Intro

[00:00:03] Dr Miranda Melcher: Hello and welcome to Just Access. Too many individuals and groups around the world today are denied access to justice. This access is vital for making human rights effective and securing human dignity, especially for those in situations of vulnerability, including women, children, minorities, migrants, or detainees.

[00:00:24] Through our podcast, we explore ideas about how to improve access to justice for all. Our motto is, everyone can be a human rights defender and our goal with these conversations is to raise awareness about human rights issues. My name is Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I’m a senior legal fellow at Just Access and the host of this podcast.

[00:00:43] In this episode, I continue in fact being the guest on the podcast, discussing my recently published book about peace treaties and how to improve outcomes coming out of civil wars. Last time we talked a bit about how I got into this research and some of the main findings of the book and [00:01:00] today we go into more detail and discuss ways in which this links to access to justice.

[00:01:05] We hope you enjoy the second part of the conversation.

[00:01:09] Interview

[00:01:19] Nalenhle Moyo: I’d like to go back into the book. The book is centered around two case studies, Angola and Mozambique. Why did you choose those two conflicts? Can you give us a bit of a background on each of them?

[00:01:34] Dr Miranda Melcher: Sure. As I discussed earlier, this research was very much motivated by these questions around how are peace treaties negotiated, how are they written, how are they implemented, and the focus on finding examples of military integration in real life to add to our understanding that is so focused on DDR.

[00:01:51] So I did something perhaps slightly unadvised and using three different databases, combined them to make a [00:02:00] list of every civil war since the end of World War II, which is, depending on how you count, at least 128, if not rather a lot more than that, and I looked at every single group involved in each of those conflicts and tried to figure out what happened to them afterwards.

[00:02:17] Not in like huge amounts of detail, but I did come up with 17 different possibilities of what could have happened. So, for example, one category was that a group wins the civil war through military victory and goes on to become both the main actor in the military and the main political actor.

[00:02:35] So like essentially complete victory on both the political and military front. Another category could be one military victory, but didn’t achieve political power afterwards, but did maintain military power. So there are a lot of different variations, 17 of them. And I essentially sorted all the groups from all the wars into those different categories to identify which ones would most specifically be able to help me look at this [00:03:00] idea of military integration.

[00:03:01] So I narrowed it down to the category where military integration of some kind was at least attempted with varying degrees of success. And within that group, then started looking for kind of useful comparisons to each other and eventually settled on Angola and Mozambique. This is mainly because of how they usefully compare to each other.

[00:03:20] So as I said before, they both start in the mid 1970s. And this is not an accident. They both were colonies of Portugal. They both fought anti colonial wars, independence wars against Portugal throughout the 1960s, along with most of Portugal’s other colonies. And so some of the key groups that later are present in the civil wars in both these countries, that’s how they start. They start by fighting against Portuguese colonization. Because they also have the same colonial history in terms of Portuguese ownership, there’s also some similarities in terms of what parts of the country have been impacted in certain ways up until the 70s that also have impacts for the [00:04:00] conflicts, the civil conflicts later on.

[00:04:01] And they both become independent in 1975 through exactly the same processes. Essentially, Portugal decides we no longer want colonies, goodbye. Pretty much all at once. And the civil wars then that follow are in many ways quite similar. So there’s kind of two main actors in each of them, a government and a rebel group to generalize them slightly.

[00:04:21] Both civil wars received outside support through Cold War proxy ideologies. They were somewhat different in terms of who supported which side, but they both had external elements of their conflict. And then crucially for the investigation of the peace processes, their peace processes looked, at least at the outside from the beginning, like they might have some interaction.

[00:04:43] Partially because they happen at the same time. So Angola starts to negotiate for peace in the civil war in about 1988, 89. Mozambique starts in about 1990. And I was like okay, those are quite similar. And some of the same external actors are [00:05:00] involved in both conflicts in similar sorts of ways.

[00:05:01] I’m curious to see if there’s much interaction in these peace processes. And the further I looked, the further I realized they were actually incredibly related to the extent that Angola signed their peace treaty first and put it into practice. And Mozambique’s draft of their own treaty at that point purposely looked just like Angola’s because that was the closest one that those involved in Mozambique, that’s where they looked to as this being the most relevant to helping them understand what to do.

