The African Union’s mission to Somalia has always struck me as peculiar at best and highly problematic at worst. With no clear mandate and objectives, paid for by Washington (and not that terribly well), with not much in terms of military equipment, no peace to enforce and coming from no particularly strong peacekeeping traditions (African militaries tended to be more adept at making war than making peace). The LA Times has an interesting article on the situation:
When a mystery illness swept through the African Union peacekeeping mission here, killing six soldiers and sickening dozens, doctors were stumped. With help from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they ruled out swine flu, tropical infection, rat-borne bacteria and even deliberate poisoning, as claimed by Somalia’s insurgents. But the culprit, doctors fear, is just as alarming: beriberi, a vitamin-deficiency disorder typically seen only in famines. Simply put, African Union soldiers appear to have died from a form of malnutrition. It’s the starkest example yet of how the mission in Somalia, which is authorized by the United Nations and largely funded by Washington, has become one of the most dangerous, yet least supported, peacekeeping operations in the world.
Most of the troops come from Burundi and Uganda, both trouble spots with their own fair share of national conflicts and tensions, and both miserably poor. The bigger problem, however, is that none of these states have ever done a successful peacekeeping op, or have had the chance to learn it from anyone. Peacekeeping in Africa generally meant multi-national forces led by Western militaries. African armed forces may be good counter-insurgents (though mostly they aren’t, in fact), but they certainly aren’t trained in peace-keeping themselves. At the same time, with the military being heavily politicised and seen as an instrument of national political interests and power struggles inside Africa, the Somalian mission is at risk of making matters worse, not better.
How do you solve a problem like Somalia?
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