New guidelines for AU peacekeepers

(PANA)-- Military experts have endorsed draft rules on how future African Union (AU) peacekeeping operations would be carried out after a meeting on Friday, Salim Ahmed Salim, a member of AU’s Panel of the Wise, said.

‘It is a matter of common knowledge that during the current military conflicts, civilians are the most affected. We have come up with guidelines that have been discussed and the understanding is that these would be taken to the various African Union policy-making organs’, Salim said Friday.

The peace and security council (PSC) is expected to examine the new guidelines approved by military experts drawn from several African states before forwarding them to African leaders for adoption. Speaking after chairing an experts’ session on the development of new guidelines for civilian protection during war, Salim said the experts have endorsed new guidelines, which would define the mandate given to future AU peacekeeping missions.

‘This will make a difference in terms of how thousands of civilians caught up in conflict could be protected’, said Salim, a former Secretary-General of the Organisation of African Unity, now the AU.

He said the development of the new set of guidelines for peacekeepers, peace support personnel and all actors to be involved in future peacekeeping operations, were necessary to deal with the new trends.

‘The era of inter-state conflicts is gone. The conflicts we are dealing with are more intra-state conflicts, where most of the casualties are civilians. The conflicts are not clearly defined war zones and no clear lines between civilian and military targets’, he said.

The Australian government is supporting efforts to create new guidelines to better protect civilians caught up in military zones across Africa, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region, the Somali inter-clan fighting and the conflicts in Chad and the Central African Republic.

‘We are recognising that mechanisms to better protect the civilians are not currently in place, yet most of the victims of these conflicts are civilians’, said Sivuyile Bam, an expert and AU’s head of peace support operations division. Bam said the new guidelines would be implemented as part of comprehensive efforts to tackle the suffering caused by conflicts across Africa.

The set of new guidelines would be used for formulating future peacekeeping operations mandates before a peace mission is deployed to a war zone. The AU expert said the new set of regulations would particularly be implemented once the African Standby Force, currently being set up, is operational.

He said the guidelines had been drawn from a rich mixture of international laws, including the international humanitarian law, the Geneva Convention, which defines diplomatic practice and the conduct of war and the AU’s latest treaty aimed at better protecting victims of war.

A retired Australian general, Michael Smith, the executive director of the Asia Pacific civil-military centre of excellence, accompanied the officials. He said it was the first time guidelines for civilian protection had been drafted. ‘We hope to assist the AU to work collaboratively to assist civilians who need protection’, Smith said.

<< Back to main