Call to overhaul UN peace missions

African leaders called this week for an overhaul in the way peacekeeping missions are handled on the continent, as the United Nations itself reconsiders its deployments in an age of cross-border terrorism.

Eight of the UN’s 15 peacekeeping missions are based in Africa, and several are beset by problems relating to insufficient equipment and mandates ill-suited to the countries in which they operate, while some are accused of abuses against the local population.

These UN deployments are involved in some of the world’s most entrenched conflicts, from rebel groups fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo to militants roaming northern Mali, to South Sudan, where a civil war has created more than a million refugees.

The leaders of Mali, Senegal and Rwanda gathered with military officials and experts this week for the annual Dakar International Forum on Peace and Security, in which a strong desire for reform was apparent.

“We cannot maintain peace where it does not exist, in those areas we must re-establish it,” noted Senegalese President Macky Sall, whose nation is due to send 1,500 police and troops to Mali at the end of the year.

Mali is beset by violence and banditry in its north and centre, despite the presence of a UN peacekeeping mission for four years and a French counter-terror force.

“Faced with asymmetrical violence, peacekeeping missions experience difficulties, to the point that they are sometimes forced to dedicate their resources to their own security,” African Union Commission Chairman Moussa Faki Mahamat noted at the forum.

The UN’s Mali mission is the world’s most dangerous active deployment, with more than 140 peacekeepers killed since its launch.

The UN on Monday opened an independent investigation to determine if UN peacekeepers responded appropriately to an outbreak of violence between May and August this year in the Central African Republic.