Global Policy Forum

Organisation of African Unity (OAU) Secretary General Salim Ahmed Salim said Thursday that peacekeeping missions in Africa often fail for lack of thorough preparation and called for a review of funding and deployment. "It is an incontestable fact that most of these missions were in the past badly under-staffed, under-funded and often ill-equipped to oversee their mandates," Salim said in an address to a political-military seminar which ended here Thursday.

Salim said the proposed UN peace-keeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was inadequate, taking into account the size of the country and the number of parties involved in the war. Some 3,000 peacekeepers are to be deployed in the DRC to back up about 500 military observers whose job will be to monitor a ceasefire signed in 1999 by the Kinshasa government, its allies from Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia, and by rebels, with their Rwandan and Ugandan backers.

"I remain concerned over the current modest proposal for the deployment in the DRC, a vast country with complex and multi-faceted problems and myriad of actors, including non-state actors," he said. The OAU chief, however, said Africans were themselves to blame for endless conflicts that created the need for expensive and time-wasting peacekeeping mission. "For African conflicts, prevention is not only better than cure, but also far more cheaper than the costly peacekeeping ventures which the OAU lacks the resources and expertise to undertake," he said.

The three-day seminar, opened by Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa on Tuesday, was organised by the French military, under the auspices of the OAU and the United Nations. It attracted over 150 participants from more than 30 countries, while representatives included high-ranking military officers from Africa, Asia and Europe.

The seminar is part of preparations for the upcoming French RECAMP initiative -- which will include practical joint military exercises in Tanzania next February -- currently open to members of the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC). A senior former member of the UN, Lakhdar Brahimi, described the French role in RECAMP, as "extremely useful to see France in Tanzania, getting Africans together to talk, not only about military training but also about peacekeeping operations."

Delegates at the seminar came from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Great Britain, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden and the United States.