[00:05:28] And it was in fact watching some of the problems unfold with Angola’s first treaty that caused changes in Mozambique’s own negotiations. And I was curious about that, and so I went and asked. I asked the people involved in the negotiations, why did you change that halfway through? And they said, oh, because we saw what happened in Angola, and we wanted to avoid that problem, so we made this change.

[00:05:47] And a lot of what I argue in the book is that worked. So it turns out that there were some of the same people involved they were very much watching each other, and so they ended up being, better comparisons than I expected going in. But that was the [00:06:00] multi step path that led me to investigating those two countries in particular.

[00:06:04] Nalenhle Moyo: As we speak about the civil wars, we often think about civil wars as something that is contained with no external involvement, but both of these conflicts were anything but that. There was an involvement of regional powers, Russia, the USA and the United Nations, multinational companies, local religious organizations, and bizarrely, Cuba.

[00:06:27] What’s going on?

[00:06:29] Dr Miranda Melcher: So this is what I was talking about earlier with both of these being proxy Cold War conflicts as much as we might call it the Cold War, it was really only called in the sense that the US and the USSR did not directly invade or bomb each other. But there were a whole lot of wars going on through the rest of the world that were in many ways funded and supported by each of the two sides as a way of competing against each other.

[00:06:52] And Mozambique and Angola were very much part of this. So in Angola’s case, the government side of the conflict, [00:07:00] the MPLA, received Soviet backing and Cuban backing. Including Cuban troops for quite a long time, whereas the rebel side of the conflict received support from the US and the USS ally, South Africa, including as well troops.

[00:07:14] Mozambique the rebel side also got support from South Africa and what is now Zimbabwe and was Rhodesia and the government. In Mozambique also received support from the Soviet Union. So a lot of what I argue in the book, or at least some of what I argue in the book, is that these conflicts don’t start because of the Cold War.

[00:07:32] It’s not like the U. S. goes to Angola and says, hey, government, why don’t you go attack those rebels and make a civil war here so that we can get rid of the influence? That, that’s not what we’re talking about. These weren’t created by the Cold War. However once the conflicts were underway, the fact that both sides of each of the conflicts could use this existing ideology in order to gain support to continue their own political aims I think was one of the factors that allowed them to [00:08:00] continue.

[00:08:00] But Angola in particular, that war continued long after the Cold War ended, and so I think as much as Angola in some ways is a really useful example of a Cold War proxy conflict we can’t just think that’s what it is, because the Cold War ends in 1991, and the Angolan Civil War ends in 2003.

[00:08:19] In fact, by 1992, the US and the USSR are both united in trying to get the Angolan Civil War to stop And it continues for another 10 years despite that. So the idea that these are simply Cold War proxy conflicts, I think, misses out the political aims and agency of the actors in Angola and Mozambique themselves.

[00:08:40] But it is an important component for us to understand in terms of the conflicts, and in many ways makes both of these wars, in fact, quite relevant to understanding current civil wars. Because most civil wars today do have strong external support elements, for example, Syria or Yemen to name just two. So in many ways, quite unfortunately, there are a lot of [00:09:00] relevant lessons to be learned from these civil wars that can be applied today.

[00:09:04] Nalenhle Moyo: So now that we’ve spoken about external involvement I’d want us to go a little bit deeper in understanding how the global recalibration and power at the end of the Cold War perhaps even more so colonialism and decolonialism, how did those play into these conflicts?

[00:09:20] Dr Miranda Melcher: So building off what I said earlier, I think that these do play in, but are not necessarily the cause in and of themselves, right? So I just mentioned about the impact of the end of the Cold War for Angola and how I think saying that this is mainly about the US and the USSR really doesn’t do justice to the politics on the ground.

[00:09:39] And similarly with decolonization fight that the independent struggle in both of the countries. Yes, that’s how the governments that then go on to fight the civil wars, that’s how they come to power. They start off as anti colonial movements against Portuguese colonization. They therefore then become the governments when Portugal grants [00:10:00] independence.

