The African Union mission in Somalia (AMISOM) endured a difficult first 30 months of operations. Deployed into an active war-zone, it was not long before an international debate began to revolve around how the mission should be brought to an end. This article analyses the main challenges as well as the most important local and international dynamics that affected the operation. It concludes that AMISOM was an ill-conceived mission that attracted few serious political champions partly because of the dangerous environment in which it operated and partly because of its lack of stable funding and capabilities. The predictable results were a dangerously under-resourced operation that placed peacekeepers in harm’s way for morally and politically dubious reasons.
This article analyses AMISOM’s first 30 months, focusing on the mission’s major challenges and the main international and local political dynamics that affected its operations. It argues that AMISOM was an ill-conceived mission deployed to the wrong place at the wrong time by an institution incapable of meeting its grandiose statements of intent. The predictable result was that it attracted few serious political champions and hence its personnel were left dangerously under-resourced. This amounted to placing several thousand Ugandan and Burundian peacekeepers in harm’s way for morally and politically dubious reasons. The problematic way in which the mission was established also demonstrates the importance of upholding the procedural rules of the AU’s Peace and Security Council: broken in AMISOM’s case with predictable negative results.
The main challenges are summarised as follows:
- It is difficult to conclude that AMISOM made a large contribution to peace and security in Mogadishu during its first 30 months of operations. While its personnel did engage in some humanitarian activities these have to be balanced against allegations of corruption as well as the use of indiscriminate force against the civilian population.
- In terms of the international politics surrounding AMISOM’s creation, the AU’s policy was widely seen as primarily serving Ethiopia’s interests rather than the needs of the local population, who had experienced nearly two decades of conflict, famine, drought and disease without a functioning government. At the time that AMISOM was launched, the AU had shown no evidence that it could muster, deploy, fund or manage an 8000-strong peacekeeping operation while also conducting a mission in Darfur.
- Part of the reason why the AU could not find sufficient numbers of troops was that most African governments viewed the Somalia operation as too dangerous, too costly and unlikely to succeed. This was hardly surprising because it was an ill-conceived mission that essentially entailed sending a small number of under-resourced peacekeepers to a war-zone in order to prop up one of the belligerent factions.
- Not only did this put AU peacekeepers directly in harm’s way; it also helped fuel a new phase of conflict in Mogadishu. Even so, serious debate about AMISOM’s exit strategy did not begin in earnest until late 2008. Whether AMISOM has a future in Mogadishu is thus primarily a question for the new government, the UN Security Council and the AU to answer. Whether AMISOM should have been deployed at all is a question that analysts need to debate.