Social Science Research Council

Profiling a New Effort to Secure Peace in the Casamance, Senegal
By Joanna Davidson

On September 26th, just before midnight, a Senegalese ferry carrying more than a thousand passengers from Ziguinchor to Dakar crashed and ultimately sank off the Gambian coast. The survivors, rescued by Senegalese and Gambian authorities, totaled fewer than seventy. Another fifty or so corpses were recovered. The rest of the passengers - many of them children - are presumed dead. As the tragedy was reported around the globe on the following day, international attention focused briefly on this otherwise obscure region. Radio broadcasts described the wailing crowds at Ziguinchor's port, searching for scraps of information about their loved ones. Journalists and listeners, many of them for the first time, tried to twist their tongues around that odd-sounding name of the southern Senegalese city that was the epicenter of misfortune for the moment.

It has become increasingly clear that the ferry tragedy was due to negligence on the part of Senegalese authorities who ignored safety regulations regarding maximum capacity (set at 550 passengers) and continued to board both passengers and cargo far beyond safe limits.(1) Although the ferry accident is the single most catastrophic episode in recent Senegalese history, it is not the first time that Casamançais (as residents of Senegal's southern region are called) have suffered due to State neglect. As international attention shifted elsewhere, southern Senegal was left once again to mourn for its dead, both from the ferry disaster and the violent conflict that has plagued this region for the past twenty years. In many ways, the intensity of international concern for the victims and mourners of the accident served to expose the lack of attention, both national and international, typically bestowed upon this area.

This lack of attention, according to some analysts, is the wellspring that has fed the armed conflict in southern Senegal since 1982. The Casamance, as this 300 km long strip of Senegal sandwiched between The Gambia and Guinea-Bissau is known, is geographically cut off from Senegal's seat of power in Dakar. This physical isolation has resulted in social, political and economic inequity between Senegal's north and south, both during the French colonial administration and in the post-independence era. The difference between north and south also extends to ethnic and historic realms: the majority ethnic group in the Casamance - the Diola - are decentralized wet-rice farmers who, until the Islamicization of northern Diola (between the Casamance River and the Gambian border) in the 1930s, practiced a religion based on a local spirit shrines.(2) These societies contrast starkly with northern Senegal's hierarchical, centralized, and longstanding Islamic peoples. Moreover, during European expansion in the Senegambia, the primary influence in the Casamance was Portuguese. The French did not establish their colonial authority in the region until the mid-1800s, after a series of agreements arranged between the French and Portuguese states.

Even with increasing administrative influence directed from Dakar (first from the French, then from the postcolonial state), Casamançais continued to be more closely aligned with their southern neighbors and ethnic kin across the Guinea-Bissau border. Nonetheless, they could not help but notice the increasing disparity between state resources devoted to the north, and the almost complete lack of investment and development in the south. The Casamance is Senegal's most fertile region, and most food produced in the country comes from this area. But lack of roads in the region and expropriation of land by the State and northern Senegalese immigrants fostered a sense of exploitation of the south by the north.

As an attempt to address this widening sense of regional inequity, the Mouvement des Forces Démocratiques de la Casamance (MFDC) was founded as a political party in 1947, not with an overtly separatist agenda, but with the interests of the Casamance as its animating purpose. After Senegal became independent in 1960, the MFDC was absorbed into the single party state. But the development of the Casamance continued to lag behind the rest of Senegal, and persistent requests from the Casamançais for even the most basic infrastructural investments were routinely ignored by Dakar. In 1982, Abbé Augustin Diamacoune Senghor - a Catholic priest - revived the MFDC, this time as a movement whose aim was to fight for Casamance independence from Senegal. While the kernel of discontent was still largely economic disparity within the state, Casamançais had become fed up with northern Senegalese dominance, and demanded the right - staked on often sketchy historical ground - to be an autonomous political entity.

