For tiny Burundi, big returns in sending peacekeepers to Somalia

For poorer countries like Burundi, sending soldiers to join a UN or African Union peacekeeping mission offers financial and political benefits, as well as better arms and training.

In this photo released on Nov. 19, troops from Burundi serving with the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) are seen manning frontline positions in territory recently captured from insurgents in Deynile District along the northern fringes of the capital Mogadishu, Somalia, in November.
(Stuart Price/AU-UN IST/AP)

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By Elizabeth Dickinson, Correspondent                                                           posted December 22, 2011 at 1:29 pm EST

Bujumbura, Burundi

When the Somali Islamist insurgent group Al Shabab slaughtered roughly 70 peacekeepers from Burundi earlier this month, it would easy to wonder why this tiny mountainous country in Central Africa sent 4,000 of its young men to fight in Mogadishu. Burundi is one of just three countries supplying soldiers to a joint African Union and United Nations peacekeeping mission in Somalia, known by its acronym, AMISOM. Burundi doesn’t border Somalia, and it has no visible national interest in the conflict there. What’s more, Burundi itself is still reeling from civil war. Just a year before it joined Amisom, blue helmets were patrolling Burundi’s own ceasefire.

Yet over the last five years – and through a string of casualties – Burundi hasn’t just agreed to go to Somalia; it has leapt at the chance. The reasons offer a glance into why countless troubled or impoverished countries, not just Burundi, end up staffing UN peacekeeping missions. Today, there are nearly 100,000 UN peacekeeping troops deployed worldwide, and nearly all of them come from non-OECD nations.

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For the poorest countries such as Burundi, the reason is straightforward: The UN Security Council members that craft these deployments need manpower. But that’s not something they are prepared or willing to provide – so donors like the United States and European Union offer money, training, and diplomatic support in exchange for soldiers.
In 2010, those incentives drew the support of dozens of African troop contributors, including Nigeria, Uganda, Ghana, Senegal, Rwanda, Benin, Malawi, and Burkina Faso. “For all these countries, bilateral relations with major powers matter a lot because they expect some development aid and other various forms of support [in return for their deployment,]” explains Jean-Marie Guéhenno, who served as UN Under-Secretary General for Peacekeeping from 2000 to 2008.

Rewarded for risks

How Burundi ended up in Somalia is just one example. Bujumbura sends its young men to battle because doing so has allowed the country to build, equip, and train a stronger army – and to do it on someone else’s tab. The United States is training the country’s army; the African Union (with European support) pays soldiers’ salaries while they are in theater. Those savings, plus compensation for troops and equipment, mean that Burundi earns about $45 million annually from its participation – and to boot, the country’s fractured military is finally faced with the most uniting force of all: a common enemy, one that isn’t at home in Burundi.

“[Participating in AMISOM] has helped us to create a strong national force – and a professional one,” explains Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, a former head of state and now a senator in Burundi who advocated for sending troops to Somalia.

Financial incentives are among the most alluring and hotly contested aspects of UN peacekeeping missions. As standard UN procedure, countries are reimbursed $1,028 per soldier per month of operations. Equipment is also paid for, meaning that any guns, ammunition, tanks, or other logistics that a country carries in will be reimbursed by the international community.

“What motivates potential troop contributing countries is the availability of logistics … assurances about compensation for personnel and equipment [as well as] deaths [suffered in theater,]” said Capt. Paddy Ankunda, AMISOM force spokesman in Mogadishu. “Obviously, contributions by the United States and a couple of other countries, the EU [countries], France, have been very key.”

In a country like Burundi, finances can easily tip the scales toward sending troops overseas. Around the time AMISOM was first pieced together in 2007, Burundi’s army was bloated and struggling to stick together.

The peace accords that ended the country’s strife in 2000 mandated that rebel forces be integrated into the national army. The cost of maintaining this larger force – $191 million in 2007 – was a stretch for a government with a strapped budget, half of which was already funded through international aid. (In 2010, the government had $802 billion to disperse, an amount equal to approximately how much Americans spend buying Christmas trees every year.)

