In July 2003, at a crucial summit in Maputo, Mozambique, African Union (AU) leaders reached a compromise on a document known as the Protocol Relating to the Establishment of the Peace and Security Council of the African Union. This document established the African Peace and Security Architecture, designing its main elements: the Panel of the Wise, the Continental Early Warning System, the Military Staff Committee, the African Peace Fund and, most importantly, the African Standby Force (ASF). Prior to this, the AU lacked a formal process for addressing emerging conflicts on the continent, instead having to respond to conflict situations on a case-by-case basis and oftentimes responding well after the outbreak of armed violence.

The ASF is designed in a highly decentralised manner, with coordination coming from the AU level, but much of the responsibility for planning and forming components of the ASF delegated to the sub-regional organisations that have emerged as the AU’s partners. As such, the ASF is composed of five brigades that correspond to a sub-regional grouping – the North is coupled with the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU), the East with the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), Central with the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), West with the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and the South with the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Each of these brigades is to be composed of police units, civilian specialists, 300-500 military observers, and approximately 3,000-4,000 troops. Thus, given the limited size but myriad capacities of each brigade, it stands to reason that each ASF brigade would function as a rapid response unit to emerging crises, or else would function as the core of a more considerable United Nations (UN) or AU mission. This is perhaps in keeping with the missions and institutions from which the AU derived its inspiration for the creation of the ASF at the 2003 Maputo summit.

In the wake of recent strife, particularly the civil war in Mali, the European Union (EU) has sought to assist the development of AU and AU member state capabilities in addressing the continent’s conflicts. But what is the best approach for delivering training assistance: the many European Union Training Missions (EUTMs) or the relatively new Amani Africa training cycles? Taken at face value, this question seems to be a matter of weighing the costs and benefits of micro- or macro-level approaches. However, as will be demonstrated in this paper, there are important distinctions in how the EU approaches its relationships with African stakeholders. Amani Africa builds up African institutions and treats the AU as an equal partner in the international system, whereas EUTMs subordinate individual African states to the EU and foster dependence on EU assistance through the way training is structured and delivered. As such, this paper argues that the EU should shift its focus from the deployment of EUTMs in response to crises and near conflicts, instead committing greater resources to future Amani Africa training cycles.

The African Standby Force

Principal among the sources of inspiration for the ASF was the Standby High Readiness Brigade (SHIRBRIG). This Danish-led initiative was intended to create, as its name suggests, a standby brigade which could react rapidly to emerging crises or conflicts. Declared ready for operations at the start of 2000, SHIRBRIG comprised roughly 4,000-5,000 troops at any given time, drawn from 12 countries: Argentina, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Spain, and Sweden. The aim of SHIRBRIG was to deploy early on in an emerging conflict, arriving within the area of operations within 15 to 30 days of the decision being made to deploy the forces and then operating independently for up to 60 days before a more comprehensive mission could be deployed by the UN or a relevant regional organisation.

SHIRBRIG provided the initial headquarters for the UN Mission to Eritrea-Ethiopia (UNMEE) in 2000, force headquarters for the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) in 2005, advisory personnel for the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) in 2003, and the UN Advance Mission in Sudan (UNAMIS) in 2004. SHIRBRIG also avoided one significant shortcoming experienced by African-led interventions in not relying on contributions from all the states involved. The brigade pool was comprised of a number of similar units exceeding force requirements. This ensured the deployment of the brigade even if one or more participants decided not to provide troops for a given mission. This proved to be an important feature of SHIRBRIG in its first deployment, assisting UNMEE in November 2000. Citing financial constraints, the governments of Argentina and Romania opted out of contributing personnel and resources to that deployment. As a result of the expansive brigade pool, units from other contributing states were drawn upon in order to compensate for the lack of Argentine and Romanian participation.

Unfortunately, SHIRBRIG suspended operations in June 2009. But the AU and its regional partners have drawn a number of lessons from the experience of that initiative and this can be most visibly seen in the structure of the ASF. ECOBRIG, the ASF brigade contributed by ECOWAS, is to be comprised of 6,500 troops and is intended to deploy in response to a threat of conflict within 90 days, operating independently for up to 60 days until a larger UN or AU mission can be prepared and deployed. Clearly, this closely follows the example of SHIRBRIG, envisioning similar rapid reaction capabilities and a brigade pool large enough to accommodate shortfalls in contributions from any one member state.

In setting out this new security architecture, AU leaders had planned in the 2003 Maputo summit for the ASF to become deployable by 2010. ECOBRIG is widely reputed to have been the closest of the regional brigades to achieving this target and ECOWAS has been the most active of the African regional organisations in pursuing this initiative. As such, the eventual decision not to deploy ECOBRIG in response to the Malian conflict should be of grave concern.