Thus began the "Casamance Conflict." Riots broke out in Ziguinchor in December 1982, and Senegalese troops were sent in to restore state control. Dakar assumed it would take about one week to resolve the conflict, discipline its leaders, and put an end to the idea of Casamance independence. Twenty years and several peace accords later, there is still an active conflict in the region, and, while the intensity of violence has waxed and waned over the years, there is no doubt that the Casamance's population (as well as those of its immediate neighbors) continues to suffer severe disruption and instability in their daily lives. Like other longtime war zones, the conflict has become entrenched and institutionalized into the structure of Casamance society, and violence has become, to some extent, routine. Particular people are profiting from the disruption, and thus have a personal interest in maintaining business as usual. For most of the past twenty years, Dakar's treatment of the "Casamance problem" has centered on a series of military campaigns, many of them taking on a scorched earth quality.(3) While neighboring countries have hosted and brokered a series of ceasefire agreements throughout the 1990s, each one of these has failed shortly after its signatories returned home. During this time, Casamance "rebels" increased their attacks on civilians unsympathetic to their cause, and roadside armed banditry spread throughout the region. Perhaps the most widely publicized episode involved the 1995 disappearance of four French tourists from Cap Skiring, a Casamance resort town. During the last few years, the movement has become increasingly factionalized, and MFDC leaders contend that they no longer have control over combatants "in the bush."(4)

Even though this is one of the longest lasting conflicts on the continent, relatively little is known about it. Most people outside West Africa have never heard of Ziguinchor or the Casamance, and there have been very few international attempts to intervene. Due to security risks, most NGOs left the area soon after the conflict erupted, leaving only humanitarian agencies, like the Red Cross and Catholic Relief Services, to attend to the immediate and often overwhelming relief needs of the population. Recently, though, a new player has entered this scene. In October 2001, World Education, a non-governmental organization based in Boston, Massachusetts, established a pilot program to bring about the conditions for a lasting peace in the Casamance.

World Education was founded in 1952 as a literacy project in Allahabad, India, with their sights set on becoming a world leader in non-formal, participatory education. Since then, they have opened programs in nearly four dozen countries, and, in so doing, they have "broadened the scope of needs that participatory education can address."(5) Programs in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, most of them funded primarily by USAID, have addressed economic disparity, gender inequity, and basic health and welfare. But the Ziguinchor office is the first to be directly involved in conflict resolution. Such a shift in institutional orientation reflects the careful - albeit slow - process of internal evaluation, and the increasing conviction on the part of World Education's leaders that education and other development efforts are meaningless without a certain measure of peace.

The World Education-Ziguinchor program is directed by Abdou Sarr, a native of Senegal and a veteran of NGOs and international development efforts in the Casamance and throughout Senegal. Supported by a modest staff of seven, and a relatively small USAID grant, Sarr believes that World Education's Ziguinchor program can succeed where previously peace accords have failed. Ceasefire agreements, he contends, are the easiest part of the peace process. But "peace accords mean nothing if the people do not agree… durable peace starts with community peace."(6)

The vast majority of communities in the Casamance - primarily Diola wet-rice agricultural settlements, each village made up of approximately 500 to 5,000 residents - have deep internal rifts among the inhabitants. Some of these problems pre-date the Casamance conflict; the Diola are famous for centuries of internecine fighting. But the Casamance conflict has exacerbated the intra-village tensions, and often residents of the same or neighboring villages have not spoken to each other for twenty years. The kind of mistrust and misinformation that permeate social relations in the Casamance is easily exploited by people whose primary interest is to keep the conflict alive. In order to break this cycle, World Education starts at the level of each community, hosting a series of events to address community relations, air grievances, and begin to build the requisite trust to work together in curtailing the violence. Participants in these activities have commented that this process, while directed at resolving problems pertaining to the Casamance conflict, is also helping people tackle the tensions that existed many years before the MFDC spearheaded the 1982 riots.

