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French Commentary Examines Rationale behind Africom, US Presence in Djibouti:
Le Monde
Monday, July 23, 2007
Commentyary by Laurent Zecchini: "GIs' Outpost in Africa"
The United States is at "war on terror." This is why Camp Lemonier, which it leases from the Djiboutian State, could just as well be located in Baghdad. It is a protected camp, defended by a double perimeter wall, with towers, concrete chicanes, barbed wire, and heavily armed troops, in helmets and bulletproof vests. How could they doubt that they are in a hostile environment?
Nothing could be less American than this long road, which resembles a huge garbage dump, swept by the "khamsin," the scorching wind that comes from the mountains of Ethiopia, apparently trying to gather all Africa's plastic bags in one place.
The 1,800 US troops of Camp Lemonier live in seclusion, in an aseptic and secure autarky. When they go out, it is on board white Toyota ATVs without any military markings. For security patrols, often conducted with the Djiboutian forces, they use their Humvees, mounted with machine guns, and their equipment is the same as in Iraq. though their task is to "build relations of confidence with the 'locals,'" as Major Brian Kellner, of the 6th Provisional Security Company (PSC,) calmly explained.
Less then 2 km away, two legionnaires in white kepis, red epaulettes, and khaki shorts stand guard, relaxed, in front of the open gates of the Monclar camp, headquarters of the 13th Sub-Battalion of the Foreign Legion (DBLE.) Further away, at the airbase that houses the 10 Mirage 2000s of the 4/33 Vexin fighter squadron, and at the headquarters of the Fifth Overseas Joint Forces Regiment (RAIOM,) the 2,900 French troops stationed in Djibouti feel no sense of insecurity.
In the evening they meet outside the Historil and the Palmier, Djibouti's two famous cafes, on Menelik square. Later, rue d'Ethiopie and its nightclubs grows lively: white kepis are very much in evidence at Cham's, the Baobab, and the Golden Club, but there are no marines crew-cuts to be seen. "This is understandable," Major Kellner said. "This was originally a French colony, so of course your soldiers have a different attitude to the population; you are at home here."
In a manner of speaking. On 27 June, during the ceremonies to mark the 30th anniversary of Djibouti's independence, French troops marched past Djiboutian President Ismail Omar Guelleh to the tune "En Passant par la Lorraine." They were followed by a US Army detachment, but the music stayed the same... The Americans have been in Djibouti since 2002, the French ever since they created a trading bank in Djibouti at Obock in 1862, and the Legion settled there in 1962, after leaving Algeria.
Though 11 September 2001 has not much changed the habits of French troops on the "scorching rock," it prompted the United States' decision to come here. The nerve center of the Horn of Africa, a link between the Bab Al-Mandib Strait and the Red Sea, Djibouti is also a land of very moderate Islam and an island of political stability amid a region rocked by crises.
"In 2002," Rear Admiral James Hart, commander of the Joint Tactical Forces for the Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA,) explained, "we thought that Al-Qa'ida might
leave Afghanistan and come to Africa, and we wanted to have a military response force here. We also want our troops to train the Africans so that they can have professional armed forces capable of combating the terrorist threat. But this threat has not manifested itself as we expected."
Strangely, the admiral "does not know" whether "the French are involved in the 'war on terror.'" General Michel Arrault, commander of the French Forces in Djibouti (FFDJ,) replied unambiguously: "We are not involved in the struggle against terrorism in the way the Americans understand it, but we do have sufficient military resources to protect ourselves against threats." The Djiboutian Army has some 4,000 poorly equipped troops, and without the French forces' presence it is a good bet that the neighboring countries -- Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia -- would have swallowed this tiny portion of the former empire whole. It is this security environment that persuaded the United States to come to Djibouti, with modest resources -- two combat companies, a few Black Hawk helicopters, a C-130 transport aircraft, three or four P-3 Orion naval patrol planes, but no fighters.
Admiral Hart implicitly agreed: "The French mission is to protect Djibouti, and we think that it is a safe place to be based. " To do what? "Our missions are fairly similar to those which Africom will perform," he said. Africom... the name of the major strategic revision conducted by the United States in Africa, which involves establishing a single military command on the Black Continent, which will be operational by fall 2008.
