29 April 1999
FRANCE BACKS U.S.-AFRICAN PEACEKEEPING PARTNERSHIP TRAINING
(Col. Marc Wood comments on ACRI at CSIS) (570) By Jim Fisher-Thompson USIA Staff Writer WASHINGTON -- A peacekeeping partnership for Africa, called the African Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI), has the full backing of the French government, says Colonel Marc Wood, military attache at the French Embassy here. Colonel Wood made his comment at an April 26 briefing by Ambassador Marshall McCallie, special coordinator of the State Department's ACRI Working Group, sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies' (CSIS's) Africa program. Commenting on U.S.-African partnership efforts in the peacekeeping area, including U.S. plans to establish an African Center for Security Studies (ACSS) on the continent, Colonel Wood said, "Our country [France] is in full support of these programs." He explained that "our idea is to work together, Africans, Frenchmen, and Americans side by side in the most complementary way we can to come to the same result," to enhance African peacekeeping capabilities. France is also working on similar military partnerships in sub-Saharan Africa, Wood pointed out, noting that "we recently equipped an ECOMOG [Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group] battalion with equipment from Senegal...and they are operating now after training." He added: "We intend to equip, from now to [the year] 2005, something like six [African] battalions with all the equipment needed to be able to operate full peacekeeping operations." Concerning training for senior military and civilian leaders, similar to what the ACSS program would offer, Wood said that France has "already, for quite a few years now, been offering such training" at its military academies and war colleges. And "we have had quite a few Francophone officers attend them," he said. The French soldier added that President Jacques Chirac also wants to extend such military training in France to Anglophone as well as Lusophone nations in Africa, "so we are completely open now." "We hope that in the coming years Europe and the [United] States will work more and more together toward the same results," conflict resolution in Africa, Wood said. He added that "the idea we have is the same: to promote democracy." And in that regard, "I think it is important to get people to know each other, both diplomats and military, at a certain level; to live and talk together for, say, 18 days or three weeks in order to try to solve the future problems of Africa." McCallie's main message was that ACRI is progressing from "concept to reality" in its effort to train between 10,000 and 12,000 African troops to respond to peacekeeping emergencies. To that end it is broadening its training among senior African officers to emphasize operational planning and coordination, called command and control. "We want to offer [them] a computer-assisted staff training exercise," he said. An ACRI "vision statement" last year emphasized that point when it said, "We are looking to African states to bring African solutions to the sensitive issue of command and control for brigade and higher levels of deployed operations." Since its inception in January 1997, ACRI has worked with African units from Senegal, Uganda, Mali, Malawi, Ghana, and Benin. In October, a unit from Cote d'Ivoire will be the next African nation to undertake the 60-day ACRI peacekeeper training session, conducted by 60 U.S. trainers from the Third Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg in California. ®MDNM¯
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
