The Global Eye: South Sudan tests AU resolve

The very fact that it is unable to even operationalise its standby force is a stinging indictment, writes Shannon Ebrahim.

When Sooka holds a press conference having spent 10 days on the ground in South Sudan as part of a UN human rights panel and says, “there are disturbing indicators of a looming genocide in South Sudan,” people should sit up and take note.

This is the point at which the AU is supposed to kick into action and deploy a well-equipped rapid reaction force, capable of keeping the peace. That is what the new AU peace and security architecture is supposed to be capable of doing, but the crisis in South Sudan is testing both the AU’s resolve and its capacity. Unfortunately, both are coming up short.

The very fact that the AU is unable to even operationalise its interim standby force - ACIRC - is a stinging indictment of our commitment to realising African solutions to African problems. Nowhere is more in need of the type of intervention that the AU Peace and Security Council had envisaged to halt ethnic cleansing than South Sudan. The facts have been laid bare - that brutal campaigns of rapes, extrajudicial killings, abductions, torture, looting and the burning of homes has been widespread across South Sudan.

These atrocities have been committed by both government troops, forces allied to the government, as well as forces allied to the former vice-president Riek Machar.

The situation has been escalating, and now we hear Sooka claiming that “there is already a steady process of ethnic cleansing under way in several parts of South Sudan, using starvation, gang rape and the burning of villages”.

This is not the first time that the UN has sounded the alarm. Adama Dieng, the UN secretary-general’s adviser on the prevention of genocide, told the UN Security Council on November 17 following his visit to South Sudan: “Action can and must be taken to address some of the factors that could provide fertile ground for genocide.”

Knowing how reticent the UN is to even use the term genocide, means the situation has reached catastrophic levels.

What has the AU’s reaction been?

To welcome the UN Security Council’s authorisation of an additional 4000 troops from East Africa to be deployed alongside the 16000 UN peacekeepers who have been on the ground in South Sudan for years.

The additional troops are “supposed” to have a stronger mandate to protect civilians, but it is unclear what their mandate is or how well capacitated they will be.

Judging from the record of UN troops on the ground in South Sudan, they have done little to keep the peace or protect civilians. On the contrary, UN secretary-general Ban ki Moon had to fire the Kenyan commander of the UN peacekeeping mission this year, for failing to protect civilians camped at designated UN protections sites.

What is needed is a rapid reaction force whereby troops can respond quickly to atrocities. UN troops deployed in Darfur failed to respond to atrocities or to protect civilians from mass rape, killings and a scorched earth policy, making their deployment largely a pointless exercise.

We keep saying as Africans that we are going to learn the hard lessons, that when it comes to Africa the rest of the world is just not prepared to put its troops in harm’s way and equip them with a robust peace-making mandate.

We claimed to have learnt this lesson after the 1994 Rwandan genocide, but we are now back to square one - watching the carnage unfold, and waiting for UN peacekeepers to do something about it.

What needs to be done is for the AU and the international community to implement the very specific recommendations of Adama Dieng, set out recently to prevent full-fledged genocide from unfolding in South Sudan. Dieng called for an arms embargo on South Sudan. Even if the permanent members of the UN Security Council blocked the implementation of an arms embargo, at least African states could operationalise this recommendation.

Second, Dieng has called for the establishment of a hybrid court to try gross violations of human rights. If we are going to turn our backs on the International Criminal Court then we have an obligation to fast-track the operationalisation of such a court.

Dieng has also called for the UN peacekeeping mission in South Sudan to be strengthened to protect, monitor, investigate, document and report instances of violence against civilians. It is plausible that the UN mission will be able to document and report such abuses, but to protect civilians - highly unlikely.

This is where the AU needs to move urgently from rhetoric to reality, and put a robust force on the ground that will use force to keep the peace.

* Ebrahim is Independent Media's Group Foreign Editor

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