South Africa has woken up to the shattering reality of paying the price for peace and security on the continent. For the bereaved families of 13 SANDF soldiers who fell in the Central African Republic, the true nature of the military as a profession has come to light.
Is this what we bargained for with the advent of democracy?
Indeed the glory of being the reputable peace broker and a voice of reason in geo-strategic affairs carries a price. It is the price of a nation in shock, seeking answers to why its sons and daughters should perish in foreign lands in service of the ideals of the country and all for the sake of peace.
As in any democracy the SANDF is subordinate to civilian authority. And military professionalism dictates that the Chief of the SANDF and his charges must comply with the orders of the Commander in Chief, ably advised by the Department of International Relations and Co-operation (Dirco) and the Department of Defence (DOD).
The orders have always been unambiguous on the role of South Africa's armed forces in pursuing the country's foreign policy.
Conflicts in Africa – brewed by inequality and weak state institutional capacity bequeathed by colonial rule, under-development, neo-colonialism under the guise of capacity building, United Nations (UN) lethargy shaped by textbook conflict resolution techniques prescribing outdated criteria for intervention – are but a few variables that spur South Africa's foreign policy approaches on the continent.
We ought to be reminded that it is Africans in the main, in Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, to name but a few countries, who have borne the worst brunt.
Therefore is it any wonder South Africa placed peace and security, and in particular conflict resolution, at the apex of its foreign policy. Inexperienced in UN peacekeeping and fresh from integrating seven disparate armed formations, the SANDF back in 1999 laid the foundation for the deployment of the erstwhile United Nations Mission in the Congo (Monuc), the forebear of the current United Nations Stabilisation Mission in the Congo (Monusco) in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Back then defence and security experts and pundits – some of discredited pedigree – decried the decision as naive and conjured to the public images of body bags returning to SA Air Force Waterkloof base bearing the remains of our troops who succumbed to tropical diseases of the Great Lakes region.
A decade later, the SANDF has stayed the course and today is poised to tackle a new operational theatre to enforce peace as part of an intervention force in the eastern DRC, into which the M23 movement marched last year with much swagger, while Monusco remained hamstrung by rigid UN rules of engagement and apparent timidity. Legend has it that non-African troops under Monusco waved greetings to the marauding M23 as they took control of Goma while others observed haplessly (atypical of soldiers facing an enemy).
For their part, the South Africans maintained their position and waited for UN command orders that never came to engage the enemy while observing in deep embarrassment such blatant betrayal of the Congolese civilians who long for peace and had pinned their hopes on the UN's blue berets, the largest and most expensive UN mission to date in the world.
Indeed peacekeeping viewed from this experience seems to be a picnic, only suited for non-Africans deployed on an African adventure with the governments raking millions of dollars in UN reimbursement.
Peacekeeping under a UN and a continental African Union mandate seems more palatable. But South Africa's troubles and passion to contribute towards resolving conflicts on the continent has seen it defying textbook dictates in adapting to operational realities.
South Africa bit the bullet when it committed its forces to Burundi to kick-start a somewhat shaky peace process. Characteristically the UN cried foul, citing the absence of a credible ceasefire in Burundi, while the young African Union (AU) saw it natural to support the resolve of its member state, despite being cash-strapped. Ethiopia and Mozambique were mobilised and joined South African troops in Burundi.
The AU soon smelled the coffee brewed by its member states and deployed the African Mission in Sudan (Amis), albeit ill-equipped but determined while the international community procrastinated and debated criteria for intervention and the definition of what constitutes genocide.
Despite the existence of an AU mandate, endorsed by the UN Security Council, Nigeria, Rwanda and Senegal suffered dozens of fatalities at the hands of the infamous Janjaweed militias, compelling Botswana to withdraw when it took casualties. No major casualties in the SANDF contingents were recorded in Amis or now in the hybrid United Nations African Union Mission in Darfur (Unamid).
Given the apparent sensitivity of the South African public and the obvious opportunism by the opposition's political leaders to deaths in combat, it seems an oddity that there has been neither a whimper nor a murmur in the public discourse, including the news media, about the dangers faced in Darfur by SANDF troops and their African compatriots then in Amis and now in Unamid.
Could it be that a death or casualty in a blue UN beret or green AU beret is more soft and palatable, compared to the same in a mission born from a bilateral agreement between consenting sovereign states, a la Operation Vimbezela in the CAR?
African conflict resolution is replete with SANDF deployments, from the Island of Comores to the border conflict pitting Ethiopia against Eritrea. Such has been the determination of South African foreign policy buttressed by AU blessings that indeed bilateral military assistance in capacity building and deployments at the request of a beleaguered government to avert cancerous coups on the continent is not a misnomer to international practice, the UN Charter and the general international regime governing relations between states. Have we forgotten the SANDF's forays into Lesotho in 1998 to avert a coup under Operation Boleas at the request of a nervous government?
The SANDF continues to assist the Congolose army in training and military professionalism on a bilateral agreement between South Africa and the DRC.
South Africa is and has always been committed to the peaceful resolution of conflicts on the African continent and has made substantial contributions in mediation efforts, peacemaking, peace-building, and post-conflict reconstruction. However, like all countries, South Africa has bilateral agreements with individual countries. It would be very short sighted to think you are better protected operating under a beret other than your own. War is war.
- Mtimkulu is acting head of international affairs in the Department of Defence and Dlamini is head of communications.
IOLSA