African leaders fall short on pledge to silence the guns

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African leaders fall short on pledge to silence the guns

4:58 CAT | 17 Feb 2024

File photo: AFP

Conflicts are raging in Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo

AU says more than 40% of its 55 members don’t pay their dues

Almost seven years after Sierra Leone’s then-President Ernest Bai Koroma unveiled the African Union’s Silencing the Guns initiative, which sought to end violent conflict on the continent by 2020, peace remains elusive.

The presentation of the plan to the annual summit of African leaders in Addis Ababa in 2017 came amid some of the worst humanitarian crises since the 1990s. Some 17 million people across north-eastern Nigeria, northern Cameroon, western Chad and southeastern Niger were in desperate need of aid following years of upheaval.

Another AU summit is being held in the Ethiopian capital this weekend, and the outlook is as dire, if not even worse. In the Sahel region alone, armed conflict and political upheaval claimed the lives of about 12,000 people, most of them civilians, in 2023, according to the United Nations.

Six of the AU’s 55 members have been suspended since 2020 after their governments were toppled in coups, Sudan has been mired in a civil war since April, and intensifying clashes between government forces and rebels in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo have displaced 7 million people.

While a two-year civil war in Ethiopia ended in 2022, the authorities there are still struggling to quell several violent insurgencies. Mozambique, Somalia and Uganda are facing insurgencies of their own.

“The AU can do better as an organization when it comes to mediation and high-level involvement in conflicts,” said Liesl Louw-Vaudran, a senior advisor on the AU for the International Crisis Group, a think tank that advises governments on how to promote peace. “The guns have not been silenced.”

Moussa Faki Mahamat, the chairman of the AU commission, acknowledged as much in an address to ministers ahead of the heads-of-state summit.

“The continuation of military coups, electoral violence and humanitarian crises linked to war and climate change are great sources of worry for us,” he said. “They seriously threaten the signs of emergence from Africa that we all want to see.”

Dragging its feet

Human rights groups have accused the AU of dragging its feet when it came to mediation efforts in Sudan and Ethiopia, and leaving it to other powers such as the US, European Union and Gulf states to fill the void.

Angola did request leaders to convene a meeting on the sidelines of the summit to discuss the Congo violence, but no statement on the matter is expected, according to three diplomats who were briefed on the talks. Congo’s government accuses Rwanda of backing a rebel group known as M23, an allegation its neighbour denies.

Informal bilateral meetings are also being held on the conflict in Sudan and the decision by military juntas that led Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger to withdraw from the Economic Community of West African States after the regional bloc imposed sanctions on them, the diplomats said.

Asking the AU to fix Africa’s problems is unfair given that its members starve it of funding, said Martin Ziguélé, a former prime minister of the Central African Republic.

Funding shortage

The AU says more than 40% of its members don’t pay their annual contributions.

In 2003, the AU agreed to establish a permanent standby force, comprising brigades in each of its five regions with a total of about 15,000 soldiers, to prevent war crimes, genocide and serious human rights abuses. It has never been deployed, with African heads of state having mainly opted to contribute troops to separate peacekeeping operations.

“Why is the AU powerless? The answer is very easy. They have no power,” Ziguélé said. “There is no political will among leaders for the AU to have a military force with the means to intervene. ”

That needs to change, said western diplomats, some of whose governments fund the AU.

“The AU needs to be given the mandate to intervene, and intervene early and quickly, not just when a conflict has already erupted,” said Fred Gateretse-Ngoga, a former head of the AU’s conflict prevention and early warning division.

Source: Bloomberg