Introduction
One of the advantages of setting up an international or multilateral organisation these days is that one can understand and learn from the mistakes of the past. For example, because of the Cold War, ideological and religious differences, linguistic and imperialistic backgrounds, bureaucratic tensions, etc., the United Nations never managed to acquire its own security force. The result? Avoidable genocide, massacres and killings. As it is a joint responsibility, nobody loses their sleep over a few million Africans killed. But the African Union has learnt from the mistakes of the United Nations and has decided to set up a permanent African Standby Force (ASF), reporting to the Peace and Security Council (PSC) of the African Union (AU). While this is a very good step, it is crucial that the African Union members understand the issues around the political fault lines in Africa. An Army or armed force, after all, is a political technique (a blood-spattered and terrifying technique, but a technique none the less) and the usage as well as the success of this technique is heavily dependent upon an understanding of the political fault lines inherent in Africa. Without this understanding, the setup, use and deployment of the ASF will be a regrettable non-starter, because the early warning system, as well as the mandate process, will not work.
What is the African standby force and what is it supposed to do?
It is early days as yet, but the contours and shape of the ASF are emerging. It is a permanent force, under the control of the PSC, which will be used for a variety of missions (explained below) as mandated by the PSC. The force is expected to be a combination of a core element as well as additional mission specific element, which can be requested depending upon the requirements at the time. The core element is to provide advice to the political missions of the PSC or AU; participate in observer type missions (either separately or jointly with NATO, EU, UN, or other multilateral organisations); provide peacekeeping operations and the final one, peace enforcement operations. More formally, these are the functions which an ASF will do:[1]
a. Observation and monitoring missions.
b. Other types of peace support missions.
c. Intervention in a Member State in respect of grave circumstances or at the request of a Member State in order to restore peace and security, in accordance with Article 4(h) and (j) of the Constitutive Act of the African Union (CAAU).
d. Preventive deployment.
e. Peace-building, including post-conflict disarmament and demobilisation.
f. Humanitarian assistance to alleviate the suffering of civilian population in conflict areas and support efforts to address major natural disasters; and
g. Any other functions as may be mandated by the PSC or the Assembly.
There is a crying need for this force. Much of the recent history of Africa has been a continuous litany of killings, disasters, external interventions and dashed hopes. There is a long and sad tendency of well meaning outsiders imposing their views and actions on Africa, ranging from the old colonial mindset of the “white man’s burden” to the current, “Africa cannot develop without aid and our help”. What is more, this habit of relying on outsiders means that Africa is unable to help itself. More importantly, when humanitarian and/or military help is really needed, Africa is then at the mercy of these outsiders, whose work is motivated by other incentives. This is the reason why over the past few decades, we have had minimal help, to say the least, when major disasters such as floods, drought, famine, desertification and locust swarms struck. There has been genocide, for example in Sudan, Rwanda and the Congo, with no effective interventions. There have been kleptocratic tendencies in Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe and nobody has raised a hue/cry. There have been civil wars in Sudan and the Ivory Coast and nobody much cared. Zimbabwe, the bread basket of Africa, is undergoing a slow death and nobody seems to be bothered.
Given these problems and the lack of continent or even international institutions willing and able to help, it is impossible for even one country to lend a hand, even if they are able to do so. Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt come to mind, but there is no structure in place, no institutional ability and frankly, up until recently, no desire to help others. Given a very good desire for Africans to help themselves and push for better transparency and governance, etc., a good strong African police force will seriously facilitate if not assist in avoiding many of the issues mentioned above. If there had been an ASF in existence with political backing, then quite a lot of the tragic events could be, at best avoided and at worst, have a reduced impact.
But why didn’t the external world intervene sooner if at all? Well, the main reason why the external world didn’t respond was because of political fault lines (such as issues around communist USSR and capitalist USA, Christian West and Arab Sudan, weak liberal ‘unable-to-take-casualties’ West and non-intervention in third world countries etc.). While having an ASF can address the last issue, the first issue is important. If the political fault-lines are not understood and managed, then the ASF will be less than effective and five years from now, we might again see a PSC press release about genocide, massacres, deaths and killings in Africa.
There is another reason which is lesser than the political will, and that is the rather regrettable issue that the powers that be simply didn’t know what was going on. In other words, the early warning system didn’t work in a way that was conducive to a quick deployment of forces, which could help avoid massacres, for example in Rwanda.
What are the current fault lines?
Before we talk about how to handle African political fault lines, we need to understand the types of these fault lines. At an initial glance, one can identify five major types of fault lines.