[00:10:00] But I don’t think we can necessarily say therefore inevitably there was going to be a civil war in either country. I think that’s tying things up in too neat a bow and so those are relevant areas to understanding some of the dynamics here, but cannot just go straight to that and go, got it, I understand what’s happening.

[00:10:17] Nalenhle Moyo: Let’s get into the conversation around negotiation. In this particular case studies, what did the parties decide to come? Why did they decide to come to the negotiation table? And what can we learn from them?

[00:10:30] Dr Miranda Melcher: So this is I think a really crucial point because in both cases, though to slightly differing degrees, a lot of why I think the parties came to the negotiating table in the first place is because of external pressure from the outside supporters. So looking at Angola in the first case I’m going to try and explain this without getting into too much detail about the Angolan Civil War because it is quite complicated but a Angolan Civil War was the anti colonial fight for independence in Namibia, which was not called Namibia at the [00:11:00] time, it was a colony of South Africa.

[00:11:02] And the Angolan government was Fighting a civil war within its own country, but also supporting the anti colonial movement in Namibia right across the border. And that transition of Namibia into an independent country was negotiated by the United Nations, the US and the USSR in many ways, I think of it as one of the first ways in which the US and the USSR came together as the Cold War was ending to test out how much can we work together now and Namibia in many ways was, I think, a safe place to be way for them to try out this interaction and as one of the parties of the conflict, the Angolan government was involved in these negotiations and started to get to know some of these senior people in the US, the USSR, and the UN and when that process went ahead relatively successfully, that emboldened the USSR, and the UN to say, Okay why don’t we go right across the border and try and sort out what’s happening inside Angola, right? And this was also the point where the US and the USSR were very familiar with the conflict, they had both spent [00:12:00] decades of time, money, attention, troops, fighting in it and as we’re coming in, now we’re in 1989, and the US is no longer really wanting to do this. The USSR is already in the process of collapsing, so they’re both pretty united and like, you know what, let’s wrap this up. Let’s end this. The UN is going wow, ok, we’ve been stopped from doing a lot during the Cold War, especially to end civil wars, because the US or the USSR will just veto anything that goes through the Security Council. Ok, this could be a great opportunity.

[00:12:31] We just got Namibia sorted, we’ve got some momentum here and so that was a lot of the kind of impetus for let’s start negotiations. Portugal volunteered to host the talks and so then the only difficult part was convincing the two Angolan sides to go along with this. Given that until this point a lot of the funding and support had been provided by the USSR, Cuba, and the US and South Africa, without going into too much detail, there was pressure to say, okay, at least talk to each other. You’ve been fighting since [00:13:00] 1975. It’s 1989 now, neither of you are winning. If you really want us to keep supporting you, you’re gonna have to negotiate. And so that’s, I think a big part of why the parties in Angola came to the negotiating table.

[00:13:13] In Mozambique, it’s somewhat similar. It’s happening pretty much at exactly the same time, so all the global dynamics I’ve just described pretty much still apply. But in Mozambique, there was also a key NGO, Sant’Egidio, that was based in the Vatican, but had operated in a bunch of different countries, including in Mozambique, and had been working behind the scenes throughout the 80s to do community, not peace building, but community reconciliation, community toleration to try and improve the everyday lot of a lot of people impacted by the Mozambican conflict.

[00:13:45] And so they’re in some ways in Mozambique, it was like a top down and bottom up effort that sort of met in the middle with Sant’Egidio gaining the trust of key people by their work and commitment on the ground over time. And then these high level supporters saying, you know what? Might be worth [00:14:00] doing at this point.

[00:14:01] In both cases, there’s some differences, but I think the key thing here is the role of external pressure in beginning negotiations. But note the word beginning, because that’s, in a lot of ways, where I think the external pressure stopped being helpful.

[00:14:16] Nalenhle Moyo: In your book, you mention soap, fancy shoes, and toothbrushes, as necessary for successful peace negotiations. How did you come to these details?

