With Instability at Home, an Uncertain Future for Burundi's Peacekeepers

[caption id="attachment_9596" align="alignnone" width="620"] A Burundian soldier serving in AMISOM guards a position at the edge of Mogadishu, Somalia. Photo by Stuart Price/UN Photo, Creative Commons, via Flickr.[/caption]

When Burundi's peacekeepers joined the ranks of the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM) in December 2007, it signaled that the conclusion of the country's civil war in 2005 had marked the beginning of a post-conflict identity — one that would see Burundi rapidly integrate formerly warring groups into a newly configured military and define itself as an essential contributor to peace and security on the African continent. Today, that identity is under strain, and the country's 5,400 peacekeepers, which make up "over a quarter of AMISOM's force," face an uncertain future.

President Pierre Nkurunziza's pursuit of a legally contentious third term has transformed Burundi from an exporter of security to a country that is backsliding towards sustained political violence, or even civil war. A recent United Nations delegation noted that since April 2015, when opposition to Nkurunziza's third term launched cycles of political protest and violent repression, civil society has been beaten into submission, press freedom is under fire, and opponents of the president are being executed with alarming regularity. United States Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power has emphasized that up to 240,000 people have fled Burundi, citing a "climate of fear."

Between the recent discovery of graves and the government's outright rejection of a 5,000 troop peacekeeping force from the African Union, there have been calls for the United Nations Security Council to consider deploying its own multinational peacekeeping force to de-escalate political violence and protect civilians. After a decade as a go-to source for peacekeepers, Burundi is slipping further and further into a security crisis of its own.

During the country's recovery from the civil war, Burundi put new emphasis on military cohesion as a tool for "political inclusion across ethnicities." At its peak, Burundi wore the label of "security exporter" well, earning international praise for everything from its efforts to integrate women into peacekeeping battalions to the durability and strength of its post-conflict military. The United States has been training and equipping Burundi's peacekeepers though the African Contingency Operations and Training Assistance program since 2005, with Beltway defense contractors winning large contracts from the U.S. State Department to prepare troops for their year-long AMISOM deployments.

Those days are over. The United States suspended military-to-military exercises and discontinued pre-deployment readiness training in November 2015 "over concerns that political violence in the country would hamper [their soldiers'] ability to participate in such operations." Peacekeeping specialists Nina Wilén and Gérard Birantamije have noted that "it is unlikely that Burundi will be able to maintain its current troop commitments" without international support.

The families of peacekeepers in Burundi may be in more danger than the civilians in Somalia those troops are being sent to protect, and the resources that had been tied to international support for Burundi's security sector are being rapidly depleted with each successive day of deployment. There is a real question as to what happens to this force now.

As some observers have noted, if the African Union threatened to remove Burundian troops from its flagship AMISOM mission, the effects could bite deep into the resource base of the Burundian government, which is reimbursed for each soldier that joins the force. Yet, withdrawing Burundi's peacekeepers would also deplete the African Union's strength in Somalia. As a result, it is possible that President Nkurunziza could leverage that same threat of withdrawing Burundi's peacekeepers, in an attempt to get the African Union to mute its calls for international intervention and externally mediated dialogue.

In 2016, instability at home will mean that Burundi's peacekeepers will face a climate of ongoing uncertainty, but it is likely that both the current government of Burundi and international stakeholders looking for solutions will not hesitate to use them as a bargaining chip moving forward.

Belinda O'Donnell is a political analyst based in Washington DC who writes on U.S.-Africa ties in the context of security and electoral politics. You can find her on Twitter @brjodonnell.