The originality of World Education's project, relative to others in the region, is its omnivorous approach to establishing partnerships. In addition to working directly with community members, World Education has extended its reach to include a series local and national entities -farmer's associations, youth groups, all levels of the MFDC, Senegalese army officials and combatants, the State, people who are fighting in the bush, department prefects, and powerful traditional leaders, such as kings, queens, and sacred forest elders. These partners are involved in shaping and implementing activities in each community. Another cornerstone principle of the program is its commitment to transparency and proactive communication with all participants. Sarr notes that "Everyone from Dakar to Mlomp is communicated with at all administrative levels" about World Education's activities.(7)

World Education's flagship activity to date has been a series of "cultural weekends." These are multi-day events in each village involving ice-breaking activities among estranged community members, open fora to address longstanding divisions, and commitments by various players in the conflict to stop the violence. The first day is devoted to celebration and festivity. Dancing, traditional wrestling, soccer, and feasting comprise an attempt - for many the first in twenty years - to bring the community together around a positive objective. During the second day, World Education staff hosts a public forum in which many participants have a chance to speak. Sarr observes that during these activities, "For the first time, all actors are in the same place at the same time: the State, the MFDC, the army, traditional leaders…"(8) The goal of the forum is to have opinion leaders who have been on opposing sides of the conflict all make the same verbal commitment to peace. Sarr is convinced that "if all opinion leaders say out loud that the war is over" then people will follow their example.(9)

Cultural weekends move, like a road show, from village to village throughout the Casamance, but, while they are focused on one village at a time, members of other villages are welcome to attend. In fact, this has been an unexpected occurrence as the activity moves across the region: members of a village that just hosted a cultural weekend will show up at the following one, primarily to corroborate their experience from the previous weekend. Through the cultural weekends, World Education is hoping to mend longstanding divisions within each village; the next step is to address the same issues across many villages. The ultimate goal is to create a general popular will to end the violence, which is a more effective assurance of peace than yet another ceremoniously signed ceasefire.

Sarr's prediction is that, within three or four years, the Casamance conflict will be over. Given increased MFDC factionalization, dissenting opinions and meddling involvement from MFDC contingents in Europe, and continued Casamance isolation from Dakar (especially now that the Ziguinchor-Dakar ferry route is out of commission), this seems rather optimistic. It is still too early to meaningfully evaluate the impact of World Education's presence in the region, and the aftermath of the recent ferry disaster may very well disrupt the peace process. But even if the goal takes longer to achieve than Sarr's sanguine forecast, the very process of attaining it is already putting into place a method and a mentality that can serve Casamançais in areas beyond those pertaining directly to the war. By catalyzing the effort for communities to broach - and ideally solve - common problems, World Education's work can potentially create the tools and capacity for future development processes, something that is sorely lacking in the region.

(1) The Senegalese navy runs the ferry.
(2) Diola populations in the southern Casamance and Guinea-Bissau have resisted Islamic conversion, and the majority continues to practice the traditional spirit-based religion.
(3) Senegal's current president - Abdoulaye Wade - has shown some positive signs of reversing previous State-sponsored policies and practices in the Casamance, and has expressed keen interest in addressing Casamance grievances.
(4) There are ongoing debates as to the "ethnic character" of the Casamance conflict. While the MFDC was not founded on the basis of ethnic solidarity, the majority of its constituency is Diola, reflecting the cultural composition of the region. The primary grievances of the MFDC are regionally based economic ones, but there is no doubt that the conflict has a decidedly Diola cast.
(5) P. Carey Reid, "The Enduring Vision of World Education: Popular Participation for Sustainable Communities," World Education 2000; p. 72.
(6) Interview with Abdou Sarr, September 5, 2002; Ziguinchor, Senegal.
(7) Interview with Abdou Sarr, September 5, 2002; Ziguinchor, Senegal.
(8) Interview with Abdou Sarr, September 5, 2002; Ziguinchor, Senegal.
(9) Interview with Abdou Sarr, September 5, 2002; Ziguinchor, Senegal.