[00:14:26] Dr Miranda Melcher: So this was one of the most interesting things I found in doing this research. I knew that a really key part of understanding what had happened here would be trying to, as much as possible, open that black box of what happens in negotiations. And essentially, I read everything I could get my hands on, found all the memoirs, and made kind of a list of who was in these rooms. Who was actually doing the negotiating, whether it was the whole time or just a few sessions, who was in the black box? And then tried to just go talk to them, as many as I could, which was actually a surprising number. That then combined [00:15:00] with the fact that the UN was heavily involved throughout the entire negotiation process and a lot of the implementation of both cases meant that the UN had taken notes, really, of like most of the whole thing, sometimes in quite a lot of detail.

[00:15:14] And the UN archives, which are lovely, they’re in New York, I highly recommend them to anyone doing this kind of research. There were archives to go look at, and I’m talking like committee meeting notes day after day, month after month for years. They’re really in quite a lot of detail. So that’s what I relied on in order to find out these things.

[00:15:31] But what I came to realize is that getting parties to say, okay, yeah, all right, fine, we’ll go to Portugal, we’ll go to Rome, we’ll start negotiating. That’s one thing. And let’s be clear, that’s not a small thing. But that’s not, you then have the whole lot of work to do to actually get to a treaty. So what did that work look like?

[00:15:49] And, to my surprise, it involved a lot of normal human things. For example: how does a rebel get a visa? How [00:16:00] does a rebel get a plane ticket? How does a rebel get a passport? We think of those things as being often quite straightforward, right? You apply for a passport from the government of the country you’re a national of.

[00:16:11] But what if you’re fighting that government and cannot accept its legitimacy, that’s like the whole point of why you’re fighting. Okay, that’s obviously a complication already. How are you meant to get from where you’re fighting, for example in southern Mozambique, to where the negotiations have been agreed in Rome? That’s a kind of practical issue that needs to be resolved. Similarly, the sorts of clothing that one needs to successfully fight an insurgent war versus successfully negotiate to expand one’s political and military rights sitting in the Vatican, one of the most highly decorated spaces in the world, that’s not the same type of clothing.

[00:16:49] Quite bluntly. That’s not the same kind of like daily life. That’s not the same kind of financial needs. And so in fact, those sorts of things became problems. Some of the delegation [00:17:00] coming from the Mozambique rebel group showed up in Rome, eventually, after the passport visa thing had been resolved, and refused to walk, though, into the negotiating room with the government.

[00:17:11] And one of the reasons for it was, they’ve got a whole bunch of lawyers in fancy suits that have been trained to speak that way, and we haven’t. We’ve been sufficiently militarily successful that they cannot beat us and they’re willing to talk to us, but we don’t think we’re going to get taken seriously or have any of our ideas considered if we walk into the room with them, and they laugh at us for wearing practical clothing to fight a war. So we don’t want to go into the room.

[00:17:36] Honestly, when I heard this, I was like, you know what? I see your point. How many of us feel lacking in confidence, feel unprepared, feel nervous, walking into a room when you know you’ve not got the right clothes? How was this solved? The young State Department guy who had been deployed to help with the negotiations took the rebels round and bought them [00:18:00] suits, right? Got fancy shoes. This didn’t immediately magically result in a peace treaty, but it did allow negotiations to continue. Similarly, later on in the process, once the treaty had been signed and combatants from both sides were meant to go into assembly areas in order to either give up their weapons or join the military.

[00:18:22] So these are camps that you’re meant to show up to from wherever you’ve been fighting. and register your name and your ID, and then you stay there usually for sort of six weeks to six or seven months while it’s determined kind of where you’re going to go and arrange for transportation and all that sort of stuff.

[00:18:38] And quite often, these are set up with, tents, with food, that sort of thing. But it’s a kind of standardized military list. As if it could apply to any group of soldiers from anywhere. But, turns out that list is made on the assumption that soldiers coming in are coming in with a certain amount of things.

[00:18:56] Are coming in with kind of a standard military kit. A uniform that [00:19:00] has boots, and a backpack that has a little personal hygiene kit, and whatever. And it turns out that in Mozambique, a lot of the rebel fighters were not coming in with this, right? The rebel organization in Mozambique had not been organized in the sort of highly Soviet militarized way that the government forces had been.

[00:19:18] There weren’t procurement processes to get exactly the right kinds of boots for every single soldier. And when a lot of the combatants realize this, they’re like hang on a second, you want me to stay in this camp for months at a time, and you’re assuming that I’ve brought soap with me, or toothbrushes, or boots, and I don’t have any of those things, and so I’m getting dirty, and I’m getting sick, and I don’t like this, and what, why would I do this? And stop turning up to the camps.

[00:19:43] Now obviously that’s a massive problem, given the kind of agreed timeline for peace and negotiation and processing of people. And it turns out that it was in fact pretty straightforwardly solved by getting a whole bunch of mini toothbrush kits in. this to me was a really fascinating aspect of [00:20:00] making that link between the sort of high politics, high theory level of what is international law, and what are all the complicated phrases that we might put in a peace treaty document and the real actual everyday people.

[00:20:14] And we have to understand and deal with, in my mind, they’re very reasonable requests and needs in order to make that happen. And so a lot of what I did in the book through the use of these archives and these interviews was try and move between these levels in order to understand what’s happening in the black box of negotiation and what impact this has on the ground.

[00:20:38] Nalenhle Moyo: I think I find that very interesting. It talks and looks into human dignity. And when you mentioned that, no one wants to go into a room where they don’t feel confident and they don’t feel that they’re at the same level as the people that they’re negotiating with. And I think it’s something that might be overlooked and not thought about, in this particular issues, because we’re thinking, we just want to have this negotiation [00:21:00] and get it over and done with, without really looking at who are the people we’re negotiating with and what needs do they have.

[00:21:07] Dr Miranda Melcher: Yeah, and we might be talking about things like high level theory, like what style of electoral system should we set up here or how should the parliamentary system be set up and it’s not that those things are not important, but you’re going to have a better negotiation if everyone has lunch, if everyone has water, if after the negotiation people go back to their hotel rooms and they’re not worried about how they’re going to pay for dinner.

[00:21:31] You’re going to be able to talk about all these big issues and come up with agreements on them if people are in a literally like physical human state to be able to engage with these things. And the thing that I found in this research time after time is how much this was overlooked. And one of the interesting things I found in having discussions about the book since it’s come out is hearing from people working on current peace processes and how this particular piece of the book is something that has resonated so [00:22:00] much with people working on current negotiations that are underway, suggesting that although what I’m talking about was happening in the early 90s, these are still very relevant issues.

[00:22:11] Nalenhle Moyo: No, definitely. And I can definitely see why this would be important. Now when we go back to the two case studies in one of the conflicts, the peace treaty was successful and in the other, not so much. And we’ve already talked about security as a factor, but what other lessons did you draw from these differences from the two case studies?

[00:22:31] Dr Miranda Melcher: Yeah, so this is, I think, a really key reason that this was a useful comparison and is definitely one of the key lessons of the book. So I mentioned earlier that Mozambique was watching Angola’s process and made a key change during their negotiations. And this is, I think, one of the big factors that explains why Angola’s first peace treaty did not work.

[00:22:51] Violence erupted within about 18 months to two years of it being signed. A subsequent treaty that was negotiated. pretty much didn’t work from day one. [00:23:00] And then finally, the final treaty that ended the war over 10 years after the first one was a very different kind of treaty. Whereas Mozambique had one treaty that one in the 90s stuck.

[00:23:09] And I think this change is one of the big reasons for that. The change specifically was to do with timelines and elections. So the general way that most peace treaties function is the first goal is to stop the Weidach fighting through a ceasefire. That’s the first thing that’s agreed. The reason that’s done first is the obvious physical violence aspect, but the other reason is that it’s relatively easy to agree, because all a ceasefire is saying is that on this day at this time, we will stop shooting.

[00:23:37] And we’ll stop shooting for an agreed period of time or until something else happens, but it’s not making any, it’s not agreeing to anything else besides stopping shooting. Famously, of course, the Korean War, this is still how the Korean Peninsula is divided, they signed a ceasefire but nothing else.