- Geographic: (North Africa, Southern Africa, East Africa, Central Africa, and West Africa). While these are arbitrary divisions and one may indeed question or even suggest alternative geographical sets, this is still an important fault line. For example, we have existing geographical organisations such as the Economic Community Of West African States (ECOWAS) and Southern African Development Community (SADC). The European Union looks at the North African region (more broadly defined than just the Arabic speaking region) as a bloc from an immigration perspective. The francophone community, while not formally established, does exist with discreet management from France. USA’s State Department has a completely different way of splitting up Africa in terms of its desks, such as West Africa, Southern Africa, and Central Africa. For example, northern Africa is not handled by the Bureau of African Affairs, but is handled elsewhere in the Middle East Desk. So if there is an issue which transcends these regional groupings, there can be challenges in getting the political wind behind any mandate. For example, if there is another civil war, something along the lines of what we saw in Ivory Coast, would one expect the French to intervene, while the AU troops from say Southern Africa stand by? Say the French troops do take the side of a francophone country involved in a political issue with say a non francophone country? How does the ASF react or handle it? How would the PSC and AU handle it and what mandate does it give to the ASF?
- Religious: Imported religions (Islam and Christianity) and Native religions. Some of the biggest massacres and stress points within Africa relate to religions. Whether we are talking about the eruptions between imported religions such as Christianity and Islam versus native religions, or between Islam and Christianity, this is a huge political stress point. Take again the main troop and equipment contributors to a potential ASF, Egypt, Libya, Nigeria and South Africa. Egypt and Nigeria suffer from serious religious sectarianism. South Africa has also been known to have this. So an ASF will have tiny seeds of religious divisions inside it. So if it needs to be deployed, say for example in Ethiopia or Somalia, it will invariably be faced with a political fault line because of religion. Would a Southern African force, mostly comprised of Christians, be considered to be deployed in Muslim Somalia? Look at what happened when the AU force was going to be deployed in Sudan, there were harsh and strong words uttered by various Sudanese religious leaders on how Christian crusaders were coming to break up a Muslim country.
- Imperialism: The colonised and independent kingdoms, the sub-fault lines from the colonisers: Belgium, Germany, United Kingdom and France. For some reason, some of the old colonisers get very excited about what’s happening in their former colonies. To state an example, you will have the United Kingdom ready to intervene in Sierra Leone, but will hold back if an issue blew up in a francophone country and same with France which won’t mind Nigeria having issues, but will be ready to deploy immediately if a francophone country is in danger. The United Kingdom criticises Zimbabwe, but the same level of interest isn’t shown by Germany or Belgium or the UK on any of the francophone countries. So the colonial history is very important, especially when an ASF might need legal, political, military etc. help.
- The ideological fault line (and the hangover from the cold war): Capitalism and Socialism. While the idea of free markets and capitalism is relatively well established across the world, there is still a fault line running down this ideological divide. Many of the African states are headed by leaders who implemented policies in the socialist era of the 1960’s and 1970’s.Many states suffer from inefficient public sectors, state control over economies, bureaucracy and corruption etc. While by itself this should not be an issue, when we are talking about the deployment of an external armed force, then that force needs to work with public institutions. And generally, if it is a socialist economy, reconstruction is weak. Capitalist societies have the human stock of people accustomed to getting up and fixing problems themselves, rather than relying on the state to do things for them.
- The cultural fault line: This is more difficult to explain, but could perhaps suffice with a couple of examples. Africa is a continent and the AU is based upon a geographically based identity. When there is another grouping which transcends this geographical grouping, then you have the emergence of a fault line. For example, the Arab identity amongst the Arab speaking North African countries is stronger than the African identity. Say there is an attack on or a situation in a clear African country such as say Chad or Ethiopia, due to say an Arab country’s intervention and the ASF is asked to intervene. As one can see, the political mandate for the ASF will be very difficult to achieve, as the PSC will be split internally between the North African Arab members and the others.
There can be other fault lines as well, but the above adequately show that there are indeed existing fault lines. So how does this matter? The main reason is that these fault lines will cause the political mandate for the ASF to be less than efficient. While advisory or observer missions for the ASF are comparatively less reliant on a clear political mandate, the lack thereof will definitely impact peace keeping and peace enforcement missions.
To have a clear political mandate, the PSC needs to know that there is a problem. The PSC has established a Continental Early Warning System (EWS) according to Article 12 of the Protocol establishing the PSC as adopted on 9th July 2002. This EWS is expected to avoid issues around unclear directions, information and delayed information as was evidenced in the case of Rwanda, where the UNSC did not even know that there was genocide in progress, until it was too late to stop it and hundreds of thousands had already died.
How do the political fault lines impact the EWS? This is because the EWS findings are directly related to the political mandate, which in turn is directly related to what the ASF will do on the ground. To a lesser extent, the EWS findings also influence and drive what the world understands about a particular conflict situation. Again, it is usually via the media that the world gets its information. The media reports on the intelligence reports tabled or submitted to the various international bodies such as European Union, United Nations Security Council, US Congress, etc. To understand why this is so important, see the innumerable drafts made of any submission to the UNSC, with various members spending long days and hours on drafting such a submission. And this is not even a resolution. This delay in having the right words for a submission can be deadly in case of fast moving events.
