The Burundi Intervention That Wasn’t
BY FEBRUARY 2, 2016
NAIROBI — A week after Burundian security services responded to a rebel attack by rounding up and executing dozens of suspected insurgents on Dec. 12, 2015, allegedly dumping their bodies in shallow mass graves in the capital, the African Union surprised observers by authorizing a 5,000-strong peacekeeping mission and threatening to deploy it over the objections of the Burundian government.
The move was hailed as a shrewd form of coercive diplomacy and a sign that the African Union might be better prepared than the United Nations to respond to the escalating crisis in Burundi. As top Western and U.N. diplomats wrung their hands over the threat of mass atrocities, the AU’s authorization of the African Prevention and Protection Mission in Burundi (MAPROBU) stood out as an exemplar of the AU’s mantra of “African solutions for African problems.”
That was before last weekend’s AU summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where high-minded ideas about continental solutions ran headlong into the crude political realities of an institution that has long been accused of prioritizing the interests of member heads of state over all else. Led by aging and unaccountable strongmen like Gambian President Yahya Jammeh, who came out publicly against MAPROBU at the summit, the AU Assembly, the organization’s highest decision-making authority comprising heads of state, decided not to deploy the proposed peacekeeping mission and walked back the AU’s threat to force it on the Burundian government.
“It has been, I think, bad communication.It was never the intention of the African Union to deploy a mission to Burundi without the consent of Burundian authorities,” Ibrahima Fall, the AU special representative for the Great Lakes region, told French radio RFI on Sunday. “This is unimaginable.”
Established in 2001 to replace the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the original pan-African association of the postcolonial era, the African Union has played a much more aggressive role than its predecessor in solving the continent’s myriad armed conflicts. In the words of Alpha Oumar Konaré, former chairman of the AU Commission, it has replaced the OAU’s doctrine of “non-interference” in the affairs of member states with one of “non-indifference.”
When the African Union threatened to force a peacekeeping mission, Burundi called its bluff — and threw the pan-African body’s credibility into question in the process.
BY FEBRUARY 2, 2016NAIROBI — A week after Burundian security services responded to a rebel attack by rounding up and executing dozens of suspected insurgents on Dec. 12, 2015, allegedly dumping their bodies in shallow mass graves in the capital, the African Union surprised observers by authorizing a 5,000-strong peacekeeping mission and threatening to deploy it over the objections of the Burundian government.
The move was hailed as a shrewd form of coercive diplomacy and a sign that the African Union might be better prepared than the United Nations to respond to the escalating crisis in Burundi. As top Western and U.N. diplomats wrung their hands over the threat of mass atrocities, the AU’s authorization of the African Prevention and Protection Mission in Burundi (MAPROBU) stood out as an exemplar of the AU’s mantra of “African solutions for African problems.”
That was before last weekend’s AU summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where high-minded ideas about continental solutions ran headlong into the crude political realities of an institution that has long been accused of prioritizing the interests of member heads of state over all else. Led by aging and unaccountable strongmen like Gambian President Yahya Jammeh, who came out publicly against MAPROBU at the summit, the AU Assembly, the organization’s highest decision-making authority comprising heads of state, decided not to deploy the proposed peacekeeping mission and walked back the AU’s threat to force it on the Burundian government.
“It has been, I think, bad communication.It was never the intention of the African Union to deploy a mission to Burundi without the consent of Burundian authorities,” Ibrahima Fall, the AU special representative for the Great Lakes region, told French radio RFI on Sunday. “This is unimaginable.”
Established in 2001 to replace the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the original pan-African association of the postcolonial era, the African Union has played a much more aggressive role than its predecessor in solving the continent’s myriad armed conflicts. In the words of Alpha Oumar Konaré, former chairman of the AU Commission, it has replaced the OAU’s doctrine of “non-interference” in the affairs of member states with one of “non-indifference.”
