Política monetaria para el año 2002 (Programa monetario del BCRP)

By the time the accord was signed, Nanun was slowly getting back on its feet. The economy of Nanun was in shatters, but with free movement of its citizens guaranteed, yam cultivation recovered and markets reopened. NGOs (notably the Catholic Relief Services and Assemblies of God Relief and Development Ser- vices) had a significant role in reconstruction. However, directly after the peace accord, many NGOs turned their backs on Nanun and centred their activities in the regional capital Tamale where some of them unleashed a competition for Assefa’s heritage. When an Oxfam team assessed the situation in the former conflict zone in September 1996, they saw development projects in disrepair (Van der Linde & Naylor 1999: 63).

Government control came about only piecemeal, leaning much on security forces. A large military/police contingent of Operation Gongong IV has stayed in Nanun up to date, still protecting a ban on the use of firearms.104 The Nanumba District Assembly (DA) gradually started to gain control over its citizens, again or at last. With the assistance of the military presence, the DA forced thousands of internally displaced Nanumba to return to their villages, but revenue collection

104

NDA/L/11/v.3/208 Registrar Nanumba Traditional Council to The Sector Commander (04-06-2001) ‘Permit to Use Fire Arms’; NDA/L/11/v.3/207 Registrar Nanumba Traditional Council to The Divi- sional Commander (04-06-2001) ‘Application for Police Assistance’.

did not recommence until late 1997. Dozens of destroyed schools and clinics had not yet opened as late as 1996.105

In September 1996, President Rawlings and the PPNT ‘reconciled’ Konkomba and Nanumba in a Bimbilla school park, the last but according to KOYA the most important of three ceremonies.106 _{Compared to similar ceremonies in Yendi}

(December 1994) and Salaga (May 1996), there was little media attention to the Bimbilla reconciliation. In Nanun, I found a complete silence about the ceremony too, and my interlocutors said ‘it was just politics’ or ‘I was not there’. Several NGO executives who attended to the ceremony also reflected on it as ‘not from the heart’ or ‘a political rally’.

In this ceremony, the issue of divergent reconciliation rites was solved in a construction in which the Bimbilla earth priest (Jahanfo Sirikpamo) with the assistance from a Konkomba elder, poured libation for peace, after which they sacrificed a white cock and white ram on behalf of Nanumba and a red cock and brown goat on behalf of Konkomba, to ask the earth for forgiveness.107 After that, Konkomba and Nanumba women planted a peace tree in the Bimbilla market (which died during dry season because no-one watered it). Rawlings spoke about development in Ghana, which KOYA and NAYA Presidents re- peated. KOYA President Isaac Sukpen said that: ‘It’s sad to recall events which started in 1981 and quickly tore apart a once happy family of farmers and fishermen in a fertile and highly productive District.’ But he continued that ‘nothing can stop us from marching in peace as one people to help the District recapture its position as the leading food producers and the most peaceful in the country’.108 This speech marked the beginning of a peace in which Konkomba and Nanumba spokesman would emphasise technocratic development.

105 _{GT (02-04-1996) ‘GES Demands Report on Closed Nanumba Schools’; GT (01-04-1996) ‘Nanumba}

Schools Hit by Shortage of Teachers’; GT (20-09-1997) ‘Nanumba, Konkomba Chiefs Enforce Peace Process’.

106 _{Both these reconciliation ceremonies were tense due to disagreements over sacrificial requirements.}

Both ‘traditional’ reconciliations were marked by a mishmash of Christian, Muslim and ‘traditional’ performances and what came close to a political rally. GBC (20-12-1994) ‘Dagombas/Konkombas Peace’ (in: Akapule (n.d., a)); DG (22/12/1994) ‘Dagombas, Konkombas Resolve Dispute’; Ngula, Dan K. & Kenneth Wujangi to The Chairman, Permanent Negotiation Team on Conflict in the Northern Region (15-02-1995) ‘Dagomba/Konkomba Reconciliation Ceremony at Yendi on 20th December 1994’; Kissmal, Ibrahim Hussein (18-05-1996) ‘Peace and Reconciliation Ceremony in Salaga, May 18th 1996’; ‘Address by Konkomba Chiefs and People in the East Gonja District on the Occasion of the Reconciliation Ceremony Between Konkomba and Gonjas at Salaga on 18th May, 1996’. An earlier reconciliation between Gonja and Konkomba was cancelled because Konkomba delegates failed to show up, for which they later apologised to Rawlings: GT (16-09-1995) ‘President on Peace Mission to the North’; respectively GT (30-09-1995) ‘Konkomba Chiefs, Elders Apologise to President’.

