The African Mission in Burundi

Abstract

The African Mission in Burundi (AMIB) was the first AU-mandated armed peace operation. AMIB’s deployment was authorised in 2003 before the inau-guration of the AU’s Peace and Security Council. The peace mission mirrored the AU’s ambition to intervene in African conflicts where the UN was either not too interested or delayed in responding to a volatile security situation in which there was no comprehensive peace agreement. AMIB highlights how the UN and AU could collaborate with one another in dealing with African peace operations. A number of students of African security and peacekeeping have described AMIB as a successful mission, and AMIB has been recommended as a possible model for future peace operations in Africa (Boshoff, Vrey and Rautenbach 2010; Okumu 2009; Svensson 2008).1 Based on this assertion, I examine AMIB in this chapter in order to assess its achievements and challenges, as well as the lessons that were learned from the mission for improving future peacekeeping operations in Africa. Against the backdrop of the APSA, I address three key questions that emerge from the analysis of AMIB: first, was AMIB truly a successful mission? Second, did AMIB balance the triangular area of tension in African peace operations: namely, the AU’s ambitions, its peacekeeping capacity, and the AU member states’ political will and agendas? Third, were the optimisms embedded in the APSA in terms of its ability to tackle armed conflicts and guarantee African security realised with the AU’s experiences in Burundi?