sent in under the banner of a multi-national force to

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keep the peace. From then until 1984, American efforts were concentrated on building up Amin Gemayel’s government, and it was Haig’s successor George Schultz who negotiated the 17 May agreement between Gemayel and Israel. The assumptions underlying US involvement were those of the so-called ‘Second Cold War’. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, coupled with Ronald Reagan’s election in November 1980, predisposed the US to consider the Middle East in terms of superpower conflict. As a friend, Israel had to be supported; as an enemy, Syria had to be opposed. A simplistic view of Lebanon emerged, with Reagan seeing a coherent Soviet-SyrianPLO-Druze-Shia front, opposable only by a US-Israeli-Maronite alliance. In 1983 the weakness of this policy emerged. On 23 October the US embassy in Beirut was attacked by a truck-bomb, leaving 241 American marines dead. Thereafter, US efforts were focused on extracting herself militarily and politically as inexpensively as possible. In February 1984 the US contingent of the multi-national force withdrew from Lebanon, the US virtually abstained from mediating either the Lausanne conference or the Tripartite agreement, and for over three years US policy towards Lebanon centred around the fate of the Western hostages held there by radical Islamist groups.138 In 1988 the US renewed her political involvement with three objectives: to achieve peace in Lebanon as part of her overarching regional peace strategy; to prevent the potential (and ultimately actual) constitutional meltdown that the end of Amin Gemayel’s presidency threatened, and to achieve the release of the Western hostages. Mindful of Syria’s ability, as in 1983-84, to torpedo a settlement in Lebanon not agreeable to her, and needing Syria’s influence with Iran to assist in the release of the hostages, the US in 1988 entered into a tacit but close alliance with Syria over Lebanon.139 The relationship had three phases. In the first, the US acted as the go-between between Syria and the Maronite political establishment in the search for a successor to Amin Gemayel. Though resisting Syrian attempts to push the candidacy of Suleiman Franjieh, US acceptance of Syria’s demand to present Daher as the sole candidate represented a significant concession. The second phase was marked by US support for the Arab League peace initiative and worsening relations with Aoun. Even though Aoun was initially seen as having close links with the US (he had also received military training there) and in launching the ‘War of Liberation’ had gambled on internationalising the conflict in Lebanon, the American refusal to condemn the Syrian presence led to a complete breakdown in relations. Aoun publicly berated America’s stance on Lebanon, and his supporters staged sit-ins at the US embassy in Beirut.140 The frictions reached a crescendo on 6

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September 1989, when the Bush administration evacuated US personnel from the embassy in response to the deteriorating security situation in East Beirut and to Aoun’s thinly veiled threats to take hostages and to shoot down the US embassy resupply helicopter. For the American part, it was US pressure that largely caused Saddam Hussein to recall the Frog-7 shipment to Aoun in June 1989, the US publicly supported the Taif agreement (despite the distinctly unliberal and undemocratic nature of Lebanese-Syrian relations that it implied), and the State Department blamed Aoun squarely for the intraChristian civil war of 1990.141 Despite US acceptance of a guiding role for Syria in Lebanon, what ran through American policy in these first two phases was a reluctance to see the Syrians use military force to achieve it. Both before and after Taif, US officials publicly and privately warned Syria to avoid the military option.142 The critical change came with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 and Syria’s subsequent joining of the anti-Iraq coalition. In September 1990 Secretary of State James Baker went to Damascus, the first cabinet-level visitor for years. When the Syrians attacked Aoun in October 1990, the Americans pressurised Israel to allow the use of Syrian airpower, clearing their flight path with Israel through the US embassy in Cyprus.143 Throughout the Syrian mopping up operation in Lebanon, the US kept pressure on Israel not to intervene. And while US officials proclaimed the importance of Lebanese ‘political independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity’, it was apparently just the superficial requirements of these features that they cared about. 144 In return for Syria’s free hand in Lebanon, the US hostages were released, and an agreement was reached with Syria over her involvement with terrorist groups. Thus, for example, in spring 1992 Syria bowed to combined American and Turkish pressure and asked the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), to leave their bases (albeit temporarily) in the Syrian-occupied Bekaa.145 But the main aim behind US policy was a wider one: Lebanese instability would no longer be able to obstruct Arab-Israeli peace.146

Comparison External actors played a critical role in the achievement of peace in Rhodesia in 1979 and in Lebanon in 1990. The Lancaster House and Taif processes were originated and managed solely by external actors. There is no evidence that any of the principal internal belligerents were pressing for a fresh negotiating effort in either country at the time that Britain and the Arab League launched their initiatives. In fact, the

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whole course of neither war can be understood without reference to external actors. Both wars were heavily internationalised, as neighbouring states provided arms, money, bases, training, diplomatic support, and even troops (particularly in Lebanon) to support both their own ends and their favoured belligerents. Indeed, Rhodesia and Lebanon were the principal focus of the international relations of southern Africa in the late 1970s and the Middle East in the early 1980s respectively. On the one hand, Israel sought to use its sponsorship of Bashir Gemayel to establish friendly relations with a neighbouring Arab-populated state, while South Africa attempted to do likewise with Abel Muzorewa to stem the tide of African nationalism. On the other hand, Syria and the Front-Line states sought to counter these moves, from both ideological and security considerations. External involvement thus far surpassed the so-called ‘triangulation’ model, whereby one neighbouring state aids an insurgent group against the central government of the state at war.147 External action was not purely destabilising, though. Most of the peace-making initiatives, from the 1976 Constitutional Document in Lebanon and the 1975 Victoria Falls bridge conference in Rhodesia, all the way to Taif and Lancaster House, came from outside actors. The challenge is to understand how intervention and mediation interacted, and to determine how the two either contributed to or detracted from the success of peace-making. Many theorists of civil war termination – Zartman, Licklider and Stedman included – strongly emphasise the role of external mediation of civil war. They argue, however, that neutral unbiased ‘good offices’ mediation by international organisations or NGOs is likely to prove less successful than leveraged mediation by states. The evidence from Lebanon and Rhodesia supports this claim. On the surface, Taif and Lancaster House might seem excellent examples of good offices mediation conducted under the authority of international organisations. Certainly, some of the principles of conciliatory mediation did apply in Lebanon and Rhodesia. The concentration of the mediatory role in the hands of Brahimi and Carrington prevented the belligerents from exploiting splits within the mediating parties. When one side attempted to bypass the mediator, as when the Christian deputies at Taif asked the Saudis to extract better terms from Syria, or when the Patriotic Front attempted to use the Havana NonAligned summit to wriggle out of Lancaster House, they were rebuffed. That both Britain and Saudi Arabia, as sponsors of the peace processes, were prepared to accept almost any solution as long as it brought peace, meant that conditions imposed by the mediators themselves did not prevent settlement. And the role of the Arab League and the Commonwealth was indeed important, the latter

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particularly so as in Rhodesian and in some British eyes the UN had tarnished itself through its partiality towards the Zimbabwean cause.148 The role the organisations played, though, was important less perhaps for the legitimacy conferred, than for the message of international solidarity sent for the negotiating process and for the assistance given to the belligerents in ‘selling’ the result domestically. Moreover, there is no evidence that the repeated attempts made to broker a settlement in Lebanon and Rhodesia ever actively damaged the prospects for success of subsequent initiatives. Apart from anything else, the sheer number of external peace-makers prepared to launch a fresh initiative rendered unrealistic the recommendation that mediation efforts should be sparing, in order to encourage the combatants to grasp the opportunities presented by infrequent peace-making missions. Many of the more important characteristics of good offices mediation, though, were notable by their absence. Mediators’ attempts to persuade belligerents that stalemate prevailed had noticeably little effect, whether with Ian Smith in 1974, the Patriotic Front in 1979, or Michel Aoun in 1989. Mediators’ actions did little to increase trust among belligerents. In particular, neither Lancaster House nor Taif provided much in the way of security guarantees: the Commonwealth Monitoring Force was derisorily small, while the Syrian troops stationed in Lebanon were far from trusted by Lebanese Christians. While members of the Salisbury and Patriotic Front delegations at Lancaster House welcomed the idea of a CMF, their military leaders notably derided the proposals as ineffective.149 And, as discussed in Chapter 1 above, although both peace negotiations were well handled and avoided the pitfalls experienced in earlier attempts, neither the Taif nor the Lancaster House agreement was particularly innovative or creative. In fact, the role played by the mediators at Taif and Lancaster House was less ‘good offices’ and more ‘mediator-manipulator’. The fact that states lay behind the mediation process – Brahimi might officially represent the Arab League, but Saudi Arabia was his real controller – and that both Britain and Saudi Arabia had specific interests in achieving a negotiated settlement meant that the mediation process was backed up by time, money and political prestige.150 Though neither state exhibited excessive bias in their mediation, many belligerents certainly perceived them as biased: Britain in favour of Muzorewa, Saudi Arabia of confessionalism and the Sunni zu'ama. Yet that perceived bias did not prevent the achievement of a settlement. But most critically, what made negotiations successful was not goodwill but leverage. Carrington’s coercion at Lancaster House is well documented: by both promising and threatening the ‘secondclass solution’, Carrington gained the acceptance first of the Salisbury

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regime and then of the Patriotic Front to his substantially unmodified proposals on the constitution, the transition and the cease-fire. Coercion in Lebanon was less public, was exercised more by Syria than by the mediators themselves on behalf of Taif, and took place over a more diffused period, not just during the conclave itself but over the twelve months leading up to Aoun’s defeat in October 1990. But in many ways, coercion in Lebanon exceeded that in Rhodesia, including as it did actual physical intimidation of the deputies themselves, threats to cut off supplies from Muslim militias that rejected the settlement, Syria’s blockade of the Christian enclave which contributed to the war between Aoun and the Lebanese Forces, and ultimately the direct attack on Aoun’s forces at Baabda that signalled an end to the fighting. Too strong a focus on the mediation of civil war in Lebanon and Rhodesia, however, leaves many questions unanswered. Why, for example, did Syria’s Arab competitors endorse a negotiating process that effectively cemented Syrian domination over Lebanon? Why did Iran moderate the course taken by Hizballah? Why did the Front-Line states force an unwilling Robert Mugabe to accept the Lancaster House proposals? Why did Israel and South Africa not try to forestall settlements that threatened completely to undermine their influence in their northern neighbours? Why did both Abel Muzorewa and Michel Aoun fail so dismally in their attempts to secure support from the international community? Ultimately, where did the mediators obtain the leverage that they used to such good effect? The answers can only be found by examining the foreign policies of the states involved in the two civil wars. The most important point here is that Rhodesia in 1979 and Lebanon in 1990 were in an international environment which, though hardly benign, could allow the settlement of civil war. Indeed, in contrast to the common assertion that external intervention makes settlement to civil war harder to achieve, in both Lebanon and Rhodesia it seems actively to have assisted settlement. Certainly, for much of the duration of both wars, external intervention prolonged, escalated and complicated the conflicts, especially that of Syria and Israel in Lebanon, and of South Africa, Zambia and Mozambique in Rhodesia. But at the times of both Taif and Lancaster House, external actors used their leverage on the various belligerents to engineer a settlement, doing so, moreover, at a time when many of these parties were quite prepared to continue fighting. Thus, without the FrontLine states’ pressure on Mugabe, Iran’s on Hizballah, or Syria’s on the Lebanese Muslim militias, we simply cannot understand the end of civil war in Rhodesia or Lebanon. This illuminates the question of whether intervention has to cease before civil war can end: the

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evidence from Lebanon and Rhodesia suggests decisively that it does not. Settlement was achieved in Rhodesia despite the presence of South African and Mozambican troops on Rhodesian soil, and in Lebanon despite the presence of Syrian, Israeli and Iranian troops. Interveners (or at least interveners with competing objectives) must be prepared to withdraw once a settlement is reached, but it is their continuing presence that gives them the leverage over their respective belligerent clients. Three further themes common between the two conflicts present themselves: the supremacy of regional over global politics; the distinction between active contribution and mere grudging assent to settlement; and the role played by the civil war in the decision of neighbouring states to accept its settlement. In the ending of war in Lebanon and Rhodesia the superpowers’ role was at best marginal, despite the significant global developments occurring at the time. Neither the poor superpower relations experienced in the depths of the collapse of superpower détente in the late 1970s, nor the US-Soviet co-operation seen in the ending of the Cold War in the late 1980s seem to have greatly affected Lebanon or Rhodesia. In each war US policymakers at times saw the hand of their Soviet adversaries, and in each it led them to attempt to broker a settlement, in Rhodesia between 1976 and 1978, and in Lebanon in 1982-83. In Lebanon they even committed troops with a mandate to keep a non-existent peace, with disastrous consequences. In each case, though, US diplomatic intervention was ill-fated, and by the time settlement was reached, it was with the US sitting firmly on the sidelines. Ironically, given US fears of Soviet intervention, the USSR showed even less interest in intervening in Lebanon or Rhodesia, limiting its involvement to pronouncements in favour of ‘progressive’ forces and to supplying such movements with certain amounts of arms and money. Regional politics were considerably more important in ending civil war. Here, a distinction must be made between states which the mediators needed to exert pressure on their client-belligerents, and states who were merely expected not to impede the settlement’s progress. The former – Syria, Iran, Mozambique, Zambia – were largely satisfied by the terms of the Taif and Lancaster House agreements. Syria believed that the clauses concerning her withdrawal ‘within two years’ could be circumvented and that Taif effectively cemented her control of Lebanon; Iran won the consolation of a leading role for Hizballah in the continuing fight against the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon; while Zambia and, especially, Mozambique were confident that the Patriotic Front would win the independence elections scheduled for February 1980. No doubt, these external actors more easily accepted the division of the stakes in civil

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war than did their clients inside the warring states, but they were certainly not indifferent to the terms of settlement. Those states and quasi-states written out of the negotiations – Israel, the PLO, South Africa – hardly accepted settlement with enthusiasm. By now, though, the priorities of each lay elsewhere. Just as important, the negotiating process gave them no veto over a settlement, except what could be achieved through direct military intervention, something that each was unwilling to undertake. The reasons for the failure of Israel, the PLO and South Africa to respond to a settlement that met little more than their bare minimum needs relates to a wider phenomenon: the motivation behind the regional powers’ acceptance of the Taif and Lancaster House settlements. To some extent these derived from the war and its proposed settlement, particularly as regards the Front-Line states in southern Africa, who not only found the terms of the settlement acceptable, but also were suffering from their continued involvement in the Rhodesian war – the mutually hurting stalemate applied to external rather than internal actors, as described by Stedman. Indeed, there is an extent to which the clear threat or reality of escalation in both wars – of development into conventional warfare and of spread into neighbouring countries in Rhodesia, and of constitutional meltdown in Lebanon – inspired the fresh mediation efforts by Britain and the Arab League in 1979 and 1989 respectively.151 However, states’ decisions to support or at least not to undermine the agreements generally stemmed as much from considerations quite removed from the circumstances of civil war in Lebanon and Rhodesia, from the dynamics of wider regional and global politics. The threat of escalation may have contributed to regional states’ cooperation with the Lancaster House and Taif processes, but previously the fear of escalation had not prevented South Africa from sending troops to assist the Rhodesian security forces, Zambia and Mozambique from closing their borders with Rhodesia in 1973 and 1976 respectively, Israel from invading Lebanon in 1982, and Iran from sponsoring attacks on American and French personnel in Beirut. In Lebanon in the late 1980s and in Rhodesia in the late 1970s, it was developments in regional politics more than events happening in the countries undergoing civil war that contributed to neighbouring states’ de-escalatory response to the threat of intensified conflict. Inter-Arab politics between 1988 and 1990, the shift of focus by the PLO away from Lebanon (which also lessened Israeli security fears to her north), South Africa’s desire to avoid international sanctions, and even the dire economic and military position of the Front-Line states in the late 1970s (which left them so vulnerable to Rhodesian strikes) were thus

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as important to the success of the Taif and Lancaster House agreements as were events internal to Lebanon or Rhodesia. External actors were responsible for the launching of the ultimately successful Lancaster House and Taif process: the moment may in retrospect appear to have been ‘ripe’, but neither in Rhodesia nor in Lebanon did internal actors show any interest in seizing it. The decisions and policies of external actors also complete many of the gaps left by an analysis of the internal developments of the two wars. In particular, the leverage exerted by neighbouring states over their Rhodesian and Lebanese allies proved crucial to the achievement of peace. Tellingly, too, developments in regional politics, like those within belligerent leaderships and those between fighters and noncombatants, inject another element of fluidity into the somewhat static civil war system as defined solely by battles and peace talks. Civil wars may often be prolonged, but they are rarely endless, and regional or even global factors may provide the impetus for termination. However, there is reason to doubt whether the actions of external actors were any more important than the phenomena internal to civil war that have been addressed in previous chapters. The internal sources of civil war in Rhodesia and Lebanon were complex and deep. They could not be wished or ordered away by outside powers. As outside powers found in the successive crises in the African Great Lakes region from 1993 to 1997, as the rival Egyptian and Saudi leaderships discovered in their failed attempt to force a settlement on their respective ‘clients’ in the Yemeni civil war in 1965, and as the Pakistan authorities experienced in their dealings with the Taliban in Afghanistan, local actors possess significant resources in resisting pressure to settle from outside forces.152 The Constitutional Document, the Geneva and Lausanne conferences and the Tripartite agreement in Lebanon, and the Victoria Falls bridge conference, the Kissinger initiative and the Anglo-American initiative in Rhodesia had all been unable to bring peace when the belligerents themselves were determined to continue fighting. Moreover, none of the factors discussed so far explain why peace proved no more than a temporary phenomenon, why those whose hopes for the post-war period were dashed did not return their country to outright civil war. For this, it is to the implementation of the Taif and Lancaster House settlements that we must turn.

6 IMPLEMENTATION Pinpointing exactly when a civil war ends is an imprecise art. As many theorists note, the boundary between war and peace may be unclear: ‘war’ is not continuous fighting, and ‘peace’ sees frequent violent outbreaks.1 Nevertheless, the months of December 1979 in Rhodesia and October 1990 in Lebanon, with the signing of the Lancaster House agreement and the defeat of Michel Aoun respectively, represent landmark points in the termination of the Rhodesian and Lebanese civil wars. Each month saw all the major domestic belligerent factions grant their consent to the political settlements embodied in the Lancaster House and Taif agreements. Violence continued in both countries, but the political framework for peace had been established, and no major domestic faction continued to oppose it militarily. However, the process of implementing the peace settlements in the subsequent months and years was in many ways as important as the process which preceded settlement. Peace-implementation is much narrower than peace-building: it is the process of carrying out a specific peace agreement over a period of a few months to a few years, and as such is much less ambitious than the attempt to ameliorate the root causes of war and to promote justice, positive peace and the reconciliation of former enemies.2 Even so, the obstacles to the successful implementation of a signed and agreed settlement remain legion. As the genocide in Rwanda after the failure of the 1993 Arusha peace agreement most graphically demonstrate, the creation of a compromise deal by no means indicates that conflicts of interest have ceased, nor that violence will automatically cease. Though most peace agreements include at least some provisions for disarmament, arms caching after civil war is the norm rather than the exception.3 Almost by definition, a compromise settlement will be more vulnerable to attack than an outright victory for either side. Politically, such a settlement sustains the belligerent organisations, while the fact that a compromise agreement has been signed means that no party will have achieved all of its aims. This problem is reinforced by the fact that, as Ohlson and Stedman point out with regard to southern Africa, conflict

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resolution has tended to take the form of partial solutions. Important issues, whether over the composition of the future state’s armed forces or over land distribution or suchlike, are often left in abeyance during the peace negotiations themselves.4 Particular dangers to the consolidation of peace are posed by spoilers. These can prevent the transition for peace because they are irreconcilably opposed to the peace process and any signature they may have affixed to the peace agreement was purely tactical (‘total spoilers’); because they take chances with the implementation of the settlement to procure more benefits than those assigned to them by the agreement (‘greedy spoilers’); or because they have certain additional minimum requirements that can be satisfied without the compromise breaking down (‘limited spoilers’). When aided by neighbouring states, spoilers can present almost insurmountable barriers to peace implementation.5 Further complications arise above all from the conduct of elections and the demobilisation of troops. Elections are the most common mechanism outlined in peace agreements for ending the transition from war to peace, and often serve as benchmarks of the moral standing of the settlement for the international community.6 However, their danger is that all parties will hope to win them and the losers will return to war, amply illustrated by the breakdown of the 1992 Angolan settlement and Jonas Savimbi’s refusal to accept his electoral defeat. Even if factional leaders can be persuaded to order a cease-fire, their foot-soldiers may be reluctant to obey. The economic benefits that fighters tend to accumulate in civil war, the abundance and proliferation of weapons, and the fact that civil wars often last so long that the men who fight them find readjustment to civilian life and the search for employment extremely difficult, all make the transition to peace far from straightforward.7 The result of these problems is that compromise settlements frequently break down – fully half of the time according to one study – and presage renewed fighting often more murderous than that which preceded them.8 Only with the greatest difficulty are these problems circumvented, though a ‘good’ agreement which includes the pay-offs and security guarantees that all sides require, and an effective international (often UN-led) peace-implementation strategy, may well help to produce success. Even then, though, a ‘difficult’ conflict environment may doom such efforts, where difficulty rises the greater the number of warring parties and the larger the number of soldiers, where a non-coerced agreement signed by all major warring factions is lacking, where spoilers are present or the state has collapsed, or where disposable natural resources are present or neighbouring states are hostile to the peace process.9

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The dangers of breakdown in Zimbabwe or Lebanon should prima facie have been great. As observed in Chapter 1, the settlements of Lancaster House and Taif offered much room for manoeuvre, and many actors subscribed to them partly in the hope of obtaining a favourable result from the implementation of those rather ambiguous settlements. Even then, assent to the accords had only been achieved through coercion. The parties in each war were numerous: the two ‘sides’ in Rhodesia were composed of tenuous alliances between the Rhodesian security forces and Muzorewa’s auxiliaries on the one hand, and ZANLA and ZIPRA on the other; in Lebanon, meanwhile, at least nine factions can be described as major: the two opposing parts of the Lebanese Army, the Lebanese Forces, the SLA, the Syrian Army, the PLO, Amal, the PSP and Hizballah. Here, too, drug production and state collapse provided additional dangers. Externally, many neighbouring states had only consented to settlement with reluctance, while of the international implementers Britain’s presence was small and weak, and Syria’s was strong but so biased as to undermine its legitimacy amongst many combatant factions. And within both countries, potential spoilers existed aplenty, waiting to see the direction in which peace-implementation was heading. Yet in both countries peace did emerge, though not without further violence, and hardly along democratic principles. How did this happen? As it became clear who were the winners and who the losers of the implementation process, why did the losers not return to war? Did peace bring the economic respite hoped for by a war-weary noncombatant population? How were the problems of demobilisation overcome without a resort to full-scale war? What role did external actors play in defending and assisting the Lancaster House and Taif processes once cease-fire had been achieved. Ultimately, was the conflict in each country solved, rather than just the war ended? This chapter will address these questions.

Rhodesia Cease-fire and Elections Lancaster House left many pitfalls and challenges, the first being to maintain a cease-fire and hold the independence elections scheduled for late February 1980. The process was not straightforward. On the guerrilla side, both ZANLA and ZIPRA feared an attack by Rhodesian forces on their troops concentrated at the assembly points, and so ordered many of their best fighters (around 7,000 in ZANLA’s case) to stay in the countryside, sending mujibas (young scouts) to the assembly

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points in their place. Unsupervised by the Commonwealth Monitoring Force, these guerrillas continued their campaign of coercive politicisation of the rural population, attracting vigorous charges of intimidation from Muzorewa and the Rhodesian establishment. By mid-February, nine or ten ‘contacts’ per day were reported between Patriotic Front guerrillas and the security forces, with over 200 ZANLA guerrillas estimated killed during the supposed cease-fire. Issues were further complicated by the death on 26 December 1979 in a road accident in Mozambique of ZANLA commander Josiah Tongogara, chief ZANU architect of the Patriotic Front alliance and the central pro-agreement figure in the ZANU hierarchy, and Robert Mugabe’s subsequent decision, ignoring the pleas of the Front-Line presidents, to announce that ZANU would run alone in the independence elections, not as part of a Patriotic Front coalition. Indeed, in South Matabeleland, in the one assembly point where ZANLA and ZIPRA forces were both accommodated, fighting broke out between the two contingents.10 On the Salisbury side, relations between the British governor’s staff and the Rhodesian military commanders reached crisis point in the third week of January 1980, as Mugabe’s increasingly obvious popularity and continued ZANLA operations in the countryside made Rhodesian senior officers less and less confident of a ZANU electoral defeat. At the same time, junior and middle-ranking officers instigated a series of incidents, posing as Patriotic Front guerrillas to attack civilian targets and even launching assassination attempts on Mugabe himself, most notably when a remote controlled mine narrowly missed killing him as he left for an election meeting in Fort Victoria on 10 February.11 Muzorewa, meanwhile, refused to countenance his Auxiliaries being confined to base or being monitored by the CMF, and like the Patriotic Front (though less so) they too carried out acts of intimidation against the civilian population. External actors contributed to the sense of crisis as well, with Lord Soames provoking international outcry on 6 January by announcing, but not demanding the withdrawal of a contingent of 250 South African troops stationed north of the Rhodesian-South African border at Beit Bridge. With Julius Nyerere publicly refusing to accept the election unless it brought a ZANU or ZAPU victory, the tinderbox was well and truly prepared.12 Despite the provocations, however, the cease-fire held. In part, this was a tribute to the skill of the British political and military authorities on the ground. The governor, Lord Soames, was heavily criticised for his supposed bias against ZANU, for example for his deployment of Rhodesian troops to the exclusion of the Patriotic Front guerrillas ‘placed under his authority’ by Lancaster House, for

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his failure to shake the Rhodesian bureaucracy into providing the same facilities for Mugabe as for Muzorewa, and for harbouring strongly anti-Mugabe individuals in his entourage. In fairness, though, he handled the parties with extreme skill, and if publicly he was often critical of ZANU this performed the valuable function of reassuring the Rhodesian and South African military authorities. Privately, however, he assured Mugabe that he would not exercise his power to exclude any party from the election on the grounds of intimidation, a promise he faithfully kept.13 Militarily, the CMF, although small, successfully gained the trust of the guerrillas in the bush, persuading them into the assembly points and defusing periodic crises caused by Rhodesian troop movements and food supply shortages.14 However, as Ginifer rightly argues, the cease-fire’s success despite its numerous violations owed as much to the parties’ continuing commitment to the electoral process as to skilful handling by the British authorities.15 ZANU, ZAPU and the UANC all hoped for a favourable electoral result – to disrupt the cease-fire excessively would risk disqualification and international condemnation. For all Nyerere’s hyperbole, Samora Machel constantly advised Mugabe to be calm and flexible during the interim period, even telling him to include Ian Smith in any post-election cabinet if necessary.16 For the white Rhodesian leaders, the decision to abide by the terms of Lancaster House was more touch-and-go. Rhodesian commanders complained constantly to Soames’ team about ZANU intimidation of civilians, demanding their exclusion from the voting. Against Soames’ refusal, a meeting was held on 21 January to consider breaking off the peace process. Army commander Peter Walls, intelligence chief Ken Flower and Treasury secretary David Young all urged compliance with Lancaster House, and carried the day. Ian Smith was critical of his erstwhile colleagues, criticising their failure to deliver a clear ultimatum to Soames to cancel the elections or face the consequences, but even he in his memoirs refused to countenance a ‘coup’, the white Rhodesians’ only realistic means of derailing the electoral process. Like so many Rhodesians in the late 1970s ‘wait-and-see’ seemed preferable to decisive action.17 What resulted was a massive election victory for Robert Mugabe’s ZANU.18 They won 62.9% of the black vote, which under the modified proportional representation system used gave him 57 of the 80 seats allocated to the black population. ZANU’s only setback came in the two Matabeleland provinces, where they won only one seat, as ZAPU took the remaining fifteen, added to five garnered elsewhere. With Muzorewa winning only three seats countrywide, and Smith’s Rhodesian Front winning all twenty white seats, ZANU had an overall majority that dashed any hope by internal or external parties

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of a Muzorewa-Nkomo-Smith coalition government.19 Instead, ZANU and ZAPU renewed their alliance, with Nkomo installed as Minister for Home Affairs and several ZAPU stalwarts appointed to the cabinet. Reassuring the White Community Maintaining a cease-fire and holding elections were perhaps the most public challenges facing the Lancaster House settlement, but they were by no means the last. The first was defusing the threat posed by the Rhodesian security establishment, whose candidate Abel Muzorewa had lost so decisively in the independence elections. The threat was real. As ‘Operation Quartz’, Rhodesian planners had made contingency arrangements for an airborne and special forces attack on ZANLA assembly points simultaneous with assassination attempts on Mugabe and his deputies. Though the plan presupposed a ZANU electoral defeat followed by a ZANLA resumption of arms, some junior officers in the security forces pressed for its execution regardless of Mugabe’s election victory.20 Mugabe countered this by offering reconciliation both publicly and privately. His pronouncements during the election campaign promising security of person and property for whites in Zimbabwe might be dismissed as tactical propaganda, but his public statement on the announcement on 4 March 1980 of his massive electoral victory made a strong impact: We intend to uphold [the] fundamental rights and freedoms [enshrined in the Lancaster House constitution] to the full. Similarly, it is not our intention to interfere with pension rights and other accrued benefits of the civil servants … I urge you, whether you are black or white, to join me in a new pledge to forget our grim past, forgive others and forget.21 White public acceptance of the new regime was bolstered by Mugabe’s decision to keep Peter Walls and Ken Flower as head of the military and intelligence apparatus of Zimbabwe respectively, and his cabinet appointments on 14 March of David Smith as Minister for Commerce and Industry and Denis Norman as Minister for Agriculture. The fruit of discussions held in Maputo between Mugabe, Flower and Walls even before the elections were completed at the beginning of March 1980, Mugabe’s alliance with senior white security personnel prevented rebellious elements within the Rhodesian security establishment from winning high-level endorsement of their plans. As Walls himself stated on Radio Salisbury on 3 March,

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Anybody who obeys the law will have our backing and need have nothing to fear from any of us. At the same time anybody who gets out of line or for whatever reason starts disobeying the law will be dealt with effectively and swiftly, and I may say, with quite a bit of enthusiasm.22 Mugabe’s political concessions to Zimbabwe’s whites were short-lived. In August 1980 the Ministry of Defence announced Walls’ retirement. Days earlier he had admitted in a BBC interview to having asked Margaret Thatcher to cancel the upcoming elections on the grounds of ZANU intimidation of voters and to making disparaging comments about black rule. Walls’ resignation and subsequent banishment from Zimbabwe provoked a series of white resignations from the army.23 In mid-1987, after the seven-year period stipulated by Lancaster House, the twenty white reserved parliamentary seats were abolished, though the government immediately announced the appointment of eleven whites to parliament to give the white community a continued voice. By then, though, the monolithic character of white parliamentary representation had started to crack. In the 1985 general election, Smith’s renamed Conservative Alliance of Zimbabwe had won fifteen of the twenty seats available, but with only 55% of the white vote. Post-independence white emigration exceeded even that of the late 1970s, and ten years after independence the community had shrunk to about 80,000 from 232,000 in mid-1979. By 1990 most of those left had forged a new Zimbabwean identity, while reconciling themselves to playing a politically insignificant role. Though largely withering away within months of independence, Mugabe’s political palliatives to the white community had served their purpose of forestalling a potential white-led coup. A few whites became involved in spying and sabotage for South Africa, most notably destroying Z$30 million worth of munitions at the Inkomo Barracks of the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA) in August 1981 and blowing up thirteen military aircraft at Zimbabwe’s main air base near Gweru in July 1982, but most of the emigrants chose peaceful exile. Those remaining, meanwhile, continued to enjoy a privileged economic position, as for twenty years the ZANU government refrained from radical economic reform.24 Social and Economic Dislocation Independence may have ended the suffering of civil war, at least for most of the Zimbabwean population, but it did not solve the social and economic problems that had contributed to the outbreak of war. That this would be so was not readily apparent. The Zimbabwean

