Just after making light of incidents on Kosovo’s periphery below, I’ve been alerted to much nastier events on the Chad/Darfur border. An French EU soldier has been killed and another wounded, having strayed into Sudan (I’m sure there are already conspiracy theories out there about how this happened, but let’s not pursue them). As if this wasn’t bad enough, the EU Force in Chad has apologized for entering Sudanese territory – that may have been necessary to defuse tensions and get the body back, but it leaves a sour taste. I don’t recall Sudan grovelling after its forces apparently backed the rebellion in Chad at the start of February, or after any number of other recent cross-border clashes.
This is not the first time an EU mission has lost personnel to a hostile act (that happened in the Balkans in the 1990s) but none of it previous military missions to Africa had suffered a fatality. I’ve addressed the potential impact of something like this on EU security policy before: there are obviously far worse scenarios involving greater losses, but it feels like a grim turning-point all the same. By unhappy chance, I have a new article* out on the meaning of last month’s fighting in Chad, calling it a “predictable crisis”. Here’s the core of the argument:
Three things are already clear. One is that, for the first time, an EU military deployment is not only encountering significant violence (that has happened elsewhere, as in earlier operations in the Congo) but is fuelling violence in its own right. The second is that the consensus underpinning EU security cooperation is being severely strained by the experience. The third is that this combination of events was all too predictable.
This doesn’t just mean there were concrete warnings that Chad could turn ugly, although doubts were raised about the mission from very early on. The UN Secretariat – now responsible for over 55,000 peacekeepers in Africa, many of them in highly volatile situations – had resisted getting involved in Chad as there was “no peace to keep”. In private, European officials complained the mission’s proposed deployment (one year) was too short and its personnel far too few (analysts called for 10,000 troops or more).
But, whatever the specifics of this crisis, the generic threat that an operation in Africa turning bad could harm European security cooperation has been present for far longer. That is because there has never been a real consensus on the need for such operations.
Today’s events probably won’t show up this lack of consensus too badly, as the dead man is French – had he been from one of the other contributors to the mission (Ireland, say, or Austria) there would probably have been an uproar. But this is a sad day for the EU.
* Eagle-eyed Europhile readers may note an error in the article: I claim that the 2003 European Security Strategy doesn’t refer to Africa. It does, and I knew that – sorry!
