East African Standby Brigade

The road to the East African Standby force is riddled with 'potholes'

BY GEORGE KAGAME
NAIROBI

The road leading toward the suburb of Karen in up market Nairobi city resembles any you have seen in an African city.
It is small, patchy and the large potholes are filled with muddy water that can get little vehicles stuck on occasions.


On both sides of the road after the large Nakumatt store there’s limited space for pedestrians. There are also few pedestrians these parts of Nairobi. However the cars driving towards this largely expatriate suburb are made for such rough terrains, mostly, they are four wheel drive SUVs and the passengers inside these vehicles are almost exclusively white.

Karen could easily be described as the Malibu or French Riviera of Nairobi where the rich and famous in Kenya reside, for good measure, the Kenyan Vice president and the powerful prime minister also live in this leafy suburb. Karen is also the venue for the planning element and operational headquarters of the (EAsbrig) East African Standby Brigade, many white land rovers and Ford vehicles are embellished with British Army insignia.


There are several senior British army officers residing in Karen too, they work in the nearby East African Standby Brigade offices which were donated to the EAsbrig and were only recently opened by British Ambassador to Kenya Adam Cook. The British government is the leading donor to the EAsbrig, a peace keeping force that is being developed among a grouping of 11 African nations from Egypt to Madagascar.


The EASbrig is a proposed peace keeping force for a widened East African block and is part of a larger proposed African Union Force that is being developed and promoted by African leaders as a rapid reactionary to respond to crisis situations on the continent with a homogeneous and harmonious regional organisational and administrative structure.

The EAsbrig initiative followed from recent reforms in the management of African affairs which began with the formation of the Africa Union to replace the old OAU, the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) and the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), all of which centred on strengthening African collective international capacity to guarantee each other's political stability and respect for democracy and human rights, and to promote economic development.

The African Union standby force is being built across all regional blocks on the African Continent, the East African region, which has grouped 13 thirteen nations is being largely funded by the British Government.


The approved budget for the initial establishment and activities of the Brigade is $2.5 million but todate only a handful of member countries have paid their annual obligatory fee.

The British government early in June donated 120 million shillings (about 1.95 million U.S. dollars) for the construction of the headquarters of the peace force in Nairobi to help deal with conflicts and disasters on the continent. However such contributions are viewed by experts as having ultra motives instead of fastening the progress the EAsbrig.

The EAsbrig according to official documents is supposed to be ready by 2010, however two years to that deadline, the Nairobi Planning centre of the force known as Planelem, is still on the drawing board, with just a couple of conferences organized tto discuss conflict and peace in Africa as some of its meager achievements.


In its formation, the force drew up a set of 6 scenarios in which they can react in case of any danger. These scenarios include observer missions, preventing genocide. The seriousness of the scenario determines the speed of intervention, with genocide needing 14 days in which the force can react.

The British army has sent a strong group of senior army officers whom along with senior military experts from Rwanda, Burundi, Comoros, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Madagascar, Rwanda, Seychelles, Sudan, and Uganda are devising plans for a regional standby army by 2010, the British training programme to the EAsbrig expires in 2015. Command of the brigade rotates annually in alphabetical order among the member states of Burundi, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda.

However, observers are quick to point out that the East African force will not create regional millitary block while the political block, the East African Community is still dogged with disagreements and suspicion among member states. They point out that the investment of the British in the force has wider implications than the force itself.

An independent expert observer of East African defense programmes however says the western governments especially the British are willing to spend on the EAsbrig because they have many interests in the region; these interests are far from helping create a peace keeping force for East Africa.

"The British have many of their people residing permanently in Kenya, and in light of the issues have happened in Zimbabwe, they don’t want the same in Kenya." the expert speaking strictly on terms of confidentiality says. He adds that even the US has specific security interests on the Indian ocean with a strong millitary presence on the East African coast, "most of the interests themselves are competing with those of the member states of EAsbrig, which itslef as its own complicated strings."


