Institute for National Strategic Studies

McNair Paper Number 58, Searching for Partners:  Regional Organizations and Peace Operations, Chapter 5, June 1998

5.

Africa and the Americas

Peacemaking was not an integral part of the lexicon of diplomats as they contemplated the end of World War II and the creation of a new international organization to replace the defunct League of Nations. Prime Minister Winston Churchill sought to point the way by suggesting a network of institutions that could serve as pillars for the soon-to-be formed United Nations. Noting the potential contribution of regional associations or "councils," Churchill suggested, "There should be several regional councils, august, but subordinate; these should form the massive pillars upon which the world organization should be founded in majesty and calm."1 The prime minister's meditation on the subject was well received by many delegates at the San Francisco founding conference.

However, the Churchill suggestion proved more eloquent illusion than substantive pillar. Left for future consideration and elaboration was the nature of the "councils," existing and future. For example, was the British Commonwealth truly capable of maintaining peace and security on a global canvas? To what extent should London, with an assured veto as a member of the Security Council, subordinate its Commonwealth interests to those of the General Assembly? Should France, with extensive colonial holdings in Africa and Asia, not have comparable privileges? And, for the United States, as the Goliath of the Western Hemisphere with overriding military force at its disposal, should not the Organization of American States (OAS) formed in 1943 serve as an American "pillar"?

History in the form of the emergent Cold War and processes of decolonization ultimately provided the answers. Serious economic difficulties at home that helped diminish the attractiveness of colonial possessions in times of financial stringency led to the termination of British imperium in much of Africa and Asia. In the process, the Commonwealth was transformed into a form of international leisure club for English-speaking colonial statesmen. Belgium, in due course, terminated control over Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi; the Dutch followed in Asia. Spain, after the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, ended its colonial presence in Africa, as did Portugal with the demise of Salazaar. Only the English-speaking territories in southern Africa remained to have their futures determined as the period of the Cold War entered its final stages.

One issue remained to be resolved. It proved a difficult and exasperating conundrum involving the division of labor between the United Nations and regional organizations in defusing or otherwise intervening into conflicts involving intrastate contending parties. Conventional diplomatic thinking held that interstate conflicts that threatened the order and stability of a region should be susceptible to third-party intervention, which would be disinterested, impartial, and intended to bring the conflict to early resolution through good offices and mediation. Where internal disorders and civil wars were involved, the fear obtaining among many U.N. member states was that neighbors (for a variety of reasons) would not be disinterested and impartial. Thus, the issue was posed. Could regional organizations such as the OAS prove effective in efforts to maintain peace and stability, or to raise forces to ensure such condition ? Indeed, could the OAS be expected to act vigorously in the face of U.S. opposition, or Soviet intervention to support local surrogates?

The emerging Cold War made the issue of intervention by regional organizations moot as the two superpowers transferred their rivalries to Africa and the Western Hemisphere. Both sought local allies and supported "wars of liberation," covertly transferring arms to those willing to accept the "guidance" of Washington and Moscow. The United Nations, for its part, sought to fill in with peacekeeping missions when and where the superpowers were prepared to accede, i.e., when vital national interests were not perceived as engaged or others welcomed the conflict resolution efforts of the United Nations. The majority of OAS member states welcomed U.N. involvement in mediating local disputes, fearing that to do otherwise would subordinate them to the will and wishes of the two superpowers. They continued to hope that the OAS might assume some of the same burdens; however, a consensus or conceptual foundation for undertaking such action foundered on local rivalries, and those initiatives launched proved fruitless.

The Organization of African Unity (OAU), with headquarters in Addis Ababa, suffered its own disabilities. Key among them were suspicions and enmities between the Arab north and Black African states rooted in religion and history; ideological and foreign policy differences among founding members, particularly those willing to maintain close ties with the West and others linked to Moscow for foreign policy and economic planning inspiration; and the disinclination of the overwhelming majority to see the OAU become an organization of mobilizing diplomatic and military resources to bring local conflicts to early conclusion. The ineffectual performance of the OAU can also be traced to the Cold War rivalries injected into the continent after many colonies severed their colonial moorings. Africa became an arena in which covert action, liberation movements, and massive arms transfers propped up unpopular governments and polarized much of the continent.