107

GT (16-10-1996) ‘Nanumba, Konkomba Seal Peace Process’.

108

Sukpen, Isaac B. (KOYA) ‘Address by Konkomba Chiefs and People in the Nanumba District on the Occasion of the Reconciliation Ceremony between Konkombas and Nanumbas at Bimbilla on 21st September, 1996’.

Why was this ceremony not ‘from the heart’? Everybody knew that one cannot sacrifice to earth spirits in a school park, and that there is no central sacrifice to the land spirits of Nanun. The reconciliation ceremony was considered to be politicized; the speeches of authorities were mistrusted because they, the chair- man of the PPNT, Rawlings, the KOYA and NAYA representatives were under suspicion. Finally the ceremony was considered both redundant, since there was already a peace accord and many refugees had resettled, and insufficient, because there were dozens of local reconciliations in the villages to be made (see chapter five).

Rawlings’ reconciliation was a way to regain a sovereignty in Nanun, which the routine law-preserving interventions of the Permanent Peace Negotiation Team and the Operation Gongong had failed to restore. Konkomba/Nanumba violence was a de facto sovereignty: Thousands of citizens took the law into their own hands and killed their neighbours with impunity. The NGO Consortium, in its mediated Kumasi Accord, made no single reference to law and order through security forces or arbitration and retribution, but rather a security emerging from consensus, which was locally received as a ‘pledge’. Rawlings’ administration could neither prevent nor end the violence in Northern Ghana. Konkomba and Nanumba generally interpreted Rawlings’ reconciliation as an attempt to save his own face, not surprisingly three months ahead of the general elections, and not as a sincere move to broker peace. His NDC suffered massive electoral defeat in the Nanun constituencies (see the next chapter).

Conclusion

This chapter studied the cycles of violence and peace in Nanun between 1981 and 1996 from the angle of the peace clauses on reconciliation and security. In this chapter, we have seen how the cluster of related issues, which drove a wedge between Konkomba and Nanumba, first among themselves and then between each other, exploded into communal violence. These issues concerned the para- dox between rights and obligations as citizens and subjects in Nanun, a paradox underscored by claims of equal citizenship and majority versus claims of autochthony. Although these claims drew on ethnicity, the next two chapters will show that both sets of argumentations tend to dissolve intra-ethnically. We have however seen how the contents of the conflict, a cluster of issues, has been more or less the same while they have been addressed in various forms, ranging from petitioning, to verbal expressions (or insulting), violence (the kijaak/tobu type described in chapter one) and dialogue during the Kumasi workshops. I empha- sise this distinction between content and form in order to show how a conflict can be alternately politicised and depoliticised. In chapter six I will study why petitioning has returned as a dominant form of addressing these issues after 1996.

But let’s first look again the outbreak of violence in 1981, which started as the Bimbilla Naa exercised what he considered his sovereignty, namely the violent displacement of Konkomba from Bimbilla by his warriors. This act of coercion had no precedent in Nanun and although it seemed to be a ‘traditional’ measure, it was in fact a new phenomenon. And so was its result; massive ethnic cleansing throughout Nanun by both Konkomba and Nanumba. The subsequent violence and non-violence in Nanun have to be interpreted bearing this experience in mind.

The outcome of the 1981 violence, namely, was a mutual sense of victimhood and insecurity, because the other was allegedly plotting against them. The return to multiparty democracy in 1992 triggered conflicts in surrounding parts of the Northern Region of Ghana and resulted in a widespread rumour that Konkomba were to chase all chiefly groups, vice versa. Tensions quickly mounted in Nanun and this time, there were no official warnings. While underlying the 1981 violence was a Konkomba demand for independent tribunals and a Nanumba response of imposing more customs on them, the 1994 violence broke out in a widespread mutual sentiment that their coexistence in Nanun had become impos- sible.

