Peace Operations In West Africa -ECOWAS Successes and Failures In Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea and Guinea-Bissau

By Roberto Miguel Rodriguez

This paper assess and evaluates the ECOWAS peacekeeping efforts in West Africa, specifically its successes and failures in Liberia, Sierrra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea and Guinea Bissau, using a simplified version of the evaluative framework created by Diehl and Druckman, to accommodate for the type of data that is available for these operations. The paper demonstrates that ECOWAS failed to restore peace and security in all its peacekeeping operations and that there is a lot that the sub-regional organization has to learn to deal effectively with its own conflicts. Nigeria provided most of the financial support and troops for the operations in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Cote d’Ivoire, but decided to play a more limited role in the ECOWAS interventions in Guinea and Guinea-Bissau after being severely criticized for its hegemonic role by several ECOWAS members. ECOWAS might be able to play an important role in preserving the security of the region, but only after learning from its mistakes in past operations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781329304901

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Peace Operations In West Africa -ECOWAS Successes and Failures In Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea and Guinea-Bissau

Peace Operations In West Africa: ECOWAS Successes and Failures In Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, and Guinea-Bissau

By

Roberto M. Rodriguez

August 26, 2014

@ Copyright 2014 by Roberto M. Rodriguez

ISBN: 978-1-329-30490-1

All rights reserved

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Peace Operations In West Africa: ECOWAS Successes and Failures In Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, and Guinea-Bissau

INTRODUCTION

Historiography

How ECOWAS’ Role Fits into the UN Charter

The Regionalization of Security in Africa

Africans Take Care of the Africa’s Problems

The Anti-Coup African Policy

UN-AU Cooperation

Overview of UN Operations in Africa

Poor Performance of Other Sub-Regional African Organizations

Responsibility to Protect

CHAPTER I: Peacekeeping in the Midst of Civil War: Liberia (1989-2003)

The Liberian Civil Wars: 1989-1996 and 1999-2003

The Role of Nigeria

AU Participation and the UN Take Over

Assessing the ECOMOG Operation

Liberia’s Second Civil War (1999-2003)

CHAPTER II: Sierra Leone: Blood and Diamonds (1991-2002)

Background Information

Early Developments in the Sierra Leone Crisis

The Myopic Participation of the United States in Sierra Leone

ECOMOG in Sierra Leone

CHAPTER III: Côte d’Ivoire (2002-07) and (2010-11); Guinea (2007-10) and Guinea Bissau (1998 -Present)

Côte d’Ivoire

Guinea-Bissau

CONCLUSION

The Role of Nigeria in the ECOWAS Peacekeeping Operations

The Re-hatting of the ECOWAS Forces by the UN

LIST OF REFERENCES

Archive Collections

Published Documents

Secondary Sources: Articles

Secondary Sources: Books

Dissertations

Electronic Sources

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to assess and evaluate the ECOWAS peacekeeping efforts in West Africa, specifically its successes and failures in Liberia, Sierrra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea and Guinea Bissau, using a simplified version of the evaluative framework created by Diehl and Druckman, to accommodate for the type of data that is available for these operations. The paper demonstrates that ECOWAS failed to restore peace and security in all its peacekeeping operations and that there is a lot that the sub-regional organization has to learn to deal effectively with its own conflicts. Nigeria provided most of the financial support and troops for the operations in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Cote d’Ivoire, but decided to play a more limited role in the ECOWAS interventions in Guinea and Guinea-Bissau after being severely criticized for its hegemonic role by several ECOWAS members. ECOWAS might be able to play an important role in preserving the security of the region, but only after learning from its mistakes in past operations.

DEDICATION

I dedicate this thesis to my wife Lourdes Maria Rodriguez. Without her patience,

understanding, support, and most of all love, the completion of this work would

not have been possible.