[00:23:53] The other provisions in a treaty obviously take a lot more wrangling and negotiation. So if we take the [00:24:00] ceasefire then as a starting point, how most modern treaties are designed, including Angola and Mozambique, is through a very complicated timeline of if the ceasefire is day one, what then happens on day two, day three, day four, day five, and it’s about specifying which actions different parties should take in order to achieve other objectives in the treaty.

[00:24:21] So later on in the treaty you might have agreed that, say, this many refugees get to come home. Okay, when is that going to happen? That’s a multi stage process, so you might write into the treaty that, ceasefire plus 80 days, that’s when the first buses get to go from this point to bring people home, etc.

[00:24:37] So this timeline is how all the different pieces get organized together and this timeline is, I think, where a lot of things can go wrong, and did go wrong in both cases, actually, but Mozambique made two key changes that I think made it not as bad. First of all, this timeline is usually designed by diplomats or politicians or lawyers.

[00:24:57] Now, given that my own experience is a lot closer to them than [00:25:00] otherwise, I understand. But, the problem with creating a timeline about people literally achieving actions and moving around is that logistics has to be understood. How big is the road? How many cars can actually go down the road? What sort of condition is the road in?

[00:25:14] All of these things are pretty practical to work out how long it will take to do a certain thing. If you’re saying that this many people need to move from point A to point B, and there isn’t a road between them, or the road is not in very good condition, that’s going to take a radically different amount of time than if there’s a beautiful six lane superhighway that’s ready to go.

[00:25:34] So if you don’t take these things into account when writing the timelines, your timelines just won’t logistically make sense. They might be conceptually in the right order, everyone in the room might be quite happy with them, but as soon as you put them into practice, the whole thing will fall apart pretty quickly because physics is physics.

[00:25:50] Now, a big reason why I think this happens is because people who understand logistics tend not to be in the room for these negotiations, which I think is something that can be improved. [00:26:00] I also think a lot of the people who tend to be good at this kind of logistics are military actors particularly in conflict zones.

[00:26:06] So again, this goes back to my point earlier about bringing the military more into the negotiating rooms themselves. So logistics is really key here, and this is, I think, where it went wrong in Angola. Because they wrote out this big timeline of all the things that are meant to happen, starting with the ceasefire, then combatants moving into camps, then combatants giving up their weapons, then combatants going either into the new army or to civilian life and then elections.

[00:26:34] To resolve the political question once and for all, who gets to be in charge of Angola? I have some qualms about how the elections themselves were designed, but the key thing was that elections would take place on a certain number of days after the ceasefire began. And there was no way built into the treaty to change that timing if delays happened. The goal was for most people to have given up their [00:27:00] weapons before the election, the big political stakes question before that happened. But the timeline didn’t actually make any sense given gravity and physics. So what actually happened is by the time the elections came round, loads of people still had guns and were still organized in their military units.

[00:27:18] And inevitably, given the design of the election, when one side lost and was upset about it, it was very easy to restart the war, because clearly, in their minds, the peace had not achieved what they wanted. The key change that Mozambique made is they had the exact same timeline, which also didn’t really work, but, watching what happened in Angola, they said, if we get to 60 days out from the day of the election and the disarmament goals that we set for ourselves, if they’ve not been achieved, then the UN can decide to delay elections for a year.

[00:27:57] And we continue all the agreed on steps that are supposed to happen [00:28:00] before the elections, but we allow ourselves more time to achieve them. Sure enough, that’s exactly what needed to happen, and the elections were delayed. Now the result was pretty much exactly the same. The elections were designed in the same way with the same problems, only one side won, the side that didn’t win was not particularly happy about it, but they didn’t have their guns by that point. So that’s a really key change here.

[00:28:22] The other change is around how delays are treated. Inevitably when delays happen, whichever side is less responsible for that particular delay tends to try and make political leverage out of it and go well hang on a second, they’ve not done what they said they’ve done, I should get more privileges, or they should be punished, or et cetera et cetera, this happens literally all the time, this is what those UN archives made very clear how often this happened but then something has to be done about these complaints, and this is I think another key area for flexibility.

[00:28:53] In the Angolan case, a committee was set up where these complaints could be taken to that had representatives from each side of the conflict [00:29:00] and the UN. But the UN was only allowed to observe the meeting, observe the complaints, hear the complaints. They weren’t allowed to actually decide things like, you know what, in this case, you need to calm down over here, they’re doing their best, but the road’s not that good, right?

