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Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous PlacesBy Paul Collier The Bodley Head, 255pp. £20 - FOR 10 LONG years Sierra Leone's soldiers and rebels connived in a drug-and-voodoo-fuelled campaign of looting, rape and mutilation against their own stunned fellow citizens. A series of governments – unelected and elected alike – were unable to halt the spread of this nihilistic horror, despite strong international backing. Foreign mercenaries, regional armies and UN peacekeepers were all tried and failed. But when peace finally came to Sierra Leone it was imposed quickly, dramatically and with an almost contemptuous ease.
It was May 2000 and the rebels – Foday Sankoh’s grandiosely titled Revolutionary United Front, allied to the remnants of the Sierra Leone Army – had just brushed aside an 8,700-strong force of United Nations peacekeepers, taking hundreds of them hostage.
The rebels were poised to enter the terrified capital for the third time in three years, but then, at the last minute, Britain, the former colonial power, flew in a single battalion from the elite Parachute Regiment, a lightly armed force of only 600 troops. But after only one small skirmish with these professional soldiers, the rebels fled back to the bush.
Six months later the rebels were still skulking in the interior when an even larger sea-borne British expedition arrived off the coast, tasked – it was said – with driving the rebels from interior towns and taking back the precious diamond fields. No sooner had the grey Royal Navy ships appeared on the horizon than the rebels caved in, agreeing to a ceasefire leading to their own eventual disarming.
All dressed up and with nowhere to go, the British decided to put on a show of strength near Freetown, a mock amphibious assault on beautiful Lumley Beach by several hundred Royal Marine Commandoes.Thousands of dignitaries and cheering local residents thronged onto the beach to watch the landing craft and helicopters speed ashore, and the BBC’s then West Africa correspondent, Mark Doyle, went over to them to record some interviews and “ambient sound”. After only a couple of minutes he switched off his minidisc recorder and turned slowly away.
“There is no way,” he said, shaking his head, “that anyone in Bush House will ever let us broadcast what those people are saying now.”
Behind him, hundreds of boisterous onlookers were chanting “We love you, Britain – colonise us again.”
Tony Blair’s old-school success in Sierra Leone features large in Wars, Guns and Votes by Oxford economics professor Paul Collier. Like its 2007 predecessor, The Bottom Billion, the new book is the fruit of Collier’s attempts to use economic modelling to identify, quantify and predict the causes, risk and costs of civil conflict in the world’s poorest countries.
His conclusion is bold. Although he stops short of endorsing “neo-colonialism”, he proposes that the “international community” (the West, presumably) should intervene militarily to shore up democracy and good governance in those impoverished states where they have failed to take root.
In most cases, he argues, even the “over-the-horizon” threat of rapid reaction forces based outside the continent would be enough to deter would-be rebels from attacking internationally backed leaders.
TYRANTS, MEANWHILE, could be encouraged to fall into line by a simple bargain: abide by the international rules and you will not only continue to receive foreign aid but will also be protected from rebellions and coups. Don’t abide by them, and the concomitant absence of international guarantees will encourage your own military to remove you.
“Rebellions should be turned into history as rapidly as possible because the consequences of civil war are so dire,” he writes. “But coups are a different matter. The challenge posed by coups is not to eliminate them but to harness them.”
Sadly, the notion that coups can be used as magic “guided missiles” to remove corrupt autocrats seems over-optimistic. Prof Collier rightly uses Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe as an example of how a self-serving tyrant can drag an apparently secure and prosperous democracy into political and economic collapse. But Mugabe – like the Congo’s Mobuto Sese Seko, Angola’s Eduardo dos Santos, Togo’s Gnassingbé Eyadéma, Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Mbasogo and many, many others – has also shown that a skilful tyrant can preserve his ruinous rule for decades despite being surrounded by ambitious military hardmen.
The book is best when Collier – director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford – describes the real-world pressures which act to inhibit human rights, political reform and prosperity in many poor, post-conflict countries.
Most of these “bottom billion” (the 60-odd states in which the world’s poorest billion people live, most of them in Africa) societies exist within arbitrary colonially imposed boundaries, and contain numerous ethnic groups with little or no sense of shared history or identity.
In such societies, he points out, leaders have a stronger incentive “to retain power by raping the national economy and transferring the proceeds to their own ethnic group rather than by building the national economy and benefiting everyone”.
An amusingly succinct and well-observed chapter sets out the various means available to the enterprising autocrat to rig, buy or steal elections – those tiresome dog-and-pony shows required to keep foreign aid donors happy.
The book’s title is an obvious echo of Jared
Diamond’s massive bestseller Guns, Germs and Steel, and Collier says he hopes his work too can reach a mass lay audience. To this end he has deliberately omitted most of the detailed economic research on which his theory is based (you can look it up on the internet, he says). Often, though, this leaves him making wide assertions of principle apparently unsupported by example.
Another irritant is the folksy writing voice employed throughout: of the western urge to impose elections on fragile post-conflict societies he writes “The result is not democracy: I think of it as democrazy.”
The tone is at times gratingly reminiscent of Thomas “The World is Flat” Friedman. And like Friedman and that other modern Pangloss, Francis “The End of History” Fukuyama, Collier seems to have produced a work of boundless optimism but limited shelf-life. Its premise, that “for the first time in history, the world economy looks capable of delivering the material conditions necessary for global peace”, already has a hollow ring.
In a post-Iraq world, with domestic economies teetering, armies exhausted, economic nationalism on the rise and Chinese and Russian influence growing again – not least in the “bottom billion” – the democratic world will sadly have less appetite than ever for rescuing failed little states like Sierra Leone.
Ed O'Loughlin is a former Africa correspondent for The Irish Timesand a former Middle East correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald. His first novel, Not Untrue and Not Unkind, will be published by Penguin Ireland in April.