Africa Week in Review March 28, 2014 Share This /

The United States increased its support for African partners in their efforts to defeat the Lord’s Resistance Army and apprehend rebel leader Joseph Kony. The conflict in Nigeria and the Central African Republic continue to deteriorate. Read about these and other security news from across Africa.

U.S. Policy in Africa

• U.S. Africa Command hosted the NGO Invisible Children to discuss civil-military cooperation in efforts to counter the Lord’s Resistance Army.
• French newspaper Jeune Afrique featured an exposé (in French) outlining U.S. military assistance to and training of Niger’s military throughout the last four decades. The expose detailed the growing security cooperation between the two countries as U.S. concerns with terrorism in the Sahel intensify.
• Secretary of State John Kerry announced travel plans to Algeria and Morocco to discuss counterterrorism cooperation and U.S. support for democracy with the respective governments.
• U.S. Marines conducted a crisis response exercise in Liberia that aimed to enhance U.S.-Liberian capabilities to protect U.S. diplomatic missions in the country.
• The U.S. announced nearly $83 million in additional humanitarian assistance for South Sudan, to be managed entirely by the United Nations. Around $68 million will go to the World Food Program and UNICEF, while $15 million is earmarked for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Security news across Africa

• The fall-out from last week’s successful Boko Haram attack on a military prison continues, with growing criticisms of the Nigerian military’s deadly counterattack, dubbed as a massacre by the media. Boko Haram released a video, which makes the Nigerian military look ill prepared and casts doubts on whether the inmates were indeed prisoners of war: the video shows few soldiers protecting the barracks. The fleeing detainees were emaciated and included women and children. Previously, Amnesty International documented abuse and extrajudicial killings at the detention center.
• Human Rights Watch released a report documenting human rights abuses in the Central African Republic since the Seleka coup a year ago. They concluded that the crisis continuously evolves and that “the scaled-up response by the international community since December 2013 has been unable to keep pace with the crisis.”
• Violence continues to rage in the Central African Republic, with killing, rapes and even cannibalism reported. African Union peacekeepers announced that they would officially consider Christian vigilante groups who attack peacekeepers and Muslim civilians as enemies in this conflict.
• Somalia’s defense minister, Mohamed Sheik Hassan Hamud, gave an interview outlining the state of the Somali National Army. Among the challenges the army faces are the partially lifted arms embargo, the continuous state of war, the lack of a budget for the army, and the transitional state of government in Somalia.
• In a move that worried humanitarian and human rights groups, Kenya ordered all urban-based Somali refugees to move into designated camps. Kenya’s government claims that the detainment is to prevent terrorism.
• Under the title Should the United Nations Wage War to Keep Peace?, the National Geographic explores the complex security situation in the East of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the effects of the historic mandate for the UN peacekeepers to use offensive force.
• Human Rights Watch released a report documenting how Ethiopia's government uses imported technology to spy on the phones and computers of the political opposition.
• Foreign Policy wrote a feature examining how Somalia’s breakaway regions of Somaliland and Puntland are benefitting from a Western push to build prisons to house Somalia’s apprehended pirates.
• Voice of America wrote an article examining the factors behind the reported rise in instability in Africa’s Sahel region. VOA points to a lack of governance, the destabilizing effects of the Arab spring, and the growth of a diffuse terrorist network.