The African Union force was offering to pay troops $750 each per month, through funding from the European Union – significantly more than the soldiers would make at home. “When you ask [the soldiers] to go, almost all of them are ready to go, because it’s a financial windfall,” said Ntibantunganya. Of that $750, the government would tax $100 – and deposit the rest directly into the soldiers’ bank accounts, according to a January 2010 diplomatic cable released on WikiLeaks.

Burundi’s government came out well too. Cash from the salary taxes and the relief from paying the human resources of thousands of soldiers a month were enough to inject 6 billion Burundian francs (about $45 million dollars) into the annual budget, according to the senator.

Better training

On top of the financial incentives, the United States in particular often offers something else that African militaries need: top notch training. When the Nigerian military was considering sending troops to an AU-UN mission in Darfur late last decade, for example, “There was concern for the development of capacity,” recalls former US Ambassador to Nigeria John Campbell.  Part of that meant Nigeria’s participation in a US State Department program called Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance (ACOTA), which offers boot camp-like courses for peacekeeping forces, from rank-and-file prep to officer training. Washington spent $11 million training Nigerian troops in 2009.

In Burundi, this same program contracted Northrop Grumman to train the Burundian military battalion by battalion, 10 weeks at a time. The sixteenth such battalion will conclude the course in January, according to a Western diplomat who was not authorized to speak on behalf of their capital on the matter.

Burundi’s government asked the United States to train the entire military, rather than just those troops destined to join Amisom, a request the US agreed to. The ACOTA contract is expected to run until 2013.
In theater, too, the soldiers gain vital experience, argues Ankunda. Uganda, another country that provides the mission with troops, “had the opportunity to undertake some marine training for its soldiers,” Ankunda said by phone. “[This could prove] very helpful in the future, as marines are patrolling the waters and insuring that the potential oil in the [offshore] area can be without threats.”

Political benefits

Less tangibly, peacekeeping undoubtedly yields political benefits, both at home and abroad, for the countries that participate. For Nigeria, the fourth-largest troop contributing country in 2010, this was certainly the case.

“Nigeria sees peacekeeping as part of its vocation as an African leader,” says Campbell. “Nigeria’s active participation in peacekeeping is one of the things that makes Nigeria’s claim [to try and win] a permanent African seat on the Security Council credible.”

The relationship with the United States can also be a deciding factor, according to Campbell. “I think there is no question that Nigeria’s active participation in peacekeeping is an important dimension in the bilateral relationship with countries like the United States,” he says.

Indeed, Nigeria has used this relationship to its advantage in the past, threatening to examine its peacekeeping commitment if the country was not removed from a US list of countries with unsafe air space in February 2010.

Uganda offers another example of the importance of the relationship with Washington. In November, the International Crisis Group worried out loud that Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni was using his troop commitment to AMISOM “to deflect international criticism of his brutal crackdown on a series of opposition protests at home, receive more military aid from Washington and gain political influence in the region.”

It’s not just geopolitics that can make peacekeeping look attractive. Sending troops overseas can, at times, be a way to relieve internal tensions within a military, or reward certain factions. When rebels were first integrated into the army in Burundi, for example, conflict was rife. The peacekeeping mission offered a way to remove certain elements for a time, to stop or even prevent trouble from brewing. “It is, if you will, a release valve,” explained the Western diplomat in Bujumbura. “They have a bloated military because they’ve been obliged to take in all the former rebels, and it offers an opportunity to sort that out.”

This is not to belittle the costs – which are great, and by many analysts reading, downright unfair to the countries that send their troops into danger. “When I saw that a country like Burundi was in such a difficult place as Somalia, I thought: there is something wrong in peace operations,” said Guéhenno. “We have ended up with a system where the weakest groups go to the hardest places. I think to send troops from a very fragile country [like Burundi] into such a difficult environment as Mogadishu – that is a recipe for significant losses.”

Several hundred blue helmets for AMISOM have died in the fighting in Somalia so far. And equally troubling are the conditions under which the soldiers often operate. AMISOM lacks even a single helicopter and during a recent incident in November, in which 70 peacekeepers were killed, force commanders told The New York Times that many of its soldiers had bled to death because they couldn’t be airlifted out.

