I comment on the Kony 2012 campaign and AU military operation

Here is a translation of my comments on the Kony 2012 campaign and the challenges to the AU military operation.

AU-led Regional Cooperation Initiative against the Lord’ Resistance Army (RCI-LRA) officially launched

On Saturday 24 March the African Union (AU) initiative against LRA was launched during a ceremony in Juba, South Sudan. I have already posted about this military operation which has the following objectives: strengthen the response capacity of the countries affected by the atrocities of the LRA, in order to create inherent capabilities; create an environment conducive to the stabilisation of the region free of LRA atrocities and inclusive of a political process within the framework of the Juba Agreement, if and when duly signed; and facilitate the delivery of humanitarian assistance to the affected areas. 

The operation was authorised by the AU Peace and Security Council on the 22 November last year but it has taken some time for the Regional Task Force (RTF) to become operational. Even though the armies from the affected countries have been fighting the LRA for some time (Ugandan troops have been in the area since 2008) the AU RCI-LRA is meant to coordinate these efforts. Although the RCI-LRA is supported by the UN and the US there is no UN Security Council resolution. Last year, however, the UN Security Council requested the UN Secretary General Special Representative for Central Africa and Head of the United Nations Regional Office for Central Africa (UNOCA), Abou Moussa, to finalise a regional LRA strategy. A few days ago on March 23 representatives of the UN, African Union and the UN stabilisation mission to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) provided an update on the regional strategy. 

The RTF has its headquarters in Yambio, South Sudan and will be led by an Ugandan commander, Dick Prit Olum. Senior commanders from Uganda, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Central African Republic (CAR) will be in charge of a contingent of 5,000 soldiers but it is not yet clear whether force commanders will be in operational command of soldiers from other nations. The initiative allows for cross border operations and is meant to improve cooperation and intelligence sharing between the state security forces active in the region as well as between those and the UN missions in South Sudan and DRC. 

The European Union (EU) has pledged 9 million euros in humanitarian aid for the affected populations. EU also financially supports the AU Special Envoy for LRA affected areas, Francisco Madeira, but has so far been reluctant to provide any support to the military operation as there are no mechanisms for accountability, no clear plan for civilian protection and there is no UN mandate for the operation. Apparently unspecified international partners have promised to support the AU military operation although the four countries, CAR, DRC, South Sudan and Uganda remain responsible for covering their costs for the operations.  

I really don’t know what the chances are to find LRA and Joseph Kony in this area the size of Sweden covered in dense forest with very few roads. There is always a risk with military operations and given the past atrocities committed by the security forces that now will participate in the operation, the prospect for civilian protection is rather dim.

Coup d'état in Mali

CAR is a country that has experienced several coup d'état over the decades, In Mali this is apparently happening now. This blog updates from the capital Bamako.

The mutineers are according to Jeune Afrique unhappy with the lack of equipment and supplies which has hindered the military to defeat the Touareg rebellion in the north. The mutineers, who call themselves le Comité National pour le Redressement de la Démocratie et la Restauration de l'Etat (CNRDRE) have suspended the constitution, the governement and the state institutions have been dissolved. The second part of the mutineers' declaration can be found here. The president Amadou Toumani Touré, who was meant to step down in the upcoming elections and probably would have done so, is nowhere to be found and several ministers in the government have been arrested

Comment on Kony 2012

I comment the Kony 2012 film here in Swedish.

Kony 2012 and the Ambassador - CAR is finally on the map

Eventually the Central African Republic (CAR), a blank spot on the map, gets some attention or at least people now know that it is a country. When I was going there in August people would ask me things like “But what’s the name of the COUNTRY?” That’s the name I said whereas the person would ask “Ohh, but what was the name of it before?” Well, before independence the French used to call it Oubangui-Chari and the person would look puzzled. It is a blank spot, even for many Africans. Its geographic location is quite obvious from the name but for those who still don’t know where it is click here.

The Kony 2012 campaign put CAR on the map and now the Danish documentary the Ambassador, which I mentioned in an earlier post in September last year, is getting some attention. The film is discussed in an article in Foreign Policy and can now be streamed on Swedish National TV  until 12 of April. The film was released in the beginning of October last year and was shown at the Sundance film festival earlier this year and has been on the cinemas in Denmark and Norway (and elsewhere). 

