The African Union and Coercive Diplomacy: The Case of Burundi

Amid Burundi’s intensifying domestic crisis in December 2015, the African Union (AU) took the unprecedented step of threatening to use military force against the government’s will in order to protect civilians caught up in the conflict.
In an article for the Journal of Modern African Studies, posted by Brussels-based EGMONT The Royal Institute for International Relations, NINA WILÉN and PAUL D. WILLIAMS trace the background to this decision and analyze the effectiveness and credibility of the AU’s use of coercive diplomacy as a tool of conflict management.
After its usual range of conflict management tools failed to stem the Burundian crisis, the AU Commission and Peace and Security Council (PSC) tried a new type of military compellence by invoking Article 4(h) of the Union’s Constitutive Act. The authors argue that the threatened intervention never materialized because of 1) the Burundian government’s astute diplomacy and 2) several African autocrats’ resistance to setting a precedent for future interventions where concerns about civilian protection overrode state sovereignty.
But this was not a complete defeat for the AU, WILÉN and WILLIAMS state. “The Burundi case showed the AU Commission was willing and able to address an impending crisis that directly related to its mandate to prevent violent conflicts.”
From late 2014, the AU used various diplomatic instruments, including the deployment of special envoys, a high-level panel and later, human right observers and military experts. When these failed to persuade the Burundian government to open negotiations, the PSC used targeted sanctions to try and diffuse the crisis. “The PSC’s unprecedented invocation of Article 4(h) in the immediate aftermath of the deadly episode of 11-12 December 2015 was an innovative attempt to reduce violence against civilians and put pressure on the government when all previous measures had failed.”
Yet, the AU did not directly tackle the principal cause of Burundi’s crisis: President Nkurunziza’s controversial bid for a third term. It seems clear that most observers, including the EAC’s ministers of justice and the chairperson of the AU Commission viewed a third term for Nkurunziza as unconstitutional and it certainly broke the terms of the Arusha agreement, for which the AU was a guarantor. Yet the AU’s room for maneuver was constrained for two main reasons. First, the May 2015 ruling by Burundi’s Constitutional Court in favor of Nkurunziza’s third term meant that legally, Nkurunziza’s continued rule was constitutional, despite the serious doubts about the Court’s independence reflected by the vice-president’s decision to flee the country immediately after the verdict was delivered.
Second, the EAC’s leaders were unwilling to criticize the extension of presidential term limits in Burundi given their similar behavior in their own states. Discussion of this issue was effectively killed off when the East African Community (EAC) gained the lead role for mediating the negotiations to resolve Burundi’s crisis.
The decision not to forcibly deploy the African Protection and Prevention Mission in Burundi (MAPROBU) without the host government’s consent shows the abiding power of the norm of non-intervention and the controversial nature of Article 4(h) in Africa, despite the AU’s new unofficial slogan of moving ‘from non-intervention to non-indifference’.
“The decision also showed how there can be different dynamics for the PSC convening at ambassadorial level compared to meetings at the level of heads of state or foreign ministers,” the authors state.
In retrospect, the decision not to deploy MAPROBU also made it easier for the government of Burundi to reject the deployment of a UN police mission, which was established in UN Security Council resolution 2303 of 29 July 2016. It has also probably reduced the AU’s credibility should it wish to issue a similar compellent threat in the future. On the other hand, it is possible that the PSC’s threat of Article 4(h) helped prevent an even worse spiral of violence that might have occurred after the clashes in mid-December 2015 and that a forcible military intervention might have escalated Burundi’s crisis regardless of the good intentions behind it.