Gbagbo’s Ousting: U.S Military Offers Support to Nigeria, ECOWAS

Posted by admin Africa & World Politics Sunday, February 20th, 2011

UNITED States military command in Africa, AFRICOM, may support Nigeria and ECOWAS in its proposed plan to apply military force to remove defeated President of Cote d’Ivoire, Laurent Gbagbo and install the winner of that nation’s presidential polls, Alassane Quattara.

Answering questions from foreign correspondents from Washington DC at the weekend, the Commander of AFRICOM, General William Ward, said, “where we’re asked to do something, it would certainly be looked at through our overall foreign policy lens.”

Gen. Ward was asked if the U.S would be willing to support ECOWAS’ request for the expertise of AFRICOM regarding Cote d’Ivoire.

He answered thus: “We clearly look to work with the regional organizations as closely as we can, ECOWAS clearly being one of those.”

He said that, “given the ECOWAS role in the various regional issues that it has, where we’re asked to do something, it would certainly be looked at through our overall foreign policy lens, and then given a foreign policy decision that says the United States of America would support ECOWAS in some particular activity or event, and that activity had some military equities, some security equities, U.S AFRICOM would, in fact, be ready to follow through on that support.”

It would be recalled that an ECOWAS delegation was in Washington DC and New York last month, seeking U.S and United Nations’ support for the plan of ECOWAS to use military means to oust Gbagbo.

This was before the African Union decided to set up another panel of leaders to convince Gbagbo to step down peacefully.

The panel was given another month at the end of January when the AU met in Addis Ababa.

The UN and others in the international community are awaiting the outcome of the new AU initiative, even as the situation in Cote d’Ivoire is worsening with a Nigerian bank, Access Bank among others in the country, shutting down services.

Gen. Ward also commented on the problem of oil bunkering in Nigeria and why AFRICOM is not playing a role in dealing with the situation.

According to him, AFRICOM has no role in addressing the oil-bunkering problem because “that issue is an issue for the Nigerian government. You know, clearly we have no role in that. That’s in Nigeria’s sovereign territory. We respect that, and we do not have a role in that.”

But he was quick to add that, “if there are requests for some technical assistance in dealing with it, from patrolling techniques, ways to help better effect and secure their production facilities, we have been able to offer, from time to time, advice on that. But that is not something that goes on, on a continual basis.”

Ward noted that generally, AFRICOM only does what it is asked by its African partners and those requests, which are in line with U.S and global interests.

He said: “It’s reflective of what we get asked to do in support of the nations’ requests to be a bit more effective enabling them to secure their own waters.”

But he conceded that AFRICOM has challenges of its own on the continent, which is in “getting the resources that would, in fact, be able to be used to satisfy the things that our Africa partners ask us to do.”

Truly, AFRICOM’s budget has been cut. For instance, in 2009, the U.S Command in Africa got over $300 million but the Obama administration requested about $278 million (appropriation for the Command, indicating a drop in funding.

The AFRICOM commander explained that “our ability to provide support is certainly a factor of our resources that we have available. The United States of America is very busy in many places, and so we’re being asked to do a lot of things.”

He said that AFRICOM “just cannot do all that we’re sometimes asked to do, from providing equipment to having personnel that could be conducting training exercises and other things where our soldiers, our sailors, our airmen, our Marines can work side-by-side with our partner nations as we work together to increase each of our capacities to understand the environment and to do things in a more secure way.”

-Guardianwp_posts