Natural Resources and Violent Conflict - WaterWiki.net

218 philippe le billonmajor Western powers and their oil companies once it was establishedthat UNITA had lost the elections and was unable to gain powerthrough military means.Finally, resource wealth can prolong conflict by weakening theprospects for third-party peace mediation. Access to resources can actas a divisive factor among international players. Bilateral actors areinclined to accommodate domestic interests in order to secure commercialbenefits for their corporations. In addition, the ability of the belligerentsto draw on private financial flows decreases the potentialleverage that multilateral agencies (for example, the International MonetaryFund, the World Bank, and the United Nations) exercise throughgrants and loans. In many contemporary armed conflicts, private capitalinflows have assumed greater importance than foreign assistance,especially in comparison with conflicts during the cold war era.Although access to resource revenues can contribute to prolongingconflicts, curtailing belligerents’ access to resource revenues does notautomatically ensure that a war will be shorter or have a less harmfulimpact on populations. First, belligerents lacking access to resourcesmay intensify predation and attacks on civilian populations. However,there does not seem to be a clear correspondence between access toresource wealth by belligerents and attacks on civilians. In theory, largescalerevenues can allow belligerents to shift from a war of terror targeting“soft targets” such as civilians to a conventional type of conflictmore respectful of the laws of war. In practice, however, wealthy rebelgroups such as the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leoneand UNITA have used widespread terror tactics against civilians.Second, resources can allow a party to settle a conflict by winning thewar. Massive oil revenues allowed the Angolan government to mounta decisive military campaign between 1999 and 2002 against UNITA,which was unable to exchange its significant stockpiles of diamonds forarms and logistical support. Ironically, UNITA’s diamond wealth mayhave encouraged it to pursue a bold but ultimately self-defeating strategyof conventional warfare (Malaquias 2001).Third, internal competition over resource revenues can also underminethe cohesion of armed groups and facilitate their fragmentationand ultimate demise. As a Khmer Rouge commander noted, “The bigproblem with getting our funding from business [rather than China]was to prevent an explosion of the movement because everybody likesto do business and soldiers risked doing more business than fighting.” 4In order to prevent such “explosion,” or fragmentation, the KhmerRouge fully supported soldiers and their families, tightly controlledcross-border movements, and supervised business dealings by localunits.