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economy grew rapidly in 1980 and 1981, as more than Z$70 million of international aid poured into the country, as industry underperforming because of civil war conditions returned to full productivity, as sanctions were lifted, as peasants returned home from the Protected Villages, and as both years saw excellent rains. This was accompanied by an active government social policy. The refugee rehabilitation programme undertaken by the government in 1980-81 was a success, given the immense problems it faced.25 Education expanded massively, as the introduction of free primary schooling saw primary school pupils rise from 1.2 million in 1980 to just over two million in 1983. The number of secondary school pupils quadrupled in the same period, though from a smaller base. In September 1980 free medical services were introduced for those earning less than Z$150 per month (the minimum wage was Z$70 per month), and cattle dipping was provided free for TTL inhabitants. Further agricultural initiatives included the establishment of marketing depots in every district, improved access to credit, and agricultural pricing policies to help peasant farmers.26 Though improved economic conditions undoubtedly helped the government through the immediate post-independence period, they did not last. The first post-war wave of industrial unrest and strikes had hit as early as March 1980, as the end of war heralded rising popular expectations. By 1984, real problems were mounting. Drought in 1982 and 1983, coupled with structural economic constraints facing the government – particularly finding foreign exchange to service a debt that had risen from $16 million in 1980 to more than $550 million by 1983 – meant that the minimum wage declined in real terms between July 1980 and January 1984, despite early efforts to raise it. Unemployment grew, and by 1983 real per capita income was 15% below 1974 levels.27 Social problems aggravated the situation. Many young people educated in the guerrillarun refugee camps of Zambia, Mozambique and Botswana returned with attitudes of generational equality at odds with rural society back home. Many fighters and mujibas, too, had missed out on years of education whilst serving the cause, and found themselves disadvantaged in the job market. Kriger’s investigations in Mutoko district found many peasants and mujibas, in particular, resentful of the pay-outs given to demobilising guerrillas, while their support went unrewarded. In fact, the whole issue of recognising ‘national heroes’ reflected not Zimbabwean society’s cohesiveness but its divisions.28 Of the non-military threats to social stability, though, the greatest was that of land and its redistribution. As the governmentappointed Commission on Incomes and Prices reported in 1981,

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the greatest problem facing the peasantry is land. In practically every peasant area which the Commissioners visited, the first issue raised by the people was land shortage.29 In mobilising the rural population during wartime, the Patriotic Front played heavily on unjust land distribution in Rhodesia. As governors of Zimbabwe, ZANU could or would do only little to alleviate the problem. Not only did the need to reassure the white community ensure that widespread land confiscation in breach of Lancaster House was ruled out, technical problems also prevented speedy organised resettlement: the need not only to give away land but to develop rural infrastructure, an inexperienced bureaucracy, deciding policy towards black workers employed on white commercial farms. Furthermore, population growth promised to render meaningless government success in resettling 8,600 families on 520,000 hectares of land in the eighteen months after independence. By mid-1989, only 50,000 families had been resettled, and a mere 16% of white-owned farmland purchased for resettlement. The population, meanwhile, rose from 7.5 million in 1980 to about 10.5 million in 1992.30 Indeed, to peasants whose grievances towards the Rhodesian authorities had focused as much on agricultural interference as on land distribution, ZANU’s ‘technicist’ approach of encouraging scientific farming and more individual land tenure in its resettlement programme proved disturbing. With the end of the bountiful 1981 harvest, which encouraged peasants to stay temporarily on their existing land, the numbers participating in government resettlement programmes were overshadowed by a massive growth in squatting. Especially in areas of widespread white emigration either during or after the war, such as Chimanimini and Makoni, peasants moved onto white-owned land. This gave the government a tricky problem: squatters were often not the neediest or most deserving, and to condone them at the expense of law-abiding peasants stored up resentment, but to confront them would be very difficult.31 However destabilising these developments, the government’s decisive parliamentary majority and the ruling party’s cohesiveness ensured that the machinery of the state could be used to contain their effects. For aspiring elites who co-operated there were the rewards of state patronage. The number of blacks in an expanding civil service increased from 3,400 in February 1980 to 20,200 by July 1983, and by 1987 the parliament of one hundred members contained fully fifty-two government ministers. By 1994 the colour composition of the middle classes could fairly be asserted to have been transformed, but postindependence policies had also entrenched rather than challenged

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existing economic structures and inequalities.32 In rural areas, notwithstanding their wartime revolutionary rhetoric, ZANU turned increasingly to traditional leaders – male chiefs and headmen – as agents of government policy, maintaining their salaries, and in 1985 returning local courts to their control. Although theoretically the power to allocate land in communal areas was given to District Councils in 1980, in practice traditional leaders kept control, aided by government patronage and co-option.33 Organisations that threatened to undermine government policy faced dissolution. Indeed, as Jocelyn Alexander shows, the biggest loser in Chimanimini district post-independence was the local ZANU party itself, where ‘the government was able to “demobilize” the local political party by excluding it from policy decisions and starving it of resources’.34 Party membership continued to be an important prerequisite for participating in state-run development bodies, but the party organisation itself was largely inactive, except for occasional mobilisation for elections and rallies, and functioned as a tool for the implementation of policy over which members had no discernible influence. Women’s political role, expanded in the liberation struggle, was once again restricted despite the emancipatory wartime rhetoric of the ZANU leadership.35 Parliamentary competition was similarly quashed. The modified proportional representation system employed in 1980 gave way to a British-style plurality single member district system for the 1985 election, helping ZANU to sixty-four of the sixty-five seats outside Matabeleland (where Nkomo’s ZAPU won all fifteen seats). UANC leader Abel Muzorewa was detained without trial for ten months in 1983-84 and his party disbanded in 1986. And the Zimbabwe Unity Movement, founded by Edgar Tekere in May 1989 on an anti-corruption and anti-repression platform, quickly had its rallies banned.36 To reinforce its control, the Zimbabwean state retained much of the illiberal security legislation of its Rhodesian predecessor. By its lapse in 1990, the state of emergency introduced in 1965 had been renewed forty-nine consecutive times, its nineteen renewals since independence being enacted on a bewildering variety of grounds. The Rhodesian Emergency Powers Regulations allowed the Home Affairs minister to detain anyone indefinitely in the interest of public safety or order, and 1,334 persons were so detained between January 1982 and July 1983. Even when the state of emergency was lifted in 1990, the Presidential Powers Act of 1986 gave the president in perpetuity most of the powers conferred by the state of emergency.37

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Demobilisation, Rebellion and Repression Containing civilian dissent proved easier than moving over one hundred thousand armed men into a new merged national army or into civilian life. Some aspects of demobilisation were handled surprisingly successfully. The merger of the Rhodesian security forces and the nationalist guerrillas commenced even before the independence elections and was effected by a Joint High Command comprising the leaders of the various organisations, working alongside a 150-strong British Military Advisory and Training Team. Members of ‘acceptable’ Rhodesia units wanting to stay in service – the Selous Scouts, the Guard Force and the SFA were all declared ineligible – were retained and allowed to keep their old rank. Guerrilla fighters were relegated to private, separated according to educational achievement, and sent off for training. By the time that the Joint High Command was replaced by the Defence Force Headquarters and Council in August 1981, former guerrillas were being promoted to be officers in the regular army, often replacing whites voluntarily leaving the army. Assistance with equipment and training was given by countries as varied as Britain, North Korea, China, Pakistan and Nigeria, and by 1990 Zimbabwe possessed a 50,000-strong professional regular army.38 For fighters choosing not to enter the demobilisation programme, not allowed to enter it, or disillusioned with it, the formation of ZNA was anything but successful. The independence elections were followed by a rise in banditry, as many guerrillas refused to disarm. ZANLA guerrillas were involved in attacks on police stations in Mtoko, Mount Darwin and Gutu after the elections. In both Mtoko and one area of Makoni district, troops of the ZNA had to restore order. ZIPRA guerrillas too roamed the countryside in 1980 causing trouble.39 Many guerrillas who accepted demobilisation were deeply disillusioned. Two measures were introduced to ease fighters back into civilian life. Operation SEED (Soldiers Employed in Economic Development) aimed to employ ex-combatants in agriculture, commerce and industry. Introduced by politicians who often neither supported nor understood the programme, administered by an army in a state of total flux, and targeted at fighters who were rarely interested in the collective farming projects being pushed on them, the project attracted only 2,000 troops and had high drop-out rates. The alternative of offering demobilising guerrillas two years pay as a lump sum failed to address the complex social, economic and educational problems facing returning fighters. Ex-combatants increasingly felt ignored by their wartime leaders, regretting their active

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participation in the war, and in April 1989 the Zimbabwe War Veterans Association was formed as a response to the government’s failure to look after them.40 Some members of Muzorewa’s SFA, declared ineligible for integration into the ZNA or for demobilisation benefits, took up arms against the government in a concerted response. Never deploying more than 100 men inside Zimbabwe, using South African arms and logistical support, and known as Super ZAPU for their ex-ZAPU leadership, they operated for just over a year in southern and western Matabeleland killing white farmers. By mid1984, though, Super ZAPU was disbanded, as Zimbabwean protests to a South African government pursuing a new regional tack prior to the Nkomati accord with Mozambique led to a withdrawal of South African support, and, importantly, as Super ZAPU came under pressure from a considerably more serious opposition to the ZANUled government.41 By far the most serious threat to the post-independence order came from a prolonged insurgency by dissident former ZIPRA guerrillas in Matabeleland. It was serious for several reasons: for the numbers involved; for its political consequences; for the dissidents’ attempt to address peasant disillusionment with Lancaster House; for the time the regime took to put it down; and for the savagery with which they did so. The troubles originated in clashes between ZANLA and ZIPRA guerrillas within the ZNA that effectively continued their rivalry during the civil war. By the end of 1980 only 15,000 of an estimated 65,000 guerrillas awaiting retraining had been processed, while the rest remained armed in the assembly points. Their transfer to low-cost housing schemes near Harare and Bulawayo, and the mixing of ZANLA and ZIPRA troops there, led to severe tension that erupted into armed clashes at Entumbane in February 1981 that left about two hundred dead. The exact source of discord is unclear. Certainly, ZIPRA had a number of complaints about the manner in which the ZNA was formed: their intelligence wing and air force were excluded from the new army; they were not given equal representation with ZANLA in the ZNA’s command and control structure; they complained about the creation of an all-Shona brigade, the Fifth; and they claimed discrimination in the forcible demobilisations that occurred at the end of the disarmament process. Politically, too, ZAPU ministers found themselves increasingly sidelined within government, Nkomo especially, as control over the police was removed from his Home Affairs Ministry. Jocelyn Alexander’s research into the dissidents and their campaign, however, shows that for those who deserted, victimisation and persecution

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within the ZNA by former ZANLA guerrillas encouraged by elements in the ZANU hierarchy played a far greater immediate role.42 The year following the Entumbane incident saw increasing ZIPRA defections from the army. The spark for the actual military campaign was the government discovery of ZIPRA arms caches at Ascot Farm and Hampton Ranch in February 1982. Mugabe took the opportunity to rid himself of ZAPU, dismissing Joshua Nkomo, Josiah Chinamano and Joseph Msika from government and arresting former ZIPRA army chiefs Lookout Masuku and Dumiso Dabwenga. All ZAPU properties were confiscated. In fact, the relationship between the dissidents and the ZAPU leadership was less clear. Although their somewhat uncoordinated demands included the return of ZAPU property and the readmission of ZAPU ministers to government, they were not organised by ZAPU, they were publicly disowned by the ZAPU leadership, and ZAPU as well as ZANU officials were targets of their attacks.43 For five years they waged a campaign whose intensity wavered, peaking in 1983 and declining steadily thereafter. Apparently never numbering more than four hundred at any one time and suffering from desertion rates reportedly as high as 75%, dissidents attacked government officials, white farmers and tourists, primarily to embarrass the Mugabe government.44 What made this dissident campaign so threatening to the government was that, although their political objectives remained mostly obscure, the dissidents exploited Ndebele resentment against the largely Shona regime in Harare and against the government’s failure to undertake serious land reform. In Insiza District in Matabeleland, for example, the mainly ZAPU local leadership was excluded from patronage, access to the state, and opportunities to redress grievances.45 This land issue was particularly sensitive in Matabeleland as ZIPRA’s wartime preparations for a conventional attack on Rhodesia at the expense of guerrilla warfare meant that relatively fewer white-owned farms were abandoned by 1980, removing the ‘squatter option’ for the landless and deprived. After a brief interlude, the government response was brutal and provoked international outrage when discovered. The North Korean-trained allShona Fifth Brigade was despatched to Matabeleland, where it launched a terror campaign against the civilian population. Employing a curious mix of tactics used during the civil war, troops of the ZNA used techniques of vertical envelopment to hunt down dissidents, enforced collective punishments on villages, held pungwes and forced Ndebele villagers to sing Shona songs in day-long rallies. Civilian casualty estimates vary, from the government’s outright denial, through the CCJP’s estimate of approximately 1,700 dead and missing,

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to Nkomo’s and Smith’s undoubted exaggerations of 20,000 and 30,000 casualties respectively.46 A rebellion born more from desperation than any specific political programme could not hope to overturn the Lancaster House order without external support. On independence, though, ZAPU had been forbidden to return to Zimbabwe with their heavy weapons, and in January 1981 the Zimbabwean government agreed with Zambia to take possession of ZAPU war material left in Zambia. A similar deal was struck with Botswana the following month, and by 1984 the Botswanan government itself had cracked down on the Dukwe refugee camp, where the dissidents obtained many recruits, after clashes there in December 1983. The dissidents themselves, meanwhile, stayed true to their ZAPU origins and rejected South African support.47 In late 1985 ZAPU agreed to ZANU’s offer of unity talks, two years later the parties were merged, and dissident action ceased. To some extent this represented a compromise. ZANU leaders feared the opportunities that dissident action gave to South Africa to destabilise Zimbabwe, government counter-insurgency operations were giving Zimbabwe a bad international image, and dissident attacks on white persons and property threatened Mugabe’s good relations with the white community. When a cease-fire was announced in April 1987, therefore, it was under amnesty that the dissidents emerged from the bush. Realistically, however, the merging of ZANU and ZAPU represented a defeat for the latter. Excluded from power, their constituents suffering from the Fifth Brigade’s impositions and from undisciplined dissidents, and with ZAPU’s own meetings banned and its offices closed after talks temporarily broke down in April 1987, ZAPU leaders had to accept terms that gave no more than a nod to their concerns. The name of the new ‘joint’ party was to be ZANU(PF), the party slogan ‘pamberi ne ZANU’ was the same as the old ZANU one, and Mugabe’s leadership of the merged party was established without election.48 South Africa and Destabilisation The one actor with both the power and the incentive to challenge the ZANU leadership’s hegemony in Zimbabwe seriously was South Africa. In 1978 P.W. Botha became prime minister proclaiming a ‘total strategy’ to build up South Africa’s ability to intervene militarily in southern Africa. Already in 1975 she had launched a major invasion of Angola, and did so on a lesser scale three times between 1981 and 1983.49 In Mozambique, meanwhile, the transferral of responsibility for sustaining RENAMO from Rhodesia to South Africa in 1980 ensured that civil war continued there for twelve more years.50 But for

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the danger of an international reaction, perhaps South Africa’s best opportunity to follow a similarly aggressive policy in Zimbabwe came in the first half of 1980, before the Mugabe regime had consolidated its power. Indeed to those determined to criticise every South African action, her failure to intervene in Zimbabwe after Mugabe’s electoral success has been an enigma. Stedman, for example, relies on the unconvincing argument that the new hard line had not filtered down to policy-making level and that the policy-makers were totally surprised by Muzorewa’s electoral defeat.51 In fact, although senior figures had indeed predicted a Muzorewa victory when the Lancaster House agreement was signed, by February 1980 they were resigned to a ZANU triumph.52 Publicly, they threatened military intervention if other foreign forces did so, if there was a breakdown of government and the emergence of chaos, or if innocent white civilians were murdered. Privately, senior South African officials met ZANU representatives (perhaps even Mugabe himself) in Maputo even before the elections to establish a loose non-aggression deal.53 Over the ten years following Zimbabwean independence, South Africa took a series of measures to undermine her neighbour. Aid was given to the so-called Super ZAPU rebels, with training facilities established at the Pafuri and Spencer refugee camps in the Northern Transvaal; on 3 August 1981 the South African ANC representative in Zimbabwe Joe Gqabi was assassinated outside his Harare home, one of many attacks on ANC targets; until August 1982 former white Rhodesian soldiers were employed by the South African Defence Forces to undertake occasional sabotage missions in Zimbabwe; and in March 1983 the Ndebele language Radio Truth started broadcasting from South African territory, attacking the Mugabe regime.54 Economic tools were used as well: in 1981 South Africa started squeezing Zimbabwe, terminating their preferential trade agreement and repatriating 40,000 Zimbabweans working in South Africa. Additionally, the South African railway system developed mysterious hold-ups for Zimbabwean goods, much as when Vorster was pressuring Smith in 1975-76. This proved particularly effective, as UNITA and RENAMO attacks on Zimbabwe’s western and eastern rail routes to the coast kept Zimbabwe heavily dependent on South Africa for sea transport.55 The question, though, is how to interpret these actions. Some, among whom the most cogent is Robert Price, see South Africa’s destabilisation of Zimbabwe as part of a wider regional strategy to establish firmly Botha’s Constellation of Southern African States, by seeking the collapse of radical anti-South African governments and their replacement by regimes prepared to become clients of Pretoria. The Zimbabwean government itself used similar arguments to justify

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maintaining the domestic state of emergency.56 A contrary and persuasive argument comes from Jack Spence, who has observed that in reality South African regional policy in the early 1980s contained no such coherent underpinnings, and represented a medium-term strategy to create an albeit forward defensive shield against external threats.57 Joseph Hanlon, meanwhile, shows that South African policy towards Zimbabwe was confused and contradictory. In the critical months after independence, ‘the main goal seemed simply to show Prime Minister Mugabe who was boss in the region, and to cause as much disruption as possible without overt military intervention’.58 Destabilisation, therefore, had its limits. Indeed, when measured against South Africa’s potential to overthrow the Mugabe regime, the measures actually taken by Pretoria seem rather half-hearted. At no stage was South African policy as aggressive as against Angola and Mozambique, where her aid to UNITA and RENAMO respectively sustained civil war in both countries. As long as Zimbabwe refrained from active support for the South African ANC, an area where Mugabe and his officials took care not overstep Pretoria’s mark, South Africa was prepared to confine its destabilisation of Zimbabwe to containable levels. As Robert Jaster noted after privately meeting Zimbabwean and Mozambican officials in the late spring of 1981, neither government believed that Pretoria’s leaders were trying to overthrow them or were likely to invade their territories. As during the Lancaster House conference itself, South Africa was indeed ‘the dog that didn’t bark’.59

Lebanon Peace and its Discontents The defeat of Aoun and the signing of the Second Damascus agreement between Amal and Hizballah in October and November 1990 led to a rapid pacification of Lebanon north of the Israeliimposed ‘red line’ in the south. On 7 November 1990 President Hrawi gave all the militias under two weeks to leave Beirut, and demanded that they all disarm by the end of March 1991. The militias largely departed as required, each retiring to its respective regional fiefdom, and on 4 December the army began dismantling the barricades between East and West Beirut.60 On 19 December Prime Minister Salim al-Hoss and his government resigned, making way for the government of national reconciliation called for at Taif. Omar Karami was appointed prime minister, and his cabinet included the leaders of most of the Lebanese military and political factions, the

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principal exception being Hizballah. During 1991 the government increasingly reasserted its authority, reclaiming control of all militiaheld ports during May and neutralising the Palestinian military presence in July.61 And in July 1992 the final phase in the transition to ‘normal politics’ began with the announcement of plans to hold elections in three stages at the end of August and the beginning of September, elections which proceeded as planned. However, the steady progress towards cementing peace was achieved against provocation and discontentment. Even outside southern Lebanon, where open warfare between Hizballah, the SLA and the Israeli Army continued, there were many violent incidents capable of sparking further fighting. Lebanese Forces militiamen clashed with those of the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party (SSNP) and followers of Elie Hubeiqa immediately after Aoun’s fall. Incidents persisted between Hizballah and its opponents inside the Shia community (including Amal), some of which even saw medium-calibre artillery used. Six were killed and twenty wounded in March 1992 in a firefight between Syrian troops and Lebanese police on the Beirut Airport highway. And, most publicly, two massive explosions rocked Beirut at the end of 1991, one destroying the main hall of the American University of Beirut on 8 November 1991, with no-one claiming responsibility.62 Moreover, despite official demobilisation and disarmament, all militias retained and concealed not only light but heavy weaponry as well, and kept their structures virtually intact.63 If security in Lebanon remained volatile, neither the economy nor the government showed much stability in compensation. The cessation of hostilities between the major Lebanese factions failed to stem the economic crisis of the late 1980s, as the continued fighting in the south deterred potential investors, the Gulf War of 1991 prevented the Gulf states from supporting Lebanon’s economic recovery, and, most importantly, the sheer backlog of economic problems caused by civil war came home to roost. From 2.3 Lebanese pounds to the US dollar in 1975, through 3.8 in 1982, to 500 at the end of 1989, the Lebanese pound sank to 2,473 during October 1992. Only in 1993 did the Lebanese economy pick up. In January 1992, though, Beirut was still receiving electricity for six hours each day, water only two or three times each week, and the telephone system stayed terrible. Government remained ineffective. The president, prime minister and speaker all quarrelled over their respective powers; the various militia leaders ducked into and out of the cabinet; and the cabinet itself became known for internal feuding and corruption. Little public confidence existed that the government was in any way representative. From February 1992 onwards the worsening economic situation led to strikes and riots, resulting in the resignation in May of Omar Karami.64

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Community-specific grievances, especially amongst Lebanon’s Christians, increased the potential for further unrest. Though many of the Christian political elite had co-operated at least tacitly in Aoun’s ouster, even the Council of Maronite Bishops under Cardinal Sfeir openly criticised the violent manner of its execution.65 As progress was made towards Lebanon’s first post-war parliamentary elections in 1992, a number of issues attracted Christian ire. Disarmament of the militias appeared one-sided, with the Lebanese Forces heavily targeted, while Hizballah, Amal and (until July 1991) the PLO were allowed to retain their arms to fight Israel in southern Lebanon. The return of displaced persons specified in the Taif agreement, many being Christians who had fled the Shouf during the Christian-Druze fighting of 1983, faced innumerable blockages. Syria’s influence on Lebanon’s political appointments in the wake of Taif gave Christian representation in Cabinet a distinctly pro-Syrian colouring, a contrast to majority Maronite attitudes. This was further enhanced early in 1991, as Jaja and Saadeh combined unsuccessfully to oppose a Syriansponsored proposal to nominate parliamentary deputies to replace those who had died since the last election in 1972.66 And most emphatically of all, a survey of Maronite opinion in the summer of 1992 showed 74% of Maronites opposed to parliamentary elections and to the manipulation of the electoral law by Syria and her allies (of which more later). On 23 July 1992 a general strike was held in the Christian areas of Lebanon, the normally cautious Sfeir described the elections as a ‘blatant challenge to the one whole section of the Lebanese community’, and Christian parties and their supporters boycotted the August/September elections: in the mainly Christian Jbeil district, Maha Khoury Asad won her seat with a total of forty-one votes from an electorate of 60,000.67 Muslims too, though, had much to criticise in post-war Lebanon. Nabih Berri refused to attend cabinet meetings for much of 1991, generally resentful at his lack of influence in government, and specifically in protest at the failure to reconstitute the Lebanese army in a manner favourable to his militiamen, in anger at prime minister Omar Karami’s visit to Libya (where Amal founder Musa al-Sadr had ‘disappeared’ in 1978) in the summer of 1991, and in opposition to government proposals to regulate the media.68 Hizballah, meanwhile, refused even to accept a seat in cabinet, the only major militia to do so. But loudest of all was PSP leader Walid Jumblatt. Despite his strong Syrian links, he was consistently critical of the Syrian-sponsored government. Between October 1990 and August 1992 he resigned from or boycotted the cabinet repeatedly, including in January 1991, and in January and August 1992. Fearing the marginalisation of his Druze constituency in peacetime Lebanon because of their small

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numbers, Jumblatt took a series of contrary stands: over government repossession of ports and of state-owned buildings, over militia disarmament, over army reform, over economic policy, and over policies towards the Palestinians in Lebanon.69 Establishing Order in Lebanon (1): Co-option Despite all the challenges to peace, however, the military action against Michel Aoun in October 1990 proved the last major military engagement of the war in Lebanon outside Israel’s self-declared ‘security zone’. For most of the population, after a fifteen-year war whose Lebanese casualties police figures put at almost 150,000 dead and 200,000 wounded, more important than any grievance with the post-Taif settlement was the restoration of peace and stability.70 Within two weeks of their operation against Aoun, Syrian troops assumed a less visible position in the capital, handing over their more public positions to a Lebanese army so quickly reunited that Aoun’s soldiers were back patrolling the streets of the Metn forty-eight hours after their defeat at Baabda. Leading that army was Emile Lahoud, appointed by Hrawi in November 1989 and described by one journalist as an ‘officier reconnu par tous comme politiquement honnête et militairement compétent’.71 Streets closed for years were now opened, the American University of Beirut closed down its East Beirut campus now the city was reunited, shops and banks opened, and schools and hospitals began working again. By mid-1991 Christians were visiting Muslim areas of Lebanon and vice-versa.72 To those of the political elite who co-operated with the new order of Hrawi and his Syrian masters, the fruits of patronage were made available. This applied particularly to Shiis, the largest confessional grouping in Lebanon but one which had gained little from Taif itself. Shiis were granted a major say in the recruitment policies of three large employers: the army, the internal security services and the teaching profession. Rather than cut into traditional Maronite preserves, new offices and even ministries (such as the Shiiheaded Ministry of Immigrants) were created to reward loyal Shiis and Druzes. The Amal-controlled Ministry of the South managed millions of dollars intended for reconstruction.73 But it was not just Shiis who benefited from the Taif regime. The distribution of public office, and even of parliamentary seats with the appointment of forty new deputies in June 1991, attracted figures from all across the confessional spectrum. Critics highlighted the presence in cabinet of unrepresentative figures who owed their position to Syrian influence, such as Abdallah al-Amin, Shii PSP member Muhsin Dallul and Maronite SSNP man Nasri Khuri. But apart from militia leaders, most

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of whom accepted cabinet seats as Ministers without Portfolio, the new ruling elite included pro-Syrian Christian figures of some prominence such as Elias Hrawi, Michel al-Murr, and Faris Buwayz.74 Given the length and bitterness of Lebanon’s civil war, militia demobilisation and the integration of many former militiamen into the national army was effected relatively easily, if not completely without incident. In the twelve months following Aoun’s ouster, both Walid Jumblatt and Samir Jaja urged acceleration of the integration process, which they argued was being delayed by anti-warlord politicians and army commanders. Critics mocked the ‘bloated’ armed forces of the mid-1990s, far removed from the ‘professional’ organisation of Shihab and Aoun. The Times tellingly reported the fate of one forty-year old Druze militiaman, who hanged himself in November 1990 at the prospect of losing the pay and protection money he was earning. Deprived of tax and toll revenues, the PSP, for example, laid off 7,000 of its militiamen, only some of whom were found employment in the PSP-run Civil Administration of the Mountain.75 Despite this, and assisted by the fact that militia leaders’ continued cabinet membership was made dependent on progress in demobilising their forces (and indeed by the proceeds to be made from selling weaponry to the warring factions in the Balkans), the demobilisation process was executed successfully. Between January and March 1991, the government and army moved to disarm those militiamen remaining in Beirut. On 20 March 1991 almost all militias in Lebanon were ordered to disarm by the end of April. In April, the Lebanese Forces, Amal and the PSP submitted lists of members for whom they wanted state security jobs, and in September militiamen began to be inducted into the army and police force. The 20,000 militiamen eventually so incorporated were (in theory at least) to be divided equally between Christians and Muslims: 2,800 each from Amal and the PSP; 2,800 Sunnis; 1,600 other Muslims; 6,500 from the Lebanese Forces, the Ketaeb militia, the Tanzim, the Guardians of the Cedars, and the National Liberal Party; 1,700 Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic and Armenian fighters; and 1,800 other Christians.76 The main exception to the disarmament and demobilisation process was Hizballah. Citing their role as the leading Lebanese organisation fighting the Israeli occupation, and with Iranian backing for their position, Hizballah emerged on balance victorious from a series of political and military manoeuvres in southern Lebanon between April 1991 and early 1992. In April 1992 Hizballah secretarygeneral Subhi Tufeili announced his determination not to see Hizballah disarmed, receiving vindication in July when the Lebanese army entered southern Lebanon without acting against the ‘Islamic Resistance’. Indeed, in November 1991 army co-operation even

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allowed Hizballah to retake some of its positions lost to Amal in 198990.77 Things did not go all Hizballah’s way: some in government, including Hrawi and Berri, reportedly wanted to crush Hizballah now, both to stop it growing stronger and to remove any justification for Israel to remain in Lebanon. Indeed, even during the spring of 1992 government and Hizballah waged a war of words over the resistance’s role in Lebanese politics, and it was overtly because the government was not doing enough to help the resistance that Hizballah boycotted the governments of Omar Karami and later Rafiq al-Hariri.78 The local population, too, was hesitant about seeing Hizballah actions against Israeli forces increase, though Hizballah measures to mitigate the effects of Israeli retaliation (including keeping building teams on standby to repair damaged properties) did help somewhat.79 But Hizballah’s overall success in resisting disarmament and in carving itself a firm role in post-civil war Lebanon is best illustrated by the extent to which Amal was forced to co-operate with Hizballah in its attacks on Israeli and pro-Israeli forces in southern Lebanon to maintain its public profile and political position. An organisation that had derived so much strength in its early days from opposing Palestinian attacks on Israeli targets and the consequent retaliation, and which had only recently fought an inconclusive war against Hizballah, by 1991 Amal was playing a junior role in the anti-Israeli resistance. Indeed, Amal’s political platform of 1992 had considerably more to say about resistance to Israel than about social deprivation and political reform, a sign of how far the movement had fallen since its origins in Shia social unrest in the 1970s.80 The extent to which, in the post-Taif era, Hizballah now focused on resistance to Israel at the expense of Islamic revolution was best illustrated by its participation in the 1992 parliamentary elections. As early as October 1990 Tufeili announced that ‘it is true that we are opposed to Ta’if, but our opposition is political rather than military’.81 As Syrian authority was imposed throughout Lebanon, Hizballah sought to assert its pro-Syrian credentials. Under the leadership of Abbas Mussawi, who replaced Tufeili as head of Hizballah’s ruling council in May 1991, Hizballah co-operated in the late 1991 release of the Western hostages held in Lebanon, and in January 1992 Hizballah’s ‘spiritual guide’ Mohammed Fadlallah showed prescience when he declared that, Certain Islamic currents used to call for revolution as the shortest path to power. Now I think the tendency among Islamic movements in the world is to take advantage of all democratic means available, which I think will mean participation in politics.82

