The Crisis of African Peacekeeping
Last month, Democratic Republic of the Congo President Félix Tshisekedi demanded that the United Nations begin withdrawing its 17,000 peacekeepers from his country by December. In June, Colonel Assimi Goïta’s military regime in Mali made the same demand; the UN will complete the withdrawal of its 12,000 peacekeepers from that country by January. Meanwhile, the African Union is removing its peacekeepers – numbering more than 15,000 – from Somalia, owing to Western governments’ reluctance to continue funding the mission.
These untimely departures will exacerbate instability in Africa’s most volatile regions: the Sahel, the Great Lakes, and the Horn of Africa. For that reason, they highlight the escalating crisis of peacekeeping in Africa.
At the root of this crisis is a paradox. UN peacekeepers – 84% of whom are deployed in Africa – tend to be wellresourced, but they often refuse to undertake dangerous enforcement missions to protect at-risk populations. African peacekeepers, by contrast, are more willing to do what is needed to enforce peace, but rarely receive the logistical and financial resources they need.
UN peacekeepers have a longstanding credibility problem in Africa. In 1961, the popular Congolese prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was executed under the noses of a Westerndominated UN peacekeeping mission. After that, many
African governments opposed the deployment of UN peacekeepers on their territory, and Burundi, Chad, Egypt, Eritrea, and Sudan expelled UN troops.
In doing so, these countries may have thrown the baby out with the bath water: the UN played an integral role in restoring peace and democratic rule to Namibia, Mozambique, and Sierra Leone. But African governments doubt not only the effectiveness of external peacekeeping forces, but also their intentions.
Their suspicion is hardly unfounded. The deployment of troops by external actors like France and the United States to African countries such as Chad, Djibouti, Niger, and Senegal have often amounted more to self-interested meddling than genuine efforts to strengthen Africa’s security. France, in particular, is viewed by many Africans as using UN peacekeeping troops largely to advance its own interests. During its 27 years leading the UN Department of Peace Operations, it has been accused of deploying self-interested missions to its former colonies, including the Central African Republic (CAR), Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, and Mali. It does not help that France’s decade-long counterterrorism operation in the Sahel utterly failed to stop the Islamic State and al-Qaeda from establishing a strong presence. French troops have now been expelled from bases in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger.
More
broadly,
UN
peacekeepers are often viewed by local populations – such as in South Sudan and the CAR – as observers of slaughter and displacement rather than as bulwarks against them. Like Western countries, major non-Western contributors to UN peacekeeping forces – such as Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan – tend to refuse to deploy their troops for dangerous enforcement missions in Africa.