Africa, the Great Battlefield

An article by: Mario Giro

Privatization of war, destruction of the unitary state and proliferation of autonomous armed entities are becoming a generalized modus operandi. On a continent in explosive demographic growth, disputed for its natural resources and attracted by European prosperity

More than 50 million Africans have been displaced by conflicts. More than 7 million people have fled their homes from the two Kivus in a state of widespread war involving more than a hundred militias. Perhaps more than 9 million from Sudan, a failed state fragmented by civil war whose capital Khartoum has already lost half its population. It is no longer possible to count how many people are moving to Ethiopia (last year it was already over 3 million) because of various internal wars, such as the war in Tigray, Afar region and now in Volkeit Amhara, in Oromia and Ogaden. Additionally, in the country that has not found peace since independence in 2011, there are refugees from South Sudan, perhaps more than 4 million of them. In the Sahel, more than 2 million people in Burkina Faso are fleeing jihadist violence; in Mali, at least 700,000 have moved for the same reason; half as many in Niger. In the northeastern region of Nigeria up to Lake Chad, the so-called “four border zones” (Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, and Niger), Boko Haram atrocities have caused at least 4 million people to flee. Their war has also become a model for criminal networks: throughout northern Nigeria, it is fashionable to kidnap students from schools, who are released in exchange for money. Many are heading to southern regions, but younger northern generations are losing precious school years this way. In northern Mozambique, a jihadist attack has forced some 800,000 people to flee south, while in Somalia at least 5 million Somalis have been displaced from their homes because of the long-standing conflict.

There are other crises, old and new, such as the Sinai on the border with the Middle East; Burundi; the former Spanish Sahara; and Libya, where, after the fall of Gaddafi, many Africans living there were expelled, along with many Tunisians and Libyans. Much of Tripoli’s middle class took refuge en masse in Tunisia (estimates range from 300,000 to 500,000) and then fled elsewhere because of the instability that struck there as well.

Such is the dramatic picture of the effects of war in Africa today: a suffering population of refugees, constantly on the move and looking for a way out of uninhabitable situations. According to the African Center for Strategic Studies (close to the US Department of Defense), the trend of increasing numbers of internally displaced persons (IDPs) has been stable since 2011, about a year before the latest crisis of landings on Lampedusa, as well as on the Italian and then the Greek, Cypriot, and Spanish coasts.

It is necessary to put the overall scenario in perspective: not all refugees arriving on our shores are fleeing war, but it is the latter that opens gaps or creates the right conditions for human traffickers and other smugglers. There are about 40 million internally displaced, refugees or asylum seekers in Africa today: more than double the number in 2016. The deterrence factor is that more than two-thirds of them are still roaming within their own countries, and most will remain there. But it is enough to serve as a trigger for organized emigration to Europe.

Also worth considering is the fact that of the 15 African countries with the highest number of displaced people in 2023, 14 were in conflict. Obviously, these are not all conflicts of the same type: while Sudan is in open civil war, the creeping war in the Kivus is seen very differently, as a low-intensity war but deadly to civilians. The two regions of North and South Kivu, along with neighboring Ituri, are currently the scene of endemic fighting, making the entire area unsafe. An unknown number of militias (estimated to be between 100 and 200) operate there, making a living from looting and “armed trade.” Only the clash between the Rwandan-backed M23 movement and the Kinshasa government gets into the media. It is true that the two countries have had hostile relations for some time, especially because of the predation of rare earth metals that Congo is rich in. For example, Kigali has become an exporter of coltan and lithium, which it does not possess but receives from the Kivus through allied militias. However, economic data explains the duration of the conflict rather than its origins in citizenship and difficult coexistence between ethnic groups. Prior to colonization, Nilotic ethnic groups (e.g., Tutsi and Banyamulenge) and Bantu coexisted in a delicate system of balances and counterbalances. As elsewhere, the arrival of European colonizers froze the situation accustomed to resolution through successive approximations, consolidating differences and ethnic boundaries.

The result has been deepening inequalities and increasing rigidity caused by the inability to adapt and adjust. Across Africa, pre-colonial empires, kingdoms, and centers of power (except for the likes of the Zulus) enjoyed flexible and variable forms of arrangement between groups, as evidenced, for example, by the fact that the boundary between ethnic groups was permeable (between Huti and Tutsi, for example) or that West African empires had a tradition of “mobile capital.” Even the borders between states and kingdoms were drawn differently than in Europe. The European tradition of ordering, fixing, tracking, systematizing, etc., was perceived as a deep trauma.

Obviously, in many cases, ethnic groups that were favored at the time by the coming of “whites” supported these changes, which, however, would prove to be the harbingers of many critical problems in the long run. What happened in eastern Congo (later Zaire and finally the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC) demonstrates this well today: granting and revoking citizenship, treating whole layers of local communities as indigenous or foreigners, deepened hatred and desperate attempts to survive on the same lands. Without going into complex details, we can note that the 1994 Rwandan genocide was also the final result of similar political manipulation of citizenship rights and ethnic groups that later served as the 1996 trigger for the great Congo war, of which the current conflict in the two Kivus represents only the latest manifestation. The existence of so many militias is due precisely to the fact that over the past 30 years, everyone in this vast territory has rushed to create an armed form of self-defense, which often then degenerated into crime or became a real way of life. The question to ask ourselves when faced with these types of phenomena is how long can we ignore them before the consequences reach our doorstep (and not just in terms of migration).

Another conflict to watch is in Sudan, where we are witnessing the disappearance of a State. It is useless to complain about the lack of human rights or democracy where the State no longer exists: Libya here should serve as an example. In the past, guerrilla or rebel movements have sought to conquer the state: if they succeeded, they “made” themselves a state, as happened, for example, with Frelimo in Mozambique, with the MPLA in Angola, or with the guerrilla movements in Liberia or Congo in Brazzaville. On the contrary, when it became impossible to weaken those in power, a political agreement was finally chosen if the war risked continuing for a long time. Today everything is different: every armed movement tries to maintain control over at least part of the territory where it can connect to the networks (criminal or not) of the globalized economy. We no longer seek to conquer the whole state: we are satisfied with a part as long as we can exploit its resources (wood, cocoa, diamonds, gold, coltan, etc.). Compared to the past, today it is easier to export such wealth privately and without government involvement. In the fragmentation caused by globalization, interdependence or interconnectedness does not require national unity: one can remain connected to international supply chains even without political repercussions, thus refuting one of the axioms of globalization itself. This is exactly what is happening in Sudan, where the Sudanese Army (SAF) and the largest of the militias (the RSF Rapid Support Force, created by the army itself) are fighting for control of the country’s resources. It happened as if a puppet had cut the strings. The RSF was previously used by the military power to suppress Darfur and other regional uprisings, to the point of becoming a veritable parallel army. Now they’re demanding their share. Sudan has fallen victim to conflicting appetites, sinking into a process of fragmentation that already affected Libya, Yemen, and partly Iraq, as well as Somalia 30 years ago. The possibility of privatizing the state and its security (militias, as well as contractors and armed figures of all kinds) summarizes unprecedented patterns of conflict. In this regard, Africa offers us pioneering examples. The privatization of war, the destruction of the unitary state, and the proliferation of autonomous armed actors is becoming a sad pattern that is turning universal. What is happening in Ukraine should lead to more modesty and deeper reflection: fragmentation processes are at work everywhere.

Former Italian deputy foreign minister

Mario Giro