War Is Boring

A.U. Air Defenders Could Block Eritrean Arms

26.12.09

Categorie: Africa, Air, David Axe, U.N. Peacekeeping |

by DAVID AXE

Last week I wondered aloud why the African Union has been talking about devoting some of its peacekeeping funds, donated by the U.S., E.U. and U.N., to setting up an air-defense mission for its troop contingent in Somalia. Around 5,000 Ugandan and Burundian peacekeepers, flying an A.U. flag, control key locations in Mogadishu and help prop up the fledgling Transitional Federal Government. The major threats to the TFG and the A.U. troops are the Al-Shabab Islamic group’s foot soldiers and suicide bombers, so why does the A.U. need an air force?

The answer became clearer over the past few days, with news that the U.N. has slapped Eritrea, just north of Somalia, with sanctions, including an arms embargo. “The resolution bans the import and export of weapons to Eritrea and calls on U.N. member states to inspect all suspect air and sea cargo between the Red Sea nation and Somalia,” the A.P. reports.

Recall that much of the weaponry fueling the Islamic insurgency in Somalia comes by air from Eritrea. A U.N. monitoring group “said a chartered Boeing 707 cargo plane, owned by Aerogem Aviation Ltd, based in Ghana, had made at least 13 trips from Asmara to Mogadishu, sometimes filing false flight plans,” Reuters reported in 2007. Partially as a result, “Somalia is awash with more arms than at any time since the early 1990s.”

In 2007, A.U. troops discovered a cache of rockets apparently smuggled into Somalia. (Pictured.) My Somali reporter friend Ahmed Omar Hashi went to Eritrea to report on the arms connection this summer; when he returned to Somalia, Al-Shabab assassins targeted him and his boss, Muktar Hirabe. Hirabe died in a hail of bullets; Hashi survived and is convalescing in a foreign hospital.

The A.U. controls the Mogadishu airport and could institute better cargo inspections to block arms shipments. But the Union has no ability to intercept flights to airstrips elsewhere in the country. So if by “air defense,” the A.U. means installing systems for tracking and interdicting illegal arms shipments — say, radars and interceptor aircraft based in neighboring Djibouti and Ethiopia — then an A.U. air force is a good idea.

(Photo: via David Axe)