“Bringing fighters together” A Comparative Study of Peacebuilding and Transitional Justice in Angola and Mozambique

In the aftermath of a civil war leading to democratization, transitional justice (TJ) will hardly ever be seen as a story of “the good against the evil”. The specificities of civil wars bring to the forefront the intricate connection between TJ and peacebuilding, namely DDR (Sriram, 2004; Huyse and Salter, 2008; Sriram et al, 2009; Berdal and Ucko, 2009). But why is it that when using roughly the same tools (DDR programmes, amnesties, truth commissions etc.) some peace-building processes are more successful than others? In the African context, besides from the classical transitional justice factors (transition modes, residual strength of the outgoing regime, pervasiveness of human rights discourse, diffusion effects) these processes can be better understood with an emphasis on the cultural dimension (Vaughan, 2005; Huyse and Salter, 2008). This paper focuses on how TJ tools and peacebuilding processes intersected in the cases of Angola and Mozambique, two former Portuguese colonies that submerged in brutal civil wars following their controversial decolonization processes – while in the latter, the 1992 peace accords were successful, in the former, the civil war was protracted until 2002. By analyzing Angola and Mozambique’s peace accords, specialists’ reports and secondary literature, the paper puts forward some tentative explanations on the relevance of DDR programmes in combination with other tools for promoting peace and democracy in these countries. As the paper will show, traditional leaders have frequently stepped in as substitutes for official strategies of confronting the past, deserving further attention and analysis by students of transitional justice.