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Despite Abbas Mussawi’s death in an Israeli helicopter attack on 16 February 1992 and his replacement by the formerly uncompromising Hassan Nasrallah, and despite Hizballah’s objections to features of the electoral process, including the inconsistent adoption of electoral constituencies and the setting of voter eligibility at the age of 21, on 30 June 1992 Hizballah announced its participation in the forthcoming parliamentary elections. Hedging its bets by allying electorally with Amal in South Lebanon, and buttressed by popular support for its extensive social services (precisely when the state was signally failing to deliver on this front), Hizballah’s participation was rewarded by eight seats in parliament. Although the ‘Party of God’ continued to refuse participation in government, its acceptance of the post-Taif order was demonstrated in December 1992, when for the first time since 1984 the Lebanese army moved into the southern suburbs of Beirut with 2,000 troops and forty tanks, unresisted by Hizballah or its sympathisers.83 Establishing Order in Lebanon (2): Coercion While rewards were available to those prepared to uphold the postTaif order, whether by soft-pedalling their political objectives or in Hizballah’s case by channelling them in ways beneficial to the state, those who resisted met coercion, political or military. This applied especially to Maronite leaders, whether those in the militia who found that their tactical alliance with Syria against Aoun had, unexpectedly and unfortunately for them, resulted in outright Syrian victory, or those of the traditional political elite, who deplored Aoun’s arrivisme and risk-taking but who were unreconciled to the Syrian domination of Lebanon that Aoun’s defeat implied. The most public fall from grace in the period following Aoun’s defeat was that of Lebanese Forces commander Samir Jaja. The Lebanese Forces’ thirteen-year history of opposition to Syria made Jaja and Asad uneasy allies against Michel Aoun, and with Aoun neutralised neither Asad nor his lieutenants had any intention of allowing Jaja to disrupt a pro-Syrian settlement of the Lebanese war. As early as October 1990, Syria was deploying Christian militiamen of the politically unrepresentative but pro-Syrian SSNP, and of Jaja’s enemies Elie Hubeiqa and Suleiman Tony Franjieh in areas formerly held by Aoun. Faced with the prospect of pro-Syrian militiamen moving into Lebanese Forces strongholds, particularly that of Ashrafieh in East Beirut, Jaja dragged his feet on withdrawing from Beirut in late 1990. The ‘compromise’ solution, established between Hrawi, Syrian intelligence chief in Lebanon Ghazi Kanaan, and Lebanese Forces representatives in November 1990, was effectively

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victory for Syria: the Lebanese Forces would withdraw from Beirut provided that the pro-Syrian Christian militias were curbed and that the Lebanese army troops deployed in the areas held by the Lebanese Forces were not former Aoun loyalists. By 3 December 1990, as the Lebanese Forces completed their withdrawal from Beirut to the Kisrawan-Jbeil areas of Mount Lebanon, Syria had engineered their retreat largely through the splits dividing the Christian community, without exerting the open Syrian or Lebanese Muslim pressure that might have provoked a popular Maronite reaction.84 Ironically, given his own pragmatism towards the end of the war and given the Lebanese Forces’ callous treatment of their own supposed Maronite constituents, as 1990 turned into 1991 and 1992, Jaja refused to accept the realities of post-Taif Lebanon. Offered a cabinet seat, he resigned in favour of his more conciliatory second-incommand Roger Dib on 27 March 1990 on the eve of the first full meeting of the Karami cabinet. Instead, he complained constantly about the government and its decisions: its pro-Syrian make-up, the regulation of the media, the disarmament of the militias, the appointment of deputies, the deployment of the army to South Lebanon, the holding of parliamentary elections, and the passing in August 1991 of an amnesty for war crimes that allowed Aoun his freedom but whose exclusion of those accused of assassinating political and religious figures appeared to target the Lebanese Forces leadership.85 However, without cabinet veto power, without allies, without popular support and without a battlefield on which to exert their force, Jaja’s militiamen gave the Lebanese Forces no leverage to obstruct government decision-making. The critical blow came in summer 1992. In June, Jaja contested the leadership of the Ketaeb Party against his erstwhile ally Georges Saadeh. Defeated by sixty votes to fifty-three, over the following months Jaja’s supporters were sacked from the party. That same summer, government units were deployed successfully in Kisrawan and Jbeil, and on the night of 25-26 July 1992, during negotiations between the government and the Lebanese Forces for the return to government of the militia’s headquarters building in the Qarantina area beside Beirut port, government tanks rolled into the complex and humiliatingly ‘escorted’ Jaja home.86 Before long, the movement that seemed so strong under Bashir Gemayel in the early 1980s was totally crushed. Lebanese Forces militiamen found themselves all but excluded by the process of official demobilisation and incorporation into state structures. Twenty-seven Lebanese Forces members were arrested by the army in East Beirut in October 1992. In March 1994 the government dissolved the Lebanese Forces organisation, holding them responsible for a bomb attack on a church

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north of Beirut in February. And on 21 April 1994 Samir Jaja himself was arrested in connection with the October 1990 assassination of Dany Chamoun, president of the National Liberal Party and one of Jaja’s Maronite rivals.87 The Christian political elite fared little better than their militia counterparts against Syria and her Lebanese allies. With prominent communal leaders like Amin Gemayel and Raymond Eddé in exile, with Michel Aoun joining them in August 1991, and with National Liberal Party leader Dany Chamoun assassinated with his family in Beirut on 21 October 1990, only the Ketaeb remained to defend traditional Maronite claims. Between October 1990 and the summer of 1992, Ketaeb leaders Georges Saadeh and Michel Sassin variously attended, boycotted and resigned from cabinet as they found themselves increasingly unable to influence government decisionmaking. As with the Lebanese Forces, the summer of 1992 proved critical. On 16 July 1992 parliament passed a bill for the first parliamentary elections since 1972, a bill that violated the spirit at least of the Taif agreement. Instead of the 108 seats specified at Taif, 128 were to be contested, with two-thirds of the new seats located in Syrian-controlled areas. Constituencies were enlarged or reduced ‘depending on whether this could help pro-Syrian candidates and prominent champions of the Second Republic, and harm their opponents’. The bill undermined the Christian-Muslim equality enshrined at Taif by making more Christians dependent on Muslim votes than vice-versa, while voting rules for displaced people and overseas residents also threatened to diminish Christian influence on the results.88 Interviewed in the Beirut newspaper L’Orient-le Jour in mid-July, Syrian vice-president Abdel Halim Khaddam (and designated handler of Lebanese affairs within the Syrian government) declared that those ‘qui ne veulent pas les éléctions, ne souhaitent pas, en réalité, l’aboutissement de paix au Liban’, while claiming somewhat disingenuously that Syria was neutral about the results.89 The Maronite response, and of the Ketaeb in particular, demonstrated how independent Maronite influence in Lebanon had declined since Taif. Supporters of Aoun, Jaja, Eddé and Dany Chamoun’s brother Dory all quickly announced their boycott of the elections. Early in August 1992 a series of meetings was held at Patriarch Sfeir’s seat in Bkirki to establish a common Maronite position, but they succeeded only in announcing that each party would have to determine for itself whether to participate in the elections. Saadeh vacillated, proclaiming himself satisfied with a visit to Khaddam in Damascus on 13 August, only to declare the following day that the Ketaeb would join the boycott.90 On its own terms the boycott was successful: even Hrawi’s son-in-law foreign minister Faris

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Buwayz resigned from government, and so complete was Christian refusal to vote that five seats in Kisrawan remained unfilled. Politically, though, it was a total failure. With Christian leaders, including Patriarch Sfeir, rejecting active measures to combat the Syrian ‘occupation’, even civil disobedience, neither the Ketaeb nor the other anti-Syrian Maronite parties could prevent the ruling elite’s consolidation in power. In October 1992 the Christian resolve cracked as candidates, including Saadeh and Buwayz, stood for byelections in Kisrawan. In March 1993 a Ketaeb delegation visited Damascus to repair relations damaged by the boycott. And in 1994 the Ketaeb Party convention voted to reject the ‘mistakes of the past’ and declared its allegiance to Lebanon’s Arab identity.91 With somewhat greater ease, Jumblatt too was brought to heel. Unhappy for example at government moves to repossess PSP-held but state-owned buildings and ports, and at the proposed elections, Jumblatt nevertheless declined to make common cause with antiSyrian Maronites. Under wartime conditions the absence of strong central authority and the ease with which militias could usually defend their own enclaves nourished the most unlikely alliances. With Asad now directly or indirectly holding the key cards in Lebanon, breaking with Syria was too great a risk for Jumblatt. Despite his outbursts, and despite toying with mending fences with the Maronite opposition, Jumblatt collapsed under pressure, abandoning his ports at Jiyah and Awzai, returning to cabinet, and calling off a proposed Druze strike protesting against government repossession of the National Library, the Emir Amin palace, and Beit al-Din palace in the Shouf. His reward was appointment as Minister of the Displaced in the government appointed after the 1992 elections, giving him considerable patronage power over the resettlement process, particularly important as a large percentage of displaced persons were Christians expelled from the Shouf in the early 1980s.92 With each successful army deployment giving it additional leverage over the militias, government exerted its authority throughout the former militia-controlled areas. In March 1991 defence minister Michel al-Murr announced that the army had entered a number of ports around Beirut. In May deployments took place north and east of Beirut, in areas including Batrun, Kurah, Jbeil, Kisrawan and the Metn, while a six-hundred strong army unit deployed in Tyre and the Zahrani area in southern Lebanon. And in August 1991 the army’s writ was extended to North Lebanon. Only the Israeli-held ‘security zone’ in the very south eluded the direct control of the Lebanese government and ‘brother Syria’.93

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Syrian-Lebanese Relations What made the containment of dissent, especially Maronite dissent, so important to Syria were the steps being taken between 1990 and 1992 to consolidate Syria’s satellisation of Lebanon. On paper, the Taif provisions concerning Syrian-Lebanese relations represented a carefully crafted fudge. True, the two counties were to compact ‘to ensure that Lebanon is not a source of threat to the security of Syria’ and that ‘Lebanon will not allow itself to [be] a conduit or base for any force, state or organisation which aims at violating its own security or the security of Syria’. Conversely, though, Syria promised not to allow any action that threatened Lebanon’s sovereignty, and moreover was bound to redeploy its forces to the Bekaa and its western approaches, in a specified period of time, no longer than two years, beginning after the ratification of the national accord document and the election of the President of the Republic and the formation of the government of national accord and the introduction of political reforms in a constitutional way’ 94 Critically, however, the agreement left only the governments of Lebanon and Syria to settle the final details of the redeployment, with no external guarantor. By controlling the make-up of the Lebanese government, Asad could avoid such a retreat. Syrian determination to secure a compliant post-war Lebanese government was evident as early as December 1990, when Omar Karami’s designation as prime minister was announced in the Syrian press two days before his formal parliamentary nomination. The absence of the traditional prior consultation with parliamentary deputies brought sharp condemnation from both the Lebanese Forces and Walid Jumblatt.95 Then, on 22 May 1991, the formal treaty between Lebanon and Syria predicted by Taif was signed in Damascus. The ‘Treaty of Brotherhood, Co-operation and Co-ordination’ surpassed Taif in the closeness of Syrian-Lebanese relations that it stipulated. Under it Syria and Lebanon were to co-operate in the fields, among others, of politics, economics, security, culture and science. Lebanon was committed not to ‘allow itself to become a transit point or base for any force, state or organisation that seeks to undermine its security or that of Syria’. The two countries’ foreign policies were now to be co-ordinated, and Syrian troop redeployment specified at Taif was now to be made not only to the Bekaa, but also if necessary elsewhere in Lebanon, as specified by a joint LebaneseSyrian military committee.96

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Lebanese Muslims, including Hizballah and PSP members, greeted the treaty, and even some Christians expressed relief that it did not go further in subordinating Lebanon to Syria, while others noted that the treaty’s economic provisions might act to Lebanon’s advantage.97 Overall, though, Maronites condemned the treaty as unbalanced and unfair. Patriarch Sfeir declared that it was ‘imposed by one side on the other like any accord between two unequal states’, while from Paris Amin Gemayel called it ‘a crime against sovereignty and one against democracy’. The Ketaeb political bureau, trying to tread a line of careful opposition noted in advance that it ‘arouse[d] fears and apprehensions and r[a]n counter to the objective behind our commitment to the principles of brotherly relations between the two countries’.98 Asad, though, left observers at the signing of the treaty in no doubt as to his view of Lebanese-Syrian relations: we say we are one people, although we live in two separate independent states. Nobody can ignore this fact, because it would not be in the interest of any of the two independent states nor in the interest of the people living in them.99 The co-ordination of foreign policies was evident before year end. On 17 October 1991 President Hrawi met Asad to discuss a common stand for the forthcoming Middle East peace conference at Madrid. Whether the internal power balance within Lebanon would have permitted a peace-making attempt with Israel in return for an Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon is questionable. In the event it was irrelevant. Lebanese delegates made no move at the conference before checking with Syria, and when Syria boycotted the multilateral track of negotiations initiated in Moscow in January 1992 Lebanon followed suit.100 The final step in Syria’s consolidation of her control over Lebanon came in 1992 with the failure to withdraw Syrian troops to the Bekaa as specified at Taif. As early as March 1992, senior figures in the Lebanese government hinted that the withdrawal might not take place in September, citing the Lebanese army’s inability to ensure security throughout the country.101 In July 1992, Khaddam made the Syrian stance clear: S’il faut s’en tenir au texte [of the Taif agreement], il n’y est fait mention d’aucune date … Il y a un delai de deux ans qui court à parties de l’adoption par l’Assemblé des réformes politiques.102 According to Khaddam, though, the relevant political reforms were not just the redistribution of parliamentary seats and the reduction in presidential powers undertaken in 1990, but also the longer-term (and indeed even aspirational) proposals made at Taif. No-one present

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there may have expected these reforms ever to take place, but Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon was now tied to that perennial chimera of Lebanese politics: the abolition of confessionalism. Only the Lebanese government could request a prior withdrawal, a government firmly controlled by Damascus. Ten years after Aoun’s fall, the withdrawal of Syrian troops to the Bekaa had still not occurred. External Actors Between Syria and the forces of the newly reconstituted Lebanese state, the ingredients to prevent civil war reoccurring were present. Two external actors, though, the PLO and Israel, possessed the wherewithal at least to attempt to disrupt the post-Taif settlement. In April 1991, when the Lebanese government began to disarm the militias, the pro-Arafat sections of the PLO still commanded over 5,000 guerrillas on Lebanese soil, most in the south of the country where the Israeli-Syrian ‘red lines’ prevented the deployment of Syrian troops. Even though PLO attacks against Israeli forces had virtually ended in 1985, the Palestinian guerrilla presence on the front line against Israel did give the PLO some leverage in its diplomatic (especially inter-Arab) manoeuvres. Moreover, the Lebanese parliament’s abrogation of the 1969 Cairo agreement in 1987, and the notable absence in Taif of any concession to the Palestinians, left the PLO unwilling to disarm in Lebanon without some agreement on the status of the Palestinian refugees there. As early as November 1990, Palestinian officials were warning the Lebanese government not to start a Lebanese-Palestinian war in southern Lebanon, and a dialogue began between the PLO and a Lebanese ministerial committee to resolve the issue.103 Hrawi chose to ignore the Palestinian warnings. Determined to reassert control over Lebanese territory and bolstered by Arafat’s illjudged tacit support of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, he issued warnings of his own, most forcefully in June 1991: The army will move in force at the end of the month to the south not to punish anyone but to consolidate security. We will no longer tolerate mini-states within the country, nor armies within the army. … The security of all those who have sought refuge in Lebanon will be the responsibility of the state. We no longer want to hear someone say that they will be in charge of their own security.104 Hrawi fulfilled his promise. On 1 July 1991, 10,000 Lebanese army troops entered Sidon, and over the next four days over sixty-five on all sides were killed and over a hundred wounded as Lebanese troops

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defeated PLO gunmen in the hills around the Palestinian refugee camps near Sidon. The Lebanese army refrained from entering the camps themselves, and PLO fighters were allowed to retain their personal weapons, but PLO guerrillas were now confined to the camps and all PLO heavy weapons were to be withdrawn from Lebanon.105 The question remains, though, how the PLO allowed itself to be defeated so easily. Some local PLO officials complained of a lack of battle orders, but in truth, as noted in Chapter 5 above, Lebanon was just no longer that important in PLO regional strategy. Already in February 1991 Arafat had begun to compromise with the Lebanese government, withdrawing Fatah fighters from the Iqlim al-Tuffah in favour of the Lebanese army, and suppressing a rebellion by one Lieutenant Abu Muhammad Zarurah and 250 followers, who refused to abandon their front line positions against Israel. When negotiations in Cairo between the Lebanese government and the PLO collapsed in May 1991, Arafat publicly ordered to his men to resist, but effectively abandoned them to their fate.106 This became increasingly obvious in the eighteen months following July 1991. On the one hand, Arafat moved to mend relations with the Arab states, damaged so badly over Kuwait, ahead of the Madrid peace conference and the consequent commencement of regional peace negotiations. On the other, little official objection came from the PLO leadership to increasingly harsh measures imposed on the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. The Lebanese army effectively besieged the refugee camps around Tyre in July 1991. Although a token concession was given to the Palestinians in the lifting of a neverimplemented 1983 decree limiting Palestinian participation in some fifty professions, work permits continued to be refused to Palestinians in Lebanon. And despite the worsening of economic conditions in Lebanon that affected Palestinian refugees especially, in October 1992 the government of Rafiq al-Hariri installed after the parliamentary elections issued decrees requiring all Palestinians to apply for work permits even for casual labour, refusing building permission for new camps to replace those destroyed in the war, and banning ‘horizontal expansion’ onto empty ground around the camps. The Palestinians in Lebanon, whose ‘state within a state’ had been so critical to the eruption and course of the Lebanese war, were now well and truly emasculated.107 Israeli leaders, like their Palestinian counterparts, had little to like about the emerging post-Taif settlement in Lebanon. As the Lebanese state exerted its authority in the centre and north of the country, in the south Israel and its 2,700 allied troops in the South Lebanon Army came under increasing pressure from a Hizballah

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anxious to establish itself as a government- and Syrian-approved resistance to the Israeli occupation. Between 1985 and 1991 the annual number of ‘armed incidents’ involving Israeli forces in southern Lebanon was only about twenty-five. With Hizballah installed on the front line after the Palestinian defeat of July 1991, this was matched in the month of October 1991 alone, with a further twenty incidents in November. UNIFIL personnel, stationed in the area to keep a nonexistent peace, noted a distinct improvement in Hizballah’s military performance and sophistication. In 1992, the number of attacks on Israeli and SLA personnel in the ‘security zone’ escalated to 172, and further to 330 in 1993.108 Two incidents, in particular, contributed to a sense of crisis in southern Lebanon. The signing of the Treaty of Brotherhood, Co-operation and Co-ordination between Lebanon and Syria in May 1991 provoked not only fierce condemnation from leading Israeli politicians, but also three days of Israeli air raids principally against Palestinian targets in Lebanon, the heaviest since 1985.109 And in February 1992 a series of tit-for-tat attacks in southern Lebanon during the US-sponsored regional peace negotiations escalated sharply after Israeli helicopters targeted and killed Hizballah leader Abbas Mussawi on 16 February. For a week, observers feared a return to open warfare, as Hizballah rained Katyusha rockets on northern Israel, and Israeli troops moved northwards from the ‘security zone’.110 Beneath their bluster, though, Israeli policymakers faced the same dilemma in 1991 and 1992 as since 1985: Israel could use force in Lebanon, but she could achieve little political advantage from it without reliable and influential Lebanese partners. By the early 1990s, Israel had despaired of finding such people.111 Moreover, four of the five ‘red lines’ suggested by prominent opposition figure (and soon to be prime minister) Yitzhak Rabin in May 1991 were still being observed: that Syrian forces should stay away from the LebaneseIsraeli border; that Syria should not install surface-to-air missiles in Lebanon; similarly with Syrian combat aircraft; and that the SLA should control the Jezzine enclave (which technically lay outside the ‘security zone’).112 Only one ‘red line’, that the Israeli ‘security zone’ in southern Lebanon should go unchallenged, was tested significantly between 1990 and 1992, and that was redefined by an unwritten modus vivendi established between Hizballah, the Lebanese, Syrian and Israeli governments first, and somewhat shakily, during the escalation following Abbas Mussawi’s assassination in February 1992, and then more firmly after another escalation in July 1993. A bitter and bloody low-intensity conflict continued in South Lebanon until May 2000, but apart from well-publicised flare-ups Hizballah generally avoided attacking Israeli territory itself, while Israel and the SLA largely

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restricted themselves to military targets and their deployments to the ‘security zone’.113 Israel’s grudging but nonetheless important assent to Syria’s growing domination of Lebanon was illustrated by its response to a US-brokered deal over the Lebanese parliamentary elections: Israel agreed not to instigate trouble on polling day in southern Lebanon, 6 September 1992, but refused free passage for ‘security zone’ inhabitants to vote in Lebanon’s first parliamentary elections since 1972.114 Of the external actors involved in Lebanon only Israel and the PLO possessed the potential to disrupt the Syrian-driven pacification process in Lebanon after the fall of Aoun. Regional dynamics, however, ensured that others did not even try. Eager to preserve a common purpose among the anti-Saddam Hussein coalition after Iraq’s expulsion from Kuwait, and aware that Taif gave the Arab League no role in its implementation unless explicitly requested by Lebanon and Syria, Arab and Western leaders accepted Syrian hegemony over Lebanon as a fait accompli. When Lebanese troops moved against the PLO in July 1991, only Qadhafi of Libya and some sections of the Tunisian press were critical. In October 1991, Hrawi visited France, holding talks with President Mitterand for French financial and military aid, thus signalling an end to the tension in French-Lebanese relations caused by French sympathies with Aoun.115 Even Iran, despite opposing the Middle East peace process, was left satisfied by Hizballah’s role in post-civil war Lebanon, and in September 1991 foreign minister Faris Buwayz led the first senior Lebanese government delegation to Tehran since the Iranian revolution of 1979.116 But it was the US who, above all, smoothed the international path for Syria in 1991. In February 1991, Jaja gambled on a visit to the US, where he met Assistant Secretary of State for Middle Eastern affairs John Kelly. Kelly rebuffed Jaja’s complaints about Syria, and in April 1991 back in Lebanon, US ambassador Ryan Crocker visited Jaja to recommend compliance with the cabinet decision to disarm the militias. More generally, though, US decision-makers deliberately overlooked Syria’s consolidation of her power in Lebanon, while Syria performed her side of the bargain, assisting in the release of the Western hostages held in Lebanon in late 1991, participating in the Madrid peace negotiations, and cracking down on drug production in the Bekaa valley.117 By the spring and summer of 1992, US-Syrian relations had cooled. Lack of progress in the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations allowed US officials to be more outspoken over Lebanon, and in July 1992 Secretary of State James Baker visited Lebanon, publicly supporting the latter’s independence and sovereignty, and

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announcing a ‘difference of interpretation of the Ta’if agreement’ between the US and Syria. By then, though, Syrian control over the pacification process was too complete, and US leverage too small, for these statements to have any effect, and as early as February 1993 US attitudes to Lebanon looked to improve with the visit of new Secretary of State Warren Christopher to Beirut.118

Comparison Lancaster House and Taif were both partial settlements. They provided the constitutional framework for conducting the post-war power struggle. Further, it was clear to observers and participants alike that Zimbabwean politics would never again be dominated by the white community, and that for the foreseeable future Syria would play a key role in Lebanon. But not only did the agreements fail to address the social and economic problems that had contributed to the outbreak of civil war, they left open to a significant degree the question of who would rule the post-war state. The question we must address, given that theorists have observed how frequently such compromise settlements break down, is why war did not return to Zimbabwe and Lebanon when some parties recognised that their hopes for power would be disappointed. On the surface, the ingredients for a return to war pertained in both countries. Muzorewa’s partisans in both the white and black communities expected him at least to form a coalition with Nkomo and the twenty white representatives in parliament. When Mugabe’s decisive electoral victory was announced, only a veto from the Rhodesian high command prevented junior officers from implementing a plan to attack Mugabe’s forces concentrated in the assembly points. Within months the ZANU-ZAPU coalition was under severe strain, as ZAPU ministers found themselves excluded from real power and as ZIPRA guerrillas found themselves discriminated against in the formation of the ZNA. In Lebanon, it was not just anti-Syrian Christian political and militia leaders who questioned both Taif and the manner of its implementation. The Muslim militias were also increasingly suspicious of the way in which Syria seemed increasingly to rely upon traditional parliamentary zu’ama in controlling Lebanese politics. Both countries’ economies, too, gave little cause for optimism. In Lebanon the currency crisis of the late 1980s deepened after Aoun’s defeat, while after two years of improvement the Zimbabwean economy performed no better than that of wartime Rhodesia. Inflation, unemployment and strikes were a feature of post-war Zimbabwe and Lebanon alike, providing a pool of

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potential manpower for rejectionist groups to mobilise. And there were many violent incidents that in other circumstances might have provoked a return to war. ‘Civil war’ may have ended in December 1980 in Rhodesia and in October 1990 in Lebanon, but armed groups continued to cache weapons, and bombings, banditry, assassination attempts and even limited warfare in the case of southern Lebanon continued for years afterwards. Appearances can deceive, however. Firstly, the consolidation of the post-war order in Lebanon and Zimbabwe occurred in a relatively favourable international and regional environment. Neither superpower had played much part in the ending of either war, and events following the cessation of hostilities did little to alter this reasonably benign neglect. Regionally, many actors had no reason to be overjoyed with the implementation of Taif or Lancaster House, Israel, the PLO and South Africa foremost among them. All three made some effort to safeguard their interests. PLO fighters around Sidon briefly resisted the Lebanese army in July 1991. South Africa gave low-level assistance to the Super ZAPU rebels and provided propaganda support for the dissident campaign in Matabeleland. And Israel continued its financial, logistical and direct military support for the SLA in an attempt to safeguard its northern border. By now, though, the foreign policy priorities of all three lay elsewhere, and the intensity of South African and Israeli intervention, though exaggerated by the Mugabe and Hrawi regimes to boost their domestic position, paled against the peaks of the later 1970s and the early 1980s respectively. Internally, both Taif and Lancaster House proved remarkably robust in providing a framework for lasting peace and stability in Lebanon and Zimbabwe. The compromise nature of the accords and the depoliticising effects of civil war allowed the Hrawi and Mugabe regimes to attract adherents from all sides of the ethnic and confessional spectrum. Two common themes stand out from the two regimes’ behaviour. Firstly, in the months immediately following the cessation of open hostilities, both regimes avoided radical social or economic measures that might have provoked concerted and coordinated opposition. Even the Treaty of Brotherhood, Co-operation and Co-ordination, while certainly unpopular amongst the Maronites, was not wholly unexpected and did not impinge excessively on the daily existence of most Lebanese Christians. By largely adhering to the provisions of their respective peace agreements, both Hrawi and Mugabe were able to form reasonably inclusive governments that gave all participants at least the semblance of power. For Hizballah, the one major actor which refused a place in post-war government, there was

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instead the carrot of a continuing and central role in the resistance to the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. Secondly, however, opponents either of Syria or ZANU found that their positions in cabinet gave them many things, but the opportunity to influence government policy, especially security policy, was not among them. Thus, for example, Nkomo found control over the police removed from his Home Affairs ministry, and the Lebanese militia leaders found that their positions as ministers without portfolio availed them little when most government decisions were taken outside cabinet. What emerged, therefore, in both countries in the critical months following the establishment of an effective cease-fire was a waiting game, as Hrawi and Mugabe’s opponents in government awaited an opportunity to press their claims or to turn the implementation of the peace settlement to their advantage. In doing so, however, they were compelled to take part in a process of disarmament and demobilisation that gave the renascent state the power to crush armed dissent. For a good many, though, the stick was unnecessary, as patronage replaced influence over policy-making as the currency of post-war Lebanese and Zimbabwean politics. Indeed, as the months passed since open hostilities, government management of patronage politics became easier. Whether by recovering revenues and functions lost in the Lebanese war, or by expanding the bureaucracy in Zimbabwe, or by doubling the size of the national army in both cases, the state was able to increase the patronage resources at its disposal. At the popular level there was little desire to return to war conditions in either country. Peace may not have brought prosperity, but at least it ended the depredations of armies, militias and guerrillas. Sensitive handling, whether by Mugabe in reassuring Zimbabwe’s whites or by Syria in not deploying Syrian troops in the Christian zones of Lebanon, reduced the potential for friction and confrontation. Moreover, the link between social protest and political organisation that had snapped under the pressures of civil war now proved irreparable in peacetime, as post-war Lebanon and Zimbabwe reverted under their new rulers to traditional methods of government and economic management. Any remaining grassroots political activity was either carefully monitored, as with Hizballah, or even neutralised by the resurgent state, as was the victorious ZANU party in the localities. Even the ex-ZIPRA dissidents operating in Matabeleland failed to win sustained local civilian support, despite tapping into Ndebele grievances with the post-war settlement and despite the savagery of the government campaign against them. More important, though, than any of the voluntaristic sources of loyalty towards the consolidation of peace and stability in post-civil

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war Lebanon and Zimbabwe were the coercive powers of the reconstituted state. That the state should have been able to exercise such powers is surprising. As discussed in Chapter 2 it was the inability of any one group to achieve outright military victory that had led to the Taif and Lancaster House agreements in the first place, and the compromise nature of those agreements bore the seeds of institutionalising deadlock in the post-war state. In the event, the reverse occurred. More than almost any observer predicted when the peace agreements were signed, Syria’s comprehensive victory over Aoun in October 1990, and Mugabe’s decisive electoral victory in February 1980 gave each the opportunity to construct a winning coalition after hostilities ceased. Atlas and Licklider have rightly noted the frequency of conflict between former allies after the settlement of civil war, but in Lebanon and Zimbabwe this was merely part of a wider recasting of the internal balance of power that materialised with a cease-fire in place.119 As important as conflict between former allies was the forging of alliances between former enemies. As early as January 1980 Mugabe signalled his intentions towards ZAPU by cancelling the Patriotic Front alliance for electoral purposes, and by February 1981 ZANU loyalists were cooperating with former Rhodesian security forces personnel to quash insurrection by discontented ZIPRA guerrillas.120 For his remote control administration of Lebanon, Asad turned increasingly from the politicians on whom he had depended to conclude the Taif agreement and the Muslim militias through which Syria had achieved many of her objectives in wartime Lebanon. Instead, Syria now acted in partnership with traditional politicians close to Damascus, Christian and Muslim, such as Karami, Hrawi and Murr, supported by the reconstituted Lebanese army under Emile Lahoud. Over-dependence on this group, meanwhile, was avoided by Syria’s close control and utilisation of Hizballah in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa. The process by which this recasting of alliances was achieved was by no means preordained. It depended on the judgement of the groups concerned – the Rhodesian army command, Lebanon’s proSyrian Maronites, Hizballah – that the post-war settlement was either acceptable or at least unavoidable. It depended, too, on the failure of those who later rejected the post-war order, the Lebanese Forces and the ex-ZIPRA dissidents for example, to act while still fully equipped and in geographically consolidated positions. This applied particularly to the Lebanese Forces, which in 1990 held enough mountainous and defensible ground to withstand a direct frontal assault, but which by 1994 had been so marginalised that its leader could be arrested and imprisoned with no violent response. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the rearrangement of alliance patterns depended on the

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splintering of ethnic and confessional groupings by civil war described in Chapter 4. Already divided by questions of how to make war and peace (as well as by more selfish considerations), Lebanon’s Maronites and Zimbabwe’s whites proved as unsuccessful at co-ordinated action in peacetime as they had in wartime. However conditional its origins, the rearrangement of wartime alliance patterns gave the state, and in Lebanon its Syrian sponsors, the wherewithal to crush opposition. Rather than return Zimbabwe to open warfare in which no side could emerge victorious, neither the Super ZAPU rebels, bandit groups composed of former members of either guerrilla army, occasional sabotage teams composed of former Rhodesian security force personnel, or even the ex-ZIPRA dissidents could challenge the ZANU state effectively. Samir Jaja, Walid Jumblatt and Nabih Berri might boycott cabinet meetings, and Lebanon’s Maronites the 1992 parliamentary elections, but none found their opposition fruitful. The supreme irony of both civil wars, wars in which so much time was spent negotiating ratios of parliamentary representation acceptable to all sides, was that within a short time of their cessation parliamentary opposition politics was dead, with electoral laws manipulated to suit the ruling coalition. The negotiated settlements of Taif and Lancaster House had given way to the politics of winner-takes-all. An analysis of events after December 1979 in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and after October 1990 in Lebanon, therefore, throws an interesting light on more general theories of settlement implementation. In some ways, the evidence from both countries supports Stedman, Licklider and others, in particular their contention that post-settlement events are critical for understanding why peace settlements hold or break down. In other ways, however, the evidence challenges some of the underlying assumptions made by these theorists. For the model of settlement implementation usually presented is a rather static one: the essence of post-settlement politics is assumed to be the enforcement of the principal provisions of the settlement itself. Elites who reject this process are castigated as ‘spoilers’. Troops facing demobilisation may rebel against the loss of their wartime economic advantages. In Zimbabwe and Lebanon, however, the ambiguities of the paper agreements led to a rather different process. As the winners and losers of the settlement became known in the two or three years after cease-fire, spoilers or attempted spoilers such as the Lebanese Forces leadership or the ex-ZIPRA dissidents were left with little choice but to spoil. The alternative was political or even in some cases physical elimination. The fact that each failed so decisively to disrupt the post-war political order was a result

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of the change in the balance of power wrought by the process of settlement and cease-fire. Lancaster House and Taif left many of the social and economic elements of ethnic or confessional conflict in Zimbabwe and Lebanon unsolved. Indeed, although the civilian population of both countries – excepting those living in the south of Lebanon – was relieved of the disastrous consequences of ongoing war, economic and social conditions failed to improve significantly in the aftermath of war, and in some respects worsened. However, the settlements did presage a recasting of the political scene so dramatic that the old political conflict could be said to be over. Of course, many political figures continued to harbour serious discontent with the political situation in both countries, Maronites in Lebanon, and ZAPU figures in Zimbabwe in particular. But the recasting of alliances and of power relations ensured that the discontents were unable to counter the reenergised (and in the Lebanese case Syrian-supported) post-war hegemonic state. Compromise and negotiated settlement, therefore, appears in both countries less as the welcome precursor of political pluralism and consociational democracy than as the gateway to the achievement politically by one or more parties of what they had been unable to gain militarily: victory.

