INTERVIEW-Africa cannot rush peace force-UK trainer

NAIROBI, June 30 (Reuters) – Africa, plagued by wars and instability, cannot rush creating its own peace force because some of its armies will take years to learn the skills of multinational soldiering, a Western expert said on Wednesday.

African countries will report on progress in setting up a pan-continental peacekeeping African Standby Force (ASF) at a summit of the 53-nation African Union next week in Addis Ababa.

“I don’t think that you can compete in the Olympics without training,” Colonel Rob Andrew, a British army trainer helping to set up the ASF in East Africa, told Reuters in an interview.

“We can’t expect too much initially… Looking at some of the armed forces within the region, their training base is low and their knowledge of the wider international protocols non-existent,” he said, referring to human rights standards.

Since Africa’s 1960s independence era, rights groups have consistently accused a shifting array of African armies of killing, raping and abducting civilians in the continent’s many wars. The accusations are routinely denied or, occasionally, explained as the regrettable but normal byproduct of conflict.

Now, with peace efforts still fragile in the continent’s many troublespots, there has been international pressure on the Ethiopia-based African Union to take a lead in peacekeeping.

So the AU plans to set up the ASF and deploy it at five regional bases by 2005, growing to a continental force by 2010.

Initially, it would involve some 15,000 AU troops, drawn primarily from the continent’s military powerhouses — South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya and Egypt, AU sources have said, but other nations would gradually come on board.

The force will have a peace-building and humanitarian role, and may intervene unilaterally in the event of “war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity, as well as a serious threat to legitimate order,” its charter says.

But Andrew said while individual armies such as those of Nigeria and Kenya had the experience to handle tricky peace missions, multinational ventures were a different task altogether and required good coordination and lengthy training.

“You have to start very slowly and very gently and build up,” said Andrew, who led a peace monitor team in Sudan and has helped train officers from several East African armies.

“I would hope that the East African Standby Brigade will start by looking at military observer missions, move gently into the Peace Support Operations arena and then, when it is comfortable and it has a logistics base, more support and standardised procedures, it will move into the chapter six arena and only in time should it then graduate to the chapter seven.”

He was referring to chapter six of the U.N. charter, which allows peacekeepers to use force to protect people from imminent harm, and chapter seven, where a mandate may allow for more substantive military action.

“We should be looking at an opportunity to contribute to voluntary missions first and then start to get involved in chapter six before we consider anything that might have a chapter seven flavour to it.”

Andrew heads a seven-strong British Peace Support Team based at the Kenyan International Peace Support Training Centre, an academy launched with Western backing in 2001 that helps build Africa’s peacekeeping skills and will have central role in developing the ASF’s East African brigade.

The Kenyan centre, which has trained almost 1,500 officers from 46 countries, is one of several taking shape around the continent to build the ASF.