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AFRICAN UNION - More People – friendly?

The formation of the African Union (AU) in July 2002 has made a significant contribution to Africa's image, both within and without the continent. It was very much part of the African Renaissance concept of South African Presidents Mandela and Mbeki, and was seen as a chance for Africa to make a fresh start after the troubled history of the early post-independence years.  The election of Alpha Oumar Konaré, former President of Mali and a committed democrat, as President of the new AU Commission in 2003, was a confirmation of the new prestige attached to the Union. The OAU, in all its forty years, had never attracted a former head of state to run its administration.

It cannot be said that the OAU, the predecessor of the AU, had helped when it came to projecting the African image. Because it had been in so many ways simply the mirror of its own membership - the "heads of state's trade union," as it was often sarcastically  referred to - which was inclusive of dictators and one-party states, accepted without any critical or moral distinction, with an absolute non-interference doctrine inspired by the territorial integrity of the existing borders built into the OAU Charter. It was also frequently condemned as an interminable talking shop full of hot air, a fact often confirmed by those who had attended its meetings.  The only occasion when it actually sent a peace-keeping force, to Chad in 1981-2,  proved to be a disastrous failure.

The inception of the AU coincided with the post 9/11 need of the West to shore up its defences against an elusive terrorist enemy - which contributed to the emphasis on the peace and security aspects of the AU in its first four years. But it does have a democratic vocation that developed in the immediate post-Cold War years of the 1990s, which happened also to be the last years of the old OAU, clearly heightening the need for reform. But it was, after all, the OAU of Secretary-General Salim Ahmed Salim that introduced an anti-coup doctrine at the summit in Algiers in 1999 that has simply been carried on and deepened by the AU (which now justifies intervention in cases of extreme human rights abuses or war crimes). This resolve was seen in the firm suspension of Mauritania from AU membership after the August 3, 2005 coup. In spite of the mitigating circumstances that subsequently emerged, it was an important principle to maintain.

The main successes of the AU so far have been in the field of security, especially the high profile dispatch of a peace-monitoring contingent to Darfur.  Although still not anywhere large enough, and capable of running into trouble depending on how a fluid situation evolves, the presence of this 7,000-strong force has by all accounts made some difference to a tense and complicated problem. One of the AU's most important new institutions, the African Peace and Security Council (APSC), established in 2004 and designed to monitor and plan for crisis and conflict situations, has clearly been useful here.

The AU's positive support for democracy has also been, on occasion, helpful, as in Burundi, the Comoros, and to a limited extent, in Togo. Moreover, the willingness to be proactive in these fields has commended the new organisation to the international community, especially those in the west that have heightened security concerns about Africa, including notably the US and the EU (which of course includes France which has always had a special military presence on the continent). This has resulted in substantial assistance to the AU's own security mechanisms. The EU, for example, has provided $130m, which is, nevertheless, complemented by the embryonic European Rapid Intervention Force. This  force, intended for use in the last resort, has only been put into use in an extremely limited operation in Bunia in the north-east Congo in 2003. The intervention, named Operation Artemis and led by France, was not deemed an unqualified success.

Given its current higher profile in Africa, the US at the moment are also happy to be involved on the security side, though they, like the French, have their own security network with their own priorities and considerations. In the US case, it has continued to deepen, especially post-9/11. An African Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI), developed by the US during the 1990s and involving training, equipment, and participation in manoeuvres, was expanded and consolidated early in the first Bush Administration in the African Contingency Operations Training and Assistance (ACOTA), to "strengthen peacekeeping and peace enforcement skills."   These developments have been paralleled by a similar initiative by the French since 1997 called RECAMP (Reinforcement of African Peace-keeping Capacities). 

To be brutally candid, the international powers now promoting and encouraging the AU appear desirous to have proxy institutions in order to reduce the necessity for outside interventions of the kind the French had consistently engaged in since 1960. It is obvious that since Rwanda and the CAR, they have had increasingly little stomach for more, although they were still involved from a more international motivation in Côte d'Ivoire. There have been other external interventions in Africa, such as the US in Somalia in 1992-3, and the British in Sierra Leone in 2000. But the world has increasingly turned to the AU and African regional organisations such as ECOWAS and SADC which have also been involved in security operations.    [back]

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