Thomas W Lippman
NEARLY six months after proposing with great fanfare to create an all-African military force to intervene in trouble spots, a chastened Clinton administration has revised the plan to meet African demands for more decision-making power and overcome French resistance.
Since President Bill Clinton approved the original plan several crises have erupted in Africa – in Zaire, in Sudan and in the Central African Republic – but any US- sponsored force is still many months away from deployment, according to administration officials and European and African diplomats.
The proposed Africa Crisis Response Force, or ACRF, “is alive and moving, very much so”, one senior official said, but “our original timetable was overly aggressive”.
That timetable called for up to 10 000 African troops to be designated, trained, equipped and prepared for deployment well before the end of this year. So far, however, only two countries have designated military units for potential participation and training has not yet begun, officials said.
Mali and Ethiopia declared their willingness to participate when then- Secretary of State Warren Christopher visited Africa in October. According to administration officials and foreign diplomats, many other African countries have endorsed the concept in principle, and several European allies have agreed to support it.
But the original US plan, hastily devised in anticipation of an explosion of violence in Burundi that has so far not occurred, failed to take into account African sensitivities about decisions made by outsiders, several sources said.
Fledgling regional groups within Africa, such as the 12-member Southern Africa Development Committee, wanted an official voice in deciding when and where an intervention force might be needed, who should be in it and what its assignment should be, and the US is prepared to accommodate them, several sources said.
Such an arrangement would move the US vision of the force closer to that of France, which has been reluctant to support what it sees as an effort to muscle in on what has traditionally been a French zone of influence.
“We ourselves would like to have further consultations with our members before we announce our ideas about it,” said Ahmed Haggag, deputy secretary general of the Organization of African Unity. “Sub-groups such as the SADC have their own blueprints about conflict resolution.”