{UAH} No longer at ease: War, terror stalking region - Comment - www.theeastafrican.co.ke

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/War-and-terror-stalking-East-Africa/-/434750/2294044/-/5gdnwl/-/index.html

No longer at ease: War, terror stalking region - Comment

East African defence and military officials meeting in the Rwanda capital Kigali last Wednesday said the Eastern Africa Standby Force (EASF) could be ready by December this year.

EASF will tackle threats of terrorism in the region, said James Kabarebe, Rwanda's Minister of Defence. He also suggested that the force could help prevent conflicts, and be deployed to peace building.

Right now, though, in all those aspects, the situation in the region is spiralling out of control. Terrorist attacks linked to the Somalia militant group Al Shabaab and its allies are up sharply in Kenya, as well as in the Somali capital Mogadishu.

The Mogadishu attacks are compromising the gains made by the African Union forces in Somalia, Amisom, in beating back Al Shabaab over the past three years.

In South Sudan, the violence that started after an alleged coup last December has taken an unusually savage turn.

As President Salva Kiir's forces battle against rebels led by his former deputy Riek Machar, both sides are carrying out mass murder at a rate that will leave more dead in the next few weeks than the Rwanda genocide of 1994 in which nearly one million were killed.

Kenya's big counter-terrorism campaign could make its military's continued stay in Somalia as part of Amisom, untenable.

Uganda, which has provided the lead contingent in Amisom for years, has a president in Yoweri Museveni who must focus on what promises to be a very difficult seventh term in office (two of them unelected).

Public services in Uganda are crumbling, and the otherwise small donor aid cuts are beginning to add up. Nearly all public servants have to endure several months of unpaid salaries.

Burundi, the other key player in Amisom, also faces a difficult situation at home. Rwanda's troops are extended in peacekeeping in Darfur, Juba, and lately Central African Republic.

Tanzania meanwhile has sent troops into the Democratic Republic of Congo as part of the UN peacekeeping there. Its role in the more aggressive UN Intervention Force Brigade is partly credited with defeating the M23 rebels.

A once meek DRC President Joseph Kabila has started thumbing his nose at neighbours.

It looks like there is nothing more Uganda, Burundi, or Kenya can do to push against Al Shabaab in Somalia, or to disrupt its growing activities in the region.

It is also hard to figure a scenario in which the region intervenes to prevent a descent into hell in South Sudan.

Any reversals in Somalia, and the worst happening in South Sudan, would result in a new flood of refugees in, especially, Kenya – where domestic nationalist sentiment has turned against Somali refugees.

There is a small new complication with the Sudanese refugees too. They were the "good" refugees in both Uganda and Kenya for decades.

However, when South Sudan first became autonomous and then independent, they mistreated the Ugandans and Kenyans who went there looking to make a fortune.

And when the crisis broke out in December, quite a few Ugandans and Kenyans in Juba were beaten, killed, or robbed before they fled.

The Sudanese, therefore, will not be as welcome as they were in the past. I cannot see how else any of this will end, other than badly.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group's executive editor for Africa & Digital Media. E-mail: cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com. Twitter: @cobbo3

No longer at ease: War, terror stalking region - Comment - www.theeastafrican.co.ke

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/War-and-terror-stalking-East-Africa/-/434750/2294044/-/5gdnwl/-/index.html

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