In the postindependence and post-Cold War era, many of the distortions and distractions remain imbedded in Africa. Superpower rivalries have receded; Washington and Moscow have collaborated in efforts to end local conflicts by supporting United Nations and OAU peacekeeping efforts. But the continent has evolved into a zone of growing political instability. The overwhelming majority remains heavily dependent on external sources of support for economic and security assistance. French military contingents based in Africa continue to intervene in Francophone states whose civilian governments are imperiled by military mutineers, largely to restore internal order and rescue threatened European communities. In the economic realm, the European Union has supported the Lome Convention over the past 30 years. The Convention has yielded over $15 billion in assistance to African and Caribbean states. However, the Convention expired in 1997, and donor fatigue is likely to lead to substantial revisions and marked declines in assistance levels.

Organization of African Unity

At its founding in 1963, the attending godfathers laid down several binding markers subsequently codified in the OAU Charter. Seminal among them was the acceptance of territorial boundaries inherited from the colonial period, along with the admonition that any disputes that might arise should be resolved through peaceful negotiation, either bilaterally or through the good offices of the OAU. A second admonition contained in the Charter enjoined nonintervention in the internal affairs of member states. The basic hope and expectation were that crises and conflicts would be self-contained.

The hope of containment has never been realized. Cold War rivalries produced blatant acts of intervention by great power surrogatesCSomalia in Ethiopia, Zaire in Angola, Libya in Chad. Moreover, with or without great power meddling, the sub-Saharan region proved a zone of endemic disorder and instability. Beginning in the early 1960s, wars in the Western Sahara, Chad, the Horn region, Sudan, Mozambique, Southern Rhodesia, Mozambique, and others claimed more than four million lives and caused large numbers of displaced persons and refugees. Genocide, most recently in Rwanda, has claimed more than 500,000 lives and the number is likely to rise as the crisis in neighboring Burundi and Zaire deepens. An historical perspective has been provided by one American scholar:

Political instability has plagued Africa since most of its countries became independent in the 1960s. Between 1960 and 1980, eight civil wars took place on the continent; ten more occurred over the next decade. Almost one-third of the world's genocides between 1960 and 1988 (eleven of thirty-five took place in Africa. Between 1963 and 1985, sixty-one coups d' etat occurred in AfricaCan average of almost three coups per year. Between 1960 and 1990, Africa's conflicts accounted for more than 6.5 million deaths.2

As a result of spreading disorders and instability, the OAU has suffered various forms of system overload, resulting in near paralysis when crises arise. Many of its honest broker efforts over the years have failed abysmally. In due course, the organization has come to be overshadowed by the United Nations and various non-African interlocutors in various peacekeeping efforts. Part of the difficulties confronting the OAU are integral to the organization itself. Its maladies include:

The frailities of the OAU, particularly the absence of a tradition of consensus building, was reflected late in 1996 in failed member support for the candidacy of Boutros-Ghali for a second 5-year term as U.N. secretary-general.

Accompanying the frailities of the OAU has been the authoritarian character of state systems constructed in the postindependence period. Most states emerged with a limited educated class and cadre of well-trained bureaucrats and technocrats. The policies adopted by narrowly based power elites were intended primarily to assure their continuation in power over an extended period of time. In addition to creation of autocratic single-party regimes, they organized patrimonial systems that recruited poorly trained followers into bureaucratic ranks, established patron-client networks, and adopted economic plans predicated on centralized state control and direction. The form of patrimonial politics and economic planning that emerged ultimately failed to meet popular needs and undermined the legitimacy of both the state and its leadership.

Weak legitimacy and failed popular support had untoward consequences for the OAU, as might be expected. There were periods of intervention by the organization. For example, the OAU sought to bring warfare in Chad (where Muammar Qadaffi's forces had been injected) and in Western Sahara (where Morocco had launched an irredentist campaign of military occupation) to an end but was unsuccessful. OAU resolutions and invocations seeking to end the 1978 Ethiopian-Somali war proved ineffectual, as were efforts directed toward conflict resolution in Angola, Liberia, and several other strife-ridden areas. In 1983, acknowledging the need to buttress its conflict resolution capabilities, the OAU created a mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management and Resolution. Oriented primarily around a crisis early-warning approach, the mechanism was expected to develop enhanced peacekeeping, peace building, and peacemaking capabilities for the OAU. The U.S. Government has supported these efforts, primarily with financial aid concentrated on improving the mechanism's communications crisis tracking system.

