by Richard Gowan | Mar 18, 2010 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia, Global Dashboard
Yesterday, Ban Ki-moon announced the formation of a Senior Advisory Group for the Review of International Civilian Capacities (which will hopefully not be known as SAGRICC). “Another UN panel,” I hear you cry, “whoopy-ruddy-doo!” But this is a serious panel dealing with a serious problem: the shortage of decent police, justice experts and other civilian specalists to deploy to post-conflict countries. Many UN missions have only 60-70% of their planned civilian staff, leaving them overstretched and unable to deal with day-to-day political issues, human rights and so on.
The new advisory group (involving former UN peacekeeping chief Jean-Marie Guéhenno and my boss, Bruce Jones) will oversee a review “to improve the international response in the aftermath of conflict by strengthening the availability, deployment and appropriateness of civilian capacities for peacebuilding.” My colleague Rahul Chandran is leading the team conducting this review. I think they’re the right team for the job.
I also think that this would be a good moment for the EU to learn a lesson from the UN. As Daniel and I pointed out in a tough paper for ECFR last year (with a foreword by Jean-Marie Guéhenno…) the EU’s own civilian peacekeeping efforts have big problems. EU missions suffer from staff short-falls almost as bad as the UN’s. In part, that’s because demand (for UN and EU ops alike) outstrips supply – which also creates technical headaches, as we pointed out in Internationale Politik:
Since the European Council sent a police mission to Bosnia in 2003, the European Union has deployed fifteen civilian operations worldwide—compared to just six military operations. These have ranged from small police reform missions in Congo to a 3,000-strong mission in Kosovo, launched in 2008, that handles not only policing issues but judicial reform, war crimes investigations, and customs.
The Union’s ability to deploy so many missions—even sending personnel as far away as Aceh, Indonesia—was one of the great successes of Javier Solana, the European Union’s foreign policy chief from 1999 to 2009. Working with a relatively small group of officials, Solana used personal diplomacy and sheer persistence to get each mission on the ground.
The EU’s bureaucratic systems have often struggled to keep up. Financing has been a particular headache: when the first personnel arrived in Aceh, they had to use their personal credit cards to fund the mission start-up. European officials also admit that they have been lucky. Although EU civilian personnel have come under attack in the Balkans and Afghanistan, they have yet to suffer any fatalities. Had a European mission suffered significant casualties—as the United Nations suffered in Iraq in 2003 and in Haiti —EU governments might have recoiled from approving missions at such a high rate.
So I’d argue that the EU should match the UN’s review with a formal self-analysis of its civilian operations (in fairness, the Swedish EU presidency made some progress in this direction by asking member-states to review their national civilian capacities).
Actually, I’d go further. Ten years ago, the UN published the highly influential Brahimi Report – an in-depth study of all aspects of peacekeeping. Succeeding reform initiatives, including this new review, all build on this extremely strong basis. The EU doesn’t have any equivalent ur-text for its operations. The Union should put together a team of wise persons to start drafting one, the sooner the better.
by Alex Evans | Mar 17, 2010 | Africa
Engrossing graph encountered while researching the effect of Chinese investment in Africa (click on it for the full size version):
From the excellent World Bank report, Africa’s Silk Road.
by Richard Gowan | Mar 15, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia, North America
The Economist’s David Rennie asked a disturbing question last week: if Obama’s America can’t make soft power work, what hope does Europe have? His thesis is that Obama has followed just the sort of multilateral, engagement-before-confrontation type of strategy that the EU advocates, and been rebuffed by Iran, Israel, China, etc. Meanwhile, Baroness Ashton and her fellow EU-builders still hanker after soft power…
But here is the question that I am starting to turn over in my mind.If our big bet in Europe is that speaking with one voice will make our norms-based, soft power approach work, what lessons should we draw when Mr Obama’s outstretched hand of friendship is smacked away? Because even in a perfect, parallel universe, in which the EU magically falls in line behind Catherine Ashton and the new EU diplomatic service, we will struggle to become one half as united as the American government is. Our 27 countries will always find it hard to match America when it comes to identifying and defending our interests. And though there can of course be differences in the messages sent out by the White House, the State Department, Congress and so on, in general America speaks with one voice to the outside world, in a way that the EU can barely hope to match.
And yet all that speaking with one voice, in defence of agreed, common interests, does not seem to shield the Obama administration from snubs.
This is an eloquent version of a problem that wonks who worry about multilateralism and transatlantic relations have been aware of for some time. The EU did a huge amount to sustain multilateral institutions during the Bush years, and benefited from playing good cop to Washington’s bad cop. Now Washington wants to be a good cop too, and European leaders feel vulnerable. If Obama’s strategy fails it won’t just discredit him, but the EU’s international approach since 2001 (or earlier).