[00:29:16] Or actually, you’re really dragging your feet on purpose, and so we’re going to adjust things. They could just observe. Whereas in Mozambique, same committee, same setup, but the UN had essentially the deciding vote. And this, I think, allowed for a lot more flexibility when inevitable delays actually happened because the UN, given that they weren’t really beholden to either side, were seen as being much more fairly able to say, you know what, I’m going to give you an extra 10 days and the other side, you’re just going to have to be okay with that because I’m not doing it to get, I’m not doing it to benefit them politically, we’re doing this in service of the peace.

[00:29:51] And so I think these two changes, both of which were about building flexibility into the treaty are a [00:30:00] huge part of why one of them worked and one of them didn’t.

[00:30:04] Nalenhle Moyo: So we spoke earlier about the involvement of other organizations and countries. And now that you’ve mentioned the UN, maybe we can speak a bit more on the extent of ownership of the local versus the extent of ownership that lay on the UN. And would you say it was still a negotiated peace treaty or it was an imposed one?

[00:30:25] Dr Miranda Melcher: So I think that although the negotiations started from external pressure, as we’ve discussed there was a lot more local ownership and involvement as things continued. In some ways in Angola, this was because, what I just mentioned, the UN not having a deciding vote, so that actually severely limited the power that the UN could have.

[00:30:43] But even in the Mozambican case, although the UN had a deciding vote the UN peacekeeping mission’s job was to implement the treaty. The UN peacekeeping mission hadn’t written the treaty so they were essentially handed it and said, okay, go make this happen and it was very much the [00:31:00] UN mission commander, I think also had a very important role as he saw himself as like, his goal was to make this document work and that meant working with both sides, that meant understanding what they actually needed to make that happen. For example, if we go back to the idea of soap and toothbrushes in the camps rather than going, Hang on, why aren’t people turning up? I’m gonna get really upset with you, and you’re no longer, you’re disobeying the thing, you’re betraying the peace.

[00:31:25] Instead, he sent his deputy to be like, hey, what’s up? Are you guys okay? What’s happening? And his deputy was the one who actually realized about the soap and the tissues, and so their attitude when he reported this back was not, oh no, your soldiers just need to get over it and do what they’ve said, it was, oh, toothpaste, okay, how do we get some toothpaste down here?

[00:31:46] And so I think that was a key part of it as well. But if they hadn’t had that kind of designed in deciding vote, then I’m not sure how much personality of difference would have made, but I think as much as the beginnings were more externally imposed, [00:32:00] it didn’t stay that way.

[00:32:03] Nalenhle Moyo: I’d like to put you on the spot now. There’s a horrifying and brutal civil war being fought in Yemen. And there have been multiple credible accusations of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the course of that conflict.

[00:32:14] If you were engaged by the conflict parties to help them lead through the process of negotiating, how would you do it? And what would you say to them?

[00:32:23] Dr Miranda Melcher: So I think what I’d emphasize is the kind of two points that I’ve made so far around flexibility and dignity. Especially in the negotiations themselves, thinking about dignity and there really, I think, isn’t too granular a level to go to, in the rooms where people are negotiating, do they all have water, right?

[00:32:40] That sounds so obvious, but I really think is worth thinking about things like how do people get to negotiations? Where are they held? Who’s invited? How are people prepared? For example, a really common one is a government, an internationally recognized government, has much more automatic access to things like lawyers through, for example, utilizing UN [00:33:00] membership.

[00:33:00] Even if they’re a hated government, by virtue of being the internationally recognized one, they can walk into headquarters in New York and ask for various kinds of support. Rebels can’t do that. As much as they might be cause celeb or anything like that, they don’t have that same sort of institutional access.

[00:33:15] And it’s a pretty different skill set trying to fight a war versus trying to sit in a room with a whole bunch of paper with a whole bunch of very specific legal phrases and negotiate one. And it’s not a given that one person has both of these sets of skills or that you could expect that someone who’s good on the battlefield will automatically, without any help, be good in the sort of hotel conference room.

[00:33:37] And so thinking about that aspect, if we really want to negotiate peace, do all sides who are at the negotiating table feel actually able to engage in that discussion in a way that they’re going to be willing to actually talk about stuff, right? Dignity, I think, is a huge part of this.

[00:33:55] In terms of the actual things you write down in the treaty, this goes back to the point I was just making [00:34:00] around flexibility. There’s no way that everything can be predicted about what’s going to happen after the treaty is signed. You cannot imagine every possible eventuality and write in, if this happens, do this. If this happens, then that. There’s no way to write a list that covers everything. Instead, I think the key is deciding in the treaty negotiations, how will you deal with stuff that comes up? Now, what happened in both of these cases happens to be the same tool, which is we’re going to have a committee, it will meet weekly, it will be chaired by the UN, and we’ll have equal representation from both sides.

[00:34:32] There’s probably other ways to do it as well, but deciding how are we going to deal with the inevitable problems that we cannot yet imagine, that I think is incredibly key to do beforehand, because then when the thing actually happens, instead of having to fight about how are we going to deal with it, you already know how you’re going to deal with it.

[00:34:51] Then you go fight about, okay I want this solution, I want that solution. Fine! But at least you’re not debating whether or not it can be discussed in the first place. [00:35:00] And so those are the kind of the two things, one in terms of procedure and one in terms of tools and mechanisms that I think are the most transferable beyond Angola and Mozambique.

[00:35:10] Nalenhle Moyo: Okay, let’s go back to the conversation around access to justice. Which is just access central topic. Your book focuses on some big political and geopolitical themes as contributed to successful peace processes, external support for the processes, you and involvement, security elections and so on. Were there any insights on access to justice for us to take away?

[00:35:37] Dr Miranda Melcher: So this is something that I don’t focus a huge amount on directly in the book. If you did a fine search for in the book the phrase access to justice, it’s probably not there. But I do think that these points particularly around dignity are actually about justice, are actually about human justice, are about ensuring that agency and ideas can actually be expressed.

[00:35:58] And that if our goal here is for people [00:36:00] to express differences of opinion through non violent means, which I think is a huge way in which we can achieve access to justice for more people, is to reduce the amount of violence as a way of resolving disputes, we need to take seriously the conditions that are created in order for people to express things in a non violent way.

[00:36:17] And I think that is about justice and dignity on an individual level, but that can then scale up to the community and even national level beyond that.

[00:36:27] Nalenhle Moyo: So would you say you see a role for access to justice and helping to bring about the next round of successful peace negotiations?

[00:36:35] Dr Miranda Melcher: I would hope so. I would hope that these findings are of interest and of use to those engaged in that kind of work and just to plug that I’d be very happy to talk to anyone interested in it about it further.

[00:36:45] Nalenhle Moyo: Great. So as we wrap up we want to know, we are definitely going to hear from you soon on the Just Access podcast, but beyond that, what’s next for you?

[00:36:54] Dr Miranda Melcher: This is something obviously I’ve been working on for a very long time, so I’m probably going to [00:37:00] continue to think about it rather a lot. But you’ll certainly hear me back as host of the Just Access podcast, I’ll continue my work over at the New Books Network as well and I’m very much hoping to continue the conversations about this book and the work within it.

[00:37:13] So I think for the next little while, that’s going to be my focus.

[00:37:17] Nalenhle Moyo: All right. Thank you, Miranda.

Outro

[00:37:20] Dr Miranda Melcher: It has been such a pleasure to share with you some of the work I’ve been doing over the last few years, but don’t worry, I’ll be back as host as usual for the future episodes.

[00:37:32] If you’re enjoying the Just Access podcast, please tell your friends, like us and share us on social media, and please rate us and leave us a review on your favourite podcast app. We love to hear what you think, and we really do read every single review, it helps us get the word out about the podcast and know what you’re liking about the show.

[00:37:49] You can also get in touch with us more directly with your comments, reflections, or suggestions for people or topics we should cover by contacting us at podcast at just-access.de, that’s [00:38:00] podcast at just-access.de. Until next time!

[00:38:06]