In Washington, undersecretary for Defense Theresa Whelan, chief of African affairs at the Pentagon, acknowledged that during the Cold War the United States took an interest in Africa only in order to wage proxy wars against the USSR.
Subsequently its vision of the Black Continent became strictly economic and humanitarian. At the Pentagon, the disastrous military venture in Somalia in 1992 served as a lesson, at least until the 7 August 1998 attacks on the US Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. On 12 October 2000 in Aden, Yemen, the destroyer, the USS Cole, was hit by a suicide craft. A year later came "September 11," and in October 2002 the French oil tanker, Limburg, suffered a terrorist attack, again in Yemeni waters.
Then the war on terrorism began, and two "bankrupt states" were identified -- Yemen and Somalia. "With regard to Africa the first signs emerged in the beginning of the 1990s, but we did not analyze them correctly," Theresa Whelan admitted. "The lesson of all this was that if you neglect some parts of the world, you take the risk that the next threat will come from there." Washington's line has been defined -- to insure that the gray areas, Africa's "ungoverned spaces," will not serve as a breeding ground for Al-Qa'ida.
While responsibility for the Black Continent is now divided among three of the five US military demands in the world, in future of the whole of Africa, apart from Egypt, will come under Africom. Officially, this increasing role will not be accompanied by a strengthening of the US military presence in Africa, confined to the 1,800 troops in Djibouti.
However it is no certainty that the 11 July appointment of four-star General William Ward (the most senior Afro-American officer in the US Army) to head up Africom will suffice to silence the resentment of Centcom, Central Command, which is angry at being deprived of part of the war on terror. The question of where to establish Africom has lost some of its acuity in recent weeks.
In response to African countries' anxiety about becoming the target of terrorist actions against US troops, Washington has said that terrorism strikes everywhere, but has concluded that it is better to establish a commands divided into three or four parts.
Access to African oil and the desire to counter China's growing presence on the Black Continent are among the strategic interests driving the United States to rationalize its approach to Africa. Washington wants to increase the proportion of its oil imports coming from Africa from 15 to 25 percent by 2015. Beijing, however, imports 30 percent of its oil from Africa, particularly from Sudan, secures oil exploration permits in Nigeria, sells weapons to half a dozen African states, and cares absolutely nothing about "good governance" in Africa...
Naval security in the Gulf of Guinea has thus become a priority axis of Washington's African policy, at least as much as the struggle against maritime piracy off the Somali coast. In June 2005 the United States launched the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Initiative (TSCTI,) whose role is complementary to that of ACOTA, a program designed to train and equip African Union (AU) troops.
France, which has during the past two years Europeanized its RECAMP (Reinforcements of African Peacekeeping Capabilities) concept, sees nothing against the establishment of this US security architecture, though it is worried about Washington's readiness to spend tens of millions of dollars, while it struggles to persuade the Europeans to spend more on Africa, particularly to finance the RECAMP depots (which are supposed to equip and arm AU "readiness brigades,") which are desperately empty.
In Djibouti, both countries are stepping up civilian-cum-military actions (education, health, reconstruction) in the region, partly in order to secure better acceptance of their armed forces' presence. At the same time detachments of French and US military instructors visit neighboring countries to train their armed forces in "peacekeeping." The fact remains that the United States greatly helped Ethiopian troops in their Blitzkrieg at the end of 2006 against Somalia, which routed the Islamic Tribunals. In June 2007 the US Navy bombarded the Bargal area, in Puntland, a semiautonomous region in the far East of Somalia, where elements of the Tribunals had taken refuge.
In January a US aircraft bombarded the South of the country, near the Kenyan border, unofficially in order to destroy an Al-Qa'ida site. During the Ethiopian offensive, Washington said that "hundreds of Islamic combatants" were flanking the Tribunals, including the three people responsible for the 1998 attacks on the Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, though nobody saw any corpses. "This business of the persons responsible for the 1998 attacks has become a major business for the Americans," President Ismail Omar Guelleh observed.
Djiboutian officials say that the United States is not using Djibouti as a bridgehead in its war on terror, adding that the US bombers took off from the discreet Ethiopian military base at Gode, in the heart of the Ogaden. The French, who control Djibouti's airspace, do not challenge this assertion, though the civil airport regularly hosts discreet white aircraft with no identifying features.
