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Africa Today 46.3/4 (1999) 232-234



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Hare, Paul. 1998. Angola's Last Best Chance for Peace: An Insider's Account of the Peace Process. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace.

Angola is living through its fourth decade of war. From 1961 to 1974, three nationalist movements—National Front for Liberation of Angola (FNLA), Popular Movement for Liberation of Angola (MPLA), and National Union for Total Liberation of Angola (UNITA)—led a war for national liberation against the Portuguese colonial administration. This war ended after the overthrow of the fascist regime in Portugal on April 25, 1974 by a group of Portuguese army officers dissatisfied with the increasingly high human and material costs of the conflict. The new Portuguese regime quickly granted independence to its African colonies. Tragically for Angola, however, independence did not usher in a new era of peace and development. Instead, the nationalist movements, unable to overcome deep-seated ethnic and ideological divisions among them, plunged the country into a fratricidal war even before independence from Portugal was officially granted on November ll, l975.

Various attempts have been made to assist the three nationalist movements in reconciling their differences. Thus far, all such attempts have ended in failure. Paul Hare's book is an insider's account of the international [End Page 232] mediation effort to achieve peace in Angola in 1994. Hare led the United States' delegation to the Lusaka peace talks. He spent a year there along with representatives from Russia, Portugal, and the United Nations in what proved to be a futile attempt to bridge the gap separating MPLA and UNITA.

Angola's Last Best Chance for Peace presents a convincing and clear description of the protracted negotiations that took place during the Lusaka peace talks. It is also enriched by detailed accounts of how political and military events on the ground often brought the negotiation process to the verge of collapse. However, since Hare's primary preoccupation is to demonstrate that the signing of the Lusaka Protocol represents an important American diplomatic achievement in Africa, the book falls short of its potential contribution to the growing literature on peace-making in Africa. It does not adequately address the fundamental issue of how to end protracted intra-state conflicts, especially when ethnicity is involved. Instead, Hare focuses mostly on U.S. diplomatic efforts to end the war. Predictably, for reasons discussed below, such efforts brought about only a temporary pause in the fighting, not lasting peace.

By focusing on the Lusaka peace talks as another American diplomatic success story, important contexts, crucial for understanding the challenges to peace in Angola, are not adequately discussed. For example, a background to the conflict, highlighting domestic, regional, and international dynamics, is crucial to understanding why MPLA and UNITA have not followed "rational estimations" to end the war. Like civil wars elsewhere, the Angolan conflict has multiple causes. Although "struggle for power and domination" is an important factor, it is not the only one. The crisis is also about the very essence of cultural identity in a divided, postcolonial, multi-ethnic/linguistic/racial society. This complexity has been compounded by the economic and administrative decay that followed the collapse of the colonial regime in Angola. In combination, these factors constituted a challenge that was beyond the nationalist movements' ability to resolve peacefully. Given the scope of the challenge, and without a unifying national political project, the nationalist movements retreated to their sub-national bases of support, giving the civil war another problematic dimension—its ethnic character.

The ethnic aspect of the Angolan conflict is inescapable. FNLA evolved from political movements representing the Bakongo ethnic group and once had as its unstated goal the resurrection of the ancient Kongo kingdom in northern Angola. MPLA drew most of its popular support from the Mbundu ethnic group that inhabited the areas around the capital. Finally, UNITA was created to represent the Ovimbundu, Angola's largest ethnic group, which occupies the south-central part of the country.

In addition to ethnicity, another important...

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