When it comes to EU security missions abroad, most eyes turn to Kosovo, where 2,000 law and order officials are about to be deployed over the next four months to stabilise the province after its secession from Serbia. But surely we ought to be paying just as much attention to events in the former French colony of Chad, where a 3,700-strong EU "peacekeeping" force is finally beginning to arrive after months of delay.
The ostensible purpose of the EU force is to help humanitarian aid workers and protect hundreds of thousands of refugees who have fled violence spreading from Sudan’s Darfur region, east of Chad. But the question asked in some EU capitals is whether the EU’s mission is turning into something quite different – namely, a prop for French foreign policy in a former African colony.
Since the start of February, French forces have played an important role in blunting a rebel assault on N’Djamena, Chad’s capital, and shoring up the government of President Idriss Deby. Paris says its forces have not been engaged in direct combat, but there is no doubt that the rebels regard France’s involvement as proof that the EU force, once it is fully in place, will not be neutral.
After all, French troops will make up more than half the total EU force, and French commanders are virtually alone in the EU in having any real experience of the area. The operational headquarters for the EU mission will be in France.
All this makes some of France’s EU partners, notably Germany, rather nervous about the EU’s role in Chad. We all know that in Afghanistan, where Nato-led forces are fighting the Taliban, the Germans are very queasy about sending troops to the dangerous southern regions where the hard military action is taking place. In central Africa, Germany is just as reluctant to get involved.
The Chad conflict pits a French-supported ruler – dictator, some would say – against a rebel movement that doesn’t want an EU military presence there. For the life of them, the Germans fail to see how it can be in their national interest to jump into this maelstrom.
The operation in Chad is one of the biggest and most difficult that the EU has ever launched. It is a tremendous test of the EU’s resources, its political will and its attempt to pursue a common foreign and security policy. But right now it is looking less and less like the humanitarian mission it was supposed to be, and more and more like a French-inspired intervention in a civil war.
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