Be that as it may, Djibouti has every reason to maintain the best possible relations with the United States. The Camp Lemonier site earns the Djiboutian treasury $13 million a year, and the US military presence has the effect of attracting capital from the Persian Gulf countries.
For its part, France's prime mission is to ensure observance of the defense agreements that bind it to Djibouti. As well as surveillance of the area, it uses its Mirages to perform a deterrent mission against any regional power tempted to disrupt the strategic balance in the Horn of Africa. "Here," General Arrault said, "the Americans' status is different from ours: theirs is an external operation. Everything we do is done transparently with the Djiboutian authorities; this is not necessarily the case with everyone..."
Admiral Hart dismissed any suspicions about the CJTF's dual role: "my mission is to try to prevent the emergence of conflicts in the region, by providing more stability. It is not to capture or kill Al-Qa'ida combatants, but to establish peaceful and democratic foundations here."
French officers embedded with US forces confirmed that the latter's mission has changed a great deal during the past two years, while adding that they do not have access to the "intelligence command": "the Americans priority," one of them said, "is now civilian-military affairs, which they consider the best way to achieve stabilization. They came here with preconceived ideas about terrorism, and they have adapted their deployment."
This development seems to be reflected in Africom's organization: its second-in-command will be a State Department representative. CJTF's commander, who was originally a Marine general, will be replaced by an admiral, and Camp Lemonier's logo, which bore the inscription "antiterrorism base," no longer reflects the real nature of the US presence in Djibouti, according to an official explanation.
Nevertheless the United States recently renewed its five-year lease, with an option for a further 10 years. At the end of July it will take possession of hundreds of portacabins (conteneurs-vie) in the huge site that will increase camp Lemonier's area fivefold.
All these changes make Djibouti the ideal candidate to host at least one of Africom's decentralized headquarters. French and Americans side by side in Desert School
It is the last camp. The troops left Djibouti 10 days ago. Since then they have marched by night through one of world's hottest and most inhospitable areas. The Djibouti Desert Battle Training and Instruction Center (CAIDD) is a nomadic school, with no fixed address and no premises, the only one of its kind, which requires every man to excel himself physically.
"This is no commando training course," according to Colonel Eric Bucquet, commanding officer of the Fifth Overseas Joint Forces Regiment (RAIOM,) "but we want people to learn to live in the desert." Since it was formed in 1997, the Desert School has issued 6,790 diplomas to soldiers from numerous French and foreign units. This is the fourth time that a US section has taken part in training. The 30 US troops include 15 Marines and 15 Army soldiers, all equally exhausted. There is a "jungle school" in California. But according to Marine Sergeant Rudy Diaz, "it is not comparable in terms of survival techniques." The US troops, all volunteers, do not regret the experience. It comprises two modules -- "acclimatization" and "battle training," each lasting five days, punctuated by an eight-day "combat module." The 140 troops march some 20 km every night through rocky terrain, guided by the stars and GPS and carrying weapons. They are followed by a caravan of 44 camels, carrying water and bags, and some 90 goats. These provide most of their food, together with rice, pasta, chili, and tomato paste. Every day several goats are sacrificed according to the "Afar method" and cooked over the embers.
This seems somewhat rustic to the Americans: "we are not accustomed to traveling with so few resources." What is the most difficult part? "The language barrier with the French, the way food is prepared and water is rationed," Rudy Diaz commented. But it is all relative: "it is tough, but less so than in Iraq, because there is not the stress of war," the Marine sergeant added. Nevertheless 10 of the 150 trainees had to drop out -- two following accidents, one as a result of acute gastritis, one after suffering two scorpion stings, and the rest as a result of heat stroke. The Desert School provides French and US troops in Djibouti with the opportunity to come together and to appreciate each other. As a result of this experience the 11 CAIDD instructors realize that the Americans and French have very different attitudes to combat: "the former have a more brutal approach to achieving their goal, whereas the latter take more account of their surrounding environment," Captain Pierre Biclet explained. "The Americans tend to use their weapons as soon as they feel threatened, whereas for us the threat needs to be direct and verified."
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