CONCLUSION Civil war is important. It is murderous, it is destabilising, and it represents by far the most common form of warfare in the contemporary international system. But contrary to popular perceptions, the end of the Cold War did not lead to a mushrooming of civil wars. Indeed, after a slight increase between 1990 and 1992 related in large part to state failure in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the global incidence of civil war declined thereafter to the levels of the 1970s.1 Moreover, if such conflicts have not increased in number since the end of the Cold War, nor does it seem they have changed in nature. The Cold War-era civil war in Lebanon, for example, established mechanisms of resource-extraction, drug-smuggling and informal taxation to rival any more recent counterpart. Even in Rhodesia, sanctions-busting activities on the Salisbury side and external financing of the Zimbabwean guerrilla movement offered plentiful opportunities for personal and organisational enrichment. Economic agendas in civil wars may be important, but they are not new.2 Nor does the supposedly ideological nature of Cold War-era civil war stand up to scrutiny in either country. To analyse civil war in Rhodesia or Lebanon as a contest between communism and democratic capitalism is fundamentally to misunderstand the sources and dynamics of those wars. Certainly, ZANU and the Lebanese National Movement declared themselves socialist, and Rhodesian whites and Lebanese Maronites made much of their Western orientation (even if they soft-pedalled the issue of majoritarian democracy itself). But even at best such ideological positions were so refracted through local lenses as to make them virtually unrecognisable as those espoused by their superpower equivalents; at worst, they were no more than cynical exercises in obtaining arms and money. If civil war itself has not undergone transformation since 1990, what has changed significantly is the international response to civil war. In place of competitive superpower interventions, fuelled by bipolarity, in countries as distant as Nicaragua, Angola and Cambodia, the end of the Cold War has brought increased co-operation between great powers and within the United Nations to resolve such conflicts. This has not, of course, applied to all civil wars: Russia has consistently resisted outside interference in its war in Chechnya; US intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 aimed to bring down the Taliban regime, not to achieve a compromise between it and its local rivals; and regional powers have consistently stoked intra-state conflict, most notably in Afghanistan and in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But

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the overall increase of internationally-approved peace-making missions – for example in Bosnia, Mozambique, Namibia, Central America and Cambodia – represents a clear break with previous patterns of intervention. Successful peace-making, however, requires a great deal more than the mere creation of a UN mission. The failures of UN peace missions in Bosnia, Somalia and Angola demonstrate not only the problems caused by intractable conflict dynamics, but also the pitfalls of poor mission design, under-resourcing, and half-hearted Security Council support. But even where such missions are skilfully and carefully established, the evidence of how civil war actually ended in Rhodesia and Lebanon highlights the limitations of the tools of negotiation and mediation provided for by Chapter VI of the UN Charter. In both countries, negotiation was as much a feature of civil war as was fighting – indeed, with few set-piece battles in either war, it was high-profile negotiations such as those at Victoria Falls, Damascus and Geneva (the latter for both wars) that grabbed the media and political spotlight. For many, just as in the post-Soviet conflicts in Transnistria, South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh, negotiation and mediation were less a means of conflict resolution than a resource, an opportunity to demonstrate their receptiveness to settlement (and so to continue receiving outside support) without risking its fulfilment.3 Rather than breakthroughs in bringing reluctant belligerents to the table for the first time, the talks at Lancaster House in 1979 and at Taif in 1989 were thus but the last in a long series of previously unsuccessful negotiations. Yet it is difficult to see the settlements that emerged as a triumph for successful and innovative drafting. Like the successive peace proposals in Bosnia, those in Rhodesia and Lebanon displayed great continuity with their predecessors.4 On the question of parliamentary representation so central to all parties – majority rule in Rhodesia, equal representation for Christians and Muslims in Lebanon – the agreements reflected previous proposals drawn up for both countries in 1976. On other issues, such as arrangements for the ceasefire and the interim period before elections in Rhodesia, and in Lebanon deconfessionalisation of the political system and relations with Syria, they steered a middle course between previous proposals. Moreover, what is most striking about the Lancaster House and Taif agreements is the absence therein of either radicalism or reassurance. In contrast to the demands for complete overhaul of the social, economic and political system presented by belligerents and theorists of civil war termination alike, and despite the complex and deep-rooted issues at the heart of confessional, societal and ethnic conflict, the agreements that did bring peace were remarkably

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conservative in nature. On the two most important such issues – that of the unequal distribution of land between white and black Rhodesians, and that of the sectarian distribution of parliamentary seats (and political life) in Lebanon – the settlements certainly paid lip service. But the stipulation that land for redistribution be purchased rather than confiscated, and the lack of a specific timetable for deconfessionalisation, left the relevant provisions obvious dead letters. Similarly, like the 1992 Rome agreement over Mozambique, both settlements left open to a surprising degree the shape of the post-war political landscape.5 If war termination supposedly involves exchanging the uncertain opportunities of war for the limited certainties of peace, neither Taif nor Lancaster House offered much certainty beyond the general principles that direct settler rule in Rhodesia and Maronite dominance in Lebanon was over, and that Syria would play a significant role in Lebanon for years to come. Almost all sides could hope for benefits in both agreements, most clearly in Rhodesia where independence elections held out the prospect of power, but also in Lebanon where all sides tried to turn the implementation period to their advantage. But there was little in the way of security guarantees or secure gains in either settlement to explain why parties that had lived by the gun for so many years were now prepared to risk defeat by political means when they had avoided it militarily for so long. If the terms of settlement present only limited clues to the success of Taif and Lancaster House, mediation, at least in its goodoffices guise, offers few more. Like set-piece negotiations, mediation by individuals, states and international organisations was a commonplace in both wars: the Front-Line states and South Africa, Kissinger and Vorster, and Vance and Owen had all, among others, attempted to resolve the Rhodesian war; teams from the Arab League, Israel and Syria had all at various times tried to mediate the Lebanese war. All had met with failure, though, and there is little evidence that it was Carrington’s mediating ability at Lancaster House, nor Brahimi’s at Taif, that made them successful where others had failed. In particular, neither made much of traditional mediating techniques: overcoming mistrust, imaginative drafting, persuading belligerents of the futility of continued fighting. Rather, key to their success was the use of leverage. Thus it was Carrington’s threat (and promise) to implement the so-called ‘second-class solution’ by recognising Muzorewa’s government in Salisbury and lifting international sanctions that brought early acceptance of each of his proposals by the Salisbury government and that dragged eventual and grudging assent from the Patriotic Front guerrilla leadership. Similarly, despite Lakhdar Brahimi’s Arab League cover, it was the Syrian Army and the threat of

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all-round Arab acceptance of Syria’s role that persuaded most belligerents of the danger of excluding themselves from the settlement process. When Lebanese Army commander and temporary prime minister Michel Aoun fought on, he was crushed. Carrington and Brahimi used leverage well, but studying their tactics does not explain how they obtained such leverage in the first place. These observations are not to deny the role that negotiation and mediation did play in achieving a settlement. Poor performance in each of these areas, whether caused by incompetence, lack of imagination, or by the sheer intractability of the conflict dynamic, had certainly impeded settlement in the past. Peace proposals such as the Anglo-American proposal in Rhodesia in 1976 and the Tripartite agreement in Lebanon in 1985 had leaned too far in one side’s favour, while the failure of Kaunda and Vorster actually to mediate at Victoria Falls rather than just bring the sides to the table resulted in immediate deadlock at that table. Though war aims changed over the course of conflict, the Lancaster House and Taif agreements did represent the culmination of a learning process of what the belligerents could potentially accept in a mediated settlement. The mediating itself was also skilled: both efforts avoided the pitfalls caused by divisions amongst international mediators experienced in conflicts from Burundi to Bosnia, their endorsement by supra-national organisations contributed to their success, and good use was made of the leverage available.6 Yet while effective negotiation and mediation may have been causes of settlement, they were by no means the only, or even the primary, causes. Military matters, for one, played a significant role. They did so, though, in a far more complex way than that suggested by the concept of the mutually hurting stalemate – whereby the parties are unable to achieve their goals unilaterally and are forced by deteriorating circumstances to search for a compromise settlement. For neither in Rhodesia in 1979 nor in Lebanon in 1989 was there a military stalemate. Indeed, rather than the drawn-out attritional deadlock suggested by ‘stalemate’, at the time of settlement in each country the battlefield was hotter and more fluid than for many a year. In 1979, Zimbabwean guerrillas were pouring into Rhodesia in ever greater numbers, while ZIPRA (the armed wing of Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU) prepared to undertake the transition from guerrilla to conventional warfare. The Rhodesian state, meanwhile, responded by expanding the paramilitary forces of its moderate black nationalist allies, and by extending the reach of its cross-border operations, hitting ever harder into Zambia and Mozambique. In 1989, meanwhile, Michel Aoun’s so-called War of Liberation against the Syrian presence

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in Lebanon drew in both the Syrian Army and the many pro-Syrian Lebanese Muslim militias in a contest that brought widespread destruction to many previously undamaged quarters of Beirut. In South Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut, the two Shia militias Amal and Hizballah fought a vicious internecine struggle, while tensions simmered between Aoun and his Christian militia rivals the Lebanese Forces, before exploding into outright warfare in early 1990. If some theorists have argued that fear of escalation may push belligerents to compromise, this was emphatically not true of the Lebanese, Rhodesians or Zimbabweans. Most importantly, though, the only mechanism by which stalemate can truly bring settlement is through belligerents’ perceptions, and in neither country did belligerent leaders believe that military developments were forcing them to compromise. Some believed they could achieve outright victory, ZANU leader Mugabe being the most notable example. But others too – Muzorewa in Rhodesia, Aoun, Lebanese Forces commander Samir Jaja and the leaders of the various Muslim militias in Lebanon – still believed that while by using military force they might not be able to achieve all their objectives, they might still eliminate specific rivals or decisively shift the terms of any future settlement in their favour. Yet if there was no mutually hurting stalemate in Rhodesia in 1979 or Lebanon in 1989, there was some sort of rough power parity. Certainly, some parties held the upper hand: in Rhodesia, the Patriotic Front alliance of ZANU and ZAPU had made considerable strides since 1975, increasing guerrilla infiltration throughout the country and forcing the Salisbury regime to consider strategic withdrawals to areas of vital concern. Meanwhile the various counter-insurgency measures employed – ‘Fireforce’ vertical envelopment tactics, improved command and control, the Protected Village programme to cut off the guerrillas from the rural population, allying with and arming black paramilitaries, and external operations against guerrilla forces – failed to stem the guerrilla influx. Yet the Rhodesian security forces were not defeated: there was no part of the country they could not enter at will, the cities remained calm, the Internal Settlement elections of April 1979 (through which Muzorewa had taken over the formal reins of power from Rhodesian Front prime minister Ian Smith) had been conducted without disruption, and the challenges the guerrillas would face in moving to conventional warfare all indicated the limits of Patriotic Front success. In Lebanon, Syria and her Lebanese, primarily Muslim, allies had by 1989 made significant gains from their low-point of 1982. Then, the Israelis had pushed back Syrian positions from the Beirut-Damascus road and had laid siege to West Beirut, while their Lebanese Maronite Christian allies secured the presidency for their

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charismatic leader Bashir Gemayel under the Israeli guns. Now, the Israelis had retreated from almost all of Lebanon, the Maronites had been expelled from the Shouf mountains and were restricted to their strongholds in East Beirut and Mount Lebanon, and the assassination of Bashir Gemayel had led to a splintering in Maronite ranks. Yet, like Rhodesia’s whites, Lebanon’s Maronites were not defeated. Combined, Aoun’s army and Jaja’s Lebanese Forces had easily enough men and firepower to protect their very defensible urban and mountainous redoubt against their Lebanese opponents, and probably too against a Syrian assault. The latter was rendered unlikely, meanwhile, by the continuing Israel-Syrian deterrence relationship. This parity, or at least absence of the prospect of imminent victory, does not explain why belligerents agreed to a settlement, but it does explain why they were able to compromise their maximalist aims when presented with agreements that went at least some way to satisfying them. Moreover, the agreements themselves closely reflected the military balance of power. Lebanese Muslims and Zimbabwean nationalists received increased – in the latter case vastly increased – parliamentary representation, while their recent battlefield gains earned them strong influence over the settlement implementation process. At the same time, the undefeated status of their Lebanese Christian and Rhodesian settler opponents was reflected in the lack of social transformation or economic reform. Land and property rights were retained intact, to the benefit of these communities. The battlefield, like the negotiating table, is an important focus for investigation in understanding the achievement of settlement in Rhodesia and Lebanon. But the two together still leave too many questions unanswered. Why, for example, were supposedly radical or intransigent leaders prepared to compromise their beliefs? Why was there no popular reaction against the socially and economically conservative settlements of Lancaster House and Taif? Why was settlement reached exactly when it was? And why did such ambiguous settlements not break down and open warfare resume as certain belligerents failed to obtain from peace the gains for which they had hoped? The answers to the first two questions are provided by an investigation of the political processes that took place both within belligerent factions and between those factions and the non-combatant communities they claimed to represent. Leadership change, as Stedman argues, proved a critical ingredient, in particular when it resulted in the isolation of ‘ideological radicals’. Thus for all that their political programmes were not in themselves particularly radical, the sheer tenacity with which Ian Smith and Michel Aoun clung to their principles of a white settler-dominated Rhodesia and a Syria-free

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Lebanon ensured that war could not end until they were removed from positions of political influence. By late 1979 Ian Smith had handed over the premiership to Abel Muzorewa, and although this really represented merely an attempt to retain real power behind the façade of moderate black nationalism, it enabled Smith’s isolation within the Salisbury delegation at Lancaster House. Outvoted eleven to one, Ian Smith could not prevent settlement. In Lebanon, meanwhile, Aoun’s emergence from relative obscurity in 1988 on Amin Gemayel’s retirement from the presidency and his subsequent anti-Syrian campaign seemed to preclude all chances of settlement While his intransigence could not prevent the signing of the Taif agreement, it was only his increasing political isolation within the everturbulent waters of Lebanese politics over the following twelve months that permitted the successful Syrian assault on his military positions in October 1990 and the subsequent implementation of the agreement. The leaders who did come to the fore in the late 1970s in Rhodesia and the late 1980s in Lebanon were each, for their various reasons, prepared to accept settlement. They did so firstly because almost all had consolidated their position at the head of their own organisation. In the absence of state structures and routines, leadership challenges proved endemic to guerrilla movements and militias in both countries, but while the absence of successful postsettlement leadership challenges does not necessarily prove that factional leaders were necessarily more secure than previously, leaders such as Robert Mugabe, Joshua Nkomo, Samir Jaja, Nabih Berri and Walid Jumblatt had all recently made significant steps to eliminate or sideline rivals within ZANU, ZAPU, the Lebanese Forces, Amal and the PSP respectively. The result was that at and around Lancaster House and Taif, the charges of betrayal of organisational radicalism – themselves often opportunist – that leaders had faced when attempting to compromise and that had dogged previous peacemaking efforts were now notable by their absence or weakness. Leaders could now make the compromises necessary to reach a settlement without fear of a palace coup. At the same time, while leaders consolidated power over their own individual organisations, deep divisions persisted and emerged between factions claiming to represent the same civilian community. Indeed, while ethnic and sectarian awareness increased amongst the general population during both wars, the ties they generated proved incapable of providing solidarity. Like the internecine struggles between Socialists, Anarchists, Trotskyists and Communists in Spain from 1936 to 1939, like those between Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic within the Bosnian Serb ‘Republica Srpska’, and like the myriad divisions within

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the Algerian Islamist movement of the 1990s, deep splits emerged in Rhodesia and Lebanon, of which that of Lebanon’s Maronites between Aoun and Jaja, that of Lebanese Shiis between Amal and Hizballah, and that of Rhodesia’s blacks between Mugabe and Nkomo were only the largest.7 Their consequence was that, as the process of settlement commenced, there was no single party in either country large or strong enough successfully to resist settlement by itself. Leaders accepted settlement secondly because many made mistakes. The success of both the Lancaster House and Taif processes was predicated on all sides hoping to turn the implementation of the settlement to their advantage. Muzorewa accepted Carrington’s proposals at Lancaster House mainly because he expected the Patriotic Front to reject them, and so international sanctions to be lifted. Even when the guerrillas accepted the peace deal, he, like the Sandinista leadership in Nicaragua in 1990, still expected to win the subsequent elections.8 Nkomo, meanwhile, realised that his largely Ndebele support limited his electoral prospects, but still expected to be able to exercise a casting vote in any post-independence coalition. In Lebanon, all supporters of Taif hoped to exercise influence in the post-settlement environment, most significantly Jaja’s Lebanese Forces, who seem to have viewed Taif more as a means of isolating Michel Aoun within the Maronite political set-up than as a genuine means of bringing peace. Within a few brief months or years, though, the hopes of all were dashed. Nkomo won only twenty seats of the hundred in Parliament, and Muzorewa a mere three, with Mugabe gaining an outright majority. By 1983, Muzorewa was being held under detention without trial and Nkomo was on the run in Europe, with his ZAPU comrades and subordinates experiencing a vicious crackdown at home. Despite the critical support he had lent to the Taif process, Samir Jaja was arrested in 1994 and sentenced to life imprisonment for his wartime activities. Had they accurately predicted their fate, none would have accepted the settlements proposed. But thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, leaders accepted settlement because the process of fighting a civil war had punctured the ideological aspirations of most factional elites. Almost all entered into hostilities with uncompromising social and political visions. Status quo factions such as the Rhodesian Front and the Lebanese Maronite political elite (and their Lebanese Forces militia offshoot) went to war convinced of their communal right to rule ‘their’ country, offering and considering few concessions to their more numerous ethnic or confessional opponents. Insurgents called not just for readjustment of seats in parliament or influence in the bureaucracy, but for radical social and political change: the Patriotic Front for revolutionary socialism, Amal and the PSP for deconfessionalism and

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(especially for the latter) socialism, Hizballah for the establishment of an Islamic state in Lebanon. Much as they might deny it, though, the process of fighting a protracted civil war saw all these visions submerged in a mass of debates over tactics, competition for leadership and increased ethnic and sectarian awareness. Whether through modification of individuals’ positions or the elimination or sidelining of hard-liners – Ian Smith, the young Marxist guerrilla leadership in ZIPA, Lebanese Forces’ leader Bashir Gemayel, Subhi Tufeili in Hizballah – compromise was more easily entertained at Lancaster House and Taif than in the early stages of each conflict. This is not to say that settlement was preordained. On the contrary, the terms of compromise were bitterly disputed in both cases, and few if any leaders actively desired peace over war. But the disputes now were over power and money, not social or constitutional structures, and as such the spoils were easier to divide. If the agreements reached at Lancaster House and Taif were socially conservative, put simply, that was because years of war had left factional leaders of all stripes more concerned about their own personal interests than those of their constituents. However, if civil war in Rhodesia in the late 1970s and Lebanon in the late 1980s was increasingly a contest for political spoils between rival elites, rather than an all-or-nothing clash of opposing ideological visions or civilian communities, this was only so because years of civil war had effectively eliminated the civilian population as an active participant in the conflict system. This, in fact, was as significant to the achievement of peace as it is under-acknowledged in the theoretical literature on civil war termination. After all, civil war had broken out in part as a result of deep social dislocation in both countries, as demographic processes increased the numbers of marginalised communities, as economic development (particularly of agriculture) led to rural unemployment and urban migration, and as members of an aspiring petit bourgeoisie found their path to economic or political influence blocked by entrenched social and political structures. At various stages in both wars, but particularly in their early years, civilians voluntarily contributed much to the war effort, including money, food, protection and recruits. During the course of civil war, though, civilians seem increasingly to have become victims rather than participants. Whether directly targeted by fighting forces or ‘merely’ caught in the cross-fire, civilians died in both wars in equal or greater numbers than did fighters. They also suffered grievously from food shortages, from the breakdown of state health and education services, from internal displacement and severe restriction of movement, and from looting and unofficial arbitrary taxation. Partly this resulted from the

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belligerents’ indiscipline of which contemporaries complained widely, and it is true that Lebanese militias of all denominations became increasingly arrogant and thoughtless to their own civilian ‘constituents’, that Rhodesian troops proved overly trigger-happy towards civilian curfew-breakers, and that the shooting of civilian survivors of the 1978 Air Rhodesia Viscount incident by ZIPRA guerrillas did little to help their leader’s cause. But to characterise the victimisation of civilians as caused mainly by indiscipline – and thus assume its irrationality – is to miss the deep political and structural factors that often lay behind this ‘indiscipline’. For Zimbabwean guerrillas, targeting white-owned farms was a deliberate policy whose aim was to undermine settler control over rural Rhodesia. For the Rhodesian security forces, heavyhanded tactics towards black peasants discouraged them from assisting guerrilla bands. And for Lebanese militias, undisputed control over ‘home’ areas went hand in hand with influence at the national political level. Indeed, once hemmed into their own cantons, the militias had little choice but to extract revenue and supplies from the local population. These factors were further compounded by the heterogeneous nature of the fighting forces. Guerrilla and militia organisations were often barely organised, resembling more a collection of loosely allied bands and private armies, and civilians suffered almost as much from the competing demands of these supposed allies (most famously in West Beirut in the mid-1980s) as they did from opposing armies. Yet, just as in Algeria whether in the 1950s or 1990s, it was when civilians did find themselves between warring factions that they suffered most. In isolated pockets in hostile territory in Lebanon, or in villages in the Rhodesian bush where the security forces ruled by day and the Zimbabwean guerrillas by night, civilian obedience became the measure of military success, and as a general rule obedience went not to those whose ‘hearts-and-minds’ strategy was more generous, but to those who offered simultaneously the most protection and the greatest threat. The process by which this victimisation generated civilian political demobilisation was neither simple, even or linear: the followings that Michel Aoun and Hizballah were able to attract in the later 1980s in Lebanon, and the electoral support amassed by Mugabe’s ZANU in the February 1980 election, all attest to that. Yet in each case the support was more wide than deep. Both Aoun and Hizballah obtained support precisely because they at first appeared different from the predatory militias prevalent in Lebanon. The constraints of the conflict system, however, soon led them to engage in vicious intra-communal fighting against the Lebanese Forces and Amal respectively, and to pursue exactly the sort of behaviour they had

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condemned. Their support suffered drastically as a result. Mugabe’s support, meanwhile, derived as much from popular awareness that only a vote for ZANU could end the war as from genuine political commitment. Indeed, there is widespread evidence that by 1979 the Zimbabwean guerrillas were facing a crisis of legitimacy in the countryside and that the Lancaster House agreement came just in time to prevent such an implosion. In addition, if the peace settlements did little to address the social or economic problems facing civilian communities, they at least offered important symbolic and political benefits: Lebanon’s Muslims and Zimbabwe’s African population could point to increased (in the latter case, vastly increased) political representation, while their civilian opponents were left with dignity and property rights largely intact. Those grievances that remained, meanwhile, did not disappear, and in the case of land hunger in Zimbabwe they would re-emerge forcefully onto the political agenda twenty years after Lancaster House. But above all, and despite these complications, by the time that peace settlements were signed, what most civilians desired above all else – black peasants and white towndwellers in Rhodesia, and Lebanese Muslims and Christians alike – was an end to civil war. Combined, the terms of the peace settlement, the situation on the battlefield, developments within the fighting factions, and the state of relations between those factions and the civilian population all provided a relatively pliable, if highly violent, conflict dynamic in late 1970s Rhodesia and late 1980s Lebanon. In all these areas, recent and long-standing developments made the emergence of peace more likely than previously, even if it did not appear obvious to many. Yet peace in each country was hostage not just to internal developments, but to those beyond its borders. And if it was external actors, in the shape of Carrington and the British government, and Brahimi and the Arab League, who provided the immediate impetus for the peace-making efforts that proved ultimately successful, external actors also possessed the wherewithal to prevent settlement. This derived not so much from superpower involvement as from that of regional powers. Despite the various shifts in superpower relations that had so much effect on, for example, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Horn of Africa and civil conflict in Central America – détente and its collapse in the 1970s, the intensification and subsequent demise of the Cold War in the 1980s – superpower activity in Rhodesia and Lebanon remained relatively slight. Soviet and Chinese involvement lay in supplying some arms and money to ‘progressive’ forces, but it never reached the levels feared in Washington. US policymakers attempted to bring stability to both

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countries, partly as an attempt to counter Soviet influence, but their failure to do so was reflected most publicly in the 250 or so Marine Corps fatalities that resulted from their ill-fated intervention in Lebanon in 1982-84. In distinct contrast, regional powers profoundly influenced the start, the course and, ultimately, the end of both wars. Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda and Samora Machel of FRELIMO in Mozambique provided the bases, training facilities and infiltration routes that enabled the Zimbabwean guerrillas to establish and maintain their insurgency. At the same time, South African defiance of international sanctions on Rhodesia and her supplies of arms to Salisbury were core requirements for Rhodesian resistance. In Lebanon, the expansion of PLO activity following their 1970-71 reverses in Jordan, and Israeli reaction to that activity, provided a key ingredient for the outbreak of war. For the fifteen years that followed, the PLO, Israel and Syria fought a three-way battle for influence in Lebanon that complemented the Lebanese’ own internal struggles: Syria intervened to combat PLO advances in February 1976; Israel formed an alliance with Lebanon’s Maronites to combat the PLOSyrian axis that subsequently emerged, culminating in her 1982 invasion and expulsion of the PLO from Beirut and the south; Syria supplied Lebanese factions undermining the Israeli occupation, while simultaneously fighting PLO forces in the North; between 1985 and 1988 Syria’s allies Amal fought a protracted war against returning PLO fighters in the Palestinian refugee camps, while the Israeli-controlled South Lebanon Army variously fought Syrian, Palestinian and Iranian interests adjacent to the Israeli border. Further complications were introduced in 1988, as the end of the Iran-Iraq war saw both states escalate their involvement in far-away Lebanon, Iran aiding Hizballah, Iraq the Christian factions of Aoun and the Lebanese Forces. The destabilisation this external involvement caused is difficult to quantify – the depth of enmity within Rhodesia and Lebanon was quite sufficient to sustain prolonged armed conflict by itself, and years of war left the internal and external spheres almost impossible to disaggregate – but the position of the two wars within the wider Southern African and Levantine conflict systems respectively hardly aided their resolution. The settlement processes of Lancaster House and Taif, though, occurred in what in retrospect appear regional circumstances conducive to the establishment of peace. Not of course that all regional actors were equally satisfied with events. South Africa, Israel, the PLO and Iraq in particular derived little benefit from settlements that severely limited their influence in Rhodesia and Lebanon. Yet neither Lancaster House nor Taif required those powers’ active assistance to take effect, and instead merely expected

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them to refrain from direct or indirect military spoiling. This, for their various reasons, they were unprepared to risk. South Africa required above all a solution to the Rhodesian problem that secured her northern border: the political failure of the Internal Settlement, Pretoria’s predictions of a Muzorewa victory in the February 1980 elections, and South African preference for the establishment of a deterrence relationship with a Mugabe-led Zimbabwe over a direct invasion to forestall his election victory all dictated their acceptance of the Lancaster House agreement. In Lebanon, the ‘losing’ regional powers had all turned their attention elsewhere by 1989-90. The PLO’s expulsion from Lebanon in 1982-83 and the limits placed by Syria and her allies on its return, combined with the launch of the intifada in the Occupied Territories in December 1987, served to reduce Palestinian – and thus Israeli – interest in Lebanese politics. Both retained residual interests, but for neither were they so strong as to merit radical action. Baghdad’s involvement in Lebanon, meanwhile, was always subordinate to wider regional concerns, and fighting between her two allies in 1990 followed by her August invasion of Kuwait put Lebanon low down Iraqi priorities. As Lancaster House and Taif were first signed and then implemented, neither Muzorewa and the white Rhodesian establishment, Michel Aoun, Samir Jaja’s Lebanese Forces, or Palestinian units remaining in Lebanon could count as they had done previously on regional support for their rejectionist positions. Perhaps even more critical than that of the regional ‘losers’ was the attitude towards settlement of the regional ‘winners’: Zambia, Mozambique, Syria and Iran. All were essentially satisfied by the successful peace agreements, more so in fact that their Zimbabwean and Lebanese allies. Zambia and Mozambique were confident that a Patriotic Front government would emerge from British-sponsored elections, and they were little bothered by the restrictions to be placed on this future government by the independence constitution. In any case, the goal of full Rhodesian decolonisation was to be achieved. Further, settlement promised to end the devastating Rhodesian raids on Zambian and Mozambican infrastructure that were launched throughout 1979 and intensified during the Lancaster House conference. Syrian leaders saw in the Taif agreement not just the continued role in Lebanon allocated to Damascus, but further the opportunity to bend the relevant provisions even further to their advantage during the settlement implementation process. Iran, meanwhile, gained for its ally Hizballah a leading role in the continued resistance to the Israeli occupation of her so-called ‘security zone’ in southern Lebanon, and thus a means to continue Tehran’s involvement in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

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This regional enthusiasm for, or at least acceptance of, settlement stood in direct contrast to the misgivings held by these states’ Zimbabwean and Lebanese allies. The Zimbabwean guerrilla leadership, Mugabe in particular, did not trust the British authorities or the Rhodesian security forces to permit a Patriotic Front election victory, and ZANU held out against signing the Lancaster House agreement. The Lebanese Muslim militias – Amal, the PSP and Hizballah – neither participated in the Taif conference nor supported it from afar. But it was here that the leverage which Carrington and Brahimi ‘borrowed’ from regional powers proved decisive. As the Lancaster House conference reached its climax, the Zambian and Mozambican leadership forced Mugabe’s hand. Having secured an agreement they believed favoured the Patriotic Front, they threatened to withdraw all support for the Zimbabwean guerrillas. The threat was credible, and the agreement was duly signed. In Lebanon, as the Taif agreement (itself signed merely by the largely irrelevant survivors of the 1972 Parliament) took practical shape in the months following November 1989, Syrian and Iranian leaders forced compliance from their Lebanese clients, threatening each with the prospect of isolation in a post-war environment whose emergence they would individually be unable to prevent. And on 13 October 1990, Syrian troops used the most brutal form of leverage available, crushing Michel Aoun’s resistance at Baabda and effectively ending the Lebanese civil war. The months of December 1979 and October 1990 marked the end of the Rhodesian and Lebanese wars respectively. Low-intensity violence did follow at various stages, most markedly between the Zimbabwean regime and former ZAPU ‘dissidents’ from 1982 to 1987, between the Lebanese army and the PLO in 1991, and between Hizballah and the South Lebanon Army in southern Lebanon until May 2000. But never again was Small and Singer’s ‘one thousand battle deaths per annum’ threshold approached in either country.9 However, as scholars and policymakers have become increasingly aware regarding negotiated peace settlements in civil war, the signing of a peace deal and the achievement of cease-fire by no means guarantees lasting peace. Indeed, many of the most brutal phases of civil war in recent times – Angola and Rwanda stand out – have followed peace settlements rather than preceded them. The dangers to peace in Zimbabwe and Lebanon originated in part from the social, economic and military factors that bedevil all such transitions. Despite initial wartime growth, the economies of both countries had suffered substantially from protracted civil war, as had traditional social structures and state services. These problems could not be suddenly fixed upon cease-fire, and were in fact compounded by the problem of

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reintegrating fighters who after years of war knew little else. Civilian refugee return was complicated not only in Lebanon by the continued fighting in the south, but also by the politics of return and resettlement in both countries: in Lebanon where the Druze-run local authorities saw little reason to allow displaced Christians to return to their homes in the Shouf mountains, and in Zimbabwe where resettlement was determined as much by patterns of white wartime flight and peasant squatting as by the requirements of those in greatest need. Demobilisation and disarmament remained elusive in both countries, meanwhile, as all factions cached weapons and individual fighters turned to crime. In neither country was there any shortage of armed incidents after cease-fire to provoke a renewal of open hostilities. The principal danger to peace in Zimbabwe and Lebanon, though, was neither military, social or economic: it was political. As indicated above, the Lancaster House and Taif agreements represented not so much solutions to conflict as putative frameworks for the continuation of conflict along non-violent lines. Moreover, with all sides hoping to benefit from settlement, it was unclear which parties those frameworks would benefit and how durable the frameworks themselves would be. In such circumstances, stability rested on the political calculations of the warring factions: who would emerge on top from the settlement implementation process, and what would the reaction of the losing parties be? The months following the establishment of cease-fire in both countries can be characterised as a waiting game, as all parties looked to make gains or at least preserve their position. With British authority re-established in Rhodesia, all parties jockeyed for position for the independence elections that would determine the distribution of post-war power. All used violence and coercion against the civilian population, ZANU especially, but with all parties committed to the electoral process the incentive was to avoid levels of violence that would see them disqualified from the elections. Even when ZANU swept those elections, the conciliatory message of Mugabe’s victory speech, the progress being made integrating ZANLA and ZIPRA troops with the Rhodesian security forces into a new Zimbabwean army, and the retaining of some Rhodesian military commanders and ministers in positions of authority encouraged a wait-and-see attitude on the part of those who might otherwise have returned to war. In Lebanon, the Taif process had already taken on an even more distinctly pro-Syrian colouring in the year between its signing and Aoun’s ouster. Even then, though, with Middle Eastern politics in flux and with uncertainty over which elements of the Lebanese political spectrum Damascus would choose to work through to exercise its influence, most Lebanese factions temporised, certainly while the time had not yet come to disarm.

