a search for a diplomatic solution;


the imposition of sanctions short of the use of armed force; and


as a last resort, the use of armed force to counter and reverse such aggression.

While originally narrowly conceived as a non-aggression and mutual defence pact, L'ANAD is now moving beyond narrower conceptions of subregional security to include areas such as common policy formulation and co-operation on broader issues of human security, such as economic development, population migration, banditry, pollution, etc. It has a large permanent secretariat in Abidjan, and functions at the levels of a Conference of Heads of State and Government; a Council of Ministers; and a General Secretariat.

The Conference of Heads of State and Government is the supreme authority of L'ANAD. It meets every two years, and decision-making is based on the principle of unanimity. It is responsible for appointing the Secretary-General and Comptroller of the Budget, as well as for approving the biennial budget of the General Secretariat.

The Council of Ministers comprises ministers of Defence, as well as the chiefs of Defence Staff of member states. It meets once every two years in advance of the Summit of Heads of State and Government, and is directly responsible for drafting the defence concerns to be tabled for discussion and decision at the summit. The Council of Ministers may convene in extraordinary session in the event of a threat or an act of aggression.

The General Secretariat is the permanent organ of L'ANAD, and is responsible for the daily administration of the organisation, management of its budget, and the implementation of decisions taken by the Heads of State and Government. It is directed by a Secretary-General of the rank of a General Officer, who is appointed for a three-year term which may be renewed on the proposal of the Council of Ministers. The Secretary-General is assisted by 26 professional staff, a number which is to be increased to 45.

In line with the Cairo Declaration of 1993 and pronouncements made at subsequent summits of the OAU Heads of State and Government, the L'ANAD secretariat feels that the emphasis in the area of conflict prevention, management and resolution should be placed at the level of subregional organisations. It considers this to be both a geographic and a political reality. The chiefs of Defence Staff of the L'ANAD member states have therefore been mandated to investigate the modalities for establishing a subregional peacekeeping force and to make recommendations on collective measures for combating problems related to banditry, smuggling, illegal immigration, etc.

Although L'ANAD is considered by its signatories to be the principal subregional organisation for preventing and dealing with conflict in West Africa, this role has been overshadowed by the presence of an Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) force in Liberia since 1990 and in Sierra Leone since 1997. There are some obvious reasons for this, not least because of francophone exclusivity of L'ANAD and the dominant role played by especially Nigeria, as well as Ghana in orchestrating and sustaining the ECOWAS intervention. Moreover, the dominant role which France has continued to play in guaranteeing the security of the L'ANAD signatories placed them in a unique situation when designing this security structure.

While L'ANAD appears to be moving towards a broader approach to security concerns, its existing structure and initial narrow conceptualisation in the realm of defence is likely to mitigate against significant advances in the area of politics and security in the near future.

The subregional arrangement which is structurally perhaps the closest to SADC is the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN), which was established on 8 August 1967 in Thailand, with the signing of the Bangkok Declaration by the five original member countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. Brunei Darussalam joined the Association on 8 January 1984, and Vietnam became the seventh member on 28 July 1995. Laos and Myanmar were admitted into ASEAN on 23 July 1997.

Like the SADC Treaty, the Bangkok Declaration united the ASEAN member countries in a joint effort to promote economic co-operation and the welfare of the people in the region. It set out guidelines for ASEAN's activities and defined three main objectives:

to promote the economic, social and cultural development of the region through co-operative programmes;



to safeguard the political and economic stability of the region against big power rivalry; and



to serve as a forum for the resolution of intraregional differences.

ASEAN has also followed a sectoral approach to the challenge of economic development, but summits have hitherto been held at erratic intervals, and progress in institutionalising regional development has been much slower than within SADC.22 Although political and security co-operation began early in ASEAN's formative years,23 the degree of formalisation and institutionalisation is still far behind that which has already evolved in the SADC region. It was only in 1994 that the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) was established to serve as a multilateral consultative forum aimed at promoting preventive diplomacy and confidence-building among the states in the Asia-Pacific region. The Forum consists of 21 foreign ministers of key countries of the Asia Pacific region and has different categories of membership:

the nine ASEAN Member Countries;


Cambodia as an Observer;


ten Dialogue Partners; and


Papua New Guinea as a Special Observer.

The ARF has agreed on a three-stage approach to co-operation, namely:

the promotion of confidence-building;


the development of preventive diplomacy; and


the elaboration of approaches to conflict resolution.