The Danish journalist Mads Brügger goes to CAR with a diplomatic passport (Liberian) and a hidden camera to uncover the endemic corruption that allows some people to profit on Africa’s resources. The film shows how diplomats are involved in shady business, including diamond smuggling.  Brügger is a witty man with tons of sense of humour, which provokes many since the film is not one where Africans are victimised and needs to be saved by the “white man”. Rather it shows the dirty reality of how many white men contribute to CAR’s continuing dysfunction (as in many other countries). 

It is definitely worth to watch. When I was in Bangui I often was disgusted by the behaviour of some people, which I have mentioned in earlier posts. Comments like “We just keep them floating”, “We are just helping them from falling into complete anarchy” and “They need someone from the outside, like the UN or France (!), to get this country back in its feet”, were common place. CAR is to a large extent still France’s playground where anything is possible, for those with diplomatic status and money that is…

So, the documentary the Ambassador can be streamed here (I hope it works outside Europe, I am not sure about that though.) Have a look, have a laugh because somehow what to do about it? When all is crap you need to laugh at the misery, very much in line with  the Central African sense of humour I learned to love when I was there..

Erin in Juba

I have this blog on my blog list but this post is a must read...

Kony 2012 - how to make complex issues simple

I am sure most of you by now have heard about the campaign and film  that the US lobby organisation InvisibleChildren launched. It has, as often in the case of conflict, led to a highly polarised debate. The problem with the campaign is not that Invisible Children is an organisation with a murky agenda. They surely have good intentions and have done some respectable work (for example by extending the Early Warning Radio Network, launching Mobile Response Teams, and creating the LRA Crisis Tracker, which allows communities in the region the ability to receive warnings of LRA activity and alert local security forces to LRA violence) BUT good intentions can have unintended consequences.  

In this case, with the Kony 2012 campaign, the main problem is that Invisible Children reproduce a stereotype of Joseph Kony and LRA that has very little to do with reality. I think seven points are important to make:

• LRA has not been active in Uganda since 2006, hence the group is not a security threat to the population in that country today 
• LRA is not an army of children, although LRA abducts children the bulk of the combatants consists of adolescents or adults and numbers a few hundreds although it is hard to know
• LRA is one of many other security threats to civilians and children in the region, these threats include other rebel groups, criminal gangs and state security forces
• The state security forces in the region are notorious for committing crimes against civilians, so what is the likelihood they will be able or willing to protect the population?
• To train and equip these security forces will most likely lead to further militarisation of the affected countries, hence it will increase the insecurity in the region
• Invisible Children’s board is comprised of Americans, not Ugandans or any other Africans
• Invisible Children does not represent people affected by LRA violence, hence Africans are once again deprived of agency and portrayed as helpless victims who needs to be saved 

Since there are so many good, informative, critical and interesting comments out there by now I will not further elaborate on this but refer you to those articles, comments and blogs. You are just one click away. 

One last comment; the solution to (armed) conflicts is never to demonise the enemy, on the contrary, this is often what starts and keeps a conflict going on for years, decades or even centuries. To launch a campaign film without any nuance whatsoever, in which one man is portrayed as bad simplifies the reality and takes the whole problem out of its context. I don’t think that will help anyone. However, if we look at the campaign with critical eyes perhaps this “blank spot” on the map will get some attention. The question is if this will bring something good? 

I guess time will tell, good intentions may have unintended consequences …

My report on LRA published and printed

Finally the report I have written on LRA in Central Africa is published and printed. Unfortunately it is in Swedish but for those who understand this exotic language the report can be downloaded free of charge from the FOI website

Bring the locals back in?

I got a comment on the post AU military operation - the AU-led Regional Cooperation Initiative Against the Lord’s Resistance Army from a Swedish woman, Emelie, who is raised in CAR and has spent many years in the area where the LRA currently is operating. She pointed out that the people in the affected areas often express how they are negative towards developing the infrastructure as it would open up the way for the rebels. I thought that was very interesting as this is an opinion that I have not encountered in the reports or interviews when I did research for the study of LRA in Central Africa. As Emelie says, although one might disagree with that it is difficult to work against the will of the local people. 

