‘Home Grown’ African Peackeeping

Festus Aboagye (ISS Today)-Since 2003 the drive towards the establishment of an African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) or an African Peace and Security Mechanism (APSM) has become a common topic of discourse in political, diplomatic, security and academic circles within Africa and the wider international community. Of all the different elements of the post-cold war architecture, the drive towards the establishment of the African Standby Force (ASF) is undoubtedly the most well known. But, in contrast with the level of public knowledge about the APSA, it is not so certain that the fundamental reasons for the need for this architecture, especially its critical elements, are as well understood.

The end of the cold war and the marginalisation of Africa, coupled with the vicious cycle of poverty, under-development, disease and internecine conflicts have generally been cited as the fundamental reasons for the need for such architecture. But it cannot be a mere coincidence that this notion arose around the same time that the international community, led by powerful states in the West, established an unofficial policy of abdication from direct participation in UN peacekeeping, particularly within the African continent.

As a result an imperative arose for the development of a home-grown African peace and security architecture to provide timely responses to the devastating conflicts and create conditions for possible subsequent intervention by the UN and the international community. The policy has in time spawned the doctrine of regionalisation of peacekeeping, by which the geopolitical regions of the world have to mind the security business of their own backyards.

But were the Western policy of withdrawal and the emergent trend towards the regionalisation of peacekeeping mere coincidences? Whether they were or not, we now know that the ‘real’ reason why the West has not been able to participate directly in regional peacekeeping is because of commitments towards the war on terror. We ‘know’ this because that is what they have told us.

But, lest we forget, we also ‘knew’-or, once again, we were told by the West-that the reason why they could not contribute human resources, particularly military manpower, to UN peacekeeping was that the end of the cold war had removed the need for large forces. This argument informed security sector reform in the West during the period between the end of the cold war and the new benchmark of 9/11. Essentially, before 9/11, the argument was that because of downsizing the developed world did not have sufficient resources to contribute to UN peacekeeping.

We now know that when it served their interest the most, the West was able to mobilise considerable resources for deployment to the Middle East in the immediate aftermath of the duel between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006.

We also know that in spite of considerable human loss, as well as loss of national prestige, lead nations within the West have stuck to their guns in Afghanistan and Iraq, repeatedly stating that they ‘will not cut and run’. So why did they cut and run in Somalia in 1993 and why did they abandon an innocent population to the unspeakable genocide in Rwanda in 1994?

Even though much noise has been made and continues to be made on the anniversaries of World War II, the holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, among others, innocent populations arguably continue to suffer near-genocide situations in ongoing conflicts in Africa, what some have chosen to call ‘slow tsunamis’.

So, were these the real reasons for the fast-changing Western foreign policy stances that have made it imperative for Africa to embark on much peace and security policy development within the continent? Or were they mere excuses for the national and collective foreign policy interests and objectives of the more developed states within the international community?

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