Similar to the ISDSC, the Meeting of Senior Officials for the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF-SOM) has been institutionalised to provide support and follow-up actions on the activities of the ARF. Intersessional activities are conducted through the Intersessional Support Group on Confidence-Building, the Intersessional Meeting on Disaster Relief, the Intersessional Meeting on Search and Rescue Co-operation, and the Intersessional Meeting on Peacekeeping Operations.

However, the ARF has yet to set a formal agenda, and is still in the first stage of co-operation. The informality of its meetings, for example, is maintained in order to enhance confidence among the very diverse participating countries. SADC, on the other hand, has indicated an intention to move rapidly into the areas of preventive diplomacy and conflict resolution. This means that pointers may rather be found in more mature security arrangements, such as those that have evolved in Europe.

Europe has a highly complex regional security architecture, which includes:

the 185-member United Nations;



the 55-member Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE);



the 16-member North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) plus 15 NATO Partnership for Peace (PfP) nations; and



the 28-member West European Union (WEU).

This cannot be seen in isolation from the dynamics of economic integration under the European Union (EU) and its various institutions. However, the OSCE is now taking a leading role in fostering security through co-operation in Europe, and it would be folly to ignore the positive lessons from this experience.24 From a Southern African perspective, the two most relevant institutions in this complicated security matrix are probably the OSCE and the WEU, as they are respectively somewhat analogous to the OAU and SADC (Organ) in terms of Chapter VIII of the UN Charter.

As is the case with SADC, the OSCE has its origins in an earlier co-operative framework which dates back to the Cold War era. But unlike SADC, it had to deal with regional security issues from the outset. Its predecessor was created in the early 1970s as the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) a multilateral forum for dialogue and negotiation between East and West. It was thus not born of the same type of regional solidarity that characterised the FLS and, indeed SADCC in their united battle against apartheid. Nevertheless, the Helsinki Final Act of the CSCE, signed in 1975, managed to cross the East-West ideological divide and established a number of basic principles governing the behaviour of countries towards their citizens and each other.

Until 1990, the CSCE functioned as a series of meetings and conferences setting norms and commitments and periodically reviewing their implementation. The Paris Summit of 1990 set the CSCE on a new course. In the Charter of Paris for a New Europe, the CSCE was called upon to contribute to the management of the historic changes in Europe and to respond to the new challenges of the post-Cold War period.

A series of regular meetings between 1990 and 1994 established new mechanisms, offices and principles for addressing these challenges, and at the 1994 Budapest Summit, the CSCE was reconstituted as an organisation, rather than a conference. The name change gave the OSCE a new impetus as a regional arrangement under Chapter VIII of the UN Charter and as a primary regional instrument for early warning, conflict prevention and crisis management. The legal framework of the OSCE is dynamic, in that it is made up of a whole range of agreements which supplement the Helsinki Final Act and the Charter of Paris.25

The OSCE takes a comprehensive view of security and pursues a co-operative approach to a wide range of security-related issues, including arms control, preventive diplomacy, confidence and security-building measures, human rights, election monitoring and economic security. As is the case with the OAU and SADC, all states participating in OSCE activities have equal status, and decisions are made on the basis of consensus.

Although delegations of the OSCE states meet almost daily in Vienna, the regular body for political consultation and decision-making is the Permanent Council which meets once a week. Vienna is also the site of meetings of the Forum for Security Co-operation (which deals with arms control and confidence and security-building measures), the Joint Consultative Group (responsible for promoting implementation of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe) and the Open Skies Consultative Commission.

In addition to these bodies, the political directors of participating states meet three times a year in Prague as the Senior Council. OSCE foreign ministers also hold an annual Ministerial Council Meeting and an OSCE Summit of all Heads of State or Government is convened every two years. The Secretariat, which provides operational support to the organisation, is based in Vienna, while a small office is also maintained in Prague.

The Warsaw-based Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), is a key component of the OSCE, and it plays an active role in monitoring elections, assisting in the drafting of constitutions and laws, and in promoting the development of civil societies. Of particular importance in the field of early warning and conflict prevention, is the High Commissioner on National Minorities. The High Commissioner assesses, and attempts to defuse at the earliest possible stage, situations involving national minority issues by encouraging the parties to pursue non-confrontational policies.

