FRANCE/DR CONGO: Ireland yesterday abandoned plans to send peacekeepers to the Congo after France declined an offer of Irish Rangers for the French-led MONUC force which was deployed in Bunia at the weekend, writes Lara Marlowe from Paris.
The Defence Minister, Mr Smith, recently expressed Ireland's willingness to send Rangers to the Congo, where, by some estimates, up to 50,000 people have died in ethnic violence between Hema and Lendu tribes.
Irish Rangers were sent by the UN to East Timor and are considered the most adaptable and experienced members of the forces.
But at a Force Generation Conference at the French defence ministry in Paris yesterday, France said it preferred to fill a requirement for between 40 and 50 special forces with its own men.
"As of now there is no identifiable role for Ireland at this time," said Mr John Nolan, the spokesman for Mr Smith.
Mr Nolan said Ireland did not interpret the French decision as a put-down or insult. But Commandant Martin McDermot, the officer from the Irish delegation to the EU who attended the conference yesterday, will not attend the second day today.
Sweden and South Africa are also understood to have offered special forces and to have withdrawn from the "Force Generation" process. Ireland was prepared to send administrative officers, but the French had no need for them either.
Had France accepted Ireland's offer, the Chief of Staff would have dispatched a reconnaissance team to Bunia, and the decision would have required endorsement by the Government and the Dáil. The third requirement, for a UN mandate, was fulfilled when the Security Council voted resolution 1484 at the end of May.
Ireland may be fortunate not to have been included in the force, which is plunging into a conflict considered as intractable as the Hutu genocide against hundreds of thousands of Tutsis in 1994. The warring militias in the Congo are often high on drugs, exploit child soldiers and engage in cannibalism.
Mr Smith may have been motivated in part by nostalgia. Irish UN peacekeepers fought heroically with ONUC in 1961, suffering heavy losses at Niemba.
Moreover, there are widespread misgivings about the limited mandate of the force. With only 1,400 men, 900 of them French, a perimeter limited to Bunia airport, and an expressed French intention to pull out in September, critics say the MONUC will merely displace massacres by a few kilometres, or a few months.
The French defence ministry refused to comment on foreign contributions to the force. Britain is likely to contribute a few engineers, despite reluctance on the part of the military. Two high-ranking officers from planning headquarters in London are attending the Paris conference, and a decision could be announced in the House of Commons this week, an official British source said.
"This is very clearly an operation that France could do alone, like the Americans in Iraq," said Jean-Dominique Merchet, the defence correspondent for Libération.
"The French military would prefer to work with their own men, but politically, the more countries involved the better."
The possible inclusion of Brazil and South Africa could help dispel the impression that "white Europe" is recolonising the Congo, he added.
The deployment in the Congo marks the first EU peacekeeping operation outside Europe. Some have seen the EU's involvement as a sort of consolation prize to Mr Javier