I immediately thought of how this fear also might apply to the state security forces that has quite an awful record when it comes to human rights in this region. So perhaps the people do not only fear that the rebels might have better access to prey upon them but also that the badly trained often abusive state security forces will increase its presence. 

What Emelie brings up is connected to a broader problem; the tendency of international actors to disregard the local level of conflict as has convincingly been demonstrated by Sevérine Autesserre in her book The trouble with the Congo . Autesserre demonstrates why international peacebuilders fail to address the local causes of peace process failures. She concludes that the reasons for this is that the international actor’s understanding of violence and intervention is shaped by a post-conflict peacebuilding frame which frames local conflict resolution as irrelevant and illegitimate. She analyses this in the case of the DRC and finds that this frame includes four key elements:

• International actors labeled DRC a post-conflict situation,
• they believed that violence there was innate and therefore acceptable even in peacetime,
• they conceptualised international intervention as exclusively concerned with the national and international realms,
• they saw holding elections, as opposed to local conflict resolution, as a workable, appropriate, and effective tool for state- and peacebuilding

Her article Hobbes and the Congo: Frames, Local Violence, and International Intervention  also gives a good summary of her findings and is free to download for those who don’t feel like buying the book. For those who can’t be bothered to read at all there is a recorded lecture from last year available

Sara Hellmüller argues that increased inclusion of local perspectives in peace processes can contribute to shifting the international community’s focus on who has agency in the process, which could render the concept of human security more effective. She means that although the international community has shifted its protection focus from states to individuals since the introduction of the concept human security in 1994 their focus of who is assigned agency in a conflict context hasn’t. Very interesting indeed.

The lack of taking into account local levels of violence and local perceptions has severe implications on the efficiency and results of peace building programmes supported by the international community. In the report on LRA in Central Africa I mention how the local perceptions of what should be done to end the conflict often clash with ideas about the added value of international law, in particular the International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants. 

During one of my courses in the beginning of the master’s program at Uppsala a professor who has conducted research on the Balkans held a lecture on this topic. He brought up the issue of local perceptions of the sentences of war criminal using the example of Biljana Plavšić (Биљана Плавшић) who is a former president of Republika Srpska. She was tried for war crimes in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for war crimes committed during the Bosnian war. She plea bargained with the prosecutor and only served two-thirds of her sentence in Sweden (!) and was released 27 October 2009. Many of the victims of war crimes committed during the Bosnian war felt that this was a bad joke and questioned that kind of justice. My professor had spoken to people who would have preferred Biljana Plavšić to get sentenced to live their lives: in poverty, with no electricity, struggling to get food, no job, no money, hence no future. As one woman put it: Why not let her live here, in our village, and everyday feel ashamed of what she did, let her experience how we live, that would be a punishment. Instead she served her sentence in a country known for having one of the most humane penitentiary systems in the world (humane is a good thing though, but it is not my point here.)

I am not arguing for or against the ICC, I am just saying that often local perceptions of justice are dismissed and not taken into account. It all comes down to the question why do we do it? To make ourselves feel better? Or do we care to actually listen to those affected so that they can have a participatory role? 

I think it’s about time to bring the locals back in….

To build capacity or control the armed forces?

For those of you who understand French have a look at this interview with president Bozizé. Among other things he laments about the fact that the CAR government didn't receive a single penny in budget support last year. The lack of funding has been one of the main obstacles to the implementation of SSR but it is closely connected to the fact that the government has prioritised capacity building of the FACA and police over democratic control of the armed forces, which does not converge with the donor's priorities. In my report on Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in Central Africa I also mention how the governments in the region (i.e. Uganda, CAR, DRC and South Sudan) try to use the presence of the LRA as a pretext to build up their armies. There is always a balance between capacity building and strengthening democratic control, but support and training of the militaries without  the latter will only contribute to further militarisation of those societies.

I don't think that is what the population needs...