As with the OAU Central Organ (and as stipulated for the SADC Organ), the chair of OSCE rotates annually, and consists of a troika of the current chairperson, the previous chairperson, and the succeeding chairperson. Significantly, the chairperson is a foreign minister, rather than a head of state or government.

Like the OAU in Africa, the OSCE has deployed peace missions of limited size in several European countries, including Croatia, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Moldova, Tadjikistan, and Ukraine. The organisation is playing an important role in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where, in terms of the Dayton Peace Agreement, it supervises the election process, monitors human rights and assists with negotiations on confidence-building measures and arms control.

The OSCE's Parliamentary Assembly meets once a year to discuss issues pertinent to OSCE affairs and consider declarations, recommendations and proposals to enhance security and co-operation in the OSCE area.26 The Assembly's Secretariat is located in Copenhagen.

In its structure, functions and scope, the OSCE is perhaps more akin to the OAU than to SADC. The fact that it has 55 members (compared to the 53 of OAU), and the fact that both the OSCE and OAU have deployed limited missions of observation, indicates that both organisations are currently on a much higher level in terms of conflict prevention, management and resolution than the fourteen-member SADC subregional organisation. However, the European example may also provide hints for appropriate linkages between regional organisations and subordinate security arrangements. It is in this realm that the WEU should be of particular interest to the SADC countries.

Although the WEU was created a year ahead of NATO by the Brussels Treaty of 1948 (by Britain, France and the Benelux countries), its role was largely subsumed by NATO and it remained dormant throughout the Cold War. By the end of the 1980s, Europe (like Africa) realised that it would have to bear a greater responsibility for its own security in the new strategic environment, and the WEU was resuscitated (with a good deal of encouragement from France and Germany).

In 1991, the Maastricht Treaty gave the WEU the responsibility for European defence and security policy formulation. The 1992 Petersburg Declaration assigned, among others, priority for crisis management and peacekeeping to the WEU, rather than NATO Article V-type defence,27 and stated that WEU may support UN or OSCE initiatives on a case-by-case basis. At the 1996 Berlin meeting of NATO foreign ministers, it was decided to establish a European Security and Defence Identity (ESDI). France and the US diverged on this issue, with the French wanting a much stronger independent European defence capacity and the Americans wanting to maintain the trans-Atlantic linkage. The somewhat complex compromise which was reached, was that the ESDI should develop within the NATO framework especially for crisis management operations. A significant step was taken at the June 1997 (fifteen-state) Inter-Governmental Conference of the EU, which dealt with the security chapter of the EU treaty. It was decided that the EU would have a politically superior role to the WEU.

The WEU now consists of 28 nations, divided into the following membership categories:

full members ten nations which have signed the Brussels Treaty and which are also NATO and EU members;



associate members three nations which belong to NATO, but not to the EU;



EU observers five nations which belong to the EU, but not to NATO; and



associate partners ten countries of Central and Eastern Europe which participate in the NATO Partnership for Peace (PfP), which are candidates for NATO membership, and which have applied for EU membership.

The WEU has two primary tasks:

to act as a forum for security discussions and the harmonisation of security policy among all 28 states (in this respect it mirrors the NATO PfP, but the latter is more practically oriented); and



to prepare the capacity and structures for conflict management operations (with the focus on future operations where it may be more appropriate to use an all-European capacity than NATO or UN).

The decision to use the WEU in conflict management operations may be taken on the strength of a UN or OSCE request, or upon the request of EU foreign ministers after consultation with the US and Canada.

In terms of operational capabilities, the WEU has no standing forces or permanent command structure. However, it has developed procedures for establishing and conducting operations. The planning cell also has a system of standby arrangements involving national forces of WEU members, but the final decision on deployment rests with the respective governments (as with the UN Standby Arrangements system). The WEU is also planning to use multinational European forces, such as the Euro Corps, and can potentially also draw upon NATO assets with the approval of the NATO Command Council. At this stage, however, the WEU does not have the capacity to engage in politically or militarily complex operations without US participation or drawing heavily on NATO.

In the Southern African context, it would also be premature to strive towards an autonomous regional capacity for executing complex military operations. However, the important lessons from the WEU arrangement lie beyond the narrow realm of military operations. For example, it is pertinent to note that the WEU is an organisation which is dedicated entirely to security and conflict management issues. Moreover, it provides for incremental expansion, without overextension, through the acceptance of different membership categories.