Money, dead bodies and the allure of peacekeeping

Sunday March 13, 2016

East and Horn of Africa leaders meeting in Djibouti at the end of February said they would reconsider their contribution to Somalia peacekeeping if the United Nations and other international bodies didn’t intensify their support of the African Union Mission in the country, known as Amisom, to enable it to “significantly degrade the growing threat posed by Al-Shabaab.”

Their gripe follows a recent European Union decision to reduce its financial support to Amisom troop allowances by 20 per cent, citing financial constraints.

Suggesting that African troops were getting second-class treatment, the leaders demanded that the UN provide Amisom with the same support that it provides to other peacekeeping missions.

Then last Tuesday, US Special Forces and the Somali National Army staged a night-time raid on an Al-Shabaab training camp in Awdhegle, killing scores of militants.

While the US has staged military operations in Somalia in recent years, this seems to be the first main joint one with the SNA that American officials have publicly acknowledged.

The reduction in EU allowances to Amisom troops, and the US-Somalia joint attack on Al-Shabaab may be a coincidence, but it is a pregnant one nonetheless.

It could be indicative of a view that the Somali army is at a point where it can take up a greater role against Al Shabaab, and Amisom should begin stepping back. Whatever the case, the African Union peacekeeping mission in Somalia is probably slipping into mission creep.

Somalia needed some heroic intervention by peacekeepers, which the AU provided. But peacekeeping countries tend to make wrong-headed decisions, and only two things can force them to be sensible.

First, the mission has to be costly in human terms. Over the past nine years, according to some estimates, Amisom has lost more than 2,000 men.

But that of itself doesn’t influence the thinking of political leaders unless it becomes a hot political potato too, with the public demanding the “boys and girls” return home, and if they don’t they punish the government by voting it out.

With the exception of Kenya, the leaders of the other Amisom troop contributing nations — Uganda, Ethiopia, Burundi, and Djibouti — face no such electoral threats and democratic irritation.

Second, governments think long and hard about peacekeeping if it costs them money. In Amisom’s case, someone else is paying — and in some of the countries it has become a lucrative deal for generals and a source of diplomatic capital for presidents.

Though not there yet, Amisom looks headed to where the UN Stabilisation Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Monusco, is now. It is the largest and most expensive UN peacekeeping mission in the world, but also, according to its critics, its most ineffectual and corrupt.

It has become such a gravy train for the UN mafia, reports speak of militias pillaging villages across the road from a Monusco camp while the Pakistani and Bangladeshi troops remain holed up in their base watching cricket via satellite TV.

On the other hand, there has been a quick turnaround in the peacekeeping mission in the Central African Republic. In months, a progressive new constitution was written, elections held, nullified by a court, done again, and the presidential contest was resolved in a run-off.

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