American funding contributes $400 million a year to the mission. AMISOM officials estimate that the costs of a helicopter, for example, would add $15 million more a year. Even the equipment that troops bring from home hasn’t been reimbursed, AMISOM says. By March 2012, the UN will owe $9.4 million in arrears.
Concerns about a lack of solid equipment and reliable funding from donors erupted into a full-fledged debate in the UN Security Council earlier this year when some of the main troop contributing countries, under the umbrella of the Non-Aligned Movement, called for significant increases in the rates that the UN reimburses them, both for troops and equipment. Guéhenno says that a UN panel has been set up to look for answers on the issues of funding.

Even as losses mount, the army’s operations remain incredibly popular back in Burundi. The country’s participation in UN peacekeeping has become a sort of national rebirth. When the country joined the ranks of the blue helmets, it signaled that it had transformed from a menace to a peace broker in the region.
Still, what’s most striking about Burundi’s work in Somalia is just how much good it may do at home. Perhaps catching on to the backhanded benefits, Kenya last week offered to integrate its own forces operating in Somalia into Amisom. A local headline in Nairobi’s Business Daily put it bluntly: “Country Shifts Cost of Somalia War to the United Nations.”

source: The Christian Science Monitor

Magi would have a tough time finding frankincense

By Elizabeth Weise| Religion News Service,

The world may still have gold and myrrh, but it’s quite possible that frankincense could become a thing of the past, given ecological pressures on the arid lands where it grows in Ethiopia.

The storied resin — known to millions as one of the three gifts of the Magi, the wise men who visited Jesus after his birth — is made from gum produced by the boswellia papyrifera tree. Its “bitter perfume” is used as incense in religious rituals in many cultures, as well as an ingredient in perfume and Chinese traditional medicine.

Dutch and Ethiopian researchers studying populations of the scraggly, scrublike trees in northern Ethiopia found that as many as 7 percent of the trees are dying each year, and seedlings are not surviving into saplings.

Their paper in Tuesday’s (Dec. 20) edition of the Journal of Applied Ecology finds that the Ethiopian trees that produce much of the world’s frankincense are declining so dramatically that production could be halved over the next 15 years, and the trees themselves could decline by 90 percent in the next 50 years.

Frankincense has been harvested in the wild in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa since ancient times.

The frankincense carried by the three wise men probably came from that area but those trees are mostly gone, said Frans Bongers, a professor of tropical forest ecology and management at the University of Wageningen in Holland.

“There’s still some in Somalia, but no one knows how much. The main production area in the world right now is Ethiopia,” said Bongers, who has studied the trees for the past six years.

Specialists have long said frankincense trees aren’t doing well, but the paper is the first hard data on them, and the outlook is not good.

Frankincense is harvested by making cuts in the tree bark during the dry season. A cut is made every two or three weeks, and the resin that emerges to heal the tree is collected.

How much frankincense is produced worldwide isn’t clearly known. Bongers said Europe imports about 400 tons each year, and about half of that goes on to China for use in traditional medicine while the rest goes to churches and perfume makers.

Most of that comes from Ethiopia. A long-term government push to relocate people from the highlands to the lowlands, where the trees grow, is putting tremendous pressure on the ecosystem.

Additionally, a shift in harvesting from large, government-controlled companies to private collectives has increased the pressure to collect larger amounts of resin. The old contracts were for up to 40 years, Bongers said, which gave incentive to preserve the resource. The new contracts can be as short as two years, “so they get what they can get,” he said.

Heavy tapping appears to weaken the trees, making them more prone to attacks by longhorn beetles. Up to 85 percent of fully grown trees that die are heavily infested with beetles, the researchers found.

No new trees are replacing them. The highlanders brought cattle, and seedlings don’t survive to become saplings because cattle eat them and collectors burn the grasslands to make it easier to get to the trees, killing saplings as well, Bongers said.

An Arizona man is trying to stem this tide. Jason Eslamieh, originally from Iran, grows and sells all 19 boswellia species, including the frankincense-producing type, at his nursery in Tempe.