INTRODUCTION

None of the ECOWAS peacekeeping interventions in West African countries, although they might have saved some lives, fulfilled their missions, and thus, can be categorized as failures. This paper discuss and analyze several research questions: (a) Which were the most important strengths and weaknesses of the ECOWAS peacekeeping missions in West Africa, such as Liberia (1989-2003), Sierra Leone (1991-2002), Côte d’Ivoire (2002-2007), Guinea (2007-2010) and Guinea Bissau (1998-Present)?; (b) Did they accomplish their objectives according to the criteria set by ECOWAS in each of their respective mandates?; (c) To what degree were they supported by the majority of the member states of ECOWAS, by the African Union and the United Nations?; (d) What was the role of Nigeria in these operations as the region’s hegemon and why was this role opposed by other nations within the ECOWAS organization?; (e) What motivated the serious discrepancies between the Anglophone and the Francophone countries within ECOWAS about these peacekeeping operations?; and (f) Does the evidence justify the hypothesis that Africans should solve their own conflicts as the UN has often proposed? None of these research questions have been addressed comprehensively by any other historian. The methodology used in this paper is a simplified version of the evaluative framework created by Diehl and Druckman to accommodate for the type of data that is available for these operations.[1] Specifically, this paper will compare the results of these operations with the orders provided in the operations mandate, the document authorizing the mission, which is an approach that has been used by a number of researchers.[2]

The historical literature shows a mixture of assessments and opinions from both the UN and ECOWAS participants about the conflicts that occurred in these nations and how they were handled. However, to date, there exists no comprehensive analysis of all ECOWAS’ operations, their successes and failures; and the political environment in which these operations were carried out, with constant antagonism between the different factions within ECOWAS in the case of Liberia and Sierra Leone, and with France in the case of Côte d’Ivoire. This paper attempts to start filling this important gap in the history of these peacekeeping operations.      

This paper’s major findings are that none of these operations has fulfilled the objectives established in their mandates; that ECOWAS as an economic organization so far is not prepared to assume the role of the region’s peacekeeping force because of several reasons, including the lack of harmony among the foreign policies of the governments member of ECOWAS, the dependence of the sub-regional organization on Nigeria’s military and economic resources, and the apparently irreconcilable differences between the English-speaking and the French-speaking countries within the organization which, because of their different culture and viewpoints, had opposing policies about how to resolve the sub-regional crises. In addition, the ECOWAS peacekeeping troops were poorly trained and badly equipped to fulfill their missions.

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[1] Paul F. Diel and Daniel Druckman, Evaluating Peace Operations (New York, NY: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2010), 23-24. Diel and Druckman’s evaluation framework includes five dimensions: stakeholders, time perspectives, baselines, lumping and mission types (Diel and Druckman, 11).

[2] William J. Durch, Building on Sand: UN Peacekeeping in Western Sahara, International Security 17, no. 4 (1993): 151-171; Steven R. Ratner, The New UN Peacekeeping: Building Peace in the Lands of Conflict After the Cold War (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995); Duane Bratt, Assessing the Success of UN Performance: The UN in Internal Conflicts, International Peacekeeping, 9 no. 3 (1996): 65-96; Alex J. Bellamy and Paul Williams, Who’s Keeping the Peace? Regionalization and Contemporary Peace Operations, International Security, 29 no. 4 (2005): 157-195; John Terence O’Neill and Nicholas Rees, United Nations Peacekeeping in the Post-Cold War Era (London: Routledge, 2005); Lisa Morje Howard, UN Peacekeeping in Civil Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008; Macqueen, 13-15.

Historiography

The failures of the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations to accomplish their mandates in Somalia in 1992 and in Rwanda between 1993 and 1996 challenged the UN capacity to deal with a myriad of complex peacekeeping operations.[3] As a result, the UN chose to pursue an alternative strategy in Africa by calling on regional organizations, such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), to conduct certain peacekeeping missions. Specifically, the international community promoted the mantra of having Africans take care of the African problems, which encouraged regional actors such as ECOWAS, an economic international organization, to assume the role as peacekeepers within West Africa.[4] This outsourcing of UN peace operations was both consistent with the UN Charter and the international organization’s past experiences. In addition, it was advantageous for the United Nations, because it relieved the world organization of some regional responsibility and the associated costs. However, in the case of ECOWAS, the UN’s reliance on the West African states to conduct regional peacekeeping proved to be less effective than previous experiences with the Organization of American States (OAS) or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).[5]

Initially, the West African states were proud to prove the slogan that Africans could take care of their own problems. However, as this study reveals, ECOWAS proved unable to take care of the problems in West Africa. To put these efforts into historical context, since the late 1990s, the UN was working to the limit of its capacity in relation to peacekeeping operations suffering multiple failures in Africa