This is, of course, assuming that there is a continent wide structure which gathers and processes information and then feeds it into the PSC’s EWS. Once the EWS acquires the information, political fault lines of the type mentioned above can, in the best of times, delay the submission to the PSC and in the worst of times; degrade the severity or urgency of the issue under submission. This will mean that the ASF will have a wrong mandate, if at all and will therefore not be able to address the issue.
This brings us to the issue of the political will. Again taking the Rwandan matter, which was analysed by Touko Pipparinen[2], where Kofi Annan, the then Under Secretary-General of Peacekeeping said, “If there was a problem, it was not one of information or intelligence. The problem was lack of political will”. The then UN Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali is reported to have said that, “member states were opposed to intervention in Rwanda, with early warning and without early warning. So the real problem is this: if there is no political will among the major actors in the Security Council, any UN system which we try to improve will be useless”. Besides serious disagreements over the comments about the problem being solely due to political will (or rather the lack thereof) and not caused by faulty or insufficient intelligence shows what the heads of multilateral institutions think of their major political stakeholders and bosses with respect to their political will to resolve issues.
Recommendations:
The main issue comes from the fact that very few countries are willing to put their soldiers in harm’s way if there is no direct national interest involved. Even when there is altruism involved, such as with Canada, when it became clear that genocide was planned and was being executed in Rwanda, the Canadian troops were not used to stop it. So the establishment of an ASF is a very good step, as it removes the need for asking for troops. But the issue around the EWS and its political mandate being affected by these fault lines remain.
Starting with the EWS, there are three issues. One is the reporting line to the PSC chairperson, second is the lack of formal mechanisms for incorporating external bodies into the intelligence gathering exercise and finally is the lack of transparency.
Unfortunately, the PSC protocol has set up the EWS to report directly to the Chairperson of the PSC. While this might be done for organisational reasons, this assigns far too much power to the chairperson and allows the chairperson’s personal biases and allegiances to influence the intelligence sifting, summarising, prioritisation and reporting. The reporting of the intelligence should be done to a sub-committee of the PSC (from different countries and geographical locations within Africa) and the reports / minutes of the meetings published regularly after a suitable time delay (if appropriate).
The second issue is the explicit non inclusion of the media and secondly the NGO sector. Ostensibly and by and large, both these types of organisations are independent. The media is obviously interested in uncovering issues and transmitting them. If sufficient numbers of different media outlets (TV, Bloggers, newspapers, Radio, etc.) are consolidated, then issues around independence, bias and other aspects can be averaged out and can provide a very important counter-weight to formal military and governmental information channels. The second sector, the Non-Governmental Organisations, is frequently providing services on the ground where the government is unwilling or unable to do so. A framework which brings this NGO sector into the intelligence gathering framework would be useful.
This does not mean that the information is taken from the media and NGOs and not used. These bodies are - and should be - incorporated into some mechanism for the drafting of a weekly or monthly (or some periodic) intelligence report. This brings us to the third point, namely transparency. When there is a transparent and public report, backed by independent multiple sources of information and intelligence, political fault lines are covered because the argument moves from being defined by narrow nationalistic, linguistic, cultural or geographical factors to purely humanitarian grounds.
Given reasonable operationalisation of the above points, we will end up with a situation where there are multiple sources of independent information, an open debate around current and emerging issues, and a joint public and transparent recommendation from the EWS to the PSC. Once this recommendation is tabled on the PSC chamber, one would expect the political fault lines to engage, depending upon the location and type of the issue. Again, it is vital that the debates and discussions of the PSC are open and transparent.
Conclusions
In the protocol which established the PSC of the AU, the participants were clearly concerned about the “variety of conflicts on the continent and realised that these conflicts have killed millions and have forced millions of their countrymen into becoming refugees and unable to pursue happiness”. And they voted overwhelmingly to be “determined to address the scourge of conflicts on the continent by setting up and use the ASF”[3].
While saying that, amongst the multiple active current conflicts on the continent, three are of particular interest. These are having the biggest impact on ordinary Africans. Sudan and Somalia, because African Union troops are currently deployed there under a less than efficient mandate. The third example is Zimbabwe. While relatively speaking, the political fissures mentioned above have been resolved to a certain extent in Sudan and Somalia, political fault lines have made sure that millions of Zimbabweans are in dire straits. It will be a reflection of the capacity of the AU/PSC to see how it improves situations such as Darfur and Somalia and actually engages in Zimbabwe, overcoming narrow nationalistic, religious or kleptocratic tendencies which have bedevilled Africa for so long.
The End
[1] Policy Framework for the Establishment of the African Standby Force and the Military Staff Committee, Document adopted by the Third Meeting of African Chiefs of Defense Staff 15-16 May 2003, Addis Ababa, www.africa-union.org
[2] Piiparinen, T, 2006, “Beyond the mystery of the Rwanda ‘Black Box’: Political Will and Early Warning”, International Peacekeeping, Vol 13, No. 3, 334-249
[3] Protocol establishing the PSC as adopted on 9th July 2002, page 2-5
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