African Union_Reflection Memo

In our class discussion there were quite different opinions about African Union and its role and efficiency. Some of my colleagues argued that African Union is not really efficient and more or less stagnant and rather full of dreams than full of actions. Even despite that the Africans have the will to perform actions related to conflict resolution, they are unable to do so from many reasons such as insufficient financial resources. Another problem constitutes the difficulty to agree on the proposals of interventions by all member states. The member states are very diverse, there are huge differences between English and French speaking parts, different regimes and different types of regions – all of that makes the possible missions very demanding to organise. One of my colleagues stated that this diversity is not necessarily bad and that it can help to find different kinds of approaches and solutions to various problems. My colleagues also mentioned the concept of responsibility to protect and African Union's criticism to this concept. They also talked about the shift from the concept of noninterference to nonindifference which is, from my point of view, very important and crucial for the whole African continent. The only things which were not mentioned in the class and which I find really significant and very progressive are Economic African Community of West African States' concepts of responsibility to prevent, to react and to rebuild which are part of the responsibility to protect approach and which are not usually largely referred to. I would argue that probably the most important aspect is the third one, responsibility to rebuild, which includes provision of the complete assistance for conflict resolution and, which is crucial, it focuses on reconciliation of all the warring parties and addresses the causes which gave rise to the conflict. In my opinion, without this aspect, it would be impossible to prevent another recurrence of a conflict which is not really exceptional for some African countries. However, I acknowledge that the possibility to conduct any type of interventions is very demanding since all African security actors have a limited capacity to act and they have to face numerous problems which are mainly related to sovereignty. Another issue, which was discussed in the last class, was ECOWAS and its achievements and if there actualy have been any significant successes. Somebody stated that ECOWAS could represent an ideal platform to mediate cooperation between warring parties and to discuss the possibilities of joint action, however it has not happened so far. On the other hand, ECOWAS did record some important achievements. First of them was the implementation of a protocol in 1979 which enabled the whole population of the sub-region (340 million people) to move freely across their countries. Second, in 1999 Economic African Community of West African States introduced first sub-regional security mechanisms in the whole continent which were established under the experience of ECOWAS Ceasefire Monitoring Group led by Nigeria, 1990s' peacekeeping operations in Sierra Leone and Libya. These sub-regional peacekeeping forces have already been used during the interventions in Guinea-Bissau, Côte d'Ivoire or Burkina Faso. The third great achievement was accomplished in 2001 when a governance protocol was introduced. This document helped significantly with many democratic challenges in Togo, Niger or Guinea, it also largely contributed to the change of regime in Ghana, Senegal, Benin and recently in Nigeria. Last but not least, in 2000 ECOWAS created an innovative levy which was supposed to provide other financial support to the organization. Even despite the fact that this levy is not paid regularly, it helps to decrease organization's dependence solely on the external funding (Adebajo 2015). Another challenge which we briefly touched in our class discussion was related to the scale of the African Union's authority and whether it should or not penalize or, in the most extreme case intervene, in the cases of extension of the presidential term and whether this task should be expected from the security and peace architecture. I would argue that this issue should definitely be put on the African Union's (or any other African security organization's) agenda since this problem has been pretty widespread in many African countries and can even lead to violence and violation of human rights. However, in my opinion, this authority should be enforced as the last possible solution and only if all other alternatives, such as opposition's resistance, would have failed. One regional organization that actually has adopted some measures related to the prolongation of presidential term was already mentioned ECOWAS. It has rejected any attempts to manipulate with constitutions in order to extend mandates of incumbent presidents. In 2009 ECOWAS even imposed sanctions against former president of Niger Mamadou Tandja after he had suspended Parliament and then wanted to cancel term limits (ISS 2015). Probably the only thing that the African Union could do in the case of unconstitutional extension of the presidential term would be a legal agreement among all the African Union's members which would strictly restrict presidential terms to two mandates. However, this is not really likely in the near future since the decision-making proces in the African Union is based on consensus and because among the AU's member states there are still some presidents, such as for example President of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe, who do not respect this restriction and therefore would not in any case support this proposition. Therefore the only possibilities to at least somehow restrict the unlimited ruling of some presidents would constitute of the African Union's limited tools of preventive diplomacy and early warnings, civil society movements across the whole continent, urging of the international community to the state officials and pressure from donor countries which could withdraw from the financial support to the countries breaking the agreed rules (ISS 2015)