Rennie quotes a European official who claims the problem isn’t the strategy, but the execution: the Americans are guilty of “incompetent multilateralism”. The implication is that, if only the U.S. applied its power with a little more European finesse, Obama would be in a better place right now. I’m not so sure. (more…)
by Mark Weston | Mar 14, 2010 | Africa, Economics and development
We are now in Burkina Faso, the last stop on what has been a fascinating and somewhat challenging tour of West Africa. Here’s a beginner’s guide to one of the world’s poorest countries:
1. Located in the heart (and heat) of West Africa, between the Sahara desert and the forests of the south, Burkina Faso has one of the highest fertility rates in the world. The average Burkinabe woman has six children. As a consequence, the population has increased five-fold in the past half-century. At 15 million, however, it is still under-populated compared to Great Britain, which is of similar size but has four times more people. It’s still too crowded though for the 3.5 million Burkinabe who live and work in neighbouring Ivory Coast.
2. Known in colonial times as Upper Volta, Burkina Faso means ‘Land of the Honourable People.’ Burkinabes are known as among the most honest folk in Africa.
3. The country has arguably the world’s best place names. Its capital – one of the oldest cities on Earth – is Ouagadougou. Leafy Bobo-Dioulasso, from where I am writing this, is the second city. It also boasts the desert market town of Gorom-Gorom (so good they named it twice), Bouroum-Bouroum (ditto), Fada N’Gourma, Tin-Akof, Niangoloko and, er, Rambo.
4. Burkina has few natural resources. The French only colonised it because it was a bridge between their coastal territories of Benin and Ivory Coast and their desert holdings in modern-day Mali and Niger. It even stopped being a country for 15 years from 1932, when it was carved up between its more important neighbours. The French made good use of Upper Volta’s human resources, however, forcing hundreds of thousands to build railways, farm cocoa and fight in the First World War trenches.
5. The country is dominated by the Mossi ethnic group. A tribe of brilliant horsemen (which may account for the profusion of betting shops in Bobo), the Mossi repelled slave raiders and other rivals and remained intact for 400 years until their kingdom fell to the French. Captain Paul Voulet, who led the French expedition, was a real-life Kurtz figure, who stuck victims’ heads on poles, roasted children over fires, and strung up soldiers who displeased him at a height where their feet could be reached by hyenas’ hungry jaws. When his superiors tried to rein him in, he told his troops he was no longer French but a “black chief,” who would found his own empire. After he was killed, the French, embarrassed that their civilising mission in their colonies had gone awry, attributed Voulet’s activities to the maddening heat of Africa.
6. Burkina Faso is one of Africa’s least urbanised societies. Despite plagues of locusts, catastrophic droughts, desertification, and the fatal effects of US cotton subsidies (Burkina produces cotton at one-quarter the cost of American cotton, but subsidies mean US producers can undercut Burkinabe farmers), over three-quarters still live in the countryside. The French colonial administrator R Delavignette wrote in 1946 that, ‘We came from an industrialised Europe where factories are joyless affairs, and found people who worked to music. Communal labour had its drums and tom-toms, its orchestras to cheer the workers on.’ Drummers still accompany farmers at planting and harvesting times today.
7. Burkina hosts Africa’s most important film festival, the biennial Fespaco (the next one is in 2011). Cinema attendances are falling, however, because of the proliferation of pirated DVDs.
8. Burkina was home to the ill-fated revolutionary Thomas Sankara, who as president alienated the French by calling them neo-colonialists, told the country’s creditors he wouldn’t pay them back (‘you played the game, you lost,’ he explained), slated African leaders for their corruption, and practised what he preached by ditching the ministerial Mercedes for a Renault 4, taking out a $2,000 mortgage to buy a house, and cycling around Ouagadougou on a rusty old bicycle (is David Cameron a secret fan?). Cheques he wrote often bounced. Sankara was killed in 1987 by soldiers close to his friend Blaise Compaore, who many suspect ordered the assassination. Frequently described as Africa’s Che Guevara, Sankara, who unlike most African revolutionaries died before he could sully his reputation, remains a hero to young idealists from all over the continent.
9. Blaise Compaore is still the Presdient of Burkina Faso today. Something of an eminence grise, as well as being linked to Sankara’s death he was also implicated in civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and is a longstanding supporter of the vicious Liberian warlord Charles Taylor (currently on trial in The Hague for war crimes). On the other hand, Compaore has also helped broker peace, for now, in Guinea. In the 2005 election, judged ‘free and fair’ by the 1500 (count ’em) international observers who were flown in to watch, he gained 80% of the vote.
10. Burkina’s main cities saw violent street protests in 2008, as food and fuel prices climbed beyond the reach of most urbanites. As Compaore has loosened his dictatorial grip on the country, protests of all kinds have increased. One year, the authorities in Ouagadougou tried to force motorcycle riders to wear helmets. Vigorous rioting forced them to back down.