Contrary to 1981, when state intervention was just late and insufficient, in 1994 and 1995, both sides actually challenged the neutrality of the state. First, a Nanumba mob attacked the police station in Bimbilla and Konkomba killed Nanumba farmers in Nakpayili. This kicked off another round of violence. The situation was different from 1981, because it was individual criminal behaviour which escalated. This exercise of certainty became popularised: While the 1981 violence started as a penal exercise on the instigation of the Nanumba paramount chief, the 1994 and 1995 outbursts of violence started respectively with a riot and an ambush in Nanun’s periphery.

The government argued that it had to restore law and order but it was actually fighting a war which it rather concealed. Along the way, as suspicions mounted about the security agencies backing the enemy, their violence became directed at the police (a Nanumba mob attacked the Bimbilla police station in 1994) or the army (Konkomba guerrillas ambushed soldiers near Chamba in 1994). The violence in Nanun was much more than a breakdown of law and order in a remote part of the country; Konkomba and Nanumba warriors took law into their own hands to create their own security. Behind the façade of keeping the peace and maintaining law and order, therefore, the national army had to win back its sovereignty in Nanun.

The challenge of the NGO Consortium was how to accomplish clarification and security without violence and without arbitration, which they though engen- dered accusations and counteraccusations. The Permanent Peace Negotiation

Team, as argued, was seriously handicapped not only by its allegiance to the state but especially by the state’s delegated sovereignty in terms of chieftaincy which was the core of the conflict. The Team however investigated the legality of tradi- tional and modern interventions without studying the paradox in the Constitution.

In Mamdani’s terms, the Permanent Peace Negotiation Team premised that there were collective victims and perpetrators, while the Consortium’s ideology was that in a way, everyone in Nanun was a victim and a perpetrator, but espe- cially a survivor. Above, I have analysed the processes of forgiveness and healing during the Kumasi peace workshops. It was striking that the initial delegates were not the conventional ethnic spokesmen, mostly from the Youth Associations, but ‘voices of reason’ with their feet in unspoilt traditions. Contrary to the peace initiatives by the representatives of the Government of Ghana, which found security enshrined in the rule of law, the NGO Consortium, more precisely Assefa, thought that only a spirit of forgiveness and trust could lead to a real security anchored in tradition. However, this tradition was a repre- sentation of the past, both legalised (customary law) and modernised (by the Youth).

Another crucial point for the rest of this book is that the peace process focused on forgiveness, healing and especially confidence in the other. In that spirit, traditions could glue Konkomba and Nanumba together. This approach implied a suspension of mutual prejudices. However, it remains to be seen, in the next chapters, whether prejudices and stereotypes are that disruptive for Nanun’s peace. While Konkomba/Nanumba coexistence has been, and continues to be, shrouded in morality, mutual sentiments of exploitation – Konkomba exhaust the land, while Nanumba are feudal – have just been a latent condition for victim- hood about what they considered the illegal subordination of their autochthony or citizen equality. As I hope to show in chapter six, Konkomba and Nanumba mocking each other’s character is insufficient for the explosion of violence, but feelings that their rights and entitlements are violated are not.

In chapter one, I introduced the distinction between calm and unity, which both Konkomba and Nanumba draw. I found that calm or reserve is a very ‘traditional’ way of solving problems, but it is eclipsed by a sense of postpone- ment, awaiting a verdict. But in the process of waiting, there is a lot of peace in playing soccer, playing draft, drinking beer, dancing or watching cinema. As Skalník observed (personal communication), the current coexistence between Konkomba and Nanumba is far more dynamic than that before 1981. Perhaps this is the ad hoc realm of reconciliation. Leaving this issue for chapter six, we now turn to the security in ‘traditional’ earth sacrifices in the context of rights and prejudices in chapter five, but first the security in political competition in the next chapter.

4

Political and administrative