South Africa is obviously not a member of the International Conference of the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR), but President Jacob Zuma was invited to attend its summit last week in Luanda as a special guest.
Zuma explained why he was there by saying he had been invited mainly because of South Africa’s decisive military intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
“Matters discussed in the Great Lakes region summit have an impact on the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo). It is for this reason that South Africa participated throughout the summit and found the consultations useful and positive,” he said in a statement.
His international relations adviser, Lindiwe Zulu, put it more directly. The Great Lakes leaders hoped South Africa could help solve some of the seemingly intractable crises raging in their region which they are supposed to address.
Apart from the chronic crisis in the eastern DRC, where countless armed groups still terrorise the local population, the two more recent calamities are the Central African Republic (CAR) and South Sudan.
In the CAR the violence has become dangerously sectarian, with Muslims and Christians now killing each other in vast numbers. The country has effectively had no government for months. This week Catherine Samba Sanza was sworn in as interim president after Michel Djotodia, the Seleka rebel leader who toppled President Francois Bozize last March, was forced to resign because he could not control his own rebels, let alone any of the other militias killing each other and countless innocents. Samba Sanza’s huge task is to try to stabilise the country so it can hold elections for a new government by February next year.
A force of 1 600 French troops and about 4 000 troops of the AU peacekeeping mission Misca – which is supposed to grow to 6 000 – has been unable to stop the violence.
Last week the US airlifted over 800 Rwandan troops into the CAR to bolster Misca after flying in nearly 800 Burundian troops before that.
US ambassador to the UN Samantha Power said recently she expected the efficient Rwandan troops would bolster Misca’s robust mandate to use “all necessary means” to protect civilians.
“But the militia are not yet deterred by what they have seen. The cycle of violence and retribution continues,” she added, noting that about 1 million of a population of 2.6 million had already been forced to flee their homes.
The EU this week decided to deploy about 500 troops to the CAR, fewer than the 1 000 which had been expected. Power said the EU troops could take over from the French soldiers holding Bangui airport, and allow the French troops to deploy into the countryside to stop the killing.
But the EU troops will probably arrive only by the end of next month. Officials said they would be a bridging force, remaining in the CAR for just four to six months, until Misca is fully deployed.
That served only to underline how slowly Africa is responding to the crisis. But Power was sympathetic, saying African troops were overstretched in other peacekeeping missions and that the peacekeeping efforts in the CAR should be transferred to the UN as soon as possible so other, non-African countries could contribute.
In South Sudan, the great promise offered by Africa’s newest nation when it was born in 2011 in secession from Sudan, has evaporated in just a matter of weeks. The fallout between President Salva Kiir and his former vice-president, Riek Machar, has degenerated into communal warfare between Kiir’s Dinka and Machar’s Nuer people, first in the army, then throughout the general population. Tank battles raged in the northern oil town of Malakal last week between units of the army.
At least 10 000 people have been killed and nearly half a million have been forced flee their homes since the fighting started on December 15, according to human rights bodies.
“Appalling crimes have been committed against civilians for no other reason than their ethnicity,” said Daniel Bekele, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. The UN’s assistant secretary-general for human rights, Ivan Simonovic, has reported “mass killings, extrajudicial killings, widespread destruction and looting, and child soldier recruitment” as well as rape, kidnappings, arbitrary detention and widespread destruction and looting. He has hinted at possible investigations and prosecutions of war crimes by the International Criminal Court.
Peace talks mediated by the Horn of Africa regional body Igad in Addis Ababa eventually produced a ceasefire on Thursday, though most observers warn that it will remain tentative until fighters on the ground actually observe it. And many other disagreements remain to be resolved by the negotiators.
Given such mayhem in three of its member states, one might have expected a greater sense of urgency at the ICGLR summit in Luanda. Instead there was more of a business-as-usual tone to the meeting, at least judging by the declaration issued at the end and other reports.
The leaders did urge the AU and its partners to contribute to Misca. They also expressed support for AU initiatives to address the humanitarian crisis in South Sudan and the CAR.
And they “committed to offering support” to the peace efforts in South Sudan and denounced the perpetrators of war crimes there, and said they should be held accountable.
On the DRC, the leaders committed to continue the implementation of the Peace, Security and Co-operation Framework for the DRC. This framework, adopted in Addis Ababa last February, spells out what the DRC itself, its neighbours and the international community must do to try to bring peace to the perennially unstable eastern DRC.
The key commitment of the DRC’s neighbours in the framework is to not meddle in each other’s affairs – a clear, though implicit, reference to past military support by Rwanda and Uganda for the M23 rebels and their precursors in eastern DRC.
The summit urged member states “to respect the spirit and the letter” of their commitments not to support “negative forces operating in neighbouring states”.
The framework is proving so far to be a fairly effective instrument for tackling eastern DRC turmoil. In particular, it led to the establishment of a robust Force Intervention Brigade of South African, Tanzanian and Malawian troops, attached to the UN peacekeeping mission Monusco, which helped the DRC military defeat the M23 last year.
The summit welcomed that success and urged Monusco “to urgently intensify its operations to eradicate the FDLR (Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda), ADF and all the other negative forces operating in the eastern DRC, considering that their activities not only threaten the security of the DRC, but also that of the Great Lakes region”.
After the defeat of the M23, an ethnic, Tutsi-based group aligned to Rwandan president Paul Kagame’s Tutsi-based government, Monusco and the Force Intervention Brigade have identified the FDLR as their next target. The FDLR was established by Rwandan Hutus who fled their home country after taking part in the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis.
But the fight against the FDLR is proving in some ways harder than that against M23 because the forces are more dispersed and mixed in with the local population.
And there are some doubts that DRC is as eager to go after the FDLR with the same vigour as it pursued the M23, because it does not present such a great threat to DRC.
Russ Feingold, US special envoy to the Great Lakes and DRC, told journalists last week he wanted to see Monusco redouble its efforts to defeat the FDLR as it had defeated the M23.
Given Zuma’s suggestive presence at the ICGLR summit, how will South Africa contribute further, if at all to the Great Lakes crises?
Zuma disclosed that the summit leaders had asked South Africa to help address the CAR crisis “by intervening in the process of finding an immediate solution and bring about peace in that country due to its experience in conflict resolution and national reconciliation”.
Zulu said no decision had yet been taken on what South Africa would do. Zuma’s remarks suggested that he was essentially just offering South Africa’s mediation skills. But Zulu said the full range of options – from political through to military intervention – remained on the table.
She said these might be aired at a possible meeting of Zuma and the Great Lakes leaders on the sidelines of this week’s AU summit in Addis Ababa.
And she put Zuma’s participation in the ICGLR summit in context, saying South Africa sought a bigger role in stabilising central Africa. That, as Zuma himself said, was largely because turmoil in the CAR and elsewhere tended to spill over into DRC for example, a member of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) of which South Africa is also a member.
That was why South Africa had sent troops to the CAR before, Zulu said, even if their mission had been tragically terminated by the events of March last year.
South Africa lost 15 soldiers when they were attacked by Seleka rebels en route to Bangui to topple President Francois Bozize.
Soon after that the South African government indicated it would agree to a request from central African governments to contribute troops to an African peacekeeping force in the CAR, such as Misca.
But since then the talk of the SANDF going back into the CAR to finish the job has died down. And Zulu said that South Africa had turned down a request from the Great Lakes leaders to contribute troops to the UN peacekeeping mission in South Sudan “because our forces are overstretched”.
That, of course, raised doubts about whether South Africa would also have troops to spare for the CAR, if that was what was wanted.
n Fabricius is Independent Newspapers Foreign Editor.