In early 2012, a coalition of Tuareg rebels and Islamist militants seized control of northern Mali and proclaimed the independence of the ‘Islamic Republic of Azawad’. In response to growing instability in the country, UN Security Council Resolution 2071 was adopted unanimously in October 2012, calling on ECOWAS and the AU to submit a detailed plan for intervention to the Security Council within 45 days. Over 60 days later, UN Security Council Resolution 2085 was unanimously adopted, mandating the establishment of the African-led International Support Mission to Mali (AFISMA).

Whereas the intervention in Mali could well have been a test run for ECOBRIG, given that the brigade was expected to have become operational long before the adoption of Resolutions 2071 and 2085, it is noteworthy that ECOBRIG was not deployed to effect conditions conducive to the later deployment of AFISMA. In fact, much of the efforts made to restore stability to Mali have been made outside the auspices of ECOWAS entirely, greatly undermining the traditional role of this institution as the principal conflict resolution mechanism in West Africa. This is compounded by the fact that a southward advance by the rebel forces in Mali prompted the French military to intervene in January 2013 and deploy approximately 4,000 troops to the country, while the deployment of AFISMA remained elusive.

Another blow to the credibility of ECOBRIG and ECOWAS has come with the revelation in February 2013 that the greatest contributor to AFISMA was not in fact an ECOWAS member: the Republic of Chad. A member of the neighbouring Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) and a contributor to CENTBRIG (Central African Brigade), Chad contributed more than 1,000 troops to AFISMA and also sustained greater casualties on the mission than the French, Nigerian, and Togolese forces combined. With countries external to ECOWAS leading the intervention in Mali, this casts doubt on the level of preparedness in ECOBRIG and the other ASF brigades.

If ECOBRIG was not able to contribute to the stabilisation of Mali, what can be done to bring the ASF up to a satisfactory level of readiness? To this end, the EU has launched a series of EUTMs and the Amani Africa training cycles.

Amani Africa

Amani Africa may be one of the most promising initiatives to come out of the cooperation between the EU and AU, drawing its impetus from the Joint Africa-EU Strategy adopted in December 2007 at a Lisbon summit on the AU-EU strategic partnership. With its first cycle conducted from 2008 to 2011, Amani Africa consisted of a series of training programmes and exercises intended to develop the AU’s capacity to manage and deploy the ASF at the continental level. This culminated in a Command Post Exercise in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in October 2010, which presented the entire structure of the ASF with a simulated conflict to which they would respond over the course of ten days. A subsequent Amani Africa Implementation Meeting in February 2011 brought together relevant officials to consolidate lessons learned on the status and operational capabilities of the ASF.

Such was the level of satisfaction among all relevant parties to the first cycle of Amani Africa, a second cycle was approved in November 2010. This second cycle, known as Amani Africa II, will be carried out from 2011 to 2014 with a view to making the ASF fully operational by 2015. This second cycle has also not focused only on the continental level and has involved some regional level activities. For example, with assistance from the Pearson Centre in Canada, regionally focused exercises have been held within the scope of Amani Africa II, such as Exercise Njiwa, which was held to develop the civilian and police components of EASTBRIG, the regional brigade that corresponds to IGAD. Even so, current plans for Amani Africa II envision the cycle culminating in a comprehensive training exercise to evaluate the capabilities of the ASF at the continental level.

In order for Amani Africa to have the most effective impact on the development of the ASF, however, greater focus must be placed on the regional brigades themselves than on coordination at the continental level. Exercise Njiwa allowed for the capabilities of EASTBRIG to be put to the test in a very explicit way, setting out clear deliverables and expectations and then measuring how well EASTBRIG fulfilled these. Employing such tests intensively in West Africa over previous years may have highlighted any shortcomings in ECOBRIG and allowed for these to be remedied well in advance of the strife experienced by Mali in 2012 and 2013.

As such, in the event that the ASF is not fully operational by the new target year of 2015, AU and EU officials must consider placing added emphasis on the regional brigades themselves in developing a Plan of Action for a third cycle of Amani Africa. An excellent vehicle for delivering training assistance tailored to the particular needs and realities of each ASF brigade would be the ASF technical workshops that the AU and the African regional organisations themselves have established in order to develop and exchange best practices both inter-regionally and intra-regionally. These ASF technical workshops function in a manner relevantly similar to NATO Centres of Excellence, in which many EU member states have been actively engaged and the majority of which EU member states host. In any case, regarding the ASF, a number of regions have been designated as centres of training excellence to conduct tactical, operational, and strategic training.

