[allAfrica.com]  [Africa_2003]


EU Backs African Peace Force

Business Day (Johannesburg)
NEWS
July 22, 2003
Posted to the web July 22, 2003

By Judy Dempsey
Johannesburg
BRUSSELS The European Union (EU) wants to help fund peacekeeping operations in
Africa that will be led for the first time by Africans themselves.
EU foreign ministers decided yesterday, with European Commission backing, to
consider the funding proposal.
It reflects a broad consensus that the flows of development aid from Europe to
Africa often go unallocated because of wars, instability or insecurity.
"You can't build schools, homes and hospitals when there is no security," said
a senior EU diplomat.
The commission and EU member states together spend about à 7,2bn a year for all
African countries (not including Morocco, which is dealt with separately) under
the umbrella of the Africa Union (AU). Of that total amount the commission's
own spending accounts for about à 1,8bn.
The new and radical plan is to set up a Peace Support Operation Facility to
fund peacekeeping forces under the authority of the AU something it proposed at
its recent summit in Maputo, Mozambique.
The financing of the operation facility would be shared by the commission and
the AU.
Yesterday, foreign ministers agreed that à 205m from the commission-led
European Development Fund be channelled as soon as possible into aid,
development and rehabilitation in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Javier Solana, the EU's foreign policy chief, who was in the region last week,
also asked for ways to finance and support an integrated police unit throughout
the country and methods to stem the flow of weapons.
The EU, which is conducting its first peacekeeping mission outside Europe in
Bunia, the provincial capital of Ituri province, in Congo, believes such
missions have only a short-term benefit if they are not underpinned by a
combination of development aid as well as training for the police and
judiciary.
Meanwhile, reports from Nairobi yesterday said villagers in eastern Congo
claimed that 48 people were killed in last week's renewed tribal fighting near
Bunia, where an international force had been deployed, a United Nations (UN)
spokesman said.
Leocadio Salmeron, a UN spokesman in Bunia, said villagers told a visiting team
of UN military and humanitarian officials that 45 people were killed in Tchomia
and three in Kaseni on July 15.

   

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