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The waiting proved critical in both countries. The Rhodesian security forces, the Lebanese Forces and Nkomo’s ZIPRA troops all retained their arms during this period, but political circumstances left them behind. In both Zimbabwe and Lebanon, settlement decisively recast the pattern of alliances between the various formerly belligerent factions. Durable peace, when it came and such as it was, emerged less from compromise and democracy as from coercion, manipulation, changing balances of power and loose interpretation of the settlement terms. Patronage, of course, secured the adherence of many to the new order. Lebanese Muslim militia leaders and members of the Christian traditional elite, along with ZANU party officials in the localities, gained status and financial rewards for their co-operation, if not actual policy-making influence. But more important were those many groups who became increasingly unhappy at their marginalisation in the post-war order, above all the ZAPU dissidents in Zimbabwe and the Lebanese Forces. Suffering from discrimination from their former allies in the formation of the Zimbabwe National Army, the former found themselves driven into armed, if lowintensity, opposition. The latter found their political influence a shadow of its 1982 self, their organisation outlawed and their leader jailed. But by failing to co-ordinate with other rejectionist or semirejectionist organisations, or to return to arms before their strategic positions were compromised, they were unable to confront a hegemonic ZANU leadership and an all-encompassing Syria on remotely even terms. The inability of any one side to achieve its maximal aims by military means may have been a prerequisite of settlement, but in both Rhodesia and Lebanon the consequence of settlement was the exact opposite: victory for ZANU and victory for Syria. What, then, can be drawn in overall terms from comparing the ending of these two wars? Firstly and most importantly, for a lasting settlement to be achieved, at least reasonably favourable conditions were required in the domains of settlement construction, military affairs, civilian-military relations, intra-factional politics, external relations, and settlement implementation. This is not to say that the conditions in each were equally and unambiguously favourable, but it does seem that actively unfavourable conditions in any one area could have made a compromise settlement unachievable, as they had done in the past. A ‘bad’ peace proposal such as the unbalanced AngloAmerican proposals of 1977, a military situation balanced (or perceived to be, as it was by Ian Smith in 1975) too far in favour on one side, a continuing leadership struggle within one of the major belligerent factions as occurred in the Lebanese Forces in 1985-86, a

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highly politicised non-combatant population such as had existed in Lebanon in 1975-76, an unfavourable regional environment such as obtained during the Israeli-Syrian-Palestinian power struggle in Lebanon between 1975 and 1985, or a poorly managed implementation process in which Rhodesian junior officers had coordinated early action with disaffected ZAPU guerrillas to pre-empt the installation of a ZANU government: any of these, it seems, could have rendered the prospects of a successful Lancaster House or Taif agreement void. By the time that settlement was reached in Rhodesia and Lebanon, and thereafter, conditions in some of these areas were in fact actively favourable: internal actors were for their various reasons prepared to accept settlement, if far from actively enthusiastic; external actors were prepared to use leverage to convert these internal conditions into the reality of settlement, even if they could not have done so without these internal conditions; and the way the settlements were implemented offered few opportunities for discontent to result in renewed warfare, while those opportunities that existed were not taken. Yet if developments in all these six issue areas represented causes of civil war termination, to suggest that the process of peacemaking in civil war needs success in all these areas, on the basis of the experience of Rhodesia and Lebanon, requires major qualification. To begin with, there are the obvious limitations of a two-case comparative study: that similarities can be observed even between two carefully selected cases in no way guarantees that they will apply to others. If the framework provided by these six areas of causation may usefully be extended to the study of other civil wars, it cannot be guaranteed that all six will prove to be important in those cases, nor that others will not appear. Even if the evidence from Rhodesia and Lebanon is indeed applicable to other conflicts, though, there are theoretical, practical and moral limitations to the lessons to be learned for peace-making. Theoretically, even if factors within each issue area did contribute to settlement, it does not appear that they were all equally favourable. As Chapters 1 and 2 demonstrate, while the shape of the political settlement and the state of the military balance of power did not necessarily obstruct the process of peace-making, they assisted it much less than might be thought. The peace deals reached at Lancaster House and Taif were well-constructed, at least insofar as they raised the prospects of acceptance from the belligerent factions, but they or texts like them had been on offer for many years. Even such lop-sided settlements as the 1977 Anglo-American proposal in Rhodesia failed less from peace-makers’ ineptitude as from the absence of a tenable middle ground between the belligerents on the critical issue of whose

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security forces would take charge in the period between cease-fire and independence. Military affairs, too, were not as obstructive of settlement as many contemporaries feared, but neither were they unambiguously helpful. If anything, it was the nexus between the two domains – that of the peace deal and the military – that proved important. Both Lancaster House and Taif reflected well the relative positions of the warring factions, rewarding those whose hand was stronger and preserving many of the core interests of their undefeated opponents. But it must still be noted that the belligerents themselves saw their relative positions very differently, and that few saw the settlements as ‘fair’ compromises to be adhered to thereafter. Despite the attention given to mediation and settlement design by statesmen, inter-governmental organisations and NGOs alike, Chapters 3, 4 and 5 have illustrated that developments within belligerent factions and communities, and between them and outside powers, impact greatly on the success or otherwise of such mediation attempts. For peace-makers, though, these factors present severe practical difficulties. In Rhodesia and Lebanon it appears that civilian political demobilisation and elite abandonment of ideological positions contributed to settlement. Yet if they appear important in retrospect, such processes are far from easily discerned in the midst of civil war. Belligerent leaders’ public pronouncements, regarding either their ideological position or the confidence with which they view their military position, may help the outside analyst a little, but they tend to tell us more about what those leaders want us to hear than about what they really think. The voice of the embattled peasantry or the urban poor, important though their views may be, is not easily discerned in a war zone. Even if these processes can be identified, it is doubtful whether outside peace-makers can exert much influence on them. Leadership change, too, may assist settlement, but the removal of hard-liners by external powers and their replacement with supposed doves is fraught with danger. One of the strongest themes to emerge from war in Rhodesia and Lebanon is the deep-seated nature of political and societal conflict in both countries. Outsiders could, and did, contribute greatly to the course and end of both wars, but those who did so were the very regional powers whose interests went far beyond and usually contradicted the requirements of neutral peacemaking. Lastly, yet significantly, the moral aspects of war termination limit the lessons for peace-making to be drawn from Rhodesia and Lebanon. If war did end in both countries, it is doubtful whether the manner or consequences of its ending contain lessons that neutral peace-makers may be morally or legally permitted to employ. In part this relates to the acceptability of external military assistance to civil

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war belligerents. In Rhodesia and Lebanon, the leverage with which outside powers finally secured belligerents’ assent to settlement originated firmly in the relationships of military supply and alliance between insiders and outsiders. Yet if such external involvement proved crucial to settlement in these countries, as indeed it did to the settlements of the El Salvadoran, Nicaraguan and Guatemalan civil wars in the early 1990s, the institutions of international society have generally hesitated since 1990 to approve hard military involvement to support one or other belligerent in civil war.10 The fear that such involvement would escalate crisis, or that the supply of additional armaments would cause only more suffering, lay behind arms sanctions towards Sierra Leone and Bosnia: this despite their detrimental effects on the UN-approved Sierra Leonean government, and the advantage given to Bosnian Serbs and Croats versus their Muslim opponents. Since 1995, US-led interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, as well as changing views of the legitimacy of military intervention in academic and policy-making circles, have put such external involvement back on the international agenda. But the doctrine of armed intervention for humanitarian (or other) purposes remains heavily contested, a peace-making tool useable in only limited circumstances. More, even, than this, war in Rhodesia and Lebanon ended with and even because of the disempowerment, disillusionment and suffering of the civilian population, and the abandonment of political or moral principle by belligerent elites. It resulted, too, in the effective abolition of political freedom and representative government, just as it pretended to institute them, while doing little to resolve the underlying social conflict that gave rise to war in the first place. If these were requirements of stable settlement in Rhodesia and Lebanon, it seems impossible that external peace-makers could legitimately abet these processes. A liberal approach to war termination, as discussed for example by Kaldor and Kleiboer, would instead claim that if such processes did indeed precede and follow settlement, they need not necessarily have done so.11 If the tenor of this book is that the protracted nature of war in Rhodesia and Lebanon gave rise to processes which brought its end, liberals instead focus on conflict prevention and the enabling of civil society within war-torn countries as measures to forestall and end conflict. For as long as the harder realist-influenced mechanisms of war termination are unavailable to outside peace-makers, there is nothing from Rhodesia or Lebanon to suggest that liberal measures should not be employed, even if their utility may be limited.

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The comparison of civil war in Rhodesia and Lebanon may offer little concrete guidance for international peace-makers seeking to resolve similar conflicts, beyond pointing to the difficulties facing them. Nevertheless, the two wars can contribute much to our understanding of how such conflicts often operate. In The Warrior’s Honor, Ignatieff suggests that the absence of narratives of explanation for such apparently meaningless conflicts may be undermining the ethical basis for outside engagement in them.12 If the evidence from Rhodesia and Lebanon can help construct such a narrative, that is no small contribution. For in contrast to approaches to civil war which highlight the intractability caused by exclusivist nationalist ideologies, by the depth of social cleavages, or by the economic advantages sought and gained by belligerents, war in Rhodesia and Lebanon remained above all a deeply political phenomenon. This is not to say that these other phenomena were not present: confessional and ethnic identity played a large role in Lebanon and Rhodesia respectively. Indeed, one feature noted in both wars was the tendency for ‘forward-looking’ movements based on what Kaldor terms ‘the politics of ideas’ to be crowded out by backward-looking ones based on the ‘politics of identity’.13 The Zimbabwean nationalist movement, despite its avowed aversion to tribalism, split along Shona-Ndebele lines. Nonconfessional Lebanese militias such as those of the Lebanese Communist Party and the Popular Socialist Party were either reduced to insignificance, or were ‘captured’ by one or other confessional community. Rhodesian and Lebanese societies certainly were divided: those divisions contributed greatly to the outbreak of war, and they were not solved by it. As the century ended, Zimbabwe was wracked by political and economic crisis, with land redistribution and the divisions between urban and rural black society to the fore. In Lebanon, meanwhile, many disliked the Syrian presence, but accepted it as a means of preventing inter-communal armed conflict. And, more so perhaps in Lebanon than in Rhodesia, belligerents did make large profits from their participation in civil war. The Lebanese ‘militia system’ of the 1980s, with all sides gaining from external subsidies, extorting money from the civilian population, and smuggling drugs and guns, became almost a conceptual model for observers of postCold War conflict from Liberia to Afghanistan. Yet in the search for the central dynamic of civil war and its ending in Rhodesia and Lebanon, none of these features fully convinces. Identity politics were significant, but they prevented neither the intra-ethnic conflict that was so important in both wars, nor the emergence of cross-cutting alliances. Society was divided, but the effects of protracted war on civilians of all communities was depoliticising rather than polarising. Grievances remained, but they

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became secondary to the urgent need to alleviate the suffering caused by war. Profits were made, but it is difficult to identify specific peacemaking efforts that were stalled by belligerents’ reluctance to abandon these profits. In the event, while some fighters turned to organised crime, state authority was reimposed with relative ease once settlement was reached. Rather, it is as a political contest, a war for control over or a share in the state, that war in Rhodesia and Lebanon is best understood. There were many aspects of the state over which belligerents disagreed: whether it should be capitalist or socialist, centralised or federal, religious or secular, African nationalist or white settler, Christian or Muslim. Between the Rhodesian government and the Zimbabwean guerrillas even the name of the state was contested. But in both countries there was one thing upon which almost all belligerents agreed: that the state should exist, and that they each should play a significant or even dominant role within it. Belligerents’ motivation differed, of course. Power could be sought to legitimise routines of economic extraction, to implement ideological programmes, to achieve social status, and for its own sake. The effects, though, remained much the same: it was the incompatibility of these competing demands for power, rather than divisions over identity or ideas, that lay at the heart of civil war. The competition for power within the state produced by this incompatibility resulted, therefore, not in the breakdown of politics and a descent into chaos, but in the construction of an alternative system of politics.14 That many in the West failed to discern the elements of this system is hardly surprising: if violence was institutionalised within Rhodesian and Lebanese peace-time politics in a way alien to late twentieth century Western sensibilities, wartime deepened the divide of miscomprehension. The importance of honour, tradition and ritual in both countries provided further barriers to understanding. For military strategists, many scarred by the failure of their theories and doctrines of counter-insurgency in Vietnam, the nature of the fighting challenged contemporary notions of war in the nuclear era. That sworn enemies could co-operate and compete simultaneously, that alliances could be made and broken with such rapidity, seemed perplexing. This type of warfare was thus often classified as non-conventional, the opposite of Clausewitzian.15 Yet to dismiss the warfare in Rhodesia and Lebanon as chaotic, beyond explanation even, is to miss the largely systematic nature of the limited violence that was practised in both countries. These limitations did not, of course, serve to diminish the violence inflicted on civilians: massacres grabbed headlines in both countries, while ‘collateral damage’ killed many more. The limits were rather those of geography, strategy, politics and economics, and together they reduced (though

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they by no means nullified) the effectiveness of the traditional military instruments of encounter and manoeuvre. The inability of Lebanese militias to dislodge each other from their ‘home’ territory, the shortage of manpower and equipment faced by the Rhodesian security forces, and the obstacles faced by the Zimbabwean guerrillas in widening their campaign, all enhanced the value of political rather than military manoeuvring. Even more than in inter-state warfare, recruitment, external aid, alliance-making and breaking, supply, civilian compliance and assistance, morale-boosting and profile-raising operations became central to the strategy employed by Lebanese, Rhodesians and Zimbabweans alike. At the same time, these coexisted with and mirrored many elements of the pre-war political system. The Rhodesian parliament continued to meet, and parliamentary elections continued to be held; the Zimbabwean guerrillas challenged existing rural social structures, but in their interactions with local people, chiefs and spirit mediums they became part of the fabric of an albeit strained rural society; and Lebanese militias from all confessional groups, with their taxes and social services, collectively provided a governance that was in some ways no less effective than the weak structures of pre-war central government. In the latter case, too, militia leaders largely preserved their peace-time code against attacking each other’s persons, much as government officials, former-FLN veterans and Islamist militia leaders in rural Algeria in the 1990s tended to refrain from attacking each other within the confines of the village, while perpetrating extreme violence outside it.16 The war system that emerged was both resilient and dynamic. The resilience of such systems is well-known and oft-repeated: leaders came to the fore who derived political and/or economic benefits from the continuation of hostilities, while repeated efforts from international peace-makers foundered on the intransigence of the belligerents. Ultimately, though, it was the dynamism of the system that proved critical. For all the elements that made civil war sustainable, there were many too that undermined the stability of the war system. Some were internal: military defeats and victories, assassinations and power struggles, civilian support and the withdrawal of support, and reconfiguration of alliances were perhaps the most important. Other elements of the war system were external, such as regional military interventions and peace-making efforts. As discussed above, these developments by no means guaranteed the achievement of a peace settlement. But, combined, they gave civil war in both Rhodesia and Lebanon a volatility that prevented the emergence of truly regular political rhythms and routines. Throughout both conflicts, all sides variously hoped and feared that settlement might be imminent. Repeated peace initiatives forced all to rehearse their

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negotiating positions, and thus almost to remind themselves of the aims for which they were fighting – or at least those for which they claimed to be fighting – aims which might otherwise have been forgotten entirely in the day-to-day business of civil war. The reconciling of those competing objectives was a Herculean task, achievable only after years of war had modified those objectives downwards to a level where reconciliation was, temporarily perhaps, possible. But in 1979 and 1989 respectively, peace agreements were achieved for Rhodesia and Lebanon, and over the succeeding years they proved durable enough to prevent the re-emergence of war. It may seem trivial to say it, but against the tendency to see civil war, especially ‘Third World’ civil war, as endless and unresolveable, it must yet be said: the pre-war politics of both Rhodesia and Lebanon contained the seeds of war, but so too did the war-time politics of both contain the seeds of peace.

NOTES Introduction Smith (2003), p. 20f. Small and Singer (1982); Gleditsch et al. (2002). 3 Godwin and Hancock (1993), p. 144. 4 David (1997), p. 552. 5 Figures on casualties are uncertain, but figures of 12,000 battle deaths and 20,000 overall deaths have been quoted for Rhodesia, with 43,800 battle and 167,000 total deaths in Lebanon: Godwin and Hancock (1993), p. 280f; Correlates of War (2003). 6 Kalyvas (2000), p. 3. 7 King (1997), pp. 23-25. 8 Kissinger (1994), p. 629; Mitchell (1991), p. 33. 9 Zartman (1995b), p. 8. 10 Iklé (1971), p. 95. 11 Pillar (1983), p. 24. 12 See Stedman (1991), pp. 2-3; Wagner (1993), p. 263. 13 Wesley (1997), pp. 15-16. 14 Stedman (1996), pp. 347-359; see also Smith (1995), passim, and King (1997), pp. 29-34. 15 Iklé (1971), p. 16. 16 Miall, Ramsbotham and Woodhouse (1999), p. 157. 17 Pillar (1983), p. 174. 18 Licklider (1995). 19 Stedman (1991), pp. 6-8. 20 Wallensteen and Sollenberg (1997); King (2001). 21 For examples, see respectively: Horowitz (1985), Montville (1991); Mao (1969), Rich and Stubbs (1997a); Keen (1998), Berdal and Malone (2000); Zartman (1985, 1995c, 2002), Licklider (1993a). For a general treatment of civil war termination, see King (1997). 22 See George (1979), Bowen and Petersen (1999), King, Keohane and Verba (1994). 23 King, Keohane and Verba term this ‘unit homogeneity’; King, Keohane and Verba (1994), pp. 91-94. 24 Licklider (1998), p. 127. 25 Kalyvas (2001). 26 For the former, Kaplan (1994) and Kaldor (1999); for the latter, see note 21 above. 27 Clausewitz ([1832] 1968), p. 119. 1 2

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Chapter 1 Waterman (1993), p. 292. Zartman (1995b), pp. 21-22; Zartman (2000), p. 242f. 3 See Lijphart (1969); Lijphart (1991). 4 Zartman (1985), p. 242. 5 Crocker and Hampson (1996), p. 63. 6 Zartman (1985), p. 243; Lewis (1999), p. 73f. 7 See Horowitz (1985), pp. 576ff. 8 Paris (1997). 9 Stedman (1991), p. 237. 10 For examples of the conflict resolution approach’s stress on reconciliation, see Rasmussen (1997), p. 41; also, Peck (1998), p. 45; Lederach (1997), p. 35. 11 Walter (1997; 2002). 12 Hartzell (1999). She ignores that only external actors can ensure enforcement of the institutionalised guarantees. 13 King (1997), p. 65; Keen (1998), p. 56. 14 Berdal (1996), esp. p. 74. 15 See Stedman (2002), pp. 8-11. 16 Saul (1999), p. 144. 17 For a survey of Rhodesian history up to 1965, see Blake (1977). 18 See Godwin and Hancock (1993), pp. 80-81. 19 Flower (1987), p. 99. 20 For the ZANU document, ‘Mwenje No. 2’ (announced in Lusaka in August 1972), see Nyangoni and Nyandoro (1979), pp. 249-265. For ZAPU’s ‘The Political Direction of Our Party’, see ibid., pp. 265-268. 21 Meredith (1979), pp. 129-131. 22 Stedman (1991), pp. 48-50. 23 For details, see Tamarkin (1990), pp. 71-76. 24 See Smith’s report to the Rhodesian parliament, in Rhodesia Parl. Deb. (1975), vol. 91, col.s 1256-1264. 25 Baumhögger (1984), p. 57f. 26 Nyangoni and Nyandoro (1979), pp. 389-395. 27 For a level-headed analysis of the gap between the two parties’ positions, see Nyangoni and Nyandoro (1979), pp. 396-398. 28 Stedman (1991), pp. 92-103. 29 Baumhögger (1984), p. 148. 30 Baumhögger (1984), p. 155f. 31 Baumhögger (1984), p. 157. 32 Stedman (1991), p. 121 (italics in original). 33 Tamarkin (1990), p. 162; Baumhögger (1984), p. 225. 34 White Paper Cmnd. 6919, in Baumhögger (1984), pp. 417-422. 35 Baumhögger (1984), p. 423. 36 Stedman (1991), p. 135. 37 Baumhögger (1984), p. 427. 1 2

NOTES

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Baumhögger (1984), p. 329. Carver (1989), pp. 482-535. 40 Godwin and Hancock (1993), p. 214. 41 Baumhögger (1984), p. 531. For the Constitution established in 1979 under the Internal Settlement, see Baumhögger (1984), pp. 921-942. For Sithole’s defence of the Internal Settlement, see Sithole (1978). 42 Zimbabwe News (1977), vols. 5/6, p. 42-45. 43 See Tamarkin (1990), p. 239f. Somewhat dubiously, Nkomo later claimed that he had insisted that he would not do business with Smith unless Mugabe too was involved; Nkomo (1984), p. 189. 44 See Nkomo’s interview in the Johannesburg Financial Mail on 14 March 1978 in Baumhögger (1984), p. 545; also, later comments by Nyerere to the Commonwealth Summit in Lusaka, in ibid., p. 1010. 45 Baumhögger (1984), p. 675. 46 Baumhögger (1984), p. 786. 47 For the text of the Lancaster House agreement, see UK Parliament (1980b). For discussion of the role of its mediator, see Chapter 5. 48 Baumhögger (1984), p. 1029. 49 For the text of the original proposals, see Baumhögger (1984), pp. 10721096, where are also the refined British constitutional proposals that, with minor modifications and clarifications, were to be accepted by all participating parties. For the eventual independence constitution, see Baumhögger (1984), pp. 1452-1468. 50 Sithole (1986), p. 89. 51 Baumhögger (1984), p. 1059. 52 Flower (1985), p. 58f. 53 Details of the Patriotic Front response to the proposals can be found in Baumhögger (1984), p. 1100f. 54 Ibid. (italics in original). 55 Baumhögger (1984), p. 1113; Mugabe (1985), p. 35. For the US intervention on the land issue at Lancaster House, see Lanpher (1985), p. 123f. 56 For Carrington’s proposals, see Baumhögger (1984), p. 1124; for the agreement, see UK Parliament (1980b), pp. 34-39. 57 UK Parliament (1980b), p. 35. 58 The original proposals are in Baumhögger (1984), p. 1174; for the cease-fire agreement, see UK Parliament (1980b), pp. 40-42. 59 See statement by deputy prime minister Silas Mundawarara on 26 Novermber 1979, in Baumhögger (1984), pp. 1194-1196. For the dilemma Muzorewa faced over whether to resign as prime minister or not, see Muzorewa (1985), p. 29. For his speech in parliament urging acceptance of the proposals, see ZR Parl. Deb. (1979), vol. 101, 1979, col.s 460-474. 60 Stedman (1993), p. 148. 61 Patriotic Front’s ‘Proposals on Basic Principles for a Ceasefire’, in Baumhögger (1984), p. 1178f. 62 Ginifer (1995), p. 16; Mugabe (1985), p. 10; Rice (1990). 38 39

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63 Davidow (1984); Tamarkin (1990), pp. 254-273, Flower (1987), pp. 225-250; Nkomo (1984), pp. 194-200; Smith (1997), pp. 314-330; Stedman (1991), p. 165-204. 64 Davidow (1984), p. 13. 65 For the terminology, see Stedman (1991), p. 5. 66 Mugabe (1985), p. 11. 67 Weitzer (1990), p. 109. For similar sentiments. see Soames (1980), p. 410. 68 See Baumhögger (1984), p. 379f. 69 Smith (1997), p. 238f. 70 See comments by Rhodesian Front MP and conference delegate Anderson (1985), p. 15. Also, Flower (1987), p. 249; Renwick (1997), p. 93. Hopes were entertained, too, of bringing Nkomo into an anti-ZANU coalition. 71 Zimbabwe News (July-August 1979), vol. 11, no. 2, p. 2. 72 For Mugabe comments, see Charlton (1990), p. 80. For misgivings about the Patriotic Front climbdown on land redistribution, Riddell (1980); Smith and Simpson (1981), p. 127. 73 Ohlson and Stedman (1994), p. 90. 74 Gurr (1995). 75 For an introduction to Lebanon’s history, see Cobban (1985). 76 For good summaries of the political programmes advocated by the parties in Lebanon, see Abul-Husn (1998), pp. 92-102; and Maila (1988a). 77 Abul-Husn (1998), p. 95. 78 See Snider (1984). 79 Early Shia demands were remarkably moderate in tone, and focused not on bringing the state down but on gaining access for Shiis to the state’s privileges. See Deeb (1988b), p. 684; and Picard (1993), p. 15. 80 El-Khazen (2000), pp. 327-332; Faris (1994), p. 22f. 81 Maila (1992), p. 93. For the ‘Fourteen Points’, see Keesing's (June 1981). 82 Hanf (1993), p. 273, note 150. 83 The main participants were Amin Gemayel (as chairman), Pierre Gemayel, Camille Chamoun, Suleiman Franjieh, Nabih Berri, Adil Usayran, Walid Jumblatt, Sa’ib Salam, and Rashid Karami. Raymond Eddé was invited but refused to attend. 84 Salem (1995), p. 126. 85 Bailey (1987), p. 225f. 86 Quoted in Salem (1995), p. 161. 87 Salem (1995), p. 159; Haddad (1985), pp. 121-133. 88 Faris (1994), p. 25f. 89 See Salem (1995), pp. 191-193. 90 For details see Hanf (1993), pp. 305-312. 91 Salem (1995), p. 203. 92 Salem (1995), p. 204. 93 Abul-Husn (1998), p. 106. 94 Salem (1995), pp. 231-232. 95 See Gregory (1990-91), p. 71; Salem (1995), pp. 242-248. 96 See ‘Damascus Agreements’ (1991).

