The goal of having Africa put out its own fires as far as possible looks increasingly unattainable as conflicts in West Africa and the Great Lakes demand the deployment of blue helmets.
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan expressed his concern this week that Côte d’Ivoire was sliding into conflict.
The response from the foreign ministers of Ghana, Guinea, Nigeria, Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire itself was a call for the injection of a fully-fledged UN peacekeeping force.
This demand from members of the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) coincides with a similar request to the world organisation by countries mediating peace efforts in Burundi.
As compelling as both cases may be, the UN is obliged to do the math. There are currently five UN peacekeeping operations in Africa. Their total budget amounts to close to $2-billion a year.
A total of 48 000 peacekeepers have been committed to conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ethiopia and Eritrea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Western Sahara. Of these, 31 000 troops are already in place.
There is no lack of will among Africans to put their own peacekeepers into African trouble spots.
The 3 500-strong African Union Mission in Burundi (Amib) comprises soldiers from South Africa, Mozambique and Ethiopia. Ecowas has 1 300 troops in Côte d’Ivoire.
The West African ministers put their finger on the problem this week when they said they needed UN forces in Côte d’Ivoire because the Africans do not have the resources to deploy more soldiers there.
A similar problem faces Amib, which has already drawn on United States and British financial assistance to deploy the troops there.
South Africa is spearheading the international drive to convert Amib to a UN operation and have the world body pick up the tab.
There is some sympathy for this stance in Europe, but the key remains the US, which picks up more than a quarter of the UN peacekeeping bill.
Annan’s expressed fears notwithstanding, US ambassador to the UN John Negroponte remarked this week that Washington needed to be persuaded that Côte d’Ivoire was a case for UN peacekeeping.
Once the world’s largest cocoa producer and a haven of stability in West Africa, Côte d’Ivoire now stretches the mediating efforts of the entire region.
France retains 7 000 peacekeepers in this former colonial jewel and President Laurent Gbagbo is engaged in a virtual merry-go-round of diplomatic activity in the region.
This week he was scheduled to see President Blaise Campaore of Burkina Faso to mend fences after an exchange of accusations: Gbagbo claiming that Campaore was supporting Ivorian rebels, and the Burkinabe leader maintaining Gbagbo was plotting to overthrow him.
Last weekend Gbagbo and rebel leader Guillaume Soro, along with Gabonese President Omar Bongo, met French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin. Gbagbo is also due to see Malian President Amadou Toumani Toure. Earlier this month Ivorian Foreign Minister Seydou Diarra met rebel leaders in Ouagadougou and undertook to see them again in Accra.
The crux of the rebel complaint is that despite getting nine ministerial positions in the transitional government, Gbagbo has withheld real power and responsibility from them.
The mediation pattern has become a familiar one: threaten the belligerents with being exposed as the “spoilers” and the people keeping a war weary country in conflict.
This obliges both sides to at least be seen to be going through the motions of negotiations. This pressure is even more telling on the Ivorian combatants. Unlike their counterparts in the DRC and Burundi, who have become inured to violence and instability, normality is literally the norm for the Ivorians.
The peacekeeping demands on the UN could lead the US to dust off nine-year-old plans for financing an African rapid reaction force. When the US eschewed committing its own boys to peacekeeping, following what legend now calls the “Black Hawk Down” debacle in Somaliland, it decided instead to finance peacekeeping training and capacity building in African countries.
Then president Nelson Mandela and others were deeply suspicious and offered this idea the frozen mitt. Reviving the US notion could prove complex. Washington is as reluctant now as it was then to send troops. It could take some very heavy persuading to get a country fully tied up in Afghanistan and Iraq to commit some dollars to Africa.