Africa –Week in Review February 21st, 2013 Share This /

This week, the United States conducted training in the Sahel region of Africa and renewed its engagement in South Sudan and Central African Republic. Below is our round up of security developments on the continent: 

• On Monday Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of African Affairs Linda Thomas-Greenfield, traveled to Nigeria for two days to lead the U.S. delegation to the U.S.-Nigeria Binational Commission (BNC), which focuses on good governance. Absent from her public remarks were any mention of the increasing violence in Nigeria and the recently renewed U.S. commitment to train the Nigerian military.
• U.S. Special Operations Command Africa organized a training exercise for militaries from the Sahel region. The training focused on cross-border cooperation. Eighteen countries sent over a thousand soldiers to Niger for this annual training.
• Fighting renewed in the Central African Republic after peacekeeping troops attempted to create a secure strategic route to evacuate Muslim civilians being persecuted by Christian militias. The U.S. State Department again expressed its concern with the “continued interreligious violence” and called for reinforcement of the African-led International Support Mission to the Central African Republic (MISCA) to stem the violence. Additionally, the U.S. renewed its commitment to transport, equip and train new MISCA troops.
• Boko Haram killed ninety people in an attack in Nigeria’s northeast this week. The massacre came shortly after a presidential spokesperson praised the Nigerian army for “winning the war” against the rebel group. Governor Kashim Shettima of Borno state, one of the states most affected by the insurgency, gave a public interview in which he criticized the army, stating that Boko Haram is better equipped and motivated.  
• Nigeria’s conflict is increasingly spilling across borders. This week, Niger’s army announced that it foiled a Boko Haram attack. The Nigerian army is executing cross-border raids into Cameroon, which cause civilian casualties, after arms trafficking from Cameroon to Boko Haram is reportedly increasing.

Quick hits from across the region:

• U.S. Special Envoy Donald Booth went to Ethiopia to reinforce regional efforts to negotiate an agreement between warring factions in South Sudan.
• South Sudan’s president publicly admitted this week that he had formed a private army, alleged to have been involved in ethnic killings. He denied the use of internationally banned cluster bombs, which the United Nations documented in South Sudan.
• The UN’s Somalia and Eritrea Monitoring Group authored a report, which outlines "high level and systematic abuses in weapons management and distribution" by the Somali central government. The report comes a year after the UN partially lifted an arms embargo against Somalia.
• The Christian Science Monitor wrote a scathing article on Kenya’s response to the Westgate Mall terror attack, writing that in addition to human rights concerns there is unease that the tactics Kenya’s security forces adopted are radicalizing Kenyan Muslims: many are worried that “heavy-handed police tactics, including firing on civilians, mass arrests, and alleged extrajudicial killings of prayer leaders deemed too radical – has gone so far as to possibly be counterproductive.”
• Interpol Secretary General Roland Noble traveled to West Africa this week to highlight the agency’s concern with West Africa’s growing importance as a transit hub for South American drug cartels. On a stopover in Freetown, Sierra Leone, he said that the country’s lack of law enforcement capacity is aggravating the situation.
• Government representatives from Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and Burkina Faso met to discuss the creation of a regional organization to strengthen development and security in the Sahel.
• Defense leaders from Economic Community Of West African States (ECOWAS) member states met in Guinea Bissau to discuss West African security and the rise of drug trafficking as well as piracy and maritime crime. Among the topics on the agenda were Guinea Bissau’s growing narco-trafficking problems and ECOWAS’ security assistance to the country.
• Burundi’s military announced that they would not get involved in the country’s political crisis, which spiked this weekend when riot police clashed with Tutsi protestors. The current tensions are putting a strain on the country’s complex power-sharing agreement between Hutus and Tutsis that was put in place after the country’s civil war.