NOTES

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BBC Summary of World Broadcasts - hereafter SWB - (4 May 1989), p. A/5. Middle East International (3 February 1989), p. 4. 99 SWB (23 August 1989), p. A/3. 100 SWB (8 October 1988), p. A/6. 101 SWB (7 April 1989), p. A/8. 102 Quoted in Le Monde (27 September 1989), author’s translation. 103 L'Orient-le Jour (9 September 1989), p. 3. 104 L'Orient-le Jour (23 September 1989), p. 3; SWB (16 May 1989), p. A/5. 105 SWB (29 May 1989), p. A/2. 106 SWB (2 August 1989), p. A/7. 107 Le Monde (19 September 1989). For the reasons for the Arab League aboutturn, see Chapter 5. 108 For the text, see SWB (20 September 1989), pp. A/1-A/3. 109 Hanf (1993), p. 584. 110 Maila (1992), pp. 52-65. 111 Hanf (1993), p. 589. 112 Maila (1992), p. 88. 113 Maila (1992), pp. 97-98. 114 Financial Times (13 October 1989). 115 SWB (12 October 1989), p. i. 116 SWB (11 October 1989), p. i. 117 SWB (14 October 1989), p. i. 118 See Velyati’s press comments on meeting Asad shortly after the conclusion of the Taif Accord, in SWB (1 November 1989), p. A/1. 119 SWB (16 October 1989), p. A/8. 120 SWB (2 December 1989), p. i. 121 For an analysis of Jaja’s motives in October 1989, see Pakradouni (1991), p. 249; and Harris (1997), p. 267f. 122 SWB (26 October 1989), p. i; Abu-Khalil (1991), pp. 48-49. 123 SWB (8 March 1990), p. A/5. 124 UNIFIL had been deployed in South Lebanon in 1978, and continued to monitor the conflict between Israel and the SLA on one side, and the antiIsraeli resistance on the other. 125 ‘Damascus Agreements’ (1991), pp. 177-178. 126 International Herald Tribune (5 July 1991); Le Monde (6 July 1991). Sayigh (1994a), p. 99. 127 For example, see Gregory (1990-91), p. 83. 128 Amal’s financial position was buttressed by their strong interest in the statefunded Council of the South, while Hizballah was funded primarily by Iran. See Harik (1994a), p. 41. 129 [Raad] (1990). 130 Zartman (1995b), p. 8. 131 Davidow (1984), p. 44. 132 Salem (1995), p. 272f; Owen (1992), p. 318; also, Vance (1983), p. 297f. 133 Stedman (1991), pp. 224-226. 134 Hudson (1999), p. 27. 97 98

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For Lebanese criticism of the ‘anachronistic’ nature of the settlements, see Avi-Ran (1991), p. 220; Tueni (1991), p. 21. 136 Pillar (1983); Smith (1995). 137 Stedman (1996), p. 351. 135

Chapter 2 See Smith (2003). See Kaldor (1999); Berdal and Malone (2000). For a discussion, Kalyvas (2001). 3 For example, Modelski (1964), p. 143; Zartman (2000), p. 228; Walter (1997), p. 347. 4 Keen (1998), p. 11 and passim. 5 Swainson (2000), p. 621. 6 Zartman (1995), pp. 18-19. 7 Zartman (1995), p. 19; Zartman and Aurik (1991), p. 176. 8 Pillar (1983), p. 196; Smith (1995), p. 15. 9 Stedman (1991), p. 206. 10 Godwin and Hancock (1993), p. 260; Ellert (1993), pp. 74-80; Bhebe (1999), p. 68; Cilliers (1985), p. 57. 11 Gregory (1980b), p. 18. 12 Beckett (1985), p. 186f. 13 Tamarkin (1990), p. 245; Gann and Henriksen (1981), p. xii. 14 CCJP (1978), p. 3. 15 Smiley (1980), p. 1064; Griffith (1998), p. 257; Barber (1980), p. 70. 16 Pandya (1988), p. 60. 17 For example, see Cliffe, Mpofu and Munslow (1980), p. 51; Gregory (1981), p. 69. 18 Meredith (1979), p. 280; Cilliers (1985), p. 192. 19 Baumhögger (1984), p. 760. 20 Stedman (1991), p. 167. For further details, see Chapter 5. 21 Beechcroft (n.d.), p. 24; Gann and Henriksen (1981), p. 45; Maxwell (1996); see also Rhodesia Ministry of Information, Immigration and Tourism (1978a). 22 Baumhögger (1984), p. 659. 23 Ellert (1993), pp. 1-57; Cilliers (1985), p. 6. 24 Flower (1987), p. 105. 25 Godwin and Hancock (1993), p. 91. 26 Martin and Johnson (1981), p. 88. 27 Maxwell (1996), pp. 80-81. See also Caute (1983), pp. 13-17. 28 Seegers (1986), p. 141. For ZIPRA tactics, see Alexander, McGregor and Ranger (2000), pp. 141-144. 29 Pandya (1988), pp. 19-24; Tamarkin (1990), pp. 113-115; Godwin and Hancock (1993), p. 225. 30 Bhebe (1995), p. 13. 31 For further details, see Brickhill (1995); Dabwenga (1995), p. 35; Nkomo (1984), pp. 196-198. 1 2

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Tungamirai (1995), pp. 40-41; Chung (1996), pp. 139-140. Martin and Johnson (1981), p. 23. 34 Zimbabwe Ministry of Finance (1979), pp. 15 and 24; Renwick (1981), pp. 41-49. 35 Zimbabwe Ministry of Finance (1979), p. 22; Caute (1983), p. 80. 36 Tungamirai (1995), pp. 37-39. 37 Tungamirai (1995), p. 42f. For recruitment to ZIPRA, see Bhebe (1999), pp. 103-105. 38 Stedman (1991), p. 80, n. 3; Tungamirai (1995), p. 41. 39 Cilliers (1985), p. 23. 40 Seegers (1986), p. 141. 41 Martin and Johnson (1981), p. 114. 42 Ranger (1986), p. 378. 43 Quoted in Frederikse (1982), p. 216. 44 Quoted in Brickhill (1995), p. 68. 45 Kriger (1992), p. 105. 46 Lawrence (1939), p. 134. 47 Evans (1981), p. 1. 48 Cilliers (1985), pp. 15, 132; Evans (1981), pp. 18-24; Reid Daly (1999). For a first-hand account of Rhodesian tactics by the commanding office of ‘A’ Company, 2nd Battalion, RAR, see Wood (1989). Also, Cocks (1988), pp. 3942; Hunt (n.d.), p. 52. On Rhodesian poisoning tactics, see Alexander, McGregor and Ranger (2000), p. 144f; Stiff (1985), pp. 308-310. 49 Alexander, McGregor and Ranger (2000), p. 147f; McGregor (1999); Maechling Jr (1988), p. 26. 50 Beckett (1985), pp. 171-176; Flower (1987), p. 279; Cilliers (1985), p. 77; Godwin and Hancock (1993), p. 303f. For an example of this confusion, see Reid Daly (1999), pp. 297-304. 51 Many of the Rhodesian commanders had previously served in Malaya, including Walls, Hickman and Reid Daly. 52 Hirschman (1970). 53 Frederikse (1982), p. 126. 54 Frederikse (1982), p. 90f. 55 Cilliers (1985), pp. 140-158. 56 See, for example, Godwin (1996), p. 273. On the treatment of sell-outs in Matabeleland, see Alexander, McGregor and Ranger (2000), pp. 172-174. 57 See Weinrich (1977); CCJP (1975), pp. 6-12; Ellert (1993), pp. 49-52; Kesby (1996); Schmidt (1996), pp. 247-296; Cilliers (1985), pp. 79-101; Godwin and Hancock (1993), p. 104. 58 See Stubbs (1989), p. 250f; Karnow (1984), p. 256f. Even in Malaya, the effect of the New Village programme was only to neutralise the rural population, depriving the guerrillas of recruits and supplies, rather than to win the peasants over politically. 59 Renwick (1981), pp. 52-56; Zimbabwe Central Statistical Office (1980). On the effectiveness of Rhodesian sanctions-busting, see Ellert (1993), pp. 161178. 32 33

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Minter and Schmidt (1988), p. 225. Meredith (1979), p. 210f. 62 For example, see Stoneman (1980), p. 17; Pape (1997), p. 101; Renwick (1981), p. 57. For a year by year analysis of the Rhodesian economy during the war years, see Rhodesia Ministry of Finance (1971-77); ZR Ministry of Finance (1978); Zimbabwe Ministry of Finance (1979). 63 Zimbabwe Ministry of Finance (1979), p. 20. 64 See David Smith’s budget statement in ZR Parl. Deb. (1979), vol. 100, col.s 463-495. Also, ZR Parliament (1979a), esp. pp. 12-19; ZR Parliament (1979b); Godwin and Hancock (1993), pp. 164f, 252f. 65 Baumhögger (1984), pp. 666-669. 66 Cilliers (1985), p. 52. 67 Davidow (1984), p. 58. Note, though, that by his own admission he had pushed this line since mid-1977; Young (1985), p. 146. 68 For example, see Sithole statement in Rhodesia Ministry of Information, Immigration and Tourism (1978b), p. 4. 69 See Cilliers (1985), pp. 202-215. 70 Ranger (1986), p. 387. 71 See prime ministerial statement by Abel Muzorewa and subsequent parliamentary debate ZR Parl. Deb. (1979), vol. 100, col.s 1314-1317 and 16221666. Also, Cilliers (1985), p. 207-210; Makovere (n.d.), p. 25; Alexander, McGregor and Ranger (2000), pp. 150-154. 72 Caute (1983), p. 304. 73 Gann and Henriksen (1981), p. 71; Evans (1981), p. 10. 74 Cilliers (1985), p. 119. The Selous Scouts’ prime function was to pose as guerrillas to gain the intelligence on which the tactic of vertical envelopment depended. Such ‘pseudo operations’ usually only worked if the team included ‘turned’ guerrillas. See Reid Daly (1999), p. 105. 75 Cilliers (1985), p. 213f; Gann and Henriksen (1981), p. 33. 76 Anti-Apartheid Movement (1979), p. 42. 77 For statistics of European immigration and emigration, see ZR Central Statistical Office (1980), p. 3; Stedman (1993), p. 130. 78 Godwin and Hancock (1993), p. 8. 79 Frederikse (1982), pp. 166, 275. 80 Pandya (1988), pp. 47-49. 81 Herald (28 September 1978). 82 For a useful account of Rhodesian cross-border operations, see Cilliers (1985), pp. 175-198. Also, Cole (1984); and Wood (1998). 83 The semi-official ZANU account of the war expresses clearly that the victims were civilian: Martin and Johnson (1981), p. 241f. Edgar Tekere has acknowledged that it was a military target; Rebellion! (1999). Further, as Nhongo-Simbanegavi observes from her study of camps in Mozambique, ‘although each camp had a predominant function, there was a lot of overlapping, and also, the distinction between military and refugee camps was sometimes not clear’; Nhongo-Simbanegavi (1997), p. 160. 84 Meredith (1979), pp. 237-241. 60 61

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Smith (1997), p. 196. Cilliers (1985), p. 189. 87 Martin and Johnson (1981), p. 215. 88 Mugabe (1983), p. 67. For the assassination of Chitepo, see White (2003); Flower (1987), p. 147f; Stiff (1985), pp. 124-143; Martin and Johnson (1985). 89 Martin and Johnson (1981), p. 222. 90 Tamarkin (1990), p. 112f. 91 Godwin and Hancock (1993), p. 181. Rhodesian officials naturally put the figures lower; for example, see statement by minister of defence P.K. van der Byl, Rhodesia Parl. Deb. (1976), vol. 93, col. 921. 92 Cilliers (1985), p. 42f. 93 Meredith (1979), p. 340; Cilliers (1985), p. 50 and p. 239; Brickhill (1995), p. 65. 94 Godwin and Hancock (1993), p. 147. 95 Weitzer (1990), p. 84. A similar pattern in police casualty figures can be observed in British South Africa Police (1973-78). 96 Cilliers (1985), p. 52 97 Godwin and Hancock (1993), p. 280f. 98 Baumhögger (1984), pp. 760-762; Rhodesia Parl. Deb. (1978-79), vol. 99, col.s 1833-1841; Caute (1983), p. 293. On the collapse of the rural civil administration, see Alexander, McGregor and Ranger (2000), pp. 148-150. 99 Godwin and Hancock (1993), p. 245, 251. 100 Renwick (1997), p. 6. 101 Guevara ([1961] 1985), p. 58; Laqueur (1998), p. 405; Karnow (1984). 102 Brickhill (1995), p. 52f., 65. 103 Baumhögger (1984), p. 703; Zimbabwe News (July-August 1979), vol. 11, no. 2, p. 16. 104 Gifford (1985), pp. 66-73; Gann and Henriksen (1981), p. 111; Evans (1981), p. 6. 105 Baumhögger (1984), p. 868. 106 Kriger (1992), p. 113. 107 Baumhögger (1984), p. 901. 108 Baumhögger (1984), p. 1253. 109 Soames (1980), p. 410. 110 Smith (1997), p. 175; Stedman (1991), pp. 70-73. 111 Report photocopied in Flower (1987), p. 310. Note also Flower’s comments that 1977 or 1978 represented the start of the ‘phase of the losing battle’, in Flower (1985), p. 56. 112 Walls (1985), p. 132f; Baumhögger (1984), p. 767; Smith (1985), p. 91. 113 Martin and Johnson (1981), pp. 290-292. 114 The Star International Airmail Weekly (24 June 1978). 115 Charlton (1990), p. 53. 116 Davidow (1984), p. 44. 117 Stedman (1991), p. 166. 118 Renwick (1997), p. 30; Stedman (1991), p. 207. 119 Winslow (1996), p. 247. 85 86

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Nasr (1990), p. 7; Hanf (1993), p. 337. Messara (1988), p. 9f; Makhlouf (1994), pp. 135-147. 122 Johnson (2001), p. 37. 123 Le Monde (8 April 1988). 124 Winslow (1996), p. 189; Dagher (1992), p. 24. 125 Beyhum (1989), p. 113f. 126 Beyhum (1989), p. 108; Seurat (1985), p. 60. 127 Avi-Ran (1991), p. 148f. 128 See Salem (1995), pp. 259-265; Pakradouni (1991), pp. 23-29; Keesing's (December 1988). 129 Harris (1997), p. 252f. 130 Zartman (2000), p. 228. 131 Guardian (5 October 1988); Laurent (1991), p. 92. 132 International Herald Tribune (26 December 1988). For the Camps War, see Sayigh (1994b), pp. 231-320. 133 Avi-Ran (1991), p. 155. 134 International Herald Tribune (26 May 1988, 28 June 1988, 8 July 1988); Financial Times (28 June 1988); Le Monde (9 July 1988). 135 SWB (11 September 1990), p. i. 136 Financial Times (17 July 1989). 137 Times (21 July 1989). Aoun’s artillery tended to target Syrian gun emplacements, though their deployment in civilian areas ensured substantial ‘collateral damage’. One month on there were almost 800 dead and almost 2,200 wounded; Independent (23 August 1989). 138 Halliday (1990), p. 574. 139 Independent (22 April 1989). 140 Independent (15 August 1989); Times (19 August 1989). See also Dagher (1992), pp. 19-69. 141 Le Monde (19 September 1989). 142 For example, see Gregory (1990-91), p. 79. 143 Hiro (1993), p. 132; Independent (25 May 1989). 144 Le Monde (24 September 1989); Guardian (17 October 1989). 145 Times (10 January 1990). 146 SWB (10 February 1989), p. i. 147 Hitti (1993), p. 189. 148 Christian Science Monitor (19-25 January 1990). 149 Le Monde (26 December 1990); Guardian (29 December 1990). 150 International Herald Tribune (4 January 1990); Christian Science Monitor (19-25 January 1990). 151 Independent (21 July 1990); International Herald Tribune (21 August 1990). 152 Guardian (16 February 1989); Le Monde (26-27 February 1989); Phares (1995), p. 161. 153 Phares (1995), p. 165f; Le Monde (1 February 1990). 154 Financial Times (14 February 1990); Le Monde (18-19 February 1990). 155 Le Monde (20 March 1990) reported 822 dead and 2,343 wounded since the end of January. 120 121

NOTES

259

Hiro (1993), p. 216; SWB (24 May 1990), p. A/8. Quoted in L’Orient-le Jour (15 October 1988). 158 Until September 1988, Aoun and Jaja had not spoken since the Lebanese Forces’ assassination of Colonel Khalil Kanaan, commander of the army’s 5th Brigade in September 1986. Pakradouni (1991), p. 29; Independent (1 June 1988); Harris (1997), p. 232f. 159 Harris (1989), p. 507. 160 SWB (3 April 1990), p. i; Guardian (30 July 1990). 161 Times (31 July 1990); Naoum (1992), pp. 203-207. 162 SWB (2 May 1989), p. A/9; SWB (5 April 1990), p. i. See also obituary of Dany Chamoun by Robert Fisk in the Independent (22 October 1990). 163 Middle East International (21 July 1989), p. 4; Salem (1991), p. 70. 164 Bailey (1987), p. 229; Sayigh (1994b), pp. 184-186; Norton (1987a), p. 76, 98. 165 SWB (16 October 1990), p. A/8; Le Monde (28 November 1989). 166 Independent (9 July 1990); SWB (11 October 1990), p. A/21. 167 Norton (1987a), p. 68; Kramer (1987), p. 246f; Bailey (1987), pp. 222-224. 168 Bailey (1987), p. 230-232. 169 Sayigh (1994b), p. 187, 318; Faksh (1991), p. 52; Beyoghlow (1989), p. 31; Schiff (1989), p. 24. Amal’s nature as a ‘movement’ rather than a tightly disciplined organisation made it particularly vulnerable to its fighters drifting away in the face of adversity. 170 Pakradouni (1991), p. 97. 171 Harris (1997), p. 199. 172 Harris (1997), p. 216f. 173 Salem (1993), p. 30f; see also Robert Fisk in the Independent (31 October 1989). 174 Harris (1997), p. 248. 175 Independent (3 August 1989); Picard (1993), p. 37. In an effort seemingly to remind Amal of its dependence, Syrian forces would often let Hizballah gain the upper hand in clashes in the southern suburbs of Beirut before putting a stop to them; see Guardian (17 October 1988), and Harris (1997), p. 88. 176 For example, see SWB (8 March 1989), p. i; SWB (11 April 1989), p. A/5; SWB (11 July 1990), p. A/7. 177 SWB (7 February 1990), p. A/6. 178 For Sunni society and militias, see Johnson (1986), pp. 196-198 and 209213; also, Winslow (1996), p. 197f. 179 Gregory (1990-91), p. 74. 180 Interview with Issam Naaman MP, Beirut (6 April 1997). 181 Middle East International (18 November 1988), p. 9f; Libanoscopie (10 December 1988), p. 3f. 182 For example, see Middle East International (14 April 1989), p. 9; Guardian (18 April 1989). 183 Harris (1997), p. 221. 184 International Herald Tribune (29 April 1991). 185 SWB (12 September 1989), p. A/7. 156 157

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Salem (1995), p. 253. Gazit (1993), p. 294. 188 See Ranstorp (1997), pp. 34-39; Vaziri (1992). 189 Nasrallah (1990). 190 Faksh (1991), p. 54f. 191 Jaber (1997), p. 35; Ranstorp (1997), p. 121f; Agha and Khalidi (1995), p. 25. 192 Independent (31 March 1990). 193 Le Monde (1 November 1990). 194 See Seurat (1985); Norton (1987a), p. 138f; Hanf (1993), p. 294f and 305f. 195 Robert Fisk, Independent (22 July 1989). 196 Hamzeh and Dekmejian (1994), p. 121f; SWB (11 November 1989), p. A/4. 197 For an excellent study of the Syrian domination of Zahle, see Harris (1985). 198 Hinnebusch (1986), p. 16. 199 Pakradouni (1991), p. 21f. 200 For the establishment of the alliance, see Pakradouni (1991), pp. 180-188. 201 SWB (20 October 1988), p. A/4. 202 SWB (11 November 1988), p. A/8. 203 For ‘l’incident de l’essence’, see Naoum (1992), p. 75. Jaja statement in SWB (21 February 1989), p. A/7. 204 International Herald Tribune (6 April 1989). 205 Pakradouni (1991), p. 235; Guardian (18 April 1989); Laurent (1991), p. 95; Independent (12 September 1989); Phares (1995), p. 162. 206 Laurent (1991), p. 95. 207 Le Monde (18 April 1989). 208 Le Monde (21 April 1989); Pakradouni (1991), p. 240. 209 Naoum (1992), p. 105. 210 Le Monde, (10 and 25 October 1989); International Herald Tribune (31 October 1989). 211 Hiro (1993), p. 170 212 Financial Times (8 June 1989). For reports of militia desertions, see SWB (16 December 1989), p. 1; and Le Monde (1 December 1989). 213 SWB (13 December 1989), p. A/1. 214 SWB (1 December 1989), p. A/2. 215 Phares (1995), p. 163f. 216 Le Monde (19 January 1990). 217 Independent (12 December 1989). 218 Jaja quoted in the Financial Times (4 April 1990). Middle East International (30 March 1990), p. 7f. 219 Naoum (1992), pp. 175-181. 220 SWB (31 July 1990), p. A/5. 221 Harris (1997), p. 273f; Pakradouni (1991), p. 266. 222 Rondeau (1991), p. 47. 223 Waltz (1979), p. 127. 224 Beyoghlow (1989), p. 34; Abu-Khalil (1991), p. 50; Harris (1997), p. 277. 186 187

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Le Monde (29 September 1990). Note, however, that with a US-led coalition lining up against her in the Gulf after her invasion of Kuwait, the prospects of Iraq increasing her involvement in Lebanon were slim. 226 Middle East International (15 December 1989), p. 8; SWB (14 September 1989), p. A/7; SWB (12 April 1990), p. i(a). 227 ‘Liban: L’Argent des Milices’ (1988), p. 275. 228 Independent (20 October 1990). 229 Brynen (1990), p. 195. 230 On the origins of Hizballah and the SLA, see Jaber (1997); Hamizrachi (1988). 231 Alexander, McGregor and Ranger (2000), p. 141. 232 Stedman (1991), p. 207. 233 See Harris (1997), p. 267f. 234 Morgenthau (1973), pp. 181-193. 235 Zartman (1985), p. 232. 236 Smith (1995), p. 15. 237 See Zartman (1985), p. 232f. 238 For a discussion of this in Lebanon, see Johnson (2001). 239 Kalyvas (2001). 240 Bull ([1977] 1995), p. 100. 241 Salla agrees that while perceptions of a mutually hurting stalemate are clearly very important, objective military factors are still highly relevant to understanding political outcomes; Salla (1997), p. 451. 242 For details of external support for belligerents, see Chapter 5. 225

Chapter 3 Brown (1996a); Esman (1991). Berdal and Malone (2000). 3 Guevara ([1961] 1985), p. 50; Mao (1969), p. 33. 4 Cross (1964), p. 35; Stubbs (1989), p. 1. 5 Lawrence (1939), p. 134. 6 For example, see Zimbabwe News (January-February 1978), vol. 10, no. 1, p. 4; Baumhögger (1984), pp. 127 and 165f. 7 Ranger (1985), p. 46, 103f. 8 Stedman (1993), p. 126f; Riddell (1980), p. 3. 9 Ranger (1985), p. 159. 10 Clarke (1980), p. 29; Gann and Henriksen (1981), p. 25. 11 Cokorinos (1984), p. 32. Also, Dashwood (1996), p. 32. 12 Martin and Johnson (1981), p. 21f, 158, 202f; Nkomo (1984), p. 8. 13 Gann and Henriksen (1981), p. 41f. 14 Chung (1996), p. 146. 15 Ranger (1985), p. 202f. 16 Godwin and Hancock (1993), p. 26; Gann and Henriksen (1981), p. 27f. 17 Astrow (1983), p. 135. 18 Tungamirai (1995), p. 42; Rhodesia Parl. Deb. (1976-77), vol. 95, col. 1125f. 1 2

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Ranger (1985), p. 25. Lan (1985). 21 Kriger (1992); Kriger (1988). See also Nyambara (2001). 22 Weitzer (1990), p. 85f. 23 Alexander (1996), p. 177f; Maxwell (1996), p. 81. For a discussion of the complexities of Zimbabwean nationalism itself, see Raftopoulos (1999). 24 Schmidt (1996), p. 214. 25 Ranger (1985), p. 206f. 26 Bhebe (1995), p. 8. 27 Kriger (1992), p. 166f. In areas where ZAPU guerrillas did operate, it has been argued that the residual elements of ZAPU party organisation from the early 1960s prevented the excesses of guerrilla coercion of civilian witnesses seen in some ZANLA operational areas; Alexander, McGregor and Ranger (2000), p. 162. 28 Frederikse (1982), p. 60f; cf. similar comments by ZANLA political commissar Comrade Zeppelin, ibid. Also, Ranger (1985), p. 178. 29 Nyambara (2001), pp. 786-791. 30 Lan (1985), p. 201. 31 Zimbabwe News (January-February 1978), vol. 10, no. 1, p. 4. 32 Ranger (1985), pp. 178-180. 33 See Lan (1985), passim. The parochial rather than national focus of guerrilla appeals to local spirit mediums is emphasised in Ranger (1982), p. 366f. 34 McLaughlin (1996), p. 97. See also, Maxwell (1999), pp. 125-137; Ranger (1983). At times, though, African civilians were victimised for their beliefs; see Bourdillon and Gundani (1988). 35 See Maxwell (1996); also, Ranger and Ncube (1996), pp. 52-55. 36 Alexander (1996), p. 178; Alexander, McGregor and Ranger (2000), p. 161; Seegers (1986), p. 136. 37 See Robins (1996); Maxwell (1999), pp. 139-142; Maxwell (1993). 38 For Kriger’s analysis of this, discussed in this paragraph, see Kriger (1992), pp. 153-160. 39 Mugabe (1983), p. 37. 40 Gann and Henriksen (1981), p. 91. 41 Kriger (1992), p. 104. As Alexander observes, although many chiefs did collaborate with the Rhodesian regime, many did not. The institution of the chieftainship itself thus escaped delegitimisation, further emphasising the traditional rather than revolutionary proclivities of the rural peasant; Alexander (1993), pp. 104-108, 143, and 157. 42 Bhebe (1999); McLaughlin (1998); McGregor (1999). 43 CCJP (1976), p. 40. See also the letters of former prime minister Garfield Todd, in Weiss (1999), pp. 181-203; Werbner (1991), pp. 149-156; and Staunton (1990), passim. 44 Worby (1998), p. 568. 45 Nhongo-Simbanegavi (1997), pp. 211-214; Cilliers (1985), p. 92; Ranger (1986), pp. 386-388; Maxwell (1999), p. 141f; Caute (1983), p. 18; Alexander (1996), p. 178; Ranger (1985), pp. 261-274; Ranger (1999), p. 234f. 19 20

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Nhongo-Simbanegavi (1997), p. 187. See CCJP (1976); CCJP (1975), pp. 3-6. 48 Ranger (1985), p. 263; Caute (1983), p. 271; Cilliers (1985), p. 95f; Makovere (n.d.), p. 25. 49 Baumhögger (1984), pp. 379 and 550. 50 Godwin and Hancock (1993), pp. 222-224 and 235-238; Gregory (1981), p. 77; Meredith (1979), p. 338-354. 51 For the official British report on the election campaign, which concluded that despite acts of intimidation the elections were largely free and fair, see UK Parliament (1980a), esp. pp. 11-16 and 61-63. Also, Commonwealth Secretariat (1980). On the relative insignificance of the election campaign itself, see Wiseman and Taylor (1981), p. 22. 52 See the testimony of ZANLA political commissar Janet Masunda (aka ‘Ridzai Gidi’) in Frederikse (1982), p. 277. The fact that peasants had to be persuaded not to support Muzorewa surely undermines Ranger’s thesis of the joint guerrilla-peasant programme. 53 Gregory (1981), p. 75; Rich (1982), p. 47f; Smiley (1980), p. 1070. 54 Godwin and Hancock (1993), p. 115f; Weitzer (1990), p. 90; Zimbabwe Board of Censors ([1981]); Windrich (1981); Flower (1985), p. 58; Gifford (1985), p. 72. 55 Chennells (1996), p. 104. 56 Baumhögger (1984), pp. 147-148. 57 Godwin and Hancock (1993), p. 118. 58 Godwin and Hancock (1993), p. 203f. 59 Hatchard (1993), p. 12. 60 Lamont was released and deported shortly afterwards. Even within the Catholic Church in Rhodesia, the pressures of civil war put great strains on the relationship between its urban and rural wings; Linden (1980), pp. 206-286; Randolph (1985), pp. 27-42; Bourdillon and Gundani (1988). Also, Hancock (1984); Weitzer (1990), p. 95f; Godwin and Hancock (1993), p. 166f. 61 UK Parliament (1980a), p. 21. 62 Smith (1997), p. 233. 63 Godwin and Hancock (1993), p. 314; Rhodesia Central Statistical Office (1969), p. 15; Stedman (1993), p. 127. 64 ZR Central Statistical Office (1980), pp. 3 and 9. 65 Meredith (1979), p. 357. 66 Godwin and Hancock (1993), p. 302. 67 [Kassir] (1994), p. 133. 68 For example, see Abu-Khalil (1991), p. 49; Picard (1996), p. 151; Malarkey (1988), p. 302; Corm (1994); Le Monde (28 February 1990). 69 Beyhum (1989), p. 108f. 70 SWB (1 December 1989), p. A/1; Hanf (1993), p. 601; Laurent (1991), p. 97; Rondeau (1991), p. 137. 71 Harris (1997), p. 208; Sayigh (1994b), p. 318. 72 Corm (1994), p. 219; Harris (1997), p. 222. 73 Le Monde (24 August 1989). 46 47

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For this paragraph, see Nasr (1990). For a study of this process in Zahle, see Harris (1985), pp. 282-285. 76 Nasr (1990). 77 Collings (1994), Appendix B, p. 314. For an in-depth analysis, see Kubursi (1999). 78 See Beyhum (1989), p. 112f; Picard (1993), p. 11. 79 Bose (1991), p. 107; Baroudi (1998), p. 534; Keesing's (January 1988). 80 This seems especially to have been the case amongst Maronite respondents and less so amongst Druzes. Khashan (1990); Harik and Khashan (1993). 81 Picard (1993), p. 39. 82 Middle East International (21 July 1989), p. 4. 83 Middle East International (30 March 1990), p. 7f. 84 Harik (1993b), p. 53. 85 See Middle East International (28 April 1989), p. 9. 86 The Christians had always maintained that the war was a guerre des autres, a perspective exemplified by Khazen’s emphasis on the PLO’s role in destabilising Lebanon’s political system, almost completely ignoring internal Lebanese socio-economic factors; El-Khazen (2000), pp. 131-234 and 361378. For the Shia community, see Picard (1993), p. 10. And for a similar perspective espoused by Sunni Mufti of Lebanon, see quote in Libanoscopie (10 December 1988), p. 3. 87 For an analysis of Lebanese economic growth prior to the outbreak of war, see El-Khazen (2000), pp. 250-266. 88 For a fuller treatment, see Johnson (1986); Owen (1988); Hourani (1988); Ajami (1986), pp. 52-84; Olmert (1987); Norton (1987a). 89 Johnson (1986), p. 171f. 90 Khalaf (1991), p. 48; Picard (1993), p. 9f. 91 Cobban (1985), p. 16. 92 Johnson (1986), pp. 175-179; El-Khazen (2000), pp. 82-84; Brynen (1990), pp. 171-173. As the war progressed, the Shia community too produced a grass-roots resistance to the Palestinian guerrillas. See Norton (1987a), p. 59f. 93 Harris (1985), p. 271; Beydoun (1992), pp. 40-42; El-Khazen (2000), pp. 7386. 94 Norton (1987a), p. 90f; Khalid (1985), p. 141; Halawi (1992), p. 74f; Ajami (1986), pp. 84-97; Johnson (1986), p. 172 95 Snider (1984), p. 32. 96 Jumblatt (1982); Aulas (1985), p. 22; Pakradouni (1991), pp. 105-107; Snider (1984), p. 3. 97 For an overview, see Harik (1994a). 98 Snider (1984), pp. 19-27. 99 See Harik (1993a). 100 Agha and Khalidi (1995), p. 23. 101 Harik (1994a), pp. 20-22. 102 Schiff (1989), p. 18. 103 Yapp (1991), p. 276. 104 Interview with Issam Naaman MP, Beirut (6 April 1997). 74 75

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Charif (1994); Richani (1998), pp. 27-29. Brynen (1994); Brynen (1990), pp. 161-165; Hanf (1993), p. 320. 107 Salibi (1988), p. 3. 108 Khalaf (1991), pp. 52-53. 109 See Abul-Husn (1998), pp. 9-12; Johnson (2001), p. 130. 110 The Shia community was traditionally less confessionally-oriented and more prone to ideological commitment than the other major communities in Lebanon. Bailey (1987), p. 221. 111 Richani (1998), esp. pp. 33-99. 112 Khashan (1992); Khalaf (1994), p. 277; Khalaf and Denoeux (1988), pp. 193-197. 113 Abraham (1996), p. 173f; Denoeux (1993), p. 190; Picard (1996), p. 151. 114 Halawi (1992), p. 91; Picard (1996), p. 153; Ranstorp (1997), pp. 40-49. 115 Abu-Khalil (1985), p. 54f; Faksh (1991), p. 50; Denoeux (1993), p. 191; Deeb (1988b), p. 694. 116 Salem (1995), p. 272. See also [Raad] (1990); Young (1992), p. 121. 117 Quote by Beydoun (1992), p. 51. Also, Jaber (1997), p. 29. 118 Salem (1991), p. 70. 119 Sayigh (1994b), p. 194, note 62; Harris (1991), p. 544; International Herald Tribune (23 May 1988); Christian Science Monitor (15-21 August 1988). 120 Independent (8 January 1990); Gregory (1990-91), p. 88; Guardian (30 July 1990). 121 For Algeria, see Kalyvas (1999). 105 106

Chapter 4 For the following, see Esman (1991), p. 55; Zartman (1995b), pp. 13-15; Horowitz (1985), pp. 349-350. The distinctions between the ideal-type sources of leadership tensions tend in practice to be far from clear. 2 Rich and Stubbs (1997b), p. 11; Kriesberg (1998), p. 144f. 3 Iklé (1971), p. 85. The challenges faced by David Trimble within the Ulster Unionist Party in Northern Ireland over the 1998 Good Friday agreement illustrate this. 4 See, for example, Stedman (1991), pp. 238-242; Licklider (1993b), p. 309; King (1997), pp. 61-62. 5 Stedman (1991), p. 32, note 6. 6 Craig and George (1990), p. 234. 7 Zartman (1995b), p. 15. 8 See Karny (2000), p. 394. 9 Horowitz (1985), pp. 472-473. 10 Whatever the reason, the opening addresses to the Geneva conference of neither Muzorewa nor Sithole showed much sympathy towards white interests. Baumhögger (1984), pp. 194, 200f. 11 For the Chitepo assassination, see below. For the Mboroma incident, see Martin and Johnson (1981), p. 199. 1