ECOWAS has established or mandated three training centres to serve as the technical workshops for ECOBRIG. These training centres include the National Defence College in Nigeria (aimed at strategic level planning), the Ecole du Maintien de la Paix in Mali (specialising in tactical level planning), and the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Ghana (concerned with the operational level). Engaging with, and enhancing the capabilities of, these training centres will ensure that a potential third cycle of Amani Africa sees the ASF attain operational capability at last by concentrating on the brigades. At the same time, these training centres present a greater potential for sustainability. While the contribution made by the Pearson Centre through Exercise Njiwa was valuable, it was a single exercise with a short-term impact. These case-by-case forms of collaboration are by their very nature unsustainable and lack the intensity and frequency of activities that can be afforded by local institutions like the National Defence College in Nigeria or the Kofi Annan Centre in Ghana.

Building upon Amani Africa as a leading expression of African-European security cooperation it is also of integral importance for a second reason, perhaps as equally important as the sustainability issue elaborated upon here previously. Amani Africa places greater authority over security cooperation with African stakeholders in the hands of the European Commission and necessitates greater coordination at the European level. While this may certainly undermine the capacity for some individual EU member states to pursue and express their own narrow set of state interests, it presents the EU as a much more reliable partner to the AU and builds mutual confidence in the AU-EU partnership. An obvious benefit of this increased reliability and trust is the better structuring of training assistance so as to avoid overlapping or duplicating efforts on the part of external actors.

An illustrative example of the disjointed assistance at times provided by external actors can be found in Exercise Natural Fire. In 2009, military forces from Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and the United States of America (US) participated in Natural Fire, a US-sponsored exercise designed to improve collective responses to complex humanitarian crises in East Africa. Despite the substantial opportunity to engage relevant African structures in the simulation, especially as many of those states involved are members of IGAD and contribute to EASTBRIG, the AU and regional organisations were not invited to participate in or observe Natural Fire. As such, this one-off exercise can be said to have had a limited impact on the security capabilities of the region and the national militaries involved.

This is particularly important when one considers the proclivity for individual EU member states to pursue bilateral cooperation at the expense of regional solutions like the ASF brigades. France, Britain, and a number of other European countries have sought, and continue to seek, to provide bilateral forms of training assistance to individual African states under limited transparency. This in turn contributes to distrust within regions, especially in situations where one state receives disproportionate support from a former imperial state or a state receiving support from a former imperial state is perceived to harbour aspirations toward regional hegemony.

To expand upon this point in the West African context, many of the Francophone states of this region have come to view the role of Nigeria within ECOWAS with suspicion. This animosity towards Nigeria has perhaps even undermined previous ECOWAS peace support missions. In 2002, amid growing instability in that country, ECOWAS sought to deploy the ECOWAS Mission in Cote d’Ivoire (ECOMICI), which was to be composed of nearly 1,500 troops from nine member states. Ahead of this planned deployment, Nigerian leaders initially offered their willingness to contribute most of the required troops, but it is reported that this gesture was regarded by a number of other ECOWAS members as an attempt by Nigeria to use the ECOWAS stabilisation force as a proxy to expand Nigeria’s sphere of influence in West Africa. Thus, extensive bilateral training assistance to the Nigerian military from an EU member state, such as Britain, could be perceived with a similar degree of suspicion, further jeopardising the future of ECOBRIG and undermining the unity of purpose necessary for ECOWAS to emerge as an effective security community.

The EUTM problem

With the 2015 deadline for the ASF to reach full operational capability fast approaching, the second cycle of Amani Africa and the need to consolidate EU training assistance efforts take on a heightened sense of urgency. Yet the proliferation of EUTMs across Africa presents a worrying trend. Since the launch of EUTM Somalia in 2010, individual European governments may have come to see the option of fielding an EUTM in response to an emerging or extant conflict as a means by which to preserve influence in former colonies.

Recent events in the Sahel region have particularly indicated a willingness on the part of France to act through EU structures to preserve French interests and influence in its former colonies. EUTM Mali is headed by Brigadier General François Lecointre, a French military officer. Much of the staff of EUTM Mali is drawn from the French military. Beginning in August 2012, the EU also fielded EUCAP Sahel Niger, which is responsible for improving the capacities of the Nigerien Security Forces through training assistance programmes. While the commanding officer of EUCAP Sahel Niger, Brigadier General Francisco Espinosa Navas, is a Spanish citizen, he has strong connections to the French government, having received considerable training at French military institutions and having previously served as a Spanish diplomat to France.