Seeds from the papyrifera subspecies, which makes frankincense, are notoriously difficult to germinate. Only two to eight out of a hundred grow into a plant, said Eslamieh, who authored a book on the topic. He says they must have undergone a population bottleneck due to overharvesting in the past, leaving them inbred and weak. He’s trying to create hybrids that are more vigorous.

His nursery, Miniatree.com, sells more than 100,000 seeds a year as well as 1,000 papyrifera plants. A 4-inch seedling costs $55, and fully mature trees can sell for up to $1,000.

The trees grow readily in Southern California, Florida and parts of Arizona.

Once the trees are about 4 years old, they can be tapped for frankincense. “A small tree is enough for personal use,” he said.

It’s possible that climate change is affecting the trees. Bongers has a research project underway and hopes to have an answer within two years.

(Elizabeth Weise writes for USA Today.)

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The intellectual cowardice of Bradley Manning’s critics

After imprisoning Private First Class Bradley Manning for eighteen months, the U.S. Army last week finally began the preliminary stage of his court-martial proceeding, and that initial process ended on Thursday. Manning faces over 30 charges; the most serious — “aiding the enemy” — carries a death sentence (though prosecutors are requesting “only” life in prison for the 24-year-old soldier). The technical purpose of this week’s hearing was to determine if there is sufficient evidence to warrant a full court-martial proceeding; the finding (that there is such evidence) is a virtual inevitability. Manning’s counsel, Lt. Col. David Coombs, spent the week challenging the Army’s evidence, suggesting that his client may have suffered “diminished capacity” by virtue of his gender struggles and emotional instability, and finally, forcefully arguing that the leaks were an act of political conscience and that the Army has severely “overcharged” Manning in an attempt to coerce incriminating statements against WikiLeaks (Kevin Gosztola and The Guardian were at the hearing and have recaps of what happened over the last week; my general view of Manning was set forth in an Op-Ed in The Guardian last week, and my specific view of the gender defense is here).

For the moment, I want to make one narrow point about Bradley Manning. I’ve made it before but it was really underscored for me by a debate I had on an Al Jazeera program Thursday night regarding Manning with Daniel Ellsberg and the neocon activist Cliff May, who vigorously defended the Obama administration’s treatment of Manning (the video of our segment is embedded below; it was preceded by a short interview of P.J. Crowley):

Ever since Manning was accused of being the source for the WikiLeaks disclosures, those condemning these leaks have sought to distinguishthem from Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers. With virtual unanimity, Manning’s harshest critics have contended that while Ellsberg’s leak was justifiable and noble, Manning’s alleged leaks were not; that’s because, they claim, Ellsberg’s leak was narrowly focused and devoted to exposing specific government lies, while Manning’s was indiscriminate and a far more serious breach of secrecy. When President Obama declared Manning guilty, he made the same claim: “No it wasn’t the same thing. Ellsberg’s material wasn’t classified in the same way.”

One problem for those wishing to make this claim is that Ellsberg himself has been one of Manning’s most vocal defenders, repeatedly insisting that the two leaks are largely indistinguishable. But the bigger problem for this claim is how blatantly irrational it is. As Ellsberg clearly details in this Al Jazeera debate, he — Ellsberg — dumped 7,000 pages of Top Secretdocuments: the highest known level of classification; by contrast, not a single page of what Manning is alleged to have leaked was Top Secret, but rather all bore a much lower-level secrecy designation. In that sense, Obama was right: “Ellsberg’s material wasn’t classified in the same way” — the secrets Ellsberg leaked were classified as being far more sensitive.

To the extent one wants to distinguish the two leaks, Ellsberg’s was the far more serious breach of secrecy. The U.S. Government’s own pre-leak assessment of the sensitivities of these documents proves that. How can someone — in the name of government secrecy and national security — praise the release of thousands of pages of Top Secret documents while vehemently condemning the release of documents bearing a much lower secrecy classification?

Nor is there any way to distinguish the substance of the two leaks. While the Pentagon Papers exposed the lies from American leaders regarding the Vietnam War, the WikiLeaks disclosures have done exactly the same with regard to the Iraq War, the war in Afghanistan, and a whole litany of other critical events. Here is what Ellen Knickmeyer, the Baghdad Bureau Chief for The Washington Post during the Iraq War, documented about the Iraq War logs Manning is accused of releasing:

Thanks to WikiLeaks, though, I now know the extent to which top American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world, as the Iraq mission exploded.

