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Muted Support for African Peace Force Plan

Business Day (Johannesburg)
NEWS
June 3, 2003
Posted to the web June 3, 2003

By Jonathan Katzenellenbogen, International Affairs Editor
Johannesburg
A REPORT to the Group of Eight (G-8) leaders has dealt a blow to hopes for
setting up an African peace-keeping force, dashing expectations drummed up
ahead of the G-8 summit in Evian of large-scale financial and institutional
support for such a force.
The report is a setback for Africa's efforts to put in place its own special
peacekeeping forces that could be deployed rapidly to the continent's trouble
spots.
However, G-8 leaders endorsed a plan to help Africa equip itself with its own
peace-keeping and intervention force, a German official at the gathering of the
world's richest nations said yesterday.
They agreed that Africa should be able, by 2010, to deploy troops in crisis
zones, perhaps at the request of the United Nations or the African Union (AU).
The need for a rapid intervention force was highlighted last month by the
massacres around Bunia in the northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
French and British troops are expected to arrive in the region only this week
to give needed support to Uruguayan peacekeepers who have been thin on the
ground, although hostilities have been intensifying over recent weeks.
The G-8 representatives propose in their report that there be far greater
consultation on the vision of an African peacekeeping force and that existing
foreign support for peacekeeping on the continent be better co-ordinated.
The report proposes an annual meeting between the AU and interested donors to
discuss peace and security issues.
This, it says, would provide an ongoing way of reviewing the plan for African
peacekeeping forces and its implementation.
The report takes the view that a great deal more work is needed to prepare the
AU peace and security framework, which will govern the use of such a force as
well as its actual military capability.
The report has been submitted to G-8 leaders for their endorsement and is
likely to be mentioned in a statement to be issued later today.
Last month, AU military chiefs meeting in Addis Ababa proposed five brigades to
carry out an African peacekeeping function, which experts have warned would be
well beyond what the G-8 is prepared to finance.
The G-8 report on enhancing African peace-keeping capabilities is an annex to
one reviewing the implementation of the G-8 Africa action plan backed at the
group's meeting in Kananaskis last year.
Instead of any immediate backing for a peace-keeping force, the report
recommends a more gradual approach.
However, the report does say that it is prepared to support the African vision
for what it calls a "peace and security infrastructure" as a work in progress
and will work with the continent to develop "key building blocks".
Rather than new institutions or military forces, the report proposes
encouraging more effective use of existing resources.

   

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