Johannesburg - Carana is not a nice place.
It’s got outbreaks of meningitis and cholera, crime, violence, refugees and four groups that aren’t too keen on getting on with a peace treaty.
Fortunately, Carana doesn’t exist.
But a group of Southern African senior military officers took Carana very seriously last week, in a classroom exercise on running a multinational peacekeeping mission as a joint force for the AU.
Carana is a fictitious country on a make-believe island off the east coast of Africa, a scenario developed by the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations for training.
This scenario was used during the annual Combined Joint African Exercise run from the South African National War College in Pretoria last week, using video conferencing to link to the military training colleges in Lusaka, Zambia, and Gabarone, Botswana. The exercise is run every year, but it’s the first time the video conference was used.
“The exercise has gone extremely well,” said Briga-dier General Siseko Nombewu, the commandant of the war college.
Unisa Professor Martin Rupiya said the exercise aimed to get the staff colleges in South Africa working together.
“The idea is to develop capacity in multidimensional peacekeeping training planning,” said Rupiya.
It’s also a way of identifying potential leaders among the officers.
This was the game plan: an international team of about 4 500 must go into Carana as an AU force, for a six-month mission, aiming to separate the warring forces and prepare for a permanent ceasefire and the arrival of a long-term UN mission. They had four-and-a-half days to plan this, working along the lines of a real-time situation.
Carana is “as close as possible to what is happening in Africa”, said Nombewu.
The make-believe Carana has a slow-burn civil war, only two of four groups have signed a peace treaty, and the treaty is a little wobbly even between those who signed.
Throw in offshore piracy, refugees and internally displaced people, disease, human trafficking and drugs, and it all gets a little complicated.
“It’s every sort of unfortunate circumstance going on in it that you could possibly imagine,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Huan Davies of the Royal Marines, explaining that those were the conflict issues that teams would come across in a real-life AU or UN peace-support mission.
Davies has been in the country since October, as part of the British Peace Support Team in South Africa.
“This exercise here is a principal vehicle for us to encourage greater co-operation between the countries of SADC (Southern African Development Community) in terms of preparing their forces for peace-support operations,” said Davies.
This is the sixth year the exercise has run and Davies said significant working relationships were developing between the staff colleges and their directing staff.
He said South Africans, Malawians and Zambians, who’d gone to the Democratic Republic of Congo on the intervention there earlier this year, had worked together through a previous joint exercise so became the “engine” for that team. The training aligns their work to the AU doctrine, used for such international operations.
“They must be able to understand and interpret military strategic directives from the higher levels of command,” said Nombewu.
There’s strong regional co-operation and the SADC standby brigade is based in Botswana. Future operations are expected to include colleges in Mozambique, Angola, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.
The exercise involved primarily South Africa, Bots-wana and Zambia, but here the team of about 100 included students and staff from Germany, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe.
The Peace Mission Training Centre of South Africa was also involved.
A similar exercise is planned for later this year - the Amani Africa II exercise, run here in October and November.
“We have moved away from the unilateral approach in conflict resolution to a multilateral approach, as a country in the post-1994 era, and we need to inculcate that in these commanders,” said Nombewu.
The intention is to develop “African solutions by Africans for Africans, for African problems”, he said, as these are the most successful for Africa.