SADC prepares for the African Standby Force

Military experts from member states of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) are meeting regularly to prepare for the formation of a standby peacekeeping brigade in the region by the end of this year, a senior official told IRIN. "Troops will be volunteered by the member states according to their capacity, as and when the need arises," explained Magang Phologane, political officer in the SADC Organ for Politics, Defence and Security. SADC is one of the five continental regions that are each contributing a brigade to form an African Standby Force as part of an African Union (AU) initiative to develop a common security policy by 2010. According to researchers Vanessa Kent and Mark Malan at the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies, the force will also include expert police and civilian capacity. African defence chiefs have established long-term deployment targets for the standby force that coincide with UN timelines: to be able to have boots on the ground in a traditional peacekeeping operation within 30 days of the adoption of a resolution, and in complex peacekeeping operations within 90 days, said Kent and Malan. The SADC's Phologane said, "There are no pre-identified troops/weapons/military equipment for the brigade, which will be headquartered within the SADC secretariat, which is currently based in Botswana's capital, Gaborone." South African Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota, chairman of the SADC's interstate defence and security council, called an unscheduled meeting earlier this month to "exchange views on the finalisation of the SADC brigade of the African Standby Forces", among other issues, reported the South African Press Agency (SAPA). He told SAPA that SADC was becoming increasingly involved in "theatres of conflict" and the brigade would ensure that this responsibility was carried as a collective and not left to individual countries. Lekota has often commented that South Africa's peacekeeping capacity was stretched to the limit. Besides deploying troops to UN operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi, South Africa has sent military observers and staff officers to missions in Ethiopia/Eritrea, Liberia, and Sudan. With over 3,000 men and women from the South African Defence Force deployed in these operations last year, South Africa was "a significant, if not the largest, contributor of peacekeeping troops in Africa", noted the ministry's 2003/04 annual report.