Linguistic affinity has certainly been a factor in determining the staffing of EUTM Mali and EUCAP Sahel Niger. As former French colonies, the French language has become a dominant language of business and politics in both Mali and Niger. As such, it can be expected that much of the personnel for these missions would be drawn from France over other EU member states. Nonetheless, the EU and its member states must remain conscious of the image its EUTM and other training assistance projects may have on a strategic level to the AU member states. If the deployment of an EUTM comes to be seen as a form of patronage bestowed by former colonial powers to states that had once fallen under their rule, this will undermine trust in the EU as a reliable security partner as well as potentially fostering further regional animosity.

This further demonstrates the benefit of focusing on Amani Africa as the principal expression of AU-EU security cooperation. It avoids any tendencies toward clientelism that might be engendered through the deployment of EUTMs to crisis areas. Given the nature of Amani Africa, African partners are very much in charge of steering the process, especially if a potential third cycle were to place greater emphasis on the role of ASF technical workshops. As an African-led and Africa-wide training programme, Amani Africa cannot also be dominated by any one EU member state. While French military personnel might have a linguistic affinity for working alongside Malian or Nigerian partners, British military personnel will be more likely to have a linguistic affinity for collaborating with Nigerian and Ghanaian partners, to draw upon the West African context as an example. To ensure the linguistic and cultural diversity of AU personnel is adequately addressed, the EU will need to ensure its own personnel match that level of diversity.

The over-reliance on EUTMs as an instrument of security cooperation can also contribute to another problem which Amani Africa can help to avoid. In recent years, the EU has tended to ‘fight fires’, resorting to the provision of an EUTM as a means to respond to an emerging crisis somewhere on the African continent. EUTM Somalia was apparently deployed in response to renewed instability in Somalia, in which the Islamist militant group al-Shabaab attempted to seize power in the capital of Mogadishu from the Transitional Federal Government. EUTM Mali was deployed in response to a conflict with the breakaway ‘Islamic Republic of Azawad’ briefly described here earlier. EUCAP Sahel Niger was deployed in the wake of a constitutional crisis and coup d’etat in that country. If training assistance is routinely regarded as a reactive measure rather than a preventive measure, the provision of future EUTMs may not be carried out with a view to the long-term stability of the affected region or with proper consideration given for the sustainability of the contribution made by any particular EUTM.

A Pragmatic partnership

As has been discussed here, external actors have frequently sought to enhance the security capabilities of African institutions through training assistance. However, many of these efforts have been disjointed, duplicating efforts and overlapping jurisdictions. While the EU has tended to be more coherent in its security cooperation with the AU and other African regional organisations, there are a number of potential shortcomings and pitfalls that must be avoided if the ASF is to achieve its potential as a key pillar of the African security architecture.

First of all, AU-EU security cooperation must take precedence over bilateral partnerships in order to avoid neo-colonial patterns of behaviour emerging. Secondly, the EU must resist the temptation to field an EUTM in response to every emerging crisis or conflict. Both EUTMs and bilateral training assistance programmes draw away from resources that could be dedicated to developing the ASF, thus indirectly undermining the AU and cultivating a relationship of dependency on EU member state contributions. Therefore, a more practical investment in the long-term security of Africa as a whole is Amani Africa.

Given the significantly limited role of ECOWAS in pursuing a resolution to the ongoing Malian conflict, and especially considering that France deployed a rapid reaction force in place of ECOBRIG, serious doubts remain that the ASF will be prepared to independently conduct operations by 2015. As such, all parties to the Joint Africa-EU Strategy must press for a third cycle of Amani Africa as the 2015 deadline approaches. As has been demonstrated here, Amani Africa is a model for AU-EU security cooperation and has already made considerable progress in enhancing the capabilities of the ASF at the continental level. Going forward, placing emphasis on the regional brigades, especially through collaboration with the ASF technical workshops, holds the greatest promise for ensuring that the ASF is capable of responding quickly and decisively to regional conflicts after this envisioned Amani Africa III.

The high cost of the ASF to date has compelled African leaders to seek international financial assistance for the force. Recently, a joint Africa/G8 Action Plan designated sufficient funds to bolster the many aspects of the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA), including the ASF. If EU member states wish to see a return on their investments in the APSA and the advancement of stability throughout Africa, then they must be willing to pursue innovative solutions. Prioritising Amani Africa over all other forms of training assistance beyond 2015 will guarantee impressive dividends for African stakeholders and for the AU-EU relationship itself.

Written by Paul Pryce ⁽¹⁾

NOTES:

(1) Paul Pryce is a Consultant with CAI and a freelance researcher focusing on international security and electoral issues. Contact Paul through Consultancy Africa Intelligence’s Conflict & Terrorism Unit ( conflict.terrorism@consultancyafrica.com). Edited by Nicky Berg.
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