However, a sense of limitation existed almost from the time of the mechanism's founding. Its mandate carried the following provision: If conflicts "degenerate to the extent of requiring collective international intervention and policing, the assistance or, where appropriate, the services of the United Nations will be sought." In 1994, Rwanda provided the best example of the OAU's sense of limited competence:

When asked by the U.N. Secretary-General to assume responsibility for peacekeeping in Rwanda, the OAU declined on the ground that the U.N. was better equipped to do it. The OAU is only able to deploy small observer groups (as it did in Rwanda when the first peace agreement was reached). Involvement in intrastate conflict also poses a problem for the organization.3

In the absence of an OAU consensus on intervention in intrastate conflicts, non-African third-party intervention has proved more the rule than the exception. British and American collaboration ended Southern Rhodesia's white-dominated rule and brought the country (subsequently renamed Zimbabwe) to independence in 1978-79; the former Soviet Union dispatched $l billion in military hardware and a large advisory team to Ethiopia, which helped remove Somali invaders from Ethiopia's Ogaden province in 1978-79; and French forces restored order in a number of Francophone African states.

In the case of Rwanda, efforts on the part of the United Nations to find an equitable solution ultimately failed, producing an outpouring of one million refugees into neighboring Zaire, Tanzania, and Kenya. As genocide spread in Rwanda in 1994, the small U.N. peacekeeping force suffered several casualties (primarily within the Belgian contingent) and was summarily removed. Both the OAU and concerned African leaders in neighboring state have attempted to end the widening conflict but without success. The United Nations has suffered similar failure in addressing the manifold issues associated with the widening crisis, one which threatens to spill over into neighboring African Lakes Region countries. In mid-1997, anti-Mobutu forces, with assistance from Rwanda, Uganda, and Angola, toppled the Mobutu regime that had ruled Zaire since 1965.

The recent record of U.N. efforts in Africa has shown some notable successes, as well as traumatizing failures. Its collaborative approach with the U.S. in Somalia proved disastrous for a number of reasons. The failure to establish well-defined political objectives together with deeply flawed military planning and confused chain of command arrangements helped to produce the October 1993 debacle in which 19 U.S. soldiers were killed and the termination of U.N. operations in Somalia the following year. The principal lesson to be learned was amply identified by two African affairs specialists in a recent article:

The broad lesson to be drawn . . . is that military and diplomatic interventions have a much greater chance of succeeding when they are linked to a genuine political settlement or an ongoing, sustained, political process for obtaining one. Military action without a clear political context is without utility. Likewise, diplomacy needs an element of pressure (again, usually sustained) to be effective.4

Successful U.N. intervention in Africa has occurred when a clear, balanced peace settlement plan had been negotiated and agreed to by the main parties to a dispute. In Mozambique and Namibia, the peace plan fashioned covered a wide spectrum of issues including cease-fires, cantonment of forces, demobilization, internationally monitored elections, reforms of the judiciary, and reorganization of security institutions. In the case of Angola, final settlement has yet to materialize. For its part, the United Nations learned several valuable lessons in Angola. In 1991-92, the Security Council was unable to organize and deploy a sufficiently large peacekeeping force to oversee the entire spectrum of requirements for the process to "take." In the run up to the elections, Jonas Sevimbi and official government suspicions remained, and the elections themselves came to be regarded as a zero-sum game by the adversaries. Since 1992, the United Nations has digested these lessons and is embarked on a new round of negotiations to get the peace process on track. Most observers are hopeful that ultimate reconciliation will occur, and the nation will be able to get on with the job of peace building, much as has occurred in Mozambique under U.N. auspices.

In recent years, civil war in Liberia drew the attention of a subregional organization, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). The military intervention of ECOWAS occurred in August 1990, approximately 8 months after the war had erupted. Nigeria, as the largest and militarily most powerful member of ECOWAS, argued that intervention was justified on the grounds that continued conflict threatened the stability of Liberia's neighbors, as ultimately would prove the case. The proposed intervention would become a peace enforcement operation involving a multinational West African force that would rise to 14,000 men. The forces injected, designated ECOMOG, were commanded by the Nigerians.

