CHAPTER 3: THE AFRICAN UNION’S PEACE AND SECURITY ARCHITECTURE
3.5 THE ROLE AND FUNCTIONS OF THE AFRICAN STANDBY FORCE
institutions, transparency and accountability. They further argue that the development of a Political Affairs Department12 could be more useful as an early warning indicator, which could hopefully avoid conflicts. With this view in mind, political dialogue, which was the main bargaining weapon before the establishment of the AU, failed to stop conflicts in Africa.
Therefore it is a reasonable supposition that political dialogue has to be complemented by military coercion.
3.5 THE ROLE AND FUNCTIONS OF THE AFRICAN STANDBY
neighbouring states, and (iii) the resurgence of violence after parties to a conflict have reached an agreement;
• peacebuilding, post-conflict disarmament and demobilisation;
• humanitarian assistance to alleviate the suffering of the civilian population in conflict areas and to support efforts to address major natural disasters; and
• any functions mandated by the PSC (African Union, 2002:Article 13 (3)).
Senior military officers of members of the PSC states will form a Military Staff Committee responsible for advising and assisting the PSC in issues relating to military and security requirements. The Military Staff Committee shall meet as often as required to deliberate on matters referred to it by the PSC.
The ASF will need to plan for six distinct scenarios along a spectrum covering small observer missions, classic peacekeeping operations and large-scale interventions in response to grave human rights violations or conflicts. The scenarios will be as follows:
• scenario 1 – AU/Regional military advice to a political mission;
• scenario 2 – AU/Regional observer mission co-deployed with UN mission;
• scenario 3 – Stand-alone AU/sub-regional observer mission;
• scenario 4 – AU/regional peacekeeping force for Chapter VI and preventive deployment missions;
• scenario 5 – AU peacekeeping force for complex multidimensional peacekeeping mission with low-level spoilers; and
• scenario 6 – AU intervention, e.g. genocide situations, where the international community does not act promptly (African Union, 2003b).
The deployment of the ASF was recommended as follows: for simple missions, the ASF should be able to deploy within 30 days; for complex ones it should complete its deployment within 90 days, with the military component deploying within 30 days. For interventions, the ASF is to deploy a robust military force within 14 days (African Union, 2003b).
Undertaking scenario 6 missions, implies that the ASF envisages UN Chapter VII13 types of operation, which require strong command and control, logistics support and other resources that AU member states currently lack. The AU, for instance, struggled to fund simple observer missions, such as the one in Burundi in 2003; hence it will be a very difficult task to actually fulfil Chapter VII missions with so little resources and expertise (De Coning, 2006:41). Although the challenges facing the operationalisation of the ASF are huge, some progress has been made. It was agreed that at AU Commission level, there will be a single continental planning element (PLANELM) and a single continental Military Logistic Depot (MLD) (Baranyi and Mepham, 2006:6). The ASF will be developed in two phases and be operationally ready by 2010, if all goes according to plan.
For each ASF mission, the Chairperson of the Commission will appoint a special representative and a Force Commander to facilitate command and control. Their roles and functions will be spelt out in appropriate directives as per the PSC standing operating procedures. Training for contingents’
members will also be done through guidelines provided by the Commission at both operational and tactical levels. The training doctrine will be in line with the UN doctrine with similar standards.
At the moment, the progress of the five sub-regional brigades is at different levels. The SADC Brigade has been conducting joint exercises, and has finalised the ASF training doctrine they were tasked to do as a sub-regional contribution to the continental effort (Anon, 2006a). In June 2005, a brigade-size military exercise code named Thokgamo was conducted in Botswana in an effort to build the SADC brigade capacity (Anon, 2005b:16376). Major General Les Rudman, a former SADC Brigade Commander, reported that the region was on target with its contributions to the ASF (Anon, 2005a:30). According to Colonel Carlos Francisco, a member of SADC PLANELM, a verification exercise conducted during 2005 revealed the SADC Brigade is ready for deployment. He further pointed out that the SADC Brigade will be officially launched during the SADC Summit in Zambia in August 2007 (Francisco, 2006). ECOWAS states created their standby brigade in 2004 which is, however, not yet fully operational because of a lack of resources (Da Costa, 2006). According to
13 Chapter VII missions are those that may be deployed without consent from the host nation or warring parties thereby making it an enforcement mission.
Cilliers and Malan (2005:18), ECOWAS pledged 6 200 troops for its regional brigade and progress has been made in consolidating and finalising the requirements for the brigade. The establishment of the West African brigade was much easier given that ECOWAS states have been involved in peacekeeping missions in the sub-region and the fact that they contribute substantially to UN operations hence affording them a large pool of experienced troops.
