Regional organizations like ECOWAS are better suited for peacekeeping than the United Nations. Soldiers need to be ready to die to achieve their objectives. But the ranks of U.N. peacekeeping forces are increasingly filled by a grab bag of soldiers from poor countries, motivated by a per diem and the prospect of sand and sun, if not sex, in an exotic foreign clime. It is difficult for such soilders to fathom the real importance of their assignments. For too many governments, peacekeeping has even become a means of balancing budgets by taking out a percentage of the soldiers’ pay. But regional soldiers will have felt the economic drain of war. Peacekeepers from such places as Nigeria and Guinea have experienced the spillover effects of conflicts that threaten their own families’ well-being. They can if needed enforce peace.
Defense begins at home, and Africa should be able to do better with the financial support of the international community. Blessedly gone, almost, is the day when African leaders could single handedly deploy troops abroad and sustain long and costly wars without internal challenges. Perhaps only a military regime such as that of the late Nigerian ruler Sani Abacha could have fought the protracted war that was required to restore Sierra Leone’s democratically elected President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah. But now Nigeria and many other countries are striving for true democracy. Just as they are more accountable on economic policy, their leaders now must use the politician’s tools of persuasion to justify the expenditure of a nation’s most valuable resource, the blood of its sons.
People have a right to ask why their soldiers should be sent, for instance in Sierra Leone, to defend a leader like Kabbah, who has proved beyond a doubt that he is unable to lead. The Western world too often is enamored of so-called democrats in Africa who are intolerant and lack the humility to leave office voluntarily when they can’t deliver the goods. Putting people first, and not presidents, should be the route to addressing the bad governance that is so often decried in Africa.
The Sierra Leone crisis calls once again for a reappraisal of the United Nations’ role in Africa. Without effective armies to dispatch and with no political mandate to enforce peace, the world body must be careful not to treat African countries as testing grounds in its drive to find relevance. But Africans may also have been too quick to cry racism over the United Nations’ disproportionate aid to Kosovo and East Timor. The U.N. has been stung by such criticism, but it is only fair also to have expected African leaders to have taken the lead in denouncing the main culprit in the new upsurge of violence in Sierra Leone. They should have called for Foday Sankoh’s arrest. Instead of being appeased and offered a first-class job in the bogus peace deal signed last year under the auspices of ECOWAS, the boss of the Revolutionary United Front should have been treated as what he is: a fit subject for an international criminal tribunal. But some West African leaders are known to be involved in the lucrative diamond traffic which sustains Sankoh’s rebellion. When they meet in Abuja next week, West African leaders must open a blunt discussion of peacekeeping in light of the umpteenth crisis in their region.
For bringing back peace is a prerequisite in their attempt to achieve regional integration. This goal will remain elusive as long as West Africa does not settle the various conflicts it is confronted with. In a way the crisis in Sierra Leone could be helpful if it brings a new urgency to the debate over the link between peace and economic integration. No trade, movement of persons or monetary harmony could become a reality in the violent climate which makes West Africa one of the symbols of Africa’s growing torments.