Rather than bring the Liberian conflict to early conclusion, the injection of the multinational force actually widened the war. In due course, jealousies and rivalries between Francophone contributors and English-speakers undermined unity of command. Nigeria, under a military dictatorship, lost credibility as an honest broker, and the competence of its military commanders was questioned. Financial constraints, an underdeveloped logistic support system, and declining troop morale further enfeebled the ECOMOG efforts. By 1996, ECOMOG lost complete control over the capital of Monrovia as rival factions invaded the city and looted its shops and international assistance agency facilities. The United Nations, which had maintained a small observer group in Monrovia, was compelled to evacuate it and close down its operation. For some observers, the failures of the ECOMOG operation raised serious doubt about the future of subregional peace enforcement in Africa.

The U.S. response to the crises recently emerging in Africa was tentative on the whole. During a 1994 conference with Americans specializing in African affairs in 1994, senior U.S. officials pledged to provide support for OAU efforts to limit and contain the burgeoning number of crises in the region. With the approval of Congress, funds were earmarked to augment the existing OAU communications system and to encourage formation of a crisis-warning and planning system. The latter was slow to emerge, in part because the limited number of experienced African personnel available and the shortage of African matching funds. In addition, the U.S. Government established an "Interagency Core Group" to plan and program for an Enhanced International Peacekeeping Capabilities (EIPC) initiative. Not directed exclusively toward African recipients, the program has been useful in mobilizing resources across existing U.S. programsCnotably, our International Military Education and Training program (IMET) and financing of military equipment purchases.

The U.S. Government has also launched preliminary consultations with European governments that traditionally have been contributors to U.N. peace operations. The purpose of the discussions was to explore ways to enhance peacekeeping capabilities in selected African countries through a combination of training and material support, as well as to encourage several African governments to play a lead nation role.

The most recent effort on the part of the Clinton administration was an ill-fated action in 1996 by Secretary of State Warren Christopher to encourage several African governments to join in formation of a standing force bringing together approximately 10,000 men. In travels through Africa, the secretary received a luke-warm response from several African leaders, who expressed concern that Washington's initiative might lead to excessive U.S. influence in African problem areas. Others apparently felt that Washington, disinclined to make U.S. forces available, was unfairly asking unprepared African governments to shoulder an unwanted burden.

Organization of American States

With the end of the Cold War, Latin America has begun the arduous process of reconceptualizing the basic crisis management goals of multilateral organizations in the region. At the center of discussions between member states are the circumstances and justifications for the use of military force to intervene in the internal affairs of participating members. Three basic criteria under consideration are:

At the center of discussion are the responsibilities and mandates that the region's most venerable organization, the OAS, should assume. At its founding, participating delegates hoped the organization might serve as a useful vehicle to eventually change the old hemispheric political order in which interstate conflict unsettled the regional equilibrium. The OAS Charter was quite explicit on this point, underscoring the need to "generate a regional institutional framework to formalize and consolidate . . . peaceful relations among the states in the region."

Almost from inception, the OAS failed to live up to official expectation. Little consideration was given to peacekeeping roles, thus blighting prospects for uninvited intervention in interstate conflict situations. Traditional suspicion of U.S. hegemonic ambitions in the region provided the primary motivation for member state hesitancy in embracing a broad peacekeeping mandate for the OAS. The original inspiration in creating the OASCto develop a regional collective security system at the height of World War IIClanguished in the postwar period as historic rivalries and suspicions surfaced.

During the decade following its founding, the OAS, spasmodically and without great enthusiasm, did undertake limited mediating and peacekeeping initiatives. (The organization's tentative embrace of traditional peacekeeping as an important element of institutional responsibility would have to await the demise of East-West rivalries.) A monitoring role evolved when small teams of military advisers were dispatched to conflicted border regions: the Nicaragua-Costa Rica border in 1948-49; the Nicaragua-Costa Rica border once again in 1957; and, more than a decade later, a small OAS peace observer team deployed along the Honduran-El Salvador frontier in the wake of the 1969 "soccer war."

