JOHANNESBURG/MOGADISHU, (Reuters) – A website created for Africa’s proposed continental defence force proclaims a lofty mission “to support and keep peace for Africa’s prosperity and a better life for all in the world”.
But click on current operations on the African Standby Force site (www.africa-union.org/root/au/auc/departments/psc/AMISCE/AMISCE. htm) and the response is a dispiriting “page cannot be found”.
The force dreamed of half a century ago by the founding fathers of independent Africa still exists only on paper, casting a shadow over the back-slapping at this weekend’s African Union (AU) summit, which is marking 50 years since the foundation of its precursor, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU).
Instead of a muscular rapid-response force to halt genocide, protect civilians in coups or civil wars, and pursue jihadists, drug traffickers and pirates, African peacekeeping remains a hotch-potch, almost entirely externally funded and mixed into U.N. or foreign missions.
“If ever we needed an African standby force, it is now,” said Emmanuel Kwesi Aning, head of research at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Accra, Ghana.
He pointed to recent coups and conflicts in Guinea Bissau, Mali, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and Central African Republic, jarring plotlines in the narrative of an economically emergent Africa attracting foreign trade and investment.
“If you looked at Mali, the African standby force was more a bystander force,” said South African defence analyst Helmoed Romer Heitman of the slow preparations for a U.N.-backed African force slated to intervene in late 2013 in Mali, where Islamist rebels had seized control of the northern half of the country.
Events overtook the plans. The AU largely watched from the sidelines in January as former colonial power France, at the request of Mali’s government, rushed in troops to drive back an Islamist rebel offensive threatening the southern capital Bamako.
This was not what Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, had in mind when he called for “a common defence system with African high command” in a speech at the 1963 founding of the OAU. Nkrumah also warned against “hobnobbing with colonialism”.
Plans drawn up a decade ago, when the AU replaced the toothless OAU, foresee a 5,000-strong Standby Force, comprising five regional brigades from across Africa, responding within 14 or 30 days to various crisis scenarios.
AU officials say there is no certainty the full force will be up and running by the target date of 2015.
“By that time, definitely some of the regional brigades will be fully operational, and if three out of five are fully operational, then that’s a significant result,” AU Commissioner for Peace and Security Ramtane Lamamra told Reuters.
“In the meantime … we believe we need a tool for immediate response to crisis,” he added.
Lamamra said the AU Commission was consulting with member states’ ministers and military chiefs about setting up an interim African rapid-response unit that could go into action while the larger standby force is being put together.
This month, South African President Jacob Zuma pleaded for the creation of the African Standby Force to be speeded up, citing instability in the Central African Republic, the eastern Congo and Mali, “where decisive intervention is needed”.
African troops – from South Africa, Tanzania and Malawi – are headed to eastern Democratic Republic of Congo to take on armed rebels there, but they are wearing United Nations peacekeeping hats, which means U.N. control and funding.
And while the AU has publicly backed the Mali intervention by France, which is due to hand over most security there to a U.N.-mandated African force, Paris’s military presence in its former colony still rankles with some.