The eastern sub-region has also been active as they have already identified their brigade headquarters in Addis Ababa and based their PLANELM in Nairobi, Kenya. By February 2004, member states had pledged troops and equipment, and a budget was drawn up, which required all member states to contribute a pre-agreed amount (Cilliers and Malan, 2005:18). By the end of 2004, the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) had held several meetings and reached agreements on the structure of the regional headquarters of the PLANELM and the ECCAS standby brigade (Powell, 2005:16). The North African brigade is one that is not active yet but according to Aboagye (2007), they signed a loose association under African Regional Capabilities. Under this association, they cooperate in military aspects without necessarily forming formal structures on the ground.
The AU expects to develop a headquarters component with a robust planning cell and strategic planning unit to coordinate development in the five regional brigades. Juma (2004) posits that for the African peacekeeping efforts to work, three fronts must clearly be met, which she identifies as normative, political and technical.
Normative aspects have already been dealt with (such as the vision of the AU, mandates and the continent’s ability to operationalise all organs of the PSC, including the division of labour). Some of these aspects still need to be tested for practicability, and such tests can only occur during actual peace operations.
The political aspect hinges on political will and commitment as acknowledged by Mingst (1999). Peacekeeping is an expensive undertaking that needs resources; therefore Juma (2004) highlights the need for a well-cultivated partnership with donor partners for it to be feasible.
Technical factors include deliberate moves to build capacity of PSC organs as well as sub-regional and national levels to complement each other.
Doctrinal development, interoperability as well as command structures need special emphases. As per a meeting by experts on policy formulation held in Addis Ababa from 28 November to 2 December 2005, guidelines were formulated to assist the different sub-regional bodies with further deliberations on their tasked areas of responsibilities14 (Mophuting, 2006).
All these documents will be submitted to an African Chiefs of Defence Staff meeting in January 2007 for final review before adoption in February 2007 (Francisco, 2006). All these activities indicate that the ASF, though faced with challenges, is gaining ground. But despite this visible progress, some critics still claim that its fruition is a far-fetched vision.
Klingebiel (2005:41), for instance, questions the practicality of its implementation. He argues that the AU could never afford funding the PSC given member states’ weak economic conditions. He cites the financial difficulties of the AU mission in the Sudan as a case in point. Though it is a fact that some AU partners are willing to fund such missions, he questions how long they will continuously provide funding without extending some conditions in the operations of these missions. Cilliers and Malan (2005:18) also acknowledge the difficulties of funding and further view the “deficit in African planning and mission management capacity at headquarters levels”
as another major impediment to the operationalisation of the ASF as well as to the limited national capacities of individual troop contributing nations.
Another challenge is the fact that the ASF security architecture dictates that it will be dependent on sub-regional bodies for force generation, whereas such bodies are also required to provide forces to the UN missions, as well as missions in their sub-regions. These could impose a heavy burden on manpower resources of troop-contributing nations. The PSC is also criticised for its bias on the development of the military aspect of the ASF.
De Coning (2005:41) observes that what is lacking within the ASF is the
“need to equally develop the civilian and police dimensions of the ASF framework so that the multi-dimensional nature of contemporary peace operations can be fully integrated into the AU peacekeeping concept”.
14 Sub-regional bodies making up the five sub-regional brigades were tasked to further develop framework documents and a work plan that would guide deliberations in developing documents on: Doctrine, Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), Guidelines on Command, Control, Communication and Information Systems, Logistics, Training and Evaluation for the ASF.
This said, the ASF, as an establishment in an infant organisation, would take time to reach maturity. The ASF roadmap proposes a nucleus of PLANELM established at the AU HQ, PLANELM at sub-regional HQs, a decision by sub-regional organisations to establish standby forces, pledges from member states to contribute resources to these brigades, and verification of compliance by member states. All these steps have been done by all sub-regions, except the northern region, which somewhat shows a commendable level of commitment. The importance of the ASF, inter alia, is the fact that Africa will have the capacity to provide proactive efforts to deal with root causes of conflicts, to deepen the African Renaissance and shift from the paradigm of external dependency, and emphasise collective regional/sub-regional arrangements and burden sharing. A readily available ASF will hopefully also enhance obtaining UN mandates and in addition attract donors and funding. Most importantly, it is intended to provide for future quick reaction to prevent genocide and other crimes against humanity. The fact that countries’ armies train together sharing information will help to defuse potential explosive situations based on suspicion within sub-regions and the continent as a whole.