Cuba proved a fulcrum for a drastic shift in OAS conceptual perspective. The overthrow of the Batista Government and the 1959 installation of a Communist regime under Fidel Castro provoked a new national security debate within the hemisphere. For its part, the U.S. Government viewed this development in Cuba as an extension of Soviet global ambitions and a profound threat to hemispheric stability. The Kennedy administration adopted a two-pronged strategy to deal with the perceived threatCa counterinsurgency program closely coordinated with like-minded governments in the region targeted against Cuban-backed liberation movements, combined with massive economic development assistance to address the underlying causes of popular alienation vis-a-vis local governments. Latin America and the Caribbean regions were viewed by Washington as arenas for Cold War competition requiring the U.S. to fashion special ties with local military establishments and security forces. At the same time, covert-action programs were fashioned by the U.S. intelligence community to cope with liberation movements throughout the hemisphere.

A not inconsiderable consequence of this multifaceted U.S. approach was to shrivel OAS crisis intervention capacities and to arouse additional suspicions in some Latin American circles that the American "crusade" would ineluctably lock Washington into support for conservative, inherently authoritarian regimes. This was exemplified during the 1965 crisis in the Dominican Republic. A political upheaval was looming as local parties fell into dispute over election results and fierce fighting erupted in the capital of Santo Domingo. The landing of U.S. military forces in April and May 1965 to safeguard foreign nationals was a unilateral action undertaken without consultation with OAS ambassadors. The U.S. Government contended that the OAS crisis review procedures were too cumbersome to ensure early and effective actionCthis despite the fact that the OAS had reached a decision within 12 hours during the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis. In due course, the United States urged the creation of an inter-American force to replace American troops.

The U.S. demarche to the OAS was received with only modest levels of support. The OAS resolution creating the proposed force barely received the two-thirds vote required, many ambassadors feeling that public support for unilateral U.S. military intervention should be condemned. Outside the hemisphere, support for the newly formed Latin American force was tepid at best, particularly within the U.N. Security Council where the Soviet Union and others contended that such a force would serve as after-the-fact legitimization for U.S. intervention. In due course, the size of the American military contingent diminished substantially and the OAS unit, approximately brigade sized, suffered a number of casualties after its deployment.

The Dominican experience further "soured" the OAS on multilateral peace operations. For many years thereafter, the OAS even avoided use of the term "peacekeeping," preferring instead "peace observation" or "verification." The 1980s saw a further erosion of OAS capacities in crisis resolution, particularly with the internal conflicts in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, which had problems subsumed under Cold War considerations and the introduction of Reagan "doctrine" strategies for countering Communist influence in Central America and the Caribbean regions. With the phasing out of the Cold War, local leaders in Central America, most notably President Arias of Costa Rica, undertook individual and collective initiatives to end ongoing conflicts. In the process, the OAS benefitted. It dispatched help to monitor the 1990 election in Nicaragua, which ended the Communist dictatorship there; participated in the joint mission with the United Nations to assist in the demobilization of Contra forces there as part of the Central American peace process; and in December 1990, dispatched observers, along with the United Nations, to monitor elections in Haiti. However, the OAS demonstrated it had a limited capacity to compel the return of President Aristide to office after his ouster by a military cabal. It required the threat of forceful U.S. military intervention in 1995 to restore Aristide to office.

Structural Change and Military Roles

The OAS, unlike its African counterpart, has demonstrated in recent years that it can make significant contributions to Latin American peace and stability, although it is not yet capable of organizing large-scale multinational military operations. As the problem between the U.S. and Panama's President Noriega escalated in 1989, OAS efforts to defuse the situation through mediation failed, and the United States felt compelled to undertake unilateral military action and seek the imprisonment of the Panamanian leader. In consequence, doubts were aroused regarding the willingness of the hemisphere's major power to restrain the use of military force barring an OAS mandate. The need materialized to harmonize hemispheric interests with U.S. desires not to diminish its capacity for autonomous actions where its national interests are at risk. In short, how and when could the United States be induced to surrender its "cop on the beat" approach to problems arising in the Western Hemisphere?

