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10 The Imperative for Peace-Building
- CODESRIA
- Chapter
- Additional Information
10 The Imperative for Peace-Building The histories and lessons from the conflicts in the Mano River Union and in fact, the West African sub-region have strengthened the position and indeed, argument that peace-building is a better alternative for ensuring that conflicts do not arise or resurge in the first instance. As a long-lasting strategy to the maintenance of stability, peace building should be inbuilt into any serious conflict resolution framework with a view to ensuring that the people are made part and parcel of the peace design. It appears that the UN should be given pride of place, in terms of the origin and operationalisation of post-conflict peace building processes. In fact, it was ONUSAL, the UN Observer Group to El-Salvator, with its human rights verification mandate and its emphasis on judicial, military and police reform, that undertook a role unprecedented in UN history, by moving its peace-keeping activities further into the areas of peace-building and democratisation.1 United Nations Peace Support Operations (PSOs), from which the peacebuilding repertoire emerged, have been from experience highly complex operations. PSOs usually involve a bewildering array of actors from a variety of backgrounds with different levels of experience, not to mention motivations, and engaging in what is intrinsically a deeply politicised and resourcechallenged process.2 Peace-building as a process equally involves a multiplicity of actors or agencies. These include government departments, national and international relief and development actors, non-governmental organizations, private sector companies, international financial institutions and regional organizations. Therefore, part of this complexity is in terms of being able to coordinate this vast but important array of actors. The UN Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros Ghali in 1992, had described the main tasks of post-settlement peacebuilding as: West Africa’s Trouble Spots and the Imperative for Peace-Building 87 Disarming the previously warring parties and restoration of order, the custody and possible destruction of weapons, repatriating refugees, advisory and training support for security personnel, monitoring elections, advancing efforts to protect human rights, reforming or strengthening governmental institutions and promoting formal and informal processes of political participation .3 Usually, military activities under PSOs are designed to conclude conflicts by conciliation among competing parties, rather than a short-term and superficial termination of the conflict by force. Experience has shown that in trying to reconcile conflicting parties after a war, all too frequently sufficient effort and resources necessary for this reconciliation are lacking. Oftentimes, the conditions for assisting in the peace-building efforts are unacceptable to the indigenous population. It is therefore, the inability to allocate resources to the post conflict peacebuilding phase, to oversee the return of refugees, to reform the security sector, and to assist in the establishment of a workable form of government that causes the majority of operations to end in stalemate from which the engaged military and civilian agencies cannot easily disengage.4 It is also very important not to forget the local constituency in designing any peace-building process. For instance, the ultimate success of any peace accord is to be found in the extent to which its local constituents perceive the benefits of abiding by that agreement. There is therefore, a need for marketing support for any peace settlement. A marketing perspective guides the analyst to explore the feasibility of promoting domestic support for an accord, by appealing to targeted groups on the basis of the most attractive attributes of peace.5 Responsibility and ownership of the peace-building projects should therefore be given to the locals as soon as it is practicable. Also, mechanisms for continuous funding, of which the locals should also have access need to be developed so that projects do not grind to a halt once international agents of peace-building leave a post-conflict environment. Peace-building as a strategy for enthroning peace, is therefore a proactive approach, as opposed to the rather reactive nature of previous conflict resolution mechanisms in West Africa. The Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management and Resolution, Peace and Security however, came close to approximating both a peacekeeping and a peace-building approach. At the sub-regional level, both ECOWAS and ANAD have very important roles to play in peace building. ECOWAS must at this period avoid at all costs the mistakes of the past, which led to the recrudescence of conflicts in places where it had helped to broker peace. It should be flexible and ensure that its mandate during conflict resolution includes not only peacekeeping and...