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12 Martin and Johnson (1981), pp. 167f, 218; Stedman (1991), p. 68. On the Nhari rebellion, see Martin and Johnson (1981), pp. 159-168; White (2003), pp. 19-28, and Flower (1987), p. 147f. 13 See Baumhögger (1984), pp. 37-51. It is worth noting that in Baumhögger’s collection of documents on the re-grouping of the nationalist movements in the autumn of 1975, Robert Mugabe’s name features hardly at all. 14 Muzorewa (1978), p. 213. 15 Mugabe (1985), p. 6f. 16 For an account and assessment of the Chitepo assassination, see White (2003). For the official Zambian response, see Zambia (1976). On Rhodesian involvement, see Flower (1987), p. 147f; Stiff (1985), pp. 124-143; and Martin and Johnson (1985). White usefully and interestingly points out the problematic nature of the various accusations and confessions surrounding Chitepo’s death. Yet while the claims of Rhodesian agents to have carried out the assassination do not quite match each other, and while assistance from Zimbabwean ‘insiders’ cannot be ruled out, Rhodesian elements seem most likely to have been responsible. 17 Baumhögger (1984), p. 27f; Smith and Simpson (1981), p. 81. 18 Baumhögger (1984), p. 29. 19 Ranger (1980), p. 84. 20 Astrow (1983), p. 107. 21 Smith and Simpson (1981), p. 101; Martin and Johnson (1981), p. 275. 22 See Smith and Simpson (1981), p. 105f; Astrow (1983), p. 129f. 23 Dabwenga (1995), p. 31; Sithole (1979), pp. 34-40; Bhebe (1999), p. 25f. Mthimkhulu and his followers were suspected of links with Britain and were soon detained by the Zambian authorities. On the ZANU-ZAPU split, see Nyagumbo (1980), pp. 162-194. 24 Sithole (1979), pp. 40-46; Astrow (1983), pp. 97f, 128; Brickhill (1995), p. 54. 25 Baumhögger (1984), p. 131f; Dabwenga (1995), p. 34; Alexander, McGregor and Ranger (2000), p. 147; Martin and Johnson (1981), p. 223. By the time the Marxist leadership of ZIPA developed its political pretensions, therefore, ZIPA consisted almost exclusively of ex-ZANLA guerrillas. 26 Astrow (1983), p. 128; Gregory (1980b), p. 19; Renwick (1997), p. 77; Kriger (1998). 27 Dabwenga (1995), pp. 29-33. 28 Stedman (1991), p. 105. For Machel’s role in creating the Patriotic Front, see Honwana (1985), pp. 79-81. 29 Tamarkin (1990), p. 223. 30 Smith and Simpson (1981), p. 156f. 31 Mugabe (1983), p. 60. 32 For ‘Mwenje No. 2’, see Nyangoni and Nyandoro (1979), pp. 249-265. For examples of socialist pronouncements, see Zimbabwe News (July-December 1977), vol. 9, no.s 5/6, p. 14; and vol. 10, no. 1, January-February 1978, p. 57. For the Patriotic Front joint statement of objectives, couched in similar language, see Baumhögger (1984), p. 248. For an example of uncritical

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acceptance of ZANU and ZAPU’s rhetoric of scientific socialism, see Bhebe (1999), p. 115. 33 Chingono (1992), p. 454. 34 For ZIPA and its ideology, see Moore (1995). 35 Bhebe and Ranger (1996b), p. 21. 36 Nhongo-Simbanegavi (1997), passim. 37 Mugabe (1983); Baumhögger (1984), pp. 561 and 360f. 38 See ZAPU’s 1972 ‘The political direction of our party’ document, in Nyangoni and Nyandoro (1979), pp. 265-268. 39 For example, see Day (1980). 40 Gould-Davies (1999), p. 100. 41 For examples, see interviews in 1978 with McLaughlin and with Smith and Simpson in Mugabe (1983), pp. 157f and 180-194. 42 Stedman (1991), p. 32, note 6. 43 Smith and Simpson (1981), pp. 162-167; Maxwell (1993), p. 363. 44 Seegers (1986), p. 134. 45 Kaunda, especially, was influenced by the disastrous black-on-black civil war in Angola after the Portuguese departure in 1975, and was determined to prevent a similar process in post-independence Zimbabwe. 46 Martin and Johnson (1981), p. 179. 47 Nyangoni and Nyandoro (1979), p. 403f. Muzorewa’s manifesto for the 1980 election complained vigorously at his sidelining by the Front-Line states from 1976 onwards; UANC (1980), p. 3f. 48 Martin and Johnson (1981), p. 257-262; Smith and Simpson (1981), p. 98. 49 Baumhögger (1984), pp. 270 and 369f. 50 Charlton (1990), p. 89. 51 Flower (1987), p. 85. 52 Stedman (1991), p. 212f. 53 Rhodesia Parl. Deb. (1976-77), vol. 95, col. 1119; Charlton (1990), p. 2; Baumhögger (1984), p. 523f. See also statement by Rowan Cronje, joint minister in the interim cabinet, in Baumhögger (1984), p. 625. 54 Baumhögger (1984), p. 323. For the Quenet Report, an earlier attempt by the Rhodesian Front government to gain black support – which also failed through being too tentative – see Rhodesia Parliament (1976). 55 On standing for re-election, see Baumhögger (1984), p. 759. 56 See Godwin and Hancock (1993), pp. 119-123 and 191-202. 57 Windrich (1978), p. 254. 58 Hancock (1984); Godwin and Hancock (1993), p. 301. 59 Godwin and Hancock (1993), p. 204. 60 Muzorewa (1978), pp. 172-187. 61 Davidow (1984), p. 40f. 62 Weitzer (1990), p. 100f; Evans (1981), p. 12f; Meredith (1979), p. 247; CCJP (1978). 63 Evans (1981), p. 12, note 20; Beckett (1985), p. 173. 64 Ellert (1993), p. 43; Godwin and Hancock (1993), p. 246f. On divisions in the CIO, see Ellert (1995), p. 102.

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65 Flower (1987), p. 188f; Charlton (1990), p. 95; Renwick (1997), p. 39. On the rejection of Smith’s position by the remaining white delegates at Lancaster House, see Flower (1985), p. 58f. 66 Herald (9 November 1979). 67 Snider (1984), p. 7f; Helmick (1988), pp. 309-311. 68 See Randal (1990), pp. 118-135; Snider (1984), pp. 8-10; Winslow (1996), p. 226f. 69 Salem (1995), p. 193; Pakradouni (1991), p. 109. 70 Pakradouni (1991), pp. 118-137. 71 Phares (1995), p. 153. 72 Harris (1997), p. 225. 73 See report in the Guardian (5 October 1988). 74 Pakradouni (1991), pp. 228-230; Phares (1995), p. 154. 75 See Entelis (1973); Winslow (1996), p. 192f. 76 Salem (1993), p. 26. 77 Aulas (1985), p. 22; Hanf (1993), p. 181. 78 Helmick (1988), p. 320. 79 Helmick (1988), pp. 311-316; Phares (1995), pp. 119-130; Entelis (1981), p. 233; Entelis (1973), p. 157. 80 Maila (1988a), p. 22f; Snider (1984), p. 145; Picard (1996), p. 138. 81 SWB (8 October 1988), p. A/6; L’Orient-le Jour (11 September 1989). See also Samir Jaja, ‘Après le genéral Aoun’, in Le Monde (20 December 1990). 82 Salem (1995), p. 218f. 83 For leadership struggles in Amal, see Ajami (1986), p. 213; Kramer (1987), p. 228; Norton (1987b), pp. 214-216; Picard (1993), p. 36; Halawi (1992), p. 210; Sayigh (1994b), p. 182; Deeb (1988b), p. 685f. 84 O’Ballance (1998), p. 175. 85 Sayigh (1994b), p. 177; Fisk article in Independent (22 August 1989). 86 Sayigh (1994b), p. 182; Deeb (1988b), p. 686f. 87 Salibi (1988), p. 196. 88 L’Orient-le Jour (9 September 1989). 89 For the Amal charter, see Norton (1987a), Appendix A. Also, Ajami (1986), p. 172f; Olmert (1987), p. 199; Picard (1993), p. 15. 90 Abu-Khalil (1985), p. 49; Picard (1993), p. 35f; interview with Paul Salem, director of Lebanese Centre for Policy Studies, Beirut (7 April 1997). 91 Abu-Khalil (1985), p. 31. 92 Richani (1990), p. 27; Harik (1994b), p. 474; Richani (1998), p. 121; Harik (1993b), p. 60f. 93 Salem (1993), p. 31. 94 Richani (1990); Harik (1993a), p. 394f. 95 See Ranstorp (1997), p. 43f; Denoeux (1993), pp. 186-188; Deeb (1988b), p. 693. 96 Mallat (1988), pp. 27-29; Hamzeh (1993), p. 325. 97 Mallat (1988), p. 41; Abu-Khalil (1985), p. 50; Faksh (1991), p. 50, note 54; Ranstorp (1997), p. 51f; Jaber (1997), p. 208. 98 Independent (22 August 1989); Hamzeh (1993), p. 323f.

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See SWB (2 April 1990), p. i; Guardian (2 February 1989); Harik (1994a), p. 29f. 100 Peceny and Stanley (2001). 101 Cabral (1973). 99

Chapter 5 Thucydides (1972), p. 242. See Brown (1996a), pp. 596-598; Touval and Zartman (1985b), p. 16; Smith (1995), p. 44; Zartman (1992); Zartman (1991b); Mason and Fett (1996), p. 553. 3 Zartman (1995b), pp. 4-5; Licklider (1998), p. 124; Zartman (1991b), p. 521; Licklider (1993b), p. 313; Stedman (1991), pp. 236-237; Wesley (1997), p. 26; Mitchell (1992), p. 292; Crocker (1992), p. 474; Walter (2002). 4 Stedman (1996), p. 342; King (1997), pp. 67-68 and 77-78; Zartman (2000), p. 232. On the importance of unity amongst mediators, see Jones (2002); Wesley (1997), p. 128; Stedman (1991), p. 27. 5 For example, see Burton (1990); and Kriesberg (1998). 6 See Touval (1992). 7 Zartman (1995b), p. 21. 8 Stedman (1996), p. 363; Haass (1990), p. 139; Kriesberg (1991), p. 19; Bercovitch (1997), p. 145. 9 Crocker (1992), p. 471; Low (1985), p. 98; Parsons (1988), p. 357; Goulding (2002), p. 123f. 10 Renwick (1985), p. 55. 11 Windrich (1978), pp. 215-219; Davidow (1984), p. 33. 12 See Owen (1992), pp. 271-312; Stedman (1991), p. 159f. 13 Owen (1992), p. 314f; Meredith (1979), p. 358f; Baumhögger (1984), p. 543 and 605. 14 Baumhögger (1984), pp. 511, 736-739, and 853f. See also Boyd of Merton (1979). A report by the Liberal peer Lord Chitnis, meanwhile, had condemned the internal settlement elections as ‘a gigantic confidence trick designed to foist on a cowed and indoctrinated black electorate a settlement and a constitution … formulated without its consent and … implemented without its approval’; Chitnis (1979), p. 52. 15 Charlton (1990), p. 32; Meredith (1979), p. 365f. 16 Carrington (1988), p. 290f; also Carrington (1985), 27f. 17 Renwick (1997), p. 25; Stedman (1991), p. 224; Thatcher (1995), p. 78; Charlton (1990), p. 93; Carrington (1985), p. 31f. Precedents did exist in the decolonisation of Tanzania and Kenya for parliamentary seats to be reserved for minority communities, but not for the blocking power and stranglehold on most new legislation that the constitution of Zimbabwe Rhodesia conferred on the white representatives. 18 On the Lusaka summit, see Commonwealth Heads of Government (1979), esp. pp. 4-7. Also, Baumhögger (1984), p. 1011f; Smiley (1980), p. 1065f. Whether Thatcher’s ‘capitulation’ to Commonwealth demands at Lusaka was 1 2

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real, or stage-managed to forestall further concessions, is hotly debated. See Rice (1990), pp. 41-50. 19 Rothchild (1997), p. 171; Stedman (1991), p. 215. 20 Davidow (1984), pp. 107-114; Soames (1980), p. 409; Stedman (1991), pp. 213-226; Baumhögger (1984), p. 1150; Anderson (1985), p. 15. 21 Baumhögger (1984), pp. 270-272. 22 See Kissinger (1976), p. 674f; Ohlson and Stedman (1994), p. 59; Baumhögger (1984), p. 523f. 23 For the Carter administration’s Rhodesia policy, see Vance (1983), pp. 256272 and 284-301. 24 Baumhögger (1984), pp. 286 and 549; Tamarkin (1990), pp. 181-197; Owen (1992), p. 284; Carver (1989), pp. 500, 513, and 526; Stedman (1991), p. 156160; Flower (1987), p. 182; Vance (1983), p. 269. 25 Westad (1997), p. 206; Renwick (1997), p. 21f. 26 Meredith (1979), p. 348f; Stedman (1991), p. 150; Keesing's (August 1979). 27 See statements by Carter and Vance in Baumhögger (1984), pp. 953 and 958. Also, Vance (1983), p. 290f. 28 Lanpher (1985), p. 123f; Stedman (1993), p. 146; Baumhögger (1984), p. 1234. Though there is no evidence directly linking events in the Persian Gulf to US behaviour during the Lancaster House conference, the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran and the ensuing US foreign policy crisis can only have reduced the incentive for US policymakers to interfere in the British mediation effort at Lancaster House. 29 See memorandum on the Carter-Gromyko meeting in Westad (1997), p. 202. 30 Baumhögger (1984), p. 971. 31 Papp (1981); Kempton (1989), pp. 95-150; Somerville (1993), p. 136-151; Campbell (1987-88), p. 19f; Tungamirai (1995), p. 42; Tamarkin (1990), p. 222; Smiley (1980), p. 1083. 32 Snow (1994), pp. 284-287; Keesing's (September 1977). 33 Clapham (1996), p. 144; Smaldone (1980), pp. 102-111; Snow (1994), p. 302. 34 Snow (1994), pp. 296, 310. 35 Stedman (1991), p. 113; Baumhögger (1984), pp. 366 and 721. 36 See ‘Soviet Documents on Angola and Southern Africa’ (1996-97); Jaster (1983), p. 10. Also, LeoGrande (1980), pp. 53-55. 37 For pleas by FROLIZI and the ANC for access to arms shipments, see Nyangoni and Nyandoro (1979), p. 227; and Baumhögger (1984), p. 27f. For Mugabe’s frank admission that only Front-Line pressure brought him to Geneva, Baumhögger (1984), p. 190. Other African states and organisations also provided assistance: Nigeria, for example, trained five thousand Zimbabwean guerrillas between 1976 and 1979; and after 1974 the Organisation of African Unity redirected financial and military assistance from liberation movements in the Portuguese colonies to those in Rhodesia. See Abegunrin (1992), p. 171; Meredith (1979), p. 152. 38 Of the two remaining Front-Line states, Botswana’s weak strategic and economic position meant that it played a relatively minor role in the Rhodesian

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civil war. Angola, which joined the group in March 1976, was marginalised by its distance from Rhodesia and its concentration on fighting South African intervention at home. 39 Jaster (1983), p. 2f; Thompson (1985), pp. 244-248. 40 Baumhögger (1984), p. 267. 41 Cilliers (1985), pp. 185-187. For Zambian support of the Smith-Nkomo negotiations, see Stedman (1991), p. 83, note 21. 42 Keesing's (March 1973). For armed struggle, see Kaunda’s March 1976 press statement in Baumhögger (1984), p. 74f; and his speech to the Non-Aligned Summit in Sri Lanka in August 1976, in Baumhögger (1984), p. 129f. 43 Jaster (1983), p. 9; Thompson (1985), p. 77f; Barber (1980), p. 75. 44 For Kaunda’s telex to his ambassador at the UN explaining his decision, see Baumhögger (1984), p. 696. 45 Jaster (1983), pp. 8f; Baumhögger (1984), p. 1144; Tamarkin (1990), p. 257; Renwick (1997), p. 12. For domestic opposition, see Libby (1987), p. 242f; Baumhögger (1984), p. 453; Thompson (1985), p. 242f. 46 Baumhögger (1984), pp. 663, 1107, 1174-1177, and 1182; Flower (1987), p. 244f; Cole (1984), pp. 358-373; IISS (1979), p. 55. 47 Baumhögger (1984), p. 80; Martin and Johnson (1981), p. 17. 48 Keesing's (April 1976); Martin and Johnson (1981), p. 317. 49 The termination by South Africa in April 1978 of preferential gold agreements with Mozambique further weakened the financial position of the Maputo government; Times (1 August 1978). The figures on workers are those provided by the Mozambican government in its report to the OAU Council of Ministers in June 1976, in Baumhögger (1984), p. 113; Tamarkin (1990), p. 83. For costs, see also Martin and Johnson (1981), p. 225f; Ohlson and Stedman (1994), p. 55; Nhongo-Simbanegavi (1997), pp. 168-170; comments by Jose Luis Cabaco, minister of transport in Machel’s government, in Cabaco (1985), p. 23f; and Honwana (1985), p. 81. 50 See Cole (1984), pp. 242-252 and 260-270. 51 See Hall and Young (1997), pp. 117-120; Smith and Simpson (1981), p. 152; Smith and Simpson (1981), p. 151; Baumhögger (1984), pp. 843 and 1242; Flower (1987), p. 247f; Cilliers (1985), p. 183f; Cole (1984), pp. 374-378; Martin and Johnson (1986a), pp. 1-13. 52 Cabaco (1985), pp. 20-25; Martin and Johnson (1981), p. 317; Renwick (1997), p. 93. 53 Baumhögger (1984), p. 151; Barber (1980), p. 71; see also Nyerere speech to the Oxford Union, in Nyangoni and Nyandoro (1979), p. 365. 54 Charlton (1990), p. 69f (italics in original). 55 Davidow (1984), p. 52f; Kaunda (1985), p. 120; Munangagwa (1985), p. 20; Gregory (1980a), p. 15; Nkomo (1984), p. 193; Jaster (1983), p. 16. 56 Honwana (1985), p. 84; Stedman (1991), p. 177f; Baumhögger (1984), p. 1010; Jaster (1983), p. 15; Smith and Simpson (1981), p. 152. 57 ZAPU’s decision to assist the South African ANC in their infiltration of South Africa was a source of contention between ZAPU and ZANU. ZAPU rejected ZANU’s accusations that their actions precipitated South African

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intervention in Rhodesia. Dabwenga (1995), pp. 27-29; Stedman (1993), p. 131. 58 Alao (1994), p. 8; Leonard (1983), p. 83f; Ellert (1993), pp. 113 and 122; Ford (1991), p. 38f; Stedman (1991), p. 95; Gregory (1980a), p. 17f; Guardian (3 December 1979). On co-operation between Rhodesian and South African special forces, see Reid Daly (1999), pp. 468-478. 59 Flower (1987), p. 31f; Ohlson and Stedman (1994), p. 47f, note 55. 60 See Barber and Barratt (1990), pp. 181-186; and Ford (1991), pp. 49-128. Vorster’s view of Rhodesia as dispensable was never made public, but Ian Smith and Pik Botha testify to his position; Rebellion! (1999). 61 Smith (1997), pp. 169-173 and 183-210; Smith (1985), p. 89f; Charlton (1990), p. 2; Stedman (1991), pp. 85-95; Spence (1986), pp. 295-297; Grundy (1986), p. 91. 62 Smith (1997), p. 231; Tamarkin (1990), pp. 193-197. 63 See Grundy (1986); Price (1984); Spence (1986); Davies and O’Meara (1985); Ohlson and Stedman (1994), p. 61f. 64 Baumhögger (1984), p. 365; Meredith (1979), p. 281. 65 See Smith (1997), e.g. pp. 233-235; Cilliers (1985), p. 72f; Baumhögger (1984), p. 887. 66 Charlton (1990), p. 86f; Baumhögger (1984), pp. 915 and 1112; Stedman (1991), p. 198; Gregory (1980a), p. 16. 67 SWB (7 February 1989), p. A/5. 68 For example, see Asad speech in SWB (10 March 1989), p. A/9. 69 For the former, see Seale (1988). For the latter, Pipes (1990); Deeb (1989). 70 Abu-Khalil (1994), p. 126f. For the following, see Avi-Ran (1991), pp. 7-13. 71 Nasrallah (1989d), p. 18. 72 For example, see Salem (1995), p. 153. 73 Middle East International (11 November 1991), p. 11. 74 See Hinnebusch (1986). 75 See Khaddam interview in L’Orient-le Jour (16 July 1992), p. 1; Maila (1988b), p. 36. 76 Financial Times (28 April 1989); Independent (29 April 1989). 77 For example, see SWB (24 July 1990), p. A/6. 78 For the development of the alliance, see Schulze (1998). 79 Schiff and Yaari (1986); Rabinovich (1984); Yaniv (1987). 80 See Yaniv (1987), pp. 5-42. 81 Norton (1987a), pp. 114-115. 82 For the creation of the ‘security zone’, see Hamizrachi (1988). Also, Beydoun (1992); Norton (1993); Heiberg (1991). 83 See Evron (1987). 84 Brynen (1990) p. 194. 85 For example, see Fisk (1990). 86 Norton (1991), pp. 469-470. 87 SWB (18 August 1989), p. i; Le Monde (17 August 1989); SWB (2 December 1989), p. i; Avi-Ran (1991), p. 221. 88 Rondeau (1991), p. 41f.

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89 Interview with Uri Lubrani (Israeli ‘co-ordinator’ on government activities in Lebanon), Tel-Aviv (16 April 1997); Independent (18 May 1990); Jones (1997), p. 88. 90 Interviews with Uri Lubrani, ibid.; and with Moshe Arens, Tel-Aviv (17 April 1997). 91 Middle East International (28 April 1989), p. 10. 92 Le Monde (8 November 1989, and 8-9 July 1990); SWB (15 October 1990), p. A/13. 93 For PLO strategy towards Lebanon, see Brynen (1990); also, Brynen (1994). 94 SWB (26 November 1988), p. i. 95 For example, see SWB (21 August 1989), p. A/6. For Arafat’s links with Lebanese Maronites in the late 1980s, see Pakradouni (1991). 96 Sayigh (1997), p. 606. 97 For Iranian involvement in Lebanon and the Syrian-Iranian alliance, see Agha and Khalidi (1995); Hitti (1993); Vaziri (1992). 98 Agha and Khalidi (1995), pp. 21-32; Ranstorp (1997), pp. 128-131. 99 Nasr (1990), p. 7. 100 Sirriyeh (1989), p. 44. 101 Agha and Khalidi (1995), p. 23. 102 Hiro (1993), p. 133. 103 See Fisk article in Independent (22 August 1989); SWB (29 September 1989), p. A/3. 104 L’Orient-le Jour (8 October 1989). 105 Agha and Khalidi (1995), p. 31. 106 Hitti (1993), p. 191f and p. 197, note 27; Gendzier (1989); Roy (1994), pp. 183-193. 107 Independent (18 July 1989); SWB (26 September 1989), p. i. 108 Christian Science Monitor (12-18 October 1989). 109 Financial Times (12 January 1990); Norton (1991), p. 471. 110 Norton (1999), p. 11. 111 See Avi-Ran (1991), p. 58; Faris (1994), p. 24. 112 Nasrallah (1989c); Agha and Khalidi (1995), p. 26. 113 Kienle (1990); Murden (1995), p. 126; Libanoscopie (8 September 1988), p. 13; Hanf (1993), p. 572. 114 See SWB, for example (18 April 1989), p. A/7; (22 August 1989), p. A/1f. 115 Maddy-Weitzman (1989), p. 136. 116 SWB (26 May 1989), p. A/2; SWB (1 September 1989), p. A/5. For the Frog incident, see Independent (7 July 1989); Hiro (1993), p. 150. Eventually, combined US and Soviet pressure persuaded Saddam Hussein to halt the shipment. 117 Pakradouni (1991), p. 203. 118 SWB (3 July 1989), p. A/10; SWB (2 August 1989), p. A/7. 119 Le Monde (8 November 1989); Hiro (1993), p. 167. 120 Middle East International (25 May 1990), p. 5f; Pakradouni (1991), p. 258. 121 Deeb (1988a); Maila (1994), p. 34; also comments by Elie Salem on Saudi Arabia in Salem (1995), p. 53f.

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International Herald Tribune (2 November 1989). For example, see Naoum (1992), pp. 239-244; Pakradouni (1991), p. 246. 124 On Saudi foreign policy and its tendency to launch ‘trial balloons’, see Quandt (1981), esp. p. 109. 125 As King Fahd remarked on the resumption of activity by the Arab Tripartite Committee in September 1989, ‘We will hear all points of view and will use all the views, notes and concepts in our possession in order to bring together the brothers and to clear the atmosphere of all that has affected it as a result of the escalation of the situation’; SWB (4 August 1989), p. A/4. Also SWB (13 September 1989), p. A/2f. 126 Middle East International (23 June 1989), p. 10; Halliday (1990), p. 106; SWB (17 October 1989), p. A/4. 127 Independent (22 October 1988). 128 Keesing's (May and November 1989); Nasrallah (1989a), p. 17; Middle East International (5 January 1990), p. 3. 129 Times (25 August 1989). 130 Middle East International (6 October 1989), p. 6. 131 For an account and analysis of the war over Kuwait, see Freedman and Karsh (1993); Heikal (1993); and Shlaim (1995). 132 Freedman and Karsh (1993), p. 440. 133 Gimlin (1990), p. 651f. 134 Agha and Khalidi (1995), p. 27. 135 Agha and Khalidi (1995), p. 17; also Nasrallah (1989c), p. 17. 136 See SWB (30 August 1989), p. A/1; Middle East International (8 September 1989), p. 6; Nasrallah (1989b); Rubinstein (1990), p. 301; Blanc (1993), pp. 164-166; Maila (1994), p. 43, note 6. For French involvement in Lebanon in the 1980s, see Utley (1999). 137 Times (22 August 1989). 138 See Shlaim (1995), pp. 57-59; Hudson (1988); Quandt (1991). 139 For Syria’s explicit linkage of the hostage issue to the resolution of the Lebanese political situation, see comments by foreign minister Farouk al-Shara quoted in SWB (10 October 1988), p. i. The western hostages were all released by June 1992. For US-Syrian co-operation over Lebanon, see Gregory (1990-91); Quandt (1991), pp. 81-83. For the outwardly tense relationship between the US and Syria, especially over Syrian harbouring of the Palestinian group suspected of the December 1988 Lockerbie bombing, see Spiegel and Pervin (1989). 140 For example, see SWB (22 April 1989), p. i; SWB (5 September 1989), p. A/1; International Herald Tribune (4 September 1989). 141 Gregory (1990-91). 142 L’Orient-le Jour (21 September 1989); Financial Times (1 December 1989). 143 Middle East International (26 October 1990), p. 8. 144 James Baker, quoted in Middle East International (7 August 1992), p. 9. 145 Fuller and Lesser (1993), p. 56. 146 Gerges (1997), p. 78; Nasrallah (1989a), p. 16. 147 See Zartman (1992). 122 123

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Parsons (1988), p. 358. Rice (1990), p. 59f. 150 The total cost to the British government of the Rhodesian settlement of 1979-80 was estimated at £25 million. Wiseman and Taylor (1981), p. 98. 151 For a discussion of escalation in Rhodesia, see Stedman (1991), pp. 226229. 152 On the Great Lakes, see Evans (1997), p. 14f; on Yemen, Kerr (1971), pp. 107-114; and on Pakistan and the Taliban, Rashid (2001), pp. 29, 44, 186. 148 149

Chapter 6 For examples, see Miall, Ramsbotham and Woodhouse (1999), p. 153; Keen (2001), p. 42. 2 Stedman (2002), p. 2. More generally, see Stedman, Rothchild and Cousens (2002). 3 Berdal (1996), pp. 6, 35; Spear (2002), pp. 156-168. 4 Ohlson and Stedman (1994), p. 126. 5 Stedman (1997); Downs and Stedman (2002), p. 44. 6 See Lyons (2002). 7 For the problems of demobilisation, see Berdal (1996); Cilliers (1995); Spear (2002); Lewis, Harris and dos Santos (1999). 8 Licklider (1995). 9 Downs and Stedman (2002), pp. 55-57. 10 The accidental nature of Tongogara’s death is disputed both by Ian Smith and by officials of the Movement for Democratic Change opposition party, who claim that Tongogara was killed by ZANU hard-liners because of his conciliatory stance at Lancaster House (Ian Smith speech, Oxford Union, 26 October 2000; non-attributable interview with an MDC official, 26 October 2000). Baumhögger (1984), p. 1251; Renwick (1997), pp. 77, 86; Ginifer (1995), p. 45; Munangagwa (1985), p. 19. 11 Renwick (1997), p. 89; Godwin and Hancock (1993), pp. 267-269. 12 For an excellent account of the interim period, see Keesing's (April 1980); also, Baumhögger (1984), pp. 1361-1363; Rice (1990); Chan (1985). On Nyerere’s threat, see Carrington (1985), p. 42. 13 For the charges against Soames, see Smiley (1980), pp. 1067-1069; for his defence against them, Soames (1980), p. 414f. Also, Stedman (1991), p. 203f, note 6; UK Parliament (1980a), pp. 8 and 61-63; Commonwealth Secretariat (1980), p. 74f. 14 See Rice (1990); Ginifer (1995); Learmont (1980); Acland (1985), pp. 4-13. 15 Ginifer (1995), p. 51f. 16 Honwana (1985), pp. 84-86; on Mugabe’s confidence about the forthcoming election during the interim period, see Mugabe (1985), p. 12. 17 See Renwick (1997), p. 81f; Renwick (1985), p. 70f; Smith (1997), pp. 331360; Godwin and Hancock (1993), p. 275. 1

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After the break-up of the actual Patriotic Front in January 1980, ZANU was officially renamed ZANU(PF), and ZAPU became PF-ZAPU. For the sake of clarity, they are referred to throughout by their original names. 19 UK Parliament (1980a). 20 Flower (1985), p. 63; Cole (1984), pp. 413-421; Godwin and Hancock (1993), p. 269f. 21 Baumhögger (1984), p. 1389; also, p. 1306. For testament to the importance of this speech, see for example Anderson (1985), p. 17. 22 Baumhögger (1984), p. 1386. Flower (1987), p. 265; Gregory (1980b), p. 17; Griffith (1998), p. 87f. 23 Walls (1985), p. 141; Alao (1995), p. 111. 24 Herbst (1990), p. 237f; Godwin and Hancock (1993), p. 315; Weitzer (1990), p. 160; Sithole (1986), p. 89; Munkonoweshuro (1992), p. 28. The government’s handling of the Thornhill affair, arresting and torturing a number of serving air force officers, black and white, became a cause célèbre; see Cole (1988). 25 Beechcroft (n.d.), pp. 26-29. 26 Riddell (1984), pp. 463-467; Kriger (1992), p. 227; also, Weiss (1994), p. 110f. 27 Baumhögger (1984), pp. 1422-1426; Riddell (1984), pp. 466-476; Raftopoulos (1992). 28 Nare (1996), p. 137; Kriger (1992), p. 266f; Kriger (1995), p. 162. 29 Quoted in Ranger (1985), p. 287. 30 Herbst (1990), pp. 44-62; Palmer (1990), p. 169; Zimbabwe Central Statistical Office (1992), p. 1. 31 Ranger (1985), pp. 287-314; Herbst (1990), pp. 63-81; Cokorinos (1984), p. 44; Moyo (1994), p. 5; Moyo (1979); Alexander (1996), p. 182; Alexander (1993), p. 281. 32 Weiss (1994), pp. xv, 205; Murapa (1984), p. 72f; Dzimba (1998), p. 144; Moyo (1994), p. 5f; Cliffe (1981), p. 14; Smiley (1980), p. 1077. 33 Alexander (1996), pp. 184-189. 34 Alexander (1996), p. 175, and passim. Maxwell describes a similar process in Katerere; Maxwell (1999), pp. 176-180. Also, Alexander (1993); Kriger (1992), pp. 219-225. 35 Nhongo-Simbanegavi (1997), pp. 255-294. 36 Reynolds and Sisk (1998), p. 31; Weitzer (1990), p. 167, 186. 37 Weitzer (1990), pp. 136-150; Hatchard (1993). 38 Alao (1995); Rupiah (1995); Kriger (1998); Seegers (1986), p. 150; Hatchard (1993), p. 30. 39 Alexander (1998), p. 152f; Ranger (1986), p. 390f; Alexander, McGregor and Ranger (2000), p. 185. 40 Kriger (2003); Musemwa (1995); World Bank (1995); Rupiah (1995); Barnes (1995); Seegers (1986), p. 152. 41 Alexander (1998), p. 164f; Alao (1994), p. 87f; Alexander, McGregor and Ranger (2000), pp. 196-198. 18

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42 Alexander (1998), esp. pp. 154-159; Alexander, McGregor and Ranger (2000), pp. 189-192; Alao (1994), pp. 83-87; Alao (1995); Nkomo (1984), pp. 211-223. 43 Ranger (1989), p. 165; Weitzer (1990), p. 174. 44 Alexander, McGregor and Ranger (2000), pp. 198-200. 45 Alexander (1993), p. 325; also, Alexander, McGregor and Ranger (2000), pp. 152-156. 46 Alexander (1998), pp. 166-171; Alexander, McGregor and Ranger (2000), pp. 217-224; Werbner (1991), pp. 158-173; Ranger (1999), pp. 246-253; Werbner (1996); CCJPZ and LRF (1997), esp. p. 161; Nkomo (1984), pp. 235244; Ian Smith speech, Oxford Union (26 October 2000); Godwin (1996), pp. 325-418. For government denials of Fifth Brigade atrocities, see Shamuyarira, Kumar and Kangai (1995), p. 35; Zimbabwe Department of Information (1983); also Makambe (1992). 47 Rupiah (1995), p. 37; Renwick (1997), p. 104; Alexander (1998), p. 167; Alexander, McGregor and Ranger (2000), pp. 196-198. 48 Weitzer (1990), p. 174f; Ohlson and Stedman (1994), p. 90f; Alao (1994), pp. 101-105; Alexander (1998), pp. 169-171; Alexander, McGregor and Ranger (2000), pp. 200f and 210-217; Ranger (1999), pp. 246-253; Ranger (1989), p. 163. 49 Ohlson and Stedman (1994), p. 97. 50 See Hall and Young (1997), pp. 125-130. 51 Stedman (1991), p. 230f. 52 See statement by foreign minister ‘Pik’ Botha, in Charlton (1990), p. 140. 53 Baumhögger (1984), pp. 1353, 1393, 1409; Gregory (1980b), p. 17; Leonard (1983), p. 85; Charlton (1990), p. 140. Also, Flower (1987), p. 258. 54 Price (1984); Leonard (1983), p. 88f; Martin and Johnson (1986b); Engel (1993), pp. 191-219; Grundy (1986), p. 99f. 55 Price (1984), pp. 23-25; Engel (1993), pp. 196-203; Seegers (1986), p. 155; Leonard (1983), p. 87. 56 Price (1984); Weitzer (1990), p. 150. For others, see Dzimba (1998); Davies and O’Meara (1985); Munkonoweshuro (1992); Martin and Johnson (1986b). 57 Spence (1986). 58 Hanlon (1986), p. 173. 59 Jaster (1983), p. 21; Stedman (1991), p. 230. 60 International Herald Tribune (26 October 1990); Financial Times (30 October 1990); Le Monde (25-26 November 1990); SWB (4 December 1990), p. i; Hanf (1993), p. 613; Hiro (1993), p. 185f. 61 International Herald Tribune (3 May 1990 and 16 May 1990). 62 SWB (26 March 1991), p. A/11; SWB (24 October 1991), p. A/19; SWB (6 June 1992), p. i; Beirut Review, no. 4, pp. 223, 228; Hanf (1993), p. 555. 63 Picard (1999), p. 25. 64 Collings (1994), Appendix B, p. 314; Baroudi (1998), p. 534; Eken (1995); Middle East International (10 January 1992), p. 12, and Middle East International (15 May 1992), p. 3; Financial Times (7 May 1992 and 8 October 1992); Harik and Khashan (1993), p. 56.

