Reintegration of Combatants: Were the Right Lessons Learned in Mozambique? JAREMEY McMULLIN Efforts to reintegrate combatants following Mozambique’s civil war concentrated exclusively on avoiding a return to violent conflict. Though conflict has not resumed, two challenges to long-term security remain: first, involvement among certain combatants in organized criminal activity; second, political instability from the continuing politicization of reintegration issues. Mozambique’s reinte- gration programme, in aiming only to avoid a return to war, failed to address these two issues. This has hurt Mozambique and has repercussions for southern Africa and the international community. A standard worst-case scenario is often invoked to justify the critical need to reintegrate ex-combatants into civilian life following armed con- flict within states. Large numbers of combatants on the various sides of a conflict are demobilized after a peace agreement. In the absence of proper care for those soldiers after their demobilization – programmes to help them survive, find employment and adjust to life as civilians – they become disgruntled with peace and use their weapons and skills to re-ignite conflict. Renewed violence initially takes the form of public disruption and rioting, and then escalates into a return to all- out civil war. Tragically, this devastation is not merely hypothetical: the above model has its roots in experience. In Angola the lack of alternative employment for troops from the government’s Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the Union for the Total Indepen- dence of Angola (UNITA), and indeed of any significant reintegration efforts from the second UN Angolan Verification Mission (UNAVEM II) deployed in 1991, left each side still mobilized and well-armed at elec- tions on 29 – 30 September 1992. Once UNITA denounced the election results, the slide back into civil war was rapid and bloody, exacting a devastating human and economic toll. 1 Reintegration programmes have since been designed specifically to avoid this scenario. But such a template International Peacekeeping, Vol.11, No.4, Winter 2004, pp.625–643 ISSN 1353-3312 print=1743-906X online DOI:10.1080/1353331042000248704 # 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd.