No longer at ease: War, terror stalking region
By Charles Onyango-Obbo
Posted Saturday, April 26 2014 at 12:10
East African defence and military officials meeting in the Rwanda
capital Kigali last Wednesday said the Eastern Africa Standby Force
(EASF) could be ready by December this year.
EASF will tackle threats of terrorism in the region, said James
Kabarebe, Rwanda's Minister of Defence. He also suggested that the
force could help prevent conflicts, and be deployed to peace building.
Right now, though, in all those aspects, the situation in the region
is spiralling out of control. Terrorist attacks linked to the Somalia
militant group Al Shabaab and its allies are up sharply in Kenya, as
well as in the Somali capital Mogadishu.
The Mogadishu attacks are compromising the gains made by the African
Union forces in Somalia, Amisom, in beating back Al Shabaab over the
past three years.
In South Sudan, the violence that started after an alleged coup last
December has taken an unusually savage turn.
As President Salva Kiir's forces battle against rebels led by his
former deputy Riek Machar, both sides are carrying out mass murder at
a rate that will leave more dead in the next few weeks than the Rwanda
genocide of 1994 in which nearly one million were killed.
Kenya's big counter-terrorism campaign could make its military's
continued stay in Somalia as part of Amisom, untenable.
Uganda, which has provided the lead contingent in Amisom for years,
has a president in Yoweri Museveni who must focus on what promises to
be a very difficult seventh term in office (two of them unelected).
Public services in Uganda are crumbling, and the otherwise small donor
aid cuts are beginning to add up. Nearly all public servants have to
endure several months of unpaid salaries.
Burundi, the other key player in Amisom, also faces a difficult
situation at home. Rwanda's troops are extended in peacekeeping in
Darfur, Juba, and lately Central African Republic.
Tanzania meanwhile has sent troops into the Democratic Republic of
Congo as part of the UN peacekeeping there. Its role in the more
aggressive UN Intervention Force Brigade is partly credited with
defeating the M23 rebels.
A once meek DRC President Joseph Kabila has started thumbing his nose
at neighbours.
It looks like there is nothing more Uganda, Burundi, or Kenya can do
to push against Al Shabaab in Somalia, or to disrupt its growing
activities in the region.
It is also hard to figure a scenario in which the region intervenes to
prevent a descent into hell in South Sudan.
Any reversals in Somalia, and the worst happening in South Sudan,
would result in a new flood of refugees in, especially, Kenya – where
domestic nationalist sentiment has turned against Somali refugees.
There is a small new complication with the Sudanese refugees too. They
were the "good" refugees in both Uganda and Kenya for decades.
However, when South Sudan first became autonomous and then
independent, they mistreated the Ugandans and Kenyans who went there
looking to make a fortune.
And when the crisis broke out in December, quite a few Ugandans and
Kenyans in Juba were beaten, killed, or robbed before they fled.
The Sudanese, therefore, will not be as welcome as they were in the
past. I cannot see how else any of this will end, other than badly.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group's executive editor for
Africa & Digital Media. E-mail: cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com. Twitter:
@cobbo3
http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/War-and-terror-stalking-East-Africa/-/434750/2294044/-/5gdnwl/-/index.html
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