What does the Comoros intervention say about the African Union?
Eric Witte March 30th, 2008
African Union (AU) peacekeeping in Sudan’s vast Darfur region has not gone well, hobbled by a lack of capacity, insufficient western support, and absent unity of purpose. By contrast, last week the organization was successful in intervening in the tiny Indian Ocean archipelago nation of Comoros. An AU military contingent joined Comoran government forces in prevailing against a small, poorly equipped rebel opponent. The rebel leader was successfully ousted, and may yet face justice in Comoros.
The low threshold of this military success casts doubt on its meaning for greater African ability to engage in peacemaking, peacekeeping and democratization exercises in more daunting contexts. But the strange mix of motives within the AU for intervention in the Comoros represents perhaps an even greater challenge in to future AU deployments in support of democratic governments.
A brief look at the context of the intervention helps in explaining some of the motives for intervention among various AU members.
Under the 2001 constitution, each of three Comoran islands (Grande Comore, Anjouan, and Mohéli) has its own president and broad autonomy; the three presidents are vice presidents in the Comoros Union. A federal presidency rotates among the islands every four years, and is currently held by Ahmed Abdallah Mohamed Sambi, a moderate Islamist from Anjouan educated in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Sudan, who was elected in May 2006. Sambi’s election, deemed free and fair by international observers, represented the first peaceful transition of power in Comoros in 30 years.
The current crisis in Comoros began in May last year, when armed loyalists of Col. Mohamed Bacar seized the capital of Anjouan island ahead of sham elections (replete with self-printed ballots) that extended Bacar’s term as the island’s president. After the country’s constitutional court declared the Anjouan election invalid, Bacar’s forces shot and killed two Comoran government soldiers attempting to enforce the ruling.
Until 2001, Comoros had been one of the most unstable countries in Africa since independence from France in 1975. There had been at least 18 coups, several of which were launched by the French mercenary Bob Denard, and some of which were supported by the French government. France frowned on Comoran claims to the fourth main island in the archipelago, Mayotte. Mayotte remains under French administration in accordance with a 1974 referendum.
This week’s AU-Comoran invasion of Anjouan, following months of efforts to resolve the crisis by other means and numerous unheeded warnings to Bacar and his cronies, is a positive development for the fragile young democracy in Comoros. And, indeed, the government of Tanzania, which contributed 750 troops to the effort, has cited the need for truly democratic elections on Anjouan as a rationale for its participation.
But what of the motivations of Libya and Sudan, the other two AU participants in the military intervention? Their despotic regimes surely take no interest in defending democracy in Africa, much less setting a precedent for its spread.
Libyan leader Col. Muammar Gaddafi is today the leading proponent of Pan-Africanism on the continent. As I wrote in European Voice last July when Gaddafi was pressing AU heads of government to agree to political union at a summit in Accra:
“Gaddafi’s past stabs at Pan-African politics have included the training and arming of a West African warlord network including former Liberian President Charles Taylor, Burkina Faso’s Blaise Compoaré, and the notorious limb-amputating Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone. Taylor currently faces a war crimes trial for his role in a plot that involved the export of Sierra Leone’s diamonds through Libya. From 1973 to 1987 Libya occupied a uranium-rich strip of Chad. In 2002 the Central African Republic’s teetering government rewarded Libyan military support with a 99-year concession for its gold, diamonds and suspected oil reserves.
In turn, Gaddafi has transformed Africa’s natural resources, including Libya’s own considerable oil wealth, into a lifeline for African dictators under pressure. It is no wonder that Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe was among those cheering the colonel in Accra.
If Africa were unified, Gaddafi would accurately represent the state of governance in most of its countries today: intolerant of political dissent, free media and minority groups, corrupt and afraid to submit to free and fair elections.”
Gaddafi likely saw three attractions in the Comoros intervention, in order of probable importance:
- It provided a sense of momentum to the African Union, his preferred vehicle for African unity.
- It ended any temptation that former colonial power France might have to intervene.
- Gaddafi can now likely count on political support from a grateful Comoran government (limited in its weight as it is) for his ambitions to lead the Pan-African project.
Sudan’s regime contributed 150 troops to the Comoros intervention. Khartoum has long been engaged in a series of conflicts pitting desire for central control of power and resources against resistance to this on the peripheries of the vast country. As the International Crisis Group has extensively reported, in addition to the North-South conflict and Darfur, this dynamic applies to Khartoum’s conflicts in Abyei, the Nuba Mountains, and the Blue Nile.
In the case of Darfur, the underpowered AU observation/peacekeeping force long served the Sudanese government as a shield to stave off introduction of a potentially more potent UN or even NATO force.
So for Khartoum, the Comoros intervention was likely attractive because it:
- came to the aid of a central government asserting control over a rebellious federal unit;
- and strengthened the perception of the AU as a credible alternative intervention force in Africa, which may undercut the perceived legitimacy of future interventions on the continent by non-African forces, even those operating under a United Nations umbrella.
There is certainly nothing bad per se about a desire to see enhanced AU unity and operational capacity. But there seems to be a fundamental divide between African democrats and despots with regard to what the AU should be, and what ends its operations should serve. The AU could use added capacity to protect democratic governments from insurgent warlords and would-be dictators, or it could serve interventions in support of leaders who happen to be favored by powerful AU leaders, and occasionally as a political shield to prevent external intervention in the worst of the continent’s politically induced calamities.
Rarely are these visions likely to overlap and create the requisite impetus for action, as they did this past week in Comoros.