Is that not exactly what makes so many people view the Pentagon Papers leak as noble and just? Even some of Manning’s fellow soldiers in Iraq have hailed the WikiLeaks leaker as a hero. Beyond that, the diplomatic cables and war logs released by WikiLeaks revealed falsehoods and improprieties from the U.S. government (and other governments around the world) in a wide range of areas: its involvement in the covert war in Yemen; lies told by the U.S. Government regarding horrific, civilian-slaughtering incidents in Iraq; and, in general, numerous acts of abuses, deceit and illegality regarding much of what was done under the War on Terror rubric: exactly as the Pentagon Papers did.

Nor, if the U.S. Government’s evidence is to be believed, can there be any doubt about the similarity in motives between the two leakers. Just as Ellsberg repeatedly explained that he could not in good conscience stand by and have the world remain ignorant of the government lies he discovered about the Vietnam War (a war he once supported and helped plan), so, too, did Manning repeatedly state that these leaks were vital for informing the world about the depths of brutality, corruption and deceit driving these wars (including one war to which he was deployed as a soldier) — all with the goal of triggering what he called “worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms.” In the purported chats he had, Manning described how the intense worldwide reaction to the video of an Apache helicopter shooting unarmed civilians and a Reuters journalist in Baghdad “gave me immense hope”; that’s because: “i want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.” That is as pure an expression as possible of exactly what motivated Ellsberg as well.

Just as Ellsberg came to realize the evil of the war of which he was a part and felt compelled to act to expose it even at the risk of his own liberty, so, too, did Manning (in the chat logs Manning purportedly said: “im not so much scared of getting caught and facing consequences at this point… as i am of being misunderstood”). The Army Private also explained in the chat logs that he began to realize how heinous the Iraq War was when he discovered that “insurgents” being rounded up and imprisoned by the U.S. Army were doing nothing more than issuing “scholarly critiques” of the Malaki government’s corruption — only to find that his Army superiors ignored his discovery when he brought it to their attention. Both Ellsberg and (allegedly) Manning then did the same thing: turned over the information they discovered to a third party to select the parts that should be published to the world (The New York Times for Ellsberg and WikiLeaks for Manning).

What’s really going on here in this Manning v. Ellsberg comparison is pure intellectual cowardice. At this point — four decades after it happened — most people are unwilling to stand up and publicly condemn the Pentagon Papers leak. In progressive circles, it has long been entrenched dogma that Ellsberg’s leak was just and noble and that the Nixon administration’s efforts to prosecute Ellsberg were ignoble. Ellsberg has hero status, and deservedly so: he risked his life, literally, to expose to the world just how systematic and deliberate was the U.S. Government’s deceit about the Vietnam War and how heinous was the war itself.

As a result, very few people are willing to condemn what he did (even the neocon May, in this Al Jazeera debate, was afraid to say that what Ellsberg did was wrong). So in order to condemn Manning — and, as importantly, if not more so, to defend the Obama administration — it’s necessary for Manning’s critics to contrive distinctions between the Pentagon Papers leak and the WikiLeaks disclosure: of course I approve of what Ellsberg did — all Decent People do — but what Manning is accused of doing is radically different and just awful: he must be punished.

The clear reality, though, is that those who condemn Manning now and want to see him imprisoned for decades are the direct heirs of those who, in the early 1970s, wanted to see Dan Ellsberg imprisoned for life. Those who now condemn both Ellsberg and Manning — like those who support the executive power abuses and secrecy of both the Bush and Obama administrations — are authoritarians to be sure, but at least they’re sincere and consistent in their views; it’s those who support one but condemn the other who are incoherent at best.