The OAS has concentrated on reshaping without destroying existing institutions and bodies most prominent in the old hemispheric order. The OAS has one significant advantage in this regardCit possesses the "largest storehouses of vintage security instruments"-as Richard Downes noted in an unpublished article.5 Unfortunately, many existing organizational entities have either atrophied or failed to reach mature development since their creation. The Advisory Defense Committee, contemplated in Articles 65 and 66 of the OAS Charter, as a source of advice to emergency meetings of foreign ministers, has never convened. The 1947 Treaty of Inter-American Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR) was not successfully employed once to deal with minor border disputes and mini-invasions from dissident political factions in the 1960s and 1970s. The assistance tendered by the United States to the British during the 1982 Falklands-Malvinas crisis and its subsequent arming of the "contras" during the Central America wars of the 1980s further weakened the credibility of the TIAR as a multilateral instrument for dealing with aggression, internal or external. Similarly, the 56-year-old Inter-American Defense Board (IADB) has long languished as an appendage of the OAS, which oversees its budget without according the Board full status within the OAS system.

Promoting consultation of security issues has recently formed a significant part of the OAS's re-invention efforts, as Richard Downes has observed.6 Delegates to the OAS General Assembly approved the benchmark "Santiago Commitment to Democracy and the Renewal of the Inter-American System" designed to make the OAS "more effective and useful" through the creation of a "relevant agenda" that would "respond appropriately to the new challenges and demands of the world and in the region."7 Integral to this effort is the OAS's highly visible dedication to "consultation on hemispheric security in light of the new conditions in the region,"8 a process that led to creation of a Commission on Hemispheric Security in 1992. Subsequent OAS General Assembly resolutions have called for sharing information on defense spending, registration of conventional arms, and consolidation of nuclear nonproliferation treaties. Major regional conferences on security and confidence-building measures that might be adopted have also emerged.

Closely related to initiatives involving institutional re-invention is an accompanying broad-based effort to underscore two hypotheses deemed proven by Western and especially European experience- that civilian control of military forces should be strengthened and that the promotion of security confidence-building measures will raise the region's security to a more comfortable level. With respect to the first consideration, a Unit for the Support of Democracy was formed in 1990; the OAS's Resolution 1080, passed in the 1991 General Assembly meeting in Santiago, Chile, commits the organization to convene an emergency meeting of the OAS foreign ministers within 10 days of "any sudden or irregular interruption of the democratic institutional process" in a member state. The OAS has employed this process in three cases: following the September 1991 coup d'etat in Haiti; after Peruvian President Fujimori's self-coup of April 1992; and in May 1993, in response to Guatemalan President Serrano's suspension of the constitution. While the OAS was unable to bring about a return to democracy in Haiti, its efforts did reverse threats to democratic government in the Peruvian and Guatemalan cases.

A similar prominence has been afforded to promoting proper civilian-military relations by the U.S. defense establishment and civilian academics and politicians hemispherewide who are weary of the abuses of nearly 30 years of praetorian rule. An important subtext of the 1994 Summit of the Americas was support for civilian leadership in the Americas and implicit rejection of the abuses of the military government prevalent during the previous three decades. The U.S. Department of Defense, with considerable support from nongovernmental institutions, has accorded priority to strengthening civilian management of defense establishments. Of the six "Principles of Williamsburg" announced by the U.S. Secretary of Defense following the historic July 1995 Defense Ministerial, three endorse democracy as a concept or cite the need for improved civil-military relations.

The vigorous support by the U.S. Government for civilian control of military forces has not been widely acclaimed by groups concerned with perpetuating strong military establishments. Some local observers believe that the United States seeks downsizing of Latin military forces, ultimately hoping to convert them into police forces. Others believe that downsizing will afford the United States the luxury of justifying preservation of what some believe is an overly large U.S. military establishment. Still others contend that existing civilian authorities lack expertise in military matters, and thus civilian oversight could well engender tensions between civilian leaders and military commanders. A further consideration is the absence of an OAS enforcement mechanism, reflecting the historic unwillingness of the OAS to sanction the use of force against offending parties and the lingering uneasiness throughout the hemisphere about U.S. unilateralism. Failing the absence of an enforcement mechanism, the OAS must rely on diplomacy and threats of economic sanctions to discourage deviation from the democratic standard. While provisions exist for the suspension of a member state whose government has been overthrown by force, ratification is required by two-thirds of the membershipCan exceedingly high requirement that has yet to occur.

