African-Led Peace Support Operations in a declining period of new UN Peacekeeping Operations.

• Author: Tchie, Andrew E. Yaw

1 Introduction

After the collapse of communism and the Cold War in the later 1980s, many African states moved towards democracy, which involved a wave of leadership changes in the 1990s. Some states like Benin, Zambia, Mali, and Nigeria went through civil society-led changes. In contrast, others had military regimes that were eventually reformed and held elections. The changes during this period contributed to democratic gains across the continent, but many African states remained very much elite-led. In addition, challenges such as interstate conflicts, often involving insurgency groups who resisted the state politically, persisted. During this period, ongoing forms of insecurity would evolve outside of the geographical centre of states which impacted the role of peacekeeping missions. For multilateral organizations like the United Nations (UN), the increasingly complex and multidimensional peacekeeping mandates were also confronted with diminishing human and financial resources. This required the UN to realign itself in order to better respond to crisis. Part of this realignment required the UN to revisit how it approached multidimensional peacekeeping operations (PKO). (1) One attempt to adapt came from the Brahimi Report, representing the first comprehensive effort to identify and address the technical problems (including a lack of resources, logistical and financial problem) with UN PKO s and a move away from state-focused approaches. (2) As a result, the UN would focus its PKOs on keeping the peace where there was peace to be kept. It represented a stark focus on ceasefire agreements but ensured that the UN's efforts (PKOs, peacebuilding and peacemaking) were focused on safeguarding these agreements.

Despite the UN's efforts, many African states and their societies were still riddled with growth-hindering difficulties such as conflict, corruption, political isolation, economic underdevelopment, urban and rural divisions, state capture by elites and ethnic bigotry. Alongside these challenges, during the early 1990s, the then President of the United States, Bill Clinton, issued the PDD-25 Presidential Decree, which sought to limit UN PKO s on the African continent after the Somali debacle in 1993, (3) indirectly contributing to the UN peacekeeping debacle in Rwanda six months later. In addition to this, some African leaders were not keeping to the democratic reform process or peace agreements. As a result, many states would see the rise of new resistance towards the states through violent and extremist political views.

During this period, terrorist groups, like the Maitatsine Islamic group in Nigeria and the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria, began to surface. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in the United States and the subsequent War on Terror campaign, several international Islamic extremist groups increased their operations in Africa. In some cases, Islamic extremist groups found a footing in places with long-standing grievances, isolation, center-periphery, and economic underdevelopment, and economic and political marginalization based on ethnic, religious, and socio-political identities. Significantly, much of the destabilization in the Sahel resulted from heavily armed and skilled fighters from General Muammar Qaddafi's Libya, who spilled over into Mali after his death. This resulted in emerging conflicts in Africa evolving from rebel-led civil wars designed to take over control of the state (1980-the 90s) to insurgent conflicts (2000s) designed to partition and isolate portions of the territory of a state(s) as part of a new caliphate that rejected and ignored state boundaries. Consequently, the nature of African conflict(s) today increasingly involves insurgents and violent extremists fighting the state. These are often accompanied by terror organizations targeting government installations, coercing populations, deploying indiscriminate violence as a strategic tool, and even slaughtering civilians--especially in rural areas to cause terror on the population and undermine the legitimacy of the state. (4) The new conflict actors differ from the freedom fighter periods of the 1960s. These are not groups with political wings or a purpose per se. These groups are located across borders and set up base in regions where government officials are non-existent. Most conflict actors previously focused on taking over or fighting for a stake in the state. These new actors are focused on taking complete control over areas and operating across borders, while mixing banditry, illicit finance, and indiscriminate violence as a strategy. This has meant that the UN's blue helmets were presented with new operational challenges. (5)

In response, the UN, and the African Union (AU) authorized new international interventions to protect the displaced and often persecuted populations and state agents from these aggressors. These new interventions are often comprised of enforcement operations and tasks which require a "green posture" where units must be stealthy, attack with surprise and need special forces who operate behind the lines. (6) These new interventions and operations differ fundamentally from peacekeeping doctrine in several ways. First, these operations were uniquely African, with a lead nation or a regional block responding to a crisis. Second, the operations were not deployed based on the parties' consent following a ceasefire or peace agreement, instead they only required the host state's consent. Third, the operations were no longer impartial, as they were deployed to protect the state and its people against an identified aggressor. In some ways, this legitimized the state's actions. Finally, the use of force (enforcement operations or peace enforcement operations) was no longer restricted to self-defense. In essence, these operations were then authorized to use force to protect civilians and the state and were encouraged to do so proactively, not only to protect civilians under attack or in the face of imminent danger. As a result, peacekeepers had to change their approach to dealing with this insecurity and adjust to the new environments where this insecurity continued to thrive. This, in part, led to an increase in the number of deployments by the UN and the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea-Bissau. These operations were followed by AU missions in Burundi (2003) and Darfur (2004). (7)

In the UN context, these new African-led PSOs were framed as stabilization operations, deployed to enforce forms of stability, influenced by changes in the global order, threats to regional stability, spillover effects and new conflict dynamics. However, with a global recession (in 2008), changing global order, great power rivalry manifesting in a reduction in the deployment of new UN PKOs (8) deployment, there has been a focus on supporting African-led PSOs from within the UN. As a result, the AU, Regional Economic Communities (RECs) or groups of African states and their operations represented African-led missions that were based on different peacekeeping principles than those characterized by the UN PKOs--In the UN PKO context, there have been UN-led and UN-authorized regional organizations and coalition deployments. The aim of these African-led PSOs changed from pursuing and consolidating peace agreements to disrupting and degrading the military advantage and capability of insurgent groups (often embedded amongst civilian populations). Consequently, African-led PSOs have...