Marco Jowell, the regional research officer of the International Peace Training Centre in Nairobi which is part of the British army assistance programme to the EAsbrig says that the challenges of the force are not just the interests of Britain or the US; “the East African force faces among its challenges the fact that there are many diverse members with varying security, political and economic interests. Member countries that belong to the EAC, IGAD (Intergovernmental Authority on Peace and Development) create a situation where there's no regional economic community to harmonize the interests and threats of the region. If that were the case, the block would coordinate the activities of EAsbrig like ECPWAS is doing in West Africa."


The Economic Community of West African States-ECOWAS has been instrumental in solving regional crises in West Africa, especially the conflicts in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Jowell adds that even the ECOWAS has a lead nation in Nigeria which can easily mobilize her smaller neighbours but the EAC does not have such a nation willing to fully embrace her neighbours, or even promote the idea.

The issue of membership is a thorny as countries like Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi for example have, perhaps as the governments find measures to solve the problem of being land lockedness have joined COMESA, EAC and PTA and for Rwanda and Burundi CEPGEL.


The EAsbrig ideally is supposed to be made up of 3000 troops; with each country among the 13 members contributing funds to sustain the force and troops which are stationed in their country and are always on standby should there be need for them.

However, to date, only Rwanda has contributed a standby force. Two senior Rwandan army officers, Colonels Muzungu and Claude Bizimana are also part of the senior administrative circle of EAsbrig in Nairobi and Ethiopia respectively.

The independent expert that if the dream of the East African Standby Force; "it is more viable if the different regional blocks organised themselves according to their shared geographical and political proximity, if that were to happen, we would not have differences and differing interests for example, the interests of North Africa, Horn Africa, and the rest of Africa are different and sometimes competitive."

These differences cannot be understated according to the expert, he says that the issue of communication itself is a problem that need solution; "Sudanese and Egyptians would rather be identified with Arabic Africa because simply of the lingustic issues, while the Horn of Africa also has a its own different lingua franca that is different from the rest of the members."

It can be argued here that Sudan and Egypt are in the EAsbrig just for their interests in River Nile and nothing else. Jowell adds that the inter state rivalries among member countries need to be stopped as such suspcisions pause a serious threat to the establishment of the standby force; he syas for example, that it hard to get the Ethiopians and Eriterians, he says some member countries also want to play the role of 'big brother' with their neighbours but does not any such country.


However that the role of the British army is not just limited to assisting with the set of EAsbrig; "the international peace support group is a multufaceted organisation that will help techinical assistance to police, army and civil society organisations, we organise international peace an security conferences to discuss regional concerns where security experts exchange important information that is very useful in the prevention and detection of conflict."


However, the shaky nature of the force is very clear, experts have come out to state that with the economical block of the EAC itself full of intrigue, the millitary grouping will also remain inffective, just another piece of paperwork for ducumentation officials in Western Europe and African bureacrats. First, only recently Mauritius and Tanzania withdrew their membership to join the SADC Standby Brigade.


A source with the force says that the Kenyan violence was already in the hands of the UN and so there was no need for deploying the EAsbrig force.

The success of the Easbrig will be judged on whether it can and will respond to situations of armed conflict and on the extent to which the presence regional peacekeeping forces will manage the strategic and operational challenges required to resolve complex multidimensional peace support or enforcement operations.


NOTES;
The East African Standby Force is being promoted along th ideals of the UN permanent peace brigade known as the SHIRBRIG or Standby High Readiness Brigade (SHIRBRIG), headquatered in Denemark.



The SHIRBRIG was a result of the UN’s failure to react in time to avoid the genocides of Rwanda in 1994 and Srebrenica in 1995. The specific objectives of the EAbrigade are:

(1) conduct and observe peacekeeping missions,
(2) intervene in member states when their internal security is gravely threatened, (3) conduct preventive deployments where such security threats loom in the horizon, (4) conduct post-conflict peace-building operations, including disarming and demobilising warring militias, (5) provide humanitarian assistance in conflict and disaster areas, and (6) perform such other functions as the Peace and Security Council may authorise.