One measure worthy of serious consideration and support by the U.S. Government is a long-standing Argentinian proposal to establish a regional center under U.N. auspices where Latin American military forces could train with Western militaries for international peacekeeping duties. A number of Latin American military establishments have lent military units for peacekeeping duty under U.N. direction in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere. A well-rounded training program coordinated with European and U.S. military specialists could well serve as a suitable area for exploration by the Clinton administration, particularly the Departments of State and Defense.

By comparison, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) has meager experiences and resources with which to fashion a comprehensive regionwide approach to conflict management and complex multinational peace operations. The end of the Cold War and the demise of the eastern bloc opened opportunities for localized strife in much of Sub-Saharan Africa. Military conflicts have erupted or in some instances intensified in Sudan, Somalia, Burundi, Zaire, and a half-dozen other countries. Most of these conflicts are internal but, as noted earlier, offer the prospect of contaminating and destabilizing neighboring states. In the process, governing institutions have suffered severe erosion and their legitimacy has been placed in doubt. The military capacities of most OAU members are low, as William Thom, a long-time observer of the African scene, has written:

Most African state armies are in decline, beset by a combination of shrinking budgets, international pressures to downsize and demobilize, and the lack of the freely accessible military assistance that characterized the cold war period. With few exceptions, heavy weapons are dormant, equipment is in disrepair, and training is almost nonexistent. Most militaries would have a difficult time in scraping together a company or battalion for international peacekeeping duties. In short the principal forces of order are in disorder in many countries at a time when the legitimacy of central governments (and indeed sometimes the state) is in doubt.9

African weaknesses are becoming apparent at a time when the United Nations and the OAU have demonstrated a growing inclination to turn a blind eye to emerging African crises or to declare powerlessness in resolving those in which government and state authorities have virtually evaporated. Both organizations appear to be doing peacekeeping less and entertaining the prospect of military intervention with greatly diminished enthusiasm. When the challenge of peacekeeping intervention arises, it is fueled by humanitarian considerations. As the 1993-94 Somali debacle underscored, however, humanitarian intervention unaccompanied by clearly defined political goals and adequate military forces will likely produce unsatisfactory consequences.

Nevertheless, non-African pressures for major African states to develop self-help peacekeeping measures are clearly on the rise. An example of such efforts was the attempt of the Clinton administration, notably Secretary of State Warren Christopher, to generate support in Western Europe and sub-Saharan Africa for formation of an All-African Crisis Response military capability to deal with local crisis situations. The proximate cause for this late 1996 initiative by Christopher was the widening humanitarian problem arising in eastern Zaire, Burundi, and Rwanda, together with the prospect that one million would be at risk with the eruption of widening armed conflict in the region. The Christopher approach was not supported by most Western governments, and France signaled its general opposition to the effort. In Africa, public protestations of support were followed by nonaction, and the initiative fell of its own weight.

A number of factors came into play to undermine the Christopher effort. Primary was lack of recognition in Washington of the fundamental infirmities of most African military establishments and the shortage of human and financial resources to underwrite the venture. Second, the question of command and control was certain to confuse the situation with potential contributors unwilling to place their forces at the disposition of a noncountryman. A subsidiary consideration was the legitimizing or authorization of a mandate for such a force and the ability of contributing nations to share in the decisionmaking processes regarding overall missions and roles. Equally important were worries about rising costs associated with long-term peace operations and the ability of governments within the OAU to share the burden of responsibility for operational costs. While the United States signaled its willingness to assume some of the attendant costs, African fears of non-African domination of operations could not be laid to rest.

For the immediate future, the OAU and most African governments are likely to "punch considerably below their potential weight," therefore peace operations are likely to arise. The OAU lacks the experience and institutional foundations for organizing and directing such operations. As a result, whatever major interventions occur are likely organized by and sustained with military and civilian elements from outside the continent. In some instances, notably France, light intervention forces will continue to be available for injection in a number of former colonial dependencies, but the consequence will be perpetuation of a dominant French role that appears to be neocolonial both in appearance and in substance.

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