Less than successful peacekeeping

Ending civil wars and other violence in Africa is proving problematic for the EU and US, writes Toby Vogel.

On 3 October 1993, 18 US soldiers were killed in an ambush in the Somali capital of Mogadishu as they tried to apprehend one of the warlords responsible for the ongoing violence in the country.

Their bodies were mutilated and dragged through the streets by an angry mob. Television pictures of the incident, in which hundreds of Somalis were also killed, were beamed around the world.

The Americans belonged to a special force operating outside the United Nations peacekeeping contingent, but their brutal killing had an immediate impact on peacekeeping operations elsewhere. One of the most serious military engagement by US troops since Vietnam had ended in a disaster that the US was only too happy to pin on the UN.

The carnage in Mogadishu diminished the already weak Western appetite for more robust intervention in Bosnia, Haiti and elsewhere. When government soldiers tortured ten Belgian peacekeepers to death in the early days of the genocide in Rwanda, the UN reacted by pulling out its peacekeepers altogether, paving the way for 800,000 Rwandans to be slaughtered.

Such incidents fed into age-old stereotypes of Africa as a lost continent, a place of unending violence and venality.

Long-standing civil wars did nothing to correct that image. Sudan has been at war for most of its history since independence in 1956. War in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the former Zaire, pulled in several neighbouring countries and claimed an estimated three to four million lives in the late 1990s and early 2000s, either directly through violence or through diseases and food shortages.

Today, the UN has more than 18,000 military staff in the DR Congo, but pockets of instability and violence persist, especially in the eastern regions bordering Rwanda. And elections overseen by the UN have done little to generate legitimacy

The conflict between the largely Muslim north and the Christian south of Sudan has subsided, though the 2005 peace agreement - patrolled by 10,000 UN military personnel - is fragile and has come under considerable stress in recent months. Elections are planned for next year and an independence referendum is to take place in south Sudan in 2011.

But these developments are overshadowed by conflict in Darfur, where low-intensity warfare between government-backed militias and local insurgents has claimed at least 200,000 lives.

Unfortunately, it is not just Westerners who are reluctant to intervene in African conflicts. African governments are also unwilling to criticise one of their own, and where they do, it is usually for political rather than humanitarian reasons.

Ethiopia, for example, is suffering casualties among troops deployed in neighbouring Somalia, but their deployment should be seen in the context of a regional conflict with Eritrea’s Somali allies, rather than as a classic peacekeeping exercise.

More than 200,000 people have died in Sudan’s Darfur province since 2003. After much hand-wringing by the ‘international community’ and obstruction by the government in Khartoum, a joint (or ‘hybrid’) African Union/United Nations peacekeeping force of 26,000 is set to be deployed early next year. It will be supported by an EU force in neighbouring Chad whose main task is the protection of some 200,000 refugees from Darfur and whose deployment is about to begin.

Both missions are already hampered by difficulties in getting soldiers into the field. The Sudanese government has been dragging its feet in approving the composition of the AU/UN force, which is set to replace the current, much smaller and ineffectual AU force.

A more worrying problem is the absence of a political solution to the conflict in Darfur. The peacekeepers are sent without a peace to keep - precisely the sort of conditions that proved disastrous in Somalia in 1993 (and in other situations since). Peace talks in Libya in October failed because key rebel groups failed to show up, and there has been little movement since.

Ending civil wars and other violence in Africa is proving problematic for the EU and US, writes Toby Vogel.