ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — It’s the Borrell Doctrine: The EU must be “less angelic” and supply lethal weapons to African allies if there is any hope of defeating terrorists.
On his first visit to Africa as the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Josep Borrell articulated a robust approach to confronting violent threats. He advocates that the EU abandon its largely pacifist diplomatic posture in favor of recognizing that a fist can only be answered with a fist, and that self-defense is unavoidable on the path to peace.
Borrell, a former foreign minister of Spain, is hoping to implement this new doctrine with billions of euros in a proposed European Peace Facility, a pot of cash that would exist outside the EU’s main budget. It is essentially a slush-fund created by EU member countries that would allow Brussels to circumvent prohibitions in the EU treaties against the bloc’s budget being used to finance military or defense operations.
“When a truck arrives to a village and they start killing everybody with a machine gun, you will not stop them by just preaching, huh?” Borrell said Friday, during a visit to a leather factory in Addis Ababa, where he also met Ethiopian officials and leaders of the African Union.
“Let’s be less angelical and put your foot on the ground,” Borrell said. “We are facing a war. And when you face a war, you need to do war. And for sure, we want to stop war. And we want to win the war through winning the peace.”
In a message that might sound familiar to gun rights’ advocates in the U.S., Borrell insisted on Thursday that only arming the good guys would silence the terrorists’ guns.
Call it hawkish or call it realpolitik. But it’s rarely heard in the corridors of power in Brussels. Officials there tend to insist that conflicts can only be resolved properly through dialogue, and that there can be no military solution to the conflict in _____. (Fill in the blank: Syria, Libya, Ukraine etc.)
By contrast, since taking office in December, Borrell has been forthright in stating the limits of the EU’s traditional approach. In a speech to the European Parliament in January, he acknowledged that despite the EU’s insistence that there would be no military solution to the conflict in Syria, in fact Turkey and Russia had effectively imposed one.
The approach is hardly uncontroversial, especially considering that the theme of the AU’s own annual leadership summit this year was “Silencing the Guns.”
In a message that might sound familiar to gun rights’ advocates in the U.S., Borrell insisted on Thursday that only arming the good guys would silence the terrorists’ guns.
One senior EU diplomat sought to calibrate those remarks. “It is not about arming armies, but about supporting military capabilities and providing training,” the diplomat said. “Better put would be that military capabilities are needed to silence the guns.”
At the same time, even as Borrell has urged a more muscular approach to African conflicts, he has not retreated from the primary view of the EU as a peacemaker. Traditionally, its first and best arsenal is seen as all soft power: diplomacy; sanctions; economic aid; and moral pressure.
Confirmed strong EU support to @PMEthiopia Abiy Ahmed’s reformist agenda. Upcoming elections are an important test to consolidate democracy and stability in #Ethiopia – and I am glad to announce deployment of an EU Election Observation Mission. #AUEU pic.twitter.com/t9q5GlChRu
— Josep Borrell Fontelles (@JosepBorrellF) February 28, 2020
“We are not here to make war,” he said Friday. “We are here to try to help people to defend themselves.”
Still, while the EU feels compelled to help quell the rise of deadly Islamist movements in the Sahel (the semi-arid region south of the Sahara Desert that includes parts of Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali among other countries), there are potentially steep risks in supplying weapons to African armies. Some forces have committed widely-documented human rights abuses, and there are doubts about their fighting capabilities and corruption.
“Abuses by security forces in the name of security — and there have been many — only serve to fill the ranks of jihadist groups,” said Corinne Dufka, West Africa director for Human Rights Watch, “thereby deeply complicating the goal of addressing the spread of abusive jihadist groups in West Africa.”
Borrell, however, said he had heard the AU’s clear preference for “African solutions to African problems” and that he was also taken by comments made by the AU Commission chairperson, Moussa Faki, during a joint meeting with EU officials Thursday.
At the close of the plenary session, Faki told his EU colleagues including Commission President Ursula von der Leyen that in response to “violence and the guns of terrorists that continuously kill civilians and sabotage positive developments, we also need guns and arms.” Faki’s spokeswoman said that during the closed plenary session itself he said, “it sounds paradoxical that one needs arms to be able to silence the guns, but that is also the reality.”
The EU’s proposal for a new off-budget Peace Facility would potentially allow Brussels to begin supplying lethal weapons, expanding on the African Peace Facility, which has quietly funneled billions in development aid since 2004.
On Friday, Borrell said the EU was already providing military training, equipment and other advice and support for armies in the Sahel. But he said that given the levels of violence and casualties suffered by African forces, it was clearly not sufficient.
“You will not attract investment and you will not build a country without security, and security requires strength, and strength requires arms,” Borrell said. “And I think the European Union is not a military union, it is not there to do the war. But if we train troops and we send these people to fight, better to send them well-equipped. No?”
In articulating the Borell Doctrine, the 72-year-old Spanish social democrat, appears to have won the strong backing of von der Leyen, a conservative former German defense minister.
“This is my deep conviction that it is of utmost importance to enable and empower that African Union and the Africa member states to defend their home country and their regions against terror,” von der Leyen said at the AU headquarters Thursday. “They know best where the terror comes from,” she added.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen listens to African Union Commission Chairman Moussa Faki Mahamat | Michael Tewelde/AFP via Getty Images
The EU’s proposal for a new off-budget Peace Facility would potentially allow Brussels to begin supplying lethal weapons, expanding on the African Peace Facility, which has quietly funneled billions in development aid since 2004.
In a blog post on Friday, Borrell said that, and other EU programs, had mobilized more than €3.5 billion for peacekeeping operations and other initiatives.
Earlier this week, Jutta Urpilainen, the EU commissioner for international partnerships, visited Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, where she participated in a ceremony delivering seven armored vehicles to the Mauritanian battalion of the G5 Sahel Joint Force. In all, the EU has provided 46 armored vehicles and a total of €253.6 million in financing for the joint force.
“We are strengthening our engagement, not only on security — also on development, humanitarian, political,” Borrell wrote in his blog post Friday. “And we are ready to go even further in the future.”
In Brussels on Friday, Commission officials sought to tamp down speculation that the EU would be supplying weapons anytime soon.
But how much farther will depend on tough budget negotiations in Brussels in the weeks and months ahead.
The European Commission initially proposed a new Peace Facility totaling €11 billion. But while the program technically remains “off-budget,” it is caught up in the negotiations of the EU’s next long-term financial plan, the 2021-27 Multiannual Financial Framework. A proposal by Finland when it held the presidency of the Council of the EU cut the Peace Facility to €4.5 billion, while a more recent plan from Council President Charles Michel raised it to €8 billion, his spokesman said.
There is also a debate over who eventually would control the money, with EU member countries reluctant to cede full authority to Borrell’s European External Action Service.
In Brussels on Friday, Commission officials sought to tamp down speculation that the EU would be supplying weapons anytime soon. Asked at the Commission’s daily news conference when Borrell intended for the EU to send weapons, a spokeswoman, Virginie Battu-Henriksson, said: “That’s a bit premature. He made reference to the European Peace Facility. Once funded, we will be able to discuss what kind of equipment will be provided.”
Still, Borrell was firm in his message that African allies need more help.
“Now we are training people, but the numbers of casualties they have, shows clearly that they are not well-equipped to fight,” he said in Addis Ababa. “When you see that in the last year, the Sahelian armies lost 1,500 soldiers in combat, it means that they require more training but also more equipment.”
Lili Bayer and Laurenz Gehrke contributed reporting.