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Le Monde (27 October 1990). El-Khazen (1994); Harik and Khashan (1993), p. 45f; Le Monde (13-14 January 1991); Times (21 July 1992); Le Monde (25 July 1992); Beirut Review, no. 3, p. 210. 67 Middle East International (7 August 1992), p. 9; Norton and Schwedler (1994), p. 56. 68 SWB (3 September 1991), p. A/15; SWB (11 December 1991), p. A/7; SWB (9 January 1992), p. A/5. 69 SWB (21 October 1990), p. A/16; SWB (6 May 1991), p. A/13; SWB (4 July 1991), p. A/2; SWB (31 December 1991), p. A/5; SWB (31 July 1992), p. i; Beirut Review, no. 3, p. 210; Le Monde (1 August 1992). 70 Guardian (10 March 1992). 71 Le Monde (24 and 31 October 1990). 72 Le Monde (13 November 1990); International Herald Tribune (13 December 1990); Middle East International (5 April 1991), p. 15; Daily Telegraph (18 July 1991). 73 Interviews, Paul Salem (Director, Lebanese Centre for Policy Studies) and Farid el-Khazen (Professor, American University of Beirut), Beirut (April 1997). Picard (1993), p. 36. 74 Harris (1997), p. 121f; Abu-Khalil (1994), p. 129; Lahoud (1990-91), p. 59. 75 Samir Jaja, ‘Après le général Aoun’, Le Monde (20 December 1990); SWB (2 May 1991), p. A/9; SWB (26 July 1991), p. A/14. Harris (1997), p. 282f; Khalifah (1997), p. 73. Times (17 November 1990); Harik (1993a), p. 384. 76 Picard (1999); ‘Council of Ministers Decree Dissolving the Militias’ (1991); ‘Plan for the Incorporation of Militiamen’ (1991); Hanf (1993), p. 615f; Lahoud (1990-91), p. 59f; SWB (16 April 1991), p. A/10. 77 SWB (23 April 1991), p. A/11; Keesing's (July 1991); Le Monde (22 November 1991). 78 Independent (9 October 1991); SWB (22 December 1990), p. A/10; Times (13 November 1992). For war of words, see e.g. SWB (17 March 1992), p. A/12; and SWB (28 May 1992), p. A/6. 79 Jaber (1997), p. 156; SWB (2 August 1991), p. A/7; Guardian (7 September 1992). 80 Beirut Review, no. 2, p. 199; Middle East International (1 November 1991), p. 8; [Amal] (1992). 81 SWB (29 October 1990), p. A/18. 82 SWB (10 January 1992), p. A/6. 83 Independent (17 February 1992); SWB (20 February 1992), p. A/6; SWB (2 July 1992), p. A/7; Le Monde (2 July 1992). Hamzeh (1993), esp. pp. 330-333; Jaber (1997), pp. 145-168; International Herald Tribune (30 December 1992). 84 SWB (18 October 1990), p. A/11; Le Monde (13 and 21 November 1990, 5 December 1990); Middle East International (23 November 1990), p. 8f; Pakradouni (1991), p. 271. 85 Hiro (1993), p. 189; Middle East International (11 January 1991), p. 12f; Le Monde (1 February 1991); SWB (7 February 1991), p. A/30; SWB (29 March 1991), p. A/13; SWB (6 April 1991), p. A/13; SWB (24 April 1991), p. A/12; 65 66

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SWB (16 August 1991), p. A/4f; SWB (16 January 1992), p. i(b); SWB (25 May 1992), p. A/5; SWB (22 July 1992), p. A/7. 86 Phares (1995), p. 215; Le Monde (10 June 1992); Middle East International (7 August 1992), p. 9. 87 Picard (1999), pp. 20-26; Beirut Review, no. 5, p. 250; Phares (1995), p. 218; Keesing's (April 1994). Jaja was sentenced to life imprisonment for this murder, and additionally later for the murder of prime minister Rashid Karami in 1987, and for an alleged assassination attempt on Defence Minister Michel al-Murr in 1991. 88 Hanf (1993), pp. 625-628; El-Khazen (1994). Although the confessional electoral system in Lebanon dictated how many MPs of each religious community were to be elected from each multi-member constituency, all voters in each constituency were permitted to vote for all seats in that constituency regardless of confession. Christian MPs in largely Muslim constituencies, therefore, had to compete for the affections of their Muslim constituents (and vice-versa, of course). 89 L’Orient-le Jour (16 July 1992). 90 SWB (7 August 1992), p. A/6; SWB (10 August 1992), p. A/15f; SWB (15 August 1992), p. A/9; SWB (17 August 1992), p. A/4. 91 SWB (28 August 1992), p. i; Le Monde (3 September 1992); Financial Times (8 October 1992); Norton and Schwedler (1994), p. 59; Beirut Review, no. 6, p. 213; Phares (1995), p. 218. 92 SWB (6 May 1991), p. A/13; SWB (18 May 1991), p. A/18; Beirut Review, no. 2, p. 197; Beirut Review, no. 4, p. 232; SWB (31 July 1992), p. i; SWB (3 August 1992), p. i; Harik (1997). 93 SWB (14 March 1991), p. i(b); SWB (2 May 1991), p. i; SWB (16 May 1991), p. A/15; SWB (25 August 1991), p. A/8. 94 SWB (20 September 1989), p. A/3. 95 Norton (1991), p. 457; Le Monde (22 December 1990). 96 Keesing's (May 1991). 97 SWB (27 May 1991), p. A/12f; Le Monde (24 May 1991); Middle East International (31 May 1991), p. 3; Nasrallah (1994), p. 137f. 98 International Herald Tribune (23 May 1991); SWB (27 May 1991), p. A/13; SWB (22 May 1991), p. A/12f. Also, Nasrallah (1993). 99 SWB (23 May 1991), p. A/3. 100 Keesing's (October 1991 and May 1992); Norton and Schwedler (1994), p. 64, note 3. 101 For example, see Murr statement in SWB (23 March 1992), p. A/3. 102 Khaddam interview in L’Orient-le Jour (16 July 1992). 103 SWB (13 November 1990), p. A/14; SWB (30 November 1990), p. A/10; Independent (16 November 1990); Le Monde (30 April 1991). 104 SWB (17 June 1991), p. A/13. See also Murr warning in SWB (3 April 1991), p. A/12. 105 Financial Times (2 and 3 July 1991); International Herald Tribune (2 and 5 July 1991); Guardian (2 July 1991).

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SWB (8 February 1991), p. i(b); SWB (19 February 1991), p. A/15; SWB (18 May 1991), p. A/16; Independent (1 July 1991); Middle East International (12 July 1991), p. 3f. 107 Le Monde (9 July 1991); Middle East International (25 October 1991), p. 7; SWB (13 September 1991), p. A/2; Sayigh (1994a). 108 Guardian (4 January 1991); Independent (24 July 1991); Le Monde (14 December 1991); Jaber (1997), p. 37f; Burgin (1994), esp. p. 146; McDonald (1993), pp. 148-173; Jones (1997). 109 Times (22 May 1991); International Herald Tribune (23 May 1991); SWB (7 June 1991), p. i; Independent (5 June 1991); International Herald Tribune (6 June 1991); Middle East International (14 June 1991), p. 11. 110 Keesing's (February 1992); Middle East International (6 March 1992), p. 7. 111 Interview with Uri Lubrani, Tel-Aviv (16 April 1997). 112 Jerusalem Post (21 May 1991). 113 Burgin (1994); Beirut Review, no. 3, p. 217; SWB (14 March 1992), p. A/16. 114 Middle East International (11 September 1992), p. 13. 115 Le Monde (5 July 1991); Keesing's (October 1991). 116 SWB (16 September 1991), p. i. 117 Beirut Review, no. 2, p. 196; Times (23 March 1991); Keesing's (October, November and December 1991). 118 Middle East International (17 April 1992), p. 17; Middle East International (21 August 1992), p. 10; SWB (25 July 1992), p. A/16; Hudson (1994), p. 145. 119 Atlas and Licklider (1999). 120 Alao (1995), p. 111. 106

Conclusion Gleditsch et al. (2002). See also Kalyvas (2001). 3 King (2001), p. 548f. 4 See, for example, Glenny (1996), p. 229. 5 On Mozambique, see Saul (1999), p. 144. 6 For mediation in Burundi, see Evans (1997), p. 38; on Bosnia, Glenny (1996), p. 213. 7 On Spain, see Thomas (1986), esp. pp. 521-541 and 646-674, and – for atmosphere – Orwell ([1938] 2000), pp. 101-131. On Bosnia, Glenny (1996), p. 268; and, on Algeria, Martinez (2000). 8 See Peceny and Stanley (2001), p. 158f. 9 Small and Singer (1982), p. 213. 10 Peceny and Stanley (2001). 11 Kaldor (1999), Kleiboer (1994). 12 Ignatieff (1999), p. 98. 13 Kaldor (1999), p. 77. 14 See Keen (1998), p. 11. 15 See Smith (2003). 1 2

NOTES

281

16 Of the Lebanese milita leaders killed in the war, almost all, Tony Franjieh aside, died at the hands of outsiders or Lebanese in their pay; Johnson (2001), p. 37. On limited warfare in rural Algeria, see Martinez (2000), p. 191.

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INDEX 17 May agreement (1983), 30–32, 45, 72, 75, 79, 80, 170, 181 Amal, 27, 28, 34, 36, 37, 41–43, 70, 72–83, 87, 88, 109, 113– 117, 120, 138–147, 172, 174, 175, 191, 204–210, 230–239 Anglo-American proposal (1976), 17, 18, 45, 46, 47, 94, 145, 156, 157, 163, 166, 188, 229, 241, 242 Angola, 15, 51, 107, 156, 159, 161, 165, 166, 190, 202, 203, 204, 226, 227, 239 Aoun, Michel, 3, 36–42, 49, 72– 92, 111, 116–120, 135, 136, 142–148, 169–185, 189, 204– 212, 216, 219, 220, 223, 229– 240 Arab League, 36–40, 74, 75, 78, 89, 144, 149, 169, 175–184, 187, 216, 219, 228, 236 Arafat, Yasser. see Palestine Liberation Organisation Asad, Hafez al-, 35, 41, 78–80, 83, 89, 168, 178–180, 206, 210, 213–215, 223 asymmetry, 3, 8, 45 Berri, Nabih, 31, 37, 40, 41, 75, 79, 80, 87, 113, 114, 119, 138– 141, 145, 147, 148, 206, 209, 224, 232 Botha, P.W., 166, 202, 203 Botha, Pik, 167 Botswana, 202 Brahimi, Lakhdar, 39, 46, 50, 78, 169, 183, 184, 228, 236, 239 Brotherhood, Co-operation and Co-ordination, Treaty of (1991), 43, 214, 218, 221

Carrington, Lord Peter, 21–26, 46, 50, 68, 99, 154, 155, 157, 183, 184, 228, 233, 236, 239 Carter, President Jimmy, 15, 17, 154–158, 166 Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace (CCJP), 54, 103, 107, 201 Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO), 13, 56, 65, 69, 134, 163, 165, 193, 194 Chamoun, Camille, 134, 137, 170 Chamoun, Dany, 78, 171, 212 China, 56, 102, 128, 129, 130, 150, 154, 158, 199, 236 Chirau, Chief, 18, 19 Chitepo, Herbert, 66, 69, 92, 98, 124, 125, 130, 143 Civil Administration of the Mountains (CAOM), 114, 140, 141 civilians, African, 97–106, 195–98 civilians, Lebanese, 108–18 civilians, white Rhodesian, 106–8 Clausewitz, Carl von, 8, 92, 246 Cold War, 3, 4, 6, 8, 51, 97, 180, 181, 186, 226, 236, 245 Commonwealth, 21, 24, 25, 149, 153–155, 164, 183, 184, 192; Commonwealth Monitoring Force (CMF), 24, 25, 184, 192, 193 constitution, Lebanese, 27–44, 88; 1972 election, 39, 206, 212, 239; 1992 election, 43, 49, 141, 205, 206, 212, 213, 217, 219, 224 constitution, Rhodesian, 12–27, 132; 1977 election, 107, 133; 1979 election, 19, 63, 66–68,

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104, 133, 144, 153, 154, 157, 167, 230 constitution, Zimbabwean, 12–27, 154, 155; 1980 election, 23, 26, 64, 105, 107, 128, 163, 167, 191–94, 195, 199; 1985 election, 195, 198 Constitutional Document (1976), 29, 45, 46, 140, 183, 188 counter-insurgency, Rhodesian, 59–65, 90, 97, 104, 202, 230, 246 Cuba, 15, 55, 107, 150, 156–159 Daher, Michel, 72, 136, 181 Damascus agreements (1989, 1990), 42, 76, 83, 141, 204 Dawud Dawud, 75, 139, 145 demobilisation, 11, 190, 191, 196, 199, 200, 205, 208, 211, 222, 224, 240 détente, Southern African, 66, 124, 125, 127, 130, 131, 158, 160, 166 economic aspects of civil war, 6, 8, 11, 15, 16, 22, 26, 43, 50, 51, 58, 62, 64, 65, 92, 93, 96, 109– 120, 130, 148, 161, 162, 166, 168, 174, 190, 195–199, 203, 205, 220–226, 231, 234, 236, 245–247; post-war economies, 195–98, 205–7 Egypt, 173–179, 188 Elim mission, 55, 56, 67, 102, 157 Fadlallah, Muhammed Hussein, 141–143, 209 Flower, Ken, 13, 134, 165, 193, 194 France, 27, 42, 88, 109, 117, 129, 180, 187, 219 Franjieh, Suleiman, 29–34, 72, 79, 84, 88, 112, 134, 136, 137, 181 Franjieh, Tony, 31, 71, 135 FRELIMO. see Mozambique Front for the Liberation of Zimbabwe (FROLIZI), 127, 130

Front-Line states. see Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia Frost, Des, 132 Gemayel, Amin, 31–37, 72, 73, 79, 80, 82, 116, 135, 136, 143, 144, 169, 170, 181, 212, 215, 232 Gemayel, Bashir, 28, 30, 31, 33, 37, 72, 84, 108, 113, 114, 120, 134–140, 143, 144, 146, 148, 170, 183, 211, 231, 234 Gemayel, Pierre, 31, 113, 134, 135, 137, 143 Geneva conference (Lebanon, 1983), 30–33, 82, 188, 227 Geneva conference (Rhodesia, 1976), 16, 45, 46, 55, 128, 131, 143, 145, 160, 161, 227 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 4, 180 guerrilla tactics, Zimbabwean, 56– 60 Gumbo, Rugare, 126 Hamadziripi, Mukute, 126 Hariri, Rafiq al-, 43, 209, 217 Hashim, Hassan, 139 Hickman, John, 61, 133 Hizballah, 1, 28, 36–43, 46, 71– 84, 88, 89, 111, 114, 116, 117, 120, 138, 141–147, 172–175, 178, 185, 186, 191, 204–210, 215–223, 230, 233–239 Hoss, Salim al-, 36, 37, 41, 74, 78, 79, 82, 85–87, 111, 145, 169, 204 hostages, Western (in Lebanon), 1, 35, 83, 84, 117, 142, 173, 175, 180–182, 209, 219 Hrawi, Elias, 41, 42, 77–79, 82, 83, 86–88, 179, 204, 207, 209, 210, 212, 215, 216, 219, 221– 223 Hubeiqa, Elie, 33–35, 87, 135, 136, 143, 145, 205, 210 Husseini, Hussein al-, 41, 85, 138, 139, 143, 169

INDEX ideology and civil war, 3, 5, 6, 20, 79, 93, 96, 100–104, 108, 113, 122, 124, 127–130, 132, 134, 136, 138, 140–143, 146, 148, 149, 158, 160, 168, 183, 226, 231, 233, 234, 243, 245, 246 implementation of settlement, 44, 91, 151, 189–225, 228, 231– 233, 238, 240–242 Internal Settlement, 18–25, 45, 46, 63, 105, 108, 124, 128, 132, 133, 144–146, 153, 154, 157, 159, 230, 238 intervention, external, 55, 150– 188, 202, 204, 221, 226, 237, 244, 247 Iran, 2, 29, 40, 42, 71, 75, 76, 81, 83, 85, 87, 89, 110, 114, 116, 117, 141, 142, 150, 169, 173– 178, 181, 185–187, 208, 219, 237–239 Iraq, 42, 74, 75, 81, 85, 88, 110, 141, 150, 173–180, 182, 216, 219, 237 Israel, 1, 2, 28–33, 36–38, 41–43, 70–84, 89, 90, 92, 110, 114– 117, 141, 142, 144, 147, 150, 168–187, 204–210, 213, 215– 222, 228, 230, 236–238, 242 Jordan, 173, 176, 179, 180, 237 Jumblatt, Kamal, 28, 71, 79, 113, 115, 120, 140, 141, 143 Jumblatt, Walid, 28, 31, 32, 34, 37, 40, 79–81, 87, 140, 141, 147, 206, 208, 213, 214, 224, 232 Karami, Omar, 204–206, 209, 211, 214, 223 Karami, Rashid, 31, 33, 35, 82 Kaunda, Kenneth, 13, 15, 26, 124, 144, 160–162, 229, 237 Ketaeb, 1, 40, 85, 86, 112, 113, 135, 208, 211, 212, 215 Khaddam, Abdel Halim, 29, 31, 37, 174, 212, 215

319 Kissinger, Henry, 4, 15, 16, 18, 25, 45, 47, 107, 130, 132, 155, 156, 166, 188, 228 Kuwait, invasion of (1990), 42, 177, 179, 182, 216, 217, 219, 238 Lancaster House agreement (1979), 1, 7, 21, 22, 25, 26, 44– 49, 54, 57, 61, 63, 67, 69, 70, 90, 91, 93, 99, 101, 105–108, 118, 120, 121, 124, 128, 131– 134, 144, 149, 153, 155, 157, 159, 163, 164, 167, 182–197, 200–204, 220–242 land in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, 14, 16, 19, 22, 23, 26, 48, 58, 97, 100, 101, 104, 129, 130, 157, 164, 196–198, 201 Lausanne conference (1984), 32– 34, 45, 46, 82, 181, 188 leadership, struggles for, 122–49 Lebanese Forces, 28, 32–37, 41, 43, 44, 49, 71–88, 109, 113, 116, 117, 120, 121, 134–137, 140–147, 170, 176, 177, 185, 191, 205–214, 223, 224, 230– 238, 241 Lebanese National Movement (LNM), 28, 30, 48, 71, 79, 112, 113, 115, 141, 226 Libya, 66, 79, 110, 138, 175, 176, 206, 219 limited warfare, 2, 55, 71, 92, 246 Lubrani, Uri, 172 Machel, Samora, 123, 130, 131, 160, 162–164, 193, 237 mediation, third party, 11, 17, 21, 36, 39, 45–47, 78, 144, 150– 156, 164, 169, 176, 178, 179, 183–187, 227–229, 243 Moawad, René, 41, 172, 177 Mohtashemi, Ali, 175 Moyo, Jason, 127, 143 Mozambique, 2, 11, 16, 23, 45, 55, 56, 58, 62, 65, 66, 68, 69, 90– 94, 99, 100, 106, 123–131, 144, 146, 150, 154, 159–167,

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183–187, 192, 194, 196, 200, 202, 204, 227–229, 237–239; RENAMO, 65, 123, 163, 202– 204 Mugabe, Robert, 18–20, 26, 55, 58, 64–69, 90, 98, 103, 105, 120, 124–132, 143–148, 154, 155, 158, 159, 163, 164, 185, 192–195, 201–204, 220–223, 230, 232, 233, 235, 238–240 Murabitun, 71, 80, 81 Mussawi, Abbas, 141, 142, 209, 210, 218 Muzorewa, Abel, 12, 13, 18, 19, 22, 24, 26, 58, 59, 63, 64, 67, 70, 90–92, 94, 98, 100, 104, 105, 120, 124, 125, 128, 131– 133, 143–145, 148, 154, 155, 161, 167, 183–185, 191–194, 198, 200, 203, 220, 228, 230, 232, 233, 238 Nasrallah, Hassan, 72, 85, 141, 142, 144, 210 National Pact, Lebanese, 27, 28, 30, 37, 39, 48, 112, 119, 137, 140 Nhari rebellion (1974), 125 Nhongo, Rex, 104, 126, 127, 129, 131 Nkomo, Joshua, 14–19, 23, 50, 55, 58, 67, 69, 70, 90, 98, 105, 120, 124–132, 145, 147, 154, 159, 160, 164, 194, 198, 200, 201, 202, 220, 222, 229, 232, 233, 241 Non-Aligned summit, Havana (1979), 164, 183 Owen, David, 15, 17, 20, 46, 47, 68, 69, 153, 156, 166, 228 Pakradouni, Karim, 33, 86, 177 Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), 1, 2, 28, 29, 37, 41, 43–45, 70, 71, 73–76, 79–81, 83, 87, 89, 110, 112, 115, 117, 118, 134, 136, 142, 144, 150, 168–175, 178, 179, 181, 187, 191, 205–207, 209, 216, 217,

219, 221, 237, 239, 242; Abu Musa, 73, 173, 176 Patriotic Front, 16–20, 22–26, 45, 48, 54, 55, 60, 63, 67–70, 90, 92–94, 102–107, 125, 127, 128, 130, 131, 133, 145, 147, 153–157, 159, 162, 164, 166, 167, 183–186, 192, 197, 223, 228, 230, 233, 238, 239 Popular Socialist Party (PSP), 27, 28, 32, 34, 40, 43, 44, 71, 74, 79, 80, 81, 83, 87, 88, 111, 113–115, 138–142, 147, 171, 178, 181, 191, 206–208, 213, 215, 232, 233, 239, 240, 245 Portugal, 58, 65, 66, 69, 162, 164, 165 Protected Villages, 62, 67, 104, 196, 230 Rabin, Yitzhak, 171, 218 Rafsanjani, Hashemi, 174, 175 Reid Daly, Ron, 133 RENAMO. see Mozambique Rhodesian Front, 1, 12, 13, 15, 18–20, 25, 45, 54, 99, 105, 107, 108, 125, 132, 133, 145, 147, 156, 193, 230, 233 ripe moment, 6, 70, 188 Saadeh, Georges, 40, 85–87, 135, 169, 206, 211, 212 Sadr, Musa al-, 79, 138, 140, 175, 206 Salem, Elie, 31, 32, 35, 47, 116, 138 sanctions, Rhodesian, 1, 15, 19, 23, 58, 62, 63, 67, 70, 92, 132, 144, 154–157, 161, 165, 187, 196, 226, 228, 233, 237, 244 Saudi Arabia, 2, 35, 38, 39, 45, 90, 110, 150, 169, 174–179, 183, 184, 188 Security Force Auxiliaries (SFA), 61, 63, 90, 92, 104, 146, 191, 192, 199, 200 Selous Scouts, 60, 61, 64, 65, 67, 133, 199

INDEX Sfeir, Nasrallah, 72, 85, 169, 206, 212, 215 Sithole, Ndabaningi, 18, 19, 26, 63, 90, 92, 98, 104, 105, 120, 124, 125, 133, 143, 144, 146 Smith, David, 62, 194 Smith, Ian, 1, 12–22, 25, 26, 45– 47, 53, 55, 69, 90, 91, 94, 99, 105, 107, 120, 121, 125, 127, 128, 131–133, 143, 144, 148, 153, 155–157, 160, 162, 165, 166, 184, 193, 195, 202, 203, 230, 231, 234, 241 Smith-Home negotiations (1971), 12, 13, 45, 153 Smith-Nkomo negotiations (1975-76, 1978), 12, 14, 20, 45, 55, 92, 131, 161, 235 Soames, Lord, 69, 155, 192, 193 social origins of civil war, 97–99, 111–14 South Africa, 2, 13, 15, 16, 46, 57, 64, 65, 90, 94, 105, 107, 132, 150, 153, 156, 159–161, 164– 166, 183, 185, 187, 192, 193, 195, 200, 202, 203, 221, 228, 237 South Lebanon Army (SLA), 36, 38, 41, 43, 84, 88, 89, 112, 143, 171, 191, 205, 217, 218, 221, 237, 239 stalemate, 16, 42, 45, 51–54, 64, 68–70, 74, 77, 90–93, 143, 150, 151, 184, 187, 229, 230 Syria, 2, 28–50, 70–94, 110–118, 134–144, 147, 148, 150, 167– 186, 191, 204–231, 237–242, 245 Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party (SSNP), 205, 207, 210 Taif agreement (1989), 2, 3, 7, 37–49, 72, 77–93, 110, 116– 121, 134, 137–139, 142, 144, 149, 167, 169, 172, 174, 177– 179, 182–191, 204–242 Tanzania, 15, 18, 66, 127, 130, 150, 158, 159, 161, 163

321 Tawheed, 70, 84, 168 Tekere, Edgar, 125, 126, 198 Thatcher, Margaret, 21, 153–155, 195 Tongogara, Josiah, 70, 126, 131, 143, 146, 158, 192 Tripartite agreement (1985), 34– 38, 44–48, 72, 80, 81, 94, 135, 143, 145, 169, 181, 188, 229 Tufeili, Subhi, 84, 141, 142, 208, 209, 234 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 4, 15, 79, 128–130, 154–158, 180, 181, 186, 226, 227, 236 United African National Council (UANC), 59, 100, 105, 193, 198 United Kingdom, 1, 2, 12, 16–26, 45, 50, 56, 61, 64, 67, 68, 70, 87, 91, 97, 131–134, 144, 149, 150, 153–158, 164–167, 182– 184, 187, 191–193, 198, 199, 236–240 United Nations (UN), 1, 5, 16, 17, 38, 42, 58, 153, 156, 161, 164, 170, 176, 177, 180, 184, 190, 226, 227, 244; UNIFIL, 42, 218 United States (US), 15, 17–19, 23, 32, 35, 41, 48, 55, 82, 83, 85, 91, 110, 117, 132, 136, 150, 152, 153, 156–158, 164, 166, 171, 178–182, 186, 187, 205, 218, 219, 226, 236, 244 Vance, Cyrus, 15, 17, 46, 153, 155, 157, 166, 228 Victoria Falls conference (1975), 13, 14, 45, 46, 125, 130, 144, 166, 183, 188, 227, 229 Viscount incident (1978), 20, 55, 92, 235 Vorster, John, 13, 15, 107, 144, 165, 166, 203, 228, 229 Walls, Peter, 61, 65, 69, 133, 145, 167, 193, 194, 195

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War of Liberation (1989), 36, 74– 78, 85, 91, 92, 119, 144, 169, 181, 229 Young, Andrew, 17, 153 Young, David, 63, 193 Zambia, 2, 15, 16, 19, 21, 23, 45, 56, 57, 65–67, 89–94, 98, 124–131, 144, 146, 149, 150, 154, 155, 158–166, 183, 185– 187, 192, 196, 202, 228, 229, 237–239 Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA), 13, 56–59, 65, 66, 70, 99, 100– 104, 124–130, 158–164, 191, 192, 194, 199, 200, 240 Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), see also Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, 1, 2, 12, 13, 19, 25, 26, 49, 55–57, 66, 68, 70, 98, 101, 103, 104, 106, 124–130, 133, 143, 145, 146, 158–163, 192–202, 220–226, 230, 232, 235, 239–242

Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), see also Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army, 12, 14, 19, 26, 55, 57, 59, 101, 103, 104, 125–130, 133, 146, 158, 162, 192, 193, 198, 200–202, 220, 223, 225, 229, 230, 232, 233, 239, 241, 242 Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA), 195, 199–201, 220 Zimbabwe People’s Army (ZIPA), 126–131, 144, 234 Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA), 20, 57–59, 65, 66, 68, 90, 101, 102, 127, 128, 158–161, 164, 191, 199–201, 220–224, 229, 235, 240, 241; dissidents, 200– 202, 222–224, 239, 241; Super ZAPU, 200, 203, 221, 224