As Ellsberg himself makes clear, everything that is being said now to condemn Manning — everything – was widely said about Ellsberg at the time of his leak. Back then, Ellsberg was repeatedly accused of being a traitor, of violating his oath, of endangering America’s national security, of aiding its enemies, of taking the law into his own hands; he was smeared and had his sanity continuously called into question. Had it not been for the Nixon administration’s overzealous attempts to destroy him by breaking into the office of his psychiatrist — the primary act that caused the charges against Ellsberg to be dismissed on the grounds of government misconduct — there is a real possibility that Ellsberg would still be in a federal prison today. He’s viewed as a hero now only because the passage of time has proven the nobility of his act: it’s much easier to defend those who challenge and subvert political power retrospectively than it is to do so at the time.

As the Walkely Foundation recognized last month when awarding WikiLeaks and Julian Assange Australia’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize: “the secret cables [] create[d] more scoops in a year than most journalists could imagine in a lifetime.” Those who want to see Manning punished and imprisoned for decades are driven by exactly the same mentality as those who wanted to see Ellsberg in prison back then: a belief that the U.S. Government has the right to use secrecy to hide its acts of deceit and illegality, and that those who expose such acts to the world are the real criminals. Just as the Obama administration’s obsessive persecution of whistleblowers has its roots in the secrecy-worshipping mentality of the Nixon administration — in her New Yorker article on the war on whistleblowers, Jane Mayer quotes Gabriel Schoenfeld as saying: “Obama has presided over the most draconian crackdown on leaks in our history—even more so than Nixon” — those demanding Manning’s punishment are, in every sense, the Nixonians of today. Manning’s critics are made from the same authoritarian cloth as those demanding Dan Ellsberg’s scalp in 1971. They should at least be honest enough to admit that, and stop contriving blatantly false distinctions between the two cases.

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One unanswered question surrounding the charges against Manning has long been this: who, exactly, is “the enemy” Manning is accused of aiding? On Thursday, military prosecutors supplied the answer: Al Qaeda. Apparently, by disclosing to the world the U.S. Government’s bad acts undertaken in secrecy, one is legally “aiding Al Qaeda.” Gosztola, in hisrecap of the proceedings, details how dangerous that theory is to basic journalism, as did Law Professor Kevin Jon Heller back in March.

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The New Yorker‘s George Packer emailed an objection to an item I wrote on Thursday, and I posted Packer’s objection as an update along with my own response; there is now additional information about the objection voiced by Packer, and this morning I posted it as a final update to that column.

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UPDATE: There is one other glaring irony that should be noted here. If Manning is indeed the WikiLeaks leaker, then he did not only reveal critical truths to the world, but also achieved enormous good: exactly the results the purported chat logs reflect that Manning sought. Even the harshly anti-WikiLeaks former NYT Executive Editor, Bill Keller, creditsthe release of the diplomatic cables with helping to spark the Arab Spring by exposing the true depths of the region’s dictators, including in Tunisia. By highlighting atrocities committed by U.S. troops in Iraq, the diplomatic cables prevented the Malaki government from granting the legal immunity Obama officials were demanding in exchange for keeping troops in Iraq beyond the 2011 deadline and thus helped end the Iraq War. Ironically, it’s often the very same people who most vocally celebrate the Arab Spring and the end of the Iraq War who simultaneously support the imprisonment of an individual who helped bring those events about (the WikiLeaks leaker), while cheering for a government (the Obama administration) that propped up many of those Arab dictators and tried desperately to extend the Iraq war.

If he is the WikiLeaks leaker, history will judge Manning as kindly as it has Ellsberg — and will view his persecutors just as unkindly as Nixon officials are viewed today for what they tried to do in the face of the Pentagon Papers leak.

UPDATE II: In deciding which problem is larger — excessive secrecy or excessive disclosure — consider this year-end list from Electronic Frontier Foundation entitled: “2011: The Year Secrecy Jumped the Shark,” which details just some of the most extreme secrecy abuses of The Most Transparent Administration Ever™. Jay Rosen once said: “The watchdog press died; we have [WikiLeaks] instead”; one could just as accurately say: meaningful transparency died; we have Bradley Manning instead.

UPDATE III: Here is a good report from Al Jazeera’s Listening Postfrom this week on U.S. media coverage of the Manning story, featuring interviews with Amy Goodman, FAIR’s Peter Hart, former CIA agent Roy McGovern and myself: