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Middle East Human Geography Focus Introduction: With the Cold War having ended, there is a real possibility that countries such as El Salvador that served as Cold War battlegrounds will again be relegated to the back burner of American political scholarship. The central argument of this report is that marginalizing El Salvador's recent political history would be a mistake because this history contains a large number of important lessons for ongoing U. S. peacemaking efforts in conflicts such as those in Bosnia, Northern Ireland, and the Middle East. Three specific questions are addressed: First, how were the parties to this conflict able, after a brutal, decade-long civil war that had polarized their country, to achieve a negotiated peace settlement? Second, five years after the 1992 peace accord, what obstacles remain to an enduring peace settlement?
Third, while the El Salvadoran civil war had unique features that will not be present in other violent civil conflicts, what are the lessons of the El Salvadoran peace process for peacemakers in such conflicts? In the 1979 edition of the standard textbook on politics in Latin America, Latin American Politics and Development, edited by Howard J. Ward and Harvey F. Kline, one contributor noted that El Salvador had the dubious distinction of being the Latin American country least studied by U. S.
political scientists. Whatever its other merits, the major U. S. involvement in El Salvador's 198 1992 civil war did result in a virtual explosion of writings on El Salvador by American political scientists. With the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the 1992 peace accord in El Salvador there is a good possibility that, having had its fifteen minutes of fame, El Salvador will again be relegated to the back burner of American political scholarship along with such other briefly famous countries as Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Chile, South Africa, and the Congo. The central argument of this article is that marginalizing El Salvador's recent political history would be a major mistake because the El Salvadoran transition from civil strife to civil peace (the subtitle of Dr.
Tommie Sue Montgomery's excellent book Revolution in El Salvador) contains a large number of important lessons for ongoing U. S. peacemaking efforts in conflicts such as those in Bosnia, Northern Ireland, and the Middle East. Such lessons about violent conflict always come at a high price in lives and treasure; by applying the lessons of El Salvador to ongoing violent conflicts it is to be hoped that such a costly learning process will not have to be repeated elsewhere. In this report we are going to talk about these three questions: How were the parties to the El Salvadoran conflict able, after a brutal, decade-long civil war that had polarized their country, to achieve a negotiated peace settlement?
Five years after the 1992 peace accord, what obstacles remain to an enduring peace settlement? Finally, while fully recognizing that, like every violent civil conflict, the El Salvadoran civil war had unique features that will not be present in other violent civil conflicts, what are the lessons of the El Salvadoran peace process for peacemakers in other civil conflicts? Discussion: A recent book has called the process of negotiations that resulted in an end to apartheid in South Africa in 1992 a miracle. (n 1) In light of how ominous the political-military situation in El Salvador appeared in 1989 it can equally well be said that that countrys 1992 peace accord was a miracle. Specifically, in 1989 the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), the party founded by El Salvador's oligarchy, won the presidency, thereby seemingly ending any hope of a negotiated settlement with the Marxist-Leninist Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN). Hopes for a negotiated peace were apparently further dissipated by the Fmln's massive offensive in November 1989 -- an offensive that has been called the El Salvadoran Tet.
A particularly disheartening aspect of that offensive for those who wanted an end to human rights abuses was the E] Salvadoran militarys murder of six Jesuit priests and their housekeeper. Discouraged U. S. military officers wondered if their El Salvadoran counterparts would ever understand that such gross human rights violations did their cause no good that, to paraphrase a famous saying of Talleyrand's, such human rights atrocities were worse than a crime, they are a mistake! (n 2) And yet three years later a negotiated peace accord was signed by all parties to the conflict; and despite some continuing difficulties to he discussed below, is still holding up five years after it was signed. In explaining this remarkable turn of events there are five key factors that must be highlighted and analyzed. First, the 1989 FMLN offensive starkly dramatized the fact that the military situation was stalemated; specifically, while this offensive showed that the FMLN had the ability to launch a major, sustained, countrywide offensive it also showed that the EI Salvadoran military was strong enough to indefinitely prevent the FMLN from being able to stage the sort of victorious final offensive that the Nicaraguan Sandinista's had launched in July 1979.
This perception by both sides that they could not win a total victory on the battlefield was reinforced by a second factor, namely, that the outside supporters of the two sides began to scale down their levels of assistance. By 1989 Mikhail Gorbachev had been in power for four years and it was clear to all that Cold War was winding down. This perception of a fading Cold War meant that human rights violations that the U. S. Congress and public had grudgingly accepted in the days of the struggle with the evil empire were no longer acceptable; after the 1989 murders of the Jesuits and their housekeeper, the U. S.
Congress cut military aid to El Salvador in half. The FMLN also suffered major erosion of its outside support. In the spring of 1990 the Sandinista's were defeated in the Nicaraguan elections by Violet Chamorro's United National Opposition, thereby cutting off a crucial base by which arms had been smuggled to the FMLN. Moreover, the Soviet Union had already drastically scaled down its support to the Cubans and the Nicaraguans, so there was much less that Nicaragua and Cuba could afford to do for the FMLN. This diminished involvement in El Salvador gave rise to a third important factor encouraging a negotiated settlement: With the superpowers losing interest, an opening was created for various other international actors to do what they had tried to do (with little success) during the Cold Want mediate a negotiated settlement of the conflict. This third force of international actors included international organizations like the United Nations and the Organization of American States, nongovernmental organizations like the Catholic Church and various human rights groups, and Latin American governments and leaders such as those of Mexico and Costa Rica.
This collection of mediating actors lacked the sort of military and economic resources available to the superpowers, but they had one resource the superpowers lacked: legitimacy in the eyes of both ARENA and the FMLN. A fourth factor was that people on both sides of the conflict began to feel that armed force was not the best way to achieve their political objectives, that these objectives could be better attained via democratic processes. In the case of the rebels the despair of any hope of democratic change that so many political activists felt after the oligarchy annulled the 1972 election gradually eroded as it became clear during the 1980 s that the close supervision of the electoral process by a number of outside monitoring groups, while not producing perfectly clean elections, was preventing a repetition of the stolen election of 1972. As a result, as the 1980 s went on there was a steady defection of El Salvadoran democratic activists from the rebels back to the government side. (n 3) With respect to the conservative groups in El Salvador, the steadily improving electoral success of the ARENA party as the 1980 s progressed, culminating in the victory of ARENA presidential candidate Alfredo Christian in the 1989 presidential election, convinced many F, 1 Salvadoran rightists that they too could compete electorally and hence need not fear democratic elections. Put differently, the conservative forces in El Salvador learned the hard way in the 1970 s and 1980 s a lesson that had always been clear to Latin American revolutionaries like Ernesto she Guevara, namely, that free and open elections hinder the development of revolutionary movements. As Guevara put it in his book Guerrilla Warfare, When a government has come into power through some sort of popular vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of constitutional legality, the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities of peaceful struggle have not yet been exhausted. (n 4) A final, and crucially important, factor allowing a negotiated settlement in El Salvador's civil war was that there is a sense among most El Salvadorans, whatever their political beliefs, that they have a shared political destiny.
Dr. Tommie Sue Montgomery, a widely respected U. S. student of El Salvadoran politics, has described witnessing active duty officers conversing amiably at parties with former refuel leaders, business ventures organized by former guerrillas and retired officers, and former guerrilla commanders working in a cooperative spirit with ARENA representatives in the countrys Legislative Assembly. (n 5) The importance of such a sense of shared political destiny can perhaps best be demonstrated by looking at countries and regions where it is lacking. For example, despite very elaborate constitutional provisions to guarantee the rights of both its Greek and Turkish communities, Cyprus collapsed into civil war in 1963 after only three years of independence.
There was no sense of a common Cypriot identity; instead, Greek Cypriots focused their political loyalties on Greece while Turkish Cypriots focused their political loyalties on Turkey. Similarly, in Northern Ireland, the two religious communities focus their political loyalties toward outside nations; the Catholics identify with the Republic of Ireland and the Protestants identify with Great Britain. Given this lack of any sense of political community in Cyprus and Northern Ireland, it is not surprising that the civil conflicts that broke out in each country during the 1960 s were severe enough to require the intervention of outside military forces, which, some thirty years later, are still there. The successful negotiation of a peace accord in El Salvador in 1992 is no guarantee, however, that there cannot be a relapse into civil conflict. The contemporary world scene offers a multitude of examples of peace processes that are in danger of collapsing. In Bosnia there is every reason to believe that if the United States withdraws its forces in June 1998 (and, as they have said they would, the other NATO members also withdraw their forces) that the 1995 Dayton peace accord will unravel and that the civil war will resume.
In the Middle East the extremists on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute may yet, through their acts of terrorism, destroy the Oslo peace accords. (n 6) And while the Irish Republican Army declared a cease-fire in July 1997, there can be no assurance that this cease-fire will hold up if the peace talks continue to be stalemated. The peace process in El Salvador also is confronted with major problems. The two most serious of these are the countrys very high levels of criminal violence and the question of whether the ARENA party will peacefully acquiesce should the FMLN win a presidential election in coming elections. The current homicide rate in El Salvador is almost as high as it was during the worst days of the death squads. (n 7) A public opinion survey in June and July of 1996 found that some 79 percent of the respondents identified violent crime as the number one problem they faced. (n 8) Violence at such high levels would be a serious problem for any democratic society; violence can well be called the cancer of democracy. There are many examples in the twentieth century of democratic governments collapsing and being replaced by authoritarian regimes because they were unable to maintain an adequate degree of law and order. For example, the democratic government in Uruguay was replaced by a military regime in 1972 / 1973 because the democratic government had proved itself incapable of defeating the Tupamaro urban guerillas. (n 9) The 1973 coup in Chile against the Salvador Allende government had a number of causes, but one clear reason for the (at least initially) considerable public support for the coup was that much of the Chilean population was angered by the violence engaged in by some of Allendes supporters. (n 10) Similarly, the military coup in...
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Research essay sample on Middle East Human Geography Part 1
