States of fragility

Africa is posing the EU’s new foreign-policy set-up some of its earliest and hardest tests.

Whatever strategies the European Union may develop for growth and development in Africa, they cannot take real effect without security on the ground.

Two current challenges – an independence referendum in south Sudan, and ongoing violence in Somalia – are likely to intensify in the coming months. A third challenge might arise next January, when Nigerians elect a new parliament – the fourth since the end of military rule just over a decade ago.

And across much of the continent, the weakness of state institutions and the absence of government legitimacy repeatedly allows crises to emerge in
unexpected places, as in Ivory Coast in the late 1990s and in Kenya in December 2007. The African Union is increasingly willing to tackle such challenges, and is developing the capacity to do so. But at the moment, it is still too weak, and too divided, to deal with the most serious trouble, such as threats in Sudan.

Split in Sudan

In 2005, Sudan’s central government, controlled by President Omar al-Bashir’s National Congress Party (NCP), signed a peace agreement with the main rebel group in south Sudan, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), halting decades of north-south conflict. A comprehensive peace agreement scheduled a census and nationwide elections, leading up to an independence referendum in the south – which is due to take place next January. (There will also be a referendum on Abyei, an oil-rich province that sits across the border between north and south.)

Elections took place in April, Sudan’s first multiparty poll since 1986. They
were largely peaceful, but observers noted widespread irregularities, and al-Bashir in effect ran unopposed.

Sudan-watchers are concerned that the result – overwhelming support for the NCP in the north and for the SPLM in the south – suggests a consolidation of one-party rule in the south as well. “The SPLM have been the good guys until now,” a diplomat said. “There has been a reluctance, for political reasons, to criticise their rule.”

Next year’s referendum is all but certain to result in support for the south’s
secession. A senior European Commission official said that both governments appeared willing to respect the result – but warned
that Sudan was entering “uncharted territory”.

Fact File

SECURITY CO-OPERATION

The EU’s security engagement with Africa has intensified in recent years. In 2007, the two sides held their first-ever summit, in Lisbon, and the EU named its first ambassador to the African Union (AU), Koen Vervaeke, who also serves as EUSR. The following year, Javier Solana, then the EU’s foreign policy chief, appointed Pierre-Michel Joana, a French general who had headed the EU’s security-reform mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as special adviser for African peacekeeping capabilities. 

The current co-operation extends to the Africa Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) and associated initiatives, such as the setting up of an AU situation centre and early warning system. The EU’s Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy, has provided the software with which the AU produces its intelligence assessments. But as Alex Vines of Chatham House wrote in a recent article in International Affairs, the security partnership is hampered by restrictions on the EU’s funding, which cannot be used for military
expenditure. 

The EU has contributed, primarily financially, to several AU peace missions, above all in Sudan (AMIS) and Somalia (AMISOM). To date, it has provided €300 million to AMIS and €150m to AMISOM, although much of that has been spent on logistics and paying salaries, because of restrictions on military use of EU funds. The EU has spent approximately €700m in humanitarian aid for Darfur.

He stressed that the EU was eager to finance the south in building more effective and accountable public administration, no matter what the outcome of the referendum. “We need to help south Sudan develop its capacity to govern, either as an independent state or as an autonomous region [within Sudan],” he said. “These funds must yield results.”

Alex Vines, the head of the Africa programme at Chatham House, a think-tank in London, agreed that the central government in Khartoum was unlikely to challenge the result of the referendum. The main challenge, he said, would be to “manage the separation”. On the EU side, that responsibility will fall to Rosalind Marsden, the new Special Representative (EUSR) for Sudan. Until earlier this year the UK’s ambassador in Khartoum, she was appointed to her new position in August. From her first day in the job, she has had to tackle some of the most complicated moral and practical questions that any EUSR has to deal with.

The situation is made more complicated by the ongoing, low-level conflict in the western province of Darfur – where hundreds of thousands still languish in refugee camps dating back to the height of the conflict in 2003 – and by al-Bashir’s indictment on charges of war crimes and genocide by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. The Commission official said that the ICC’s work was likely to have a “deterrent effect” on would-be perpetrators, but also warned: “There is a perception in Africa that we have solutions for everything.” Moreover, “we need al-Bashir for peace”.

Pirate attacks

Somalia is a far smaller country than Sudan but presents even more of a headache. Following her appointment as the EU’s foreign policy chief in
November, Catherine Ashton chose the EU’s anti-piracy operation off Somalia’s coast as the first high-profile Africa issue. The recognition has been gaining ground among member states, however, that the offshore mission cannot tackle the source of piracy, which lies in the country’s two decades as a ‘failed state’. The EU has drawn a controversial conclusion from this analysis: it is backing the African Union mission to prop up the transitional federal government, and training Somalia’s government forces in
Uganda.

“The mission is reflective of the difficulty that the EU has in this type of situation,” Vines said. “There was a sense that the EU needed to do something and this [mission] is as far as it could go. The EU has now chosen a side, and has to ask ‘is the policy working? Is this a sustainable approach?’”

In the coming months, the EU is to present a new strategy for the Horn of Africa that is supposed to translate into policy the support in principle agreed by the member states in November. Debate is also under way on whether the EU’s growing involvement in security questions in the Horn of Africa calls for a new EUSR post dedicated to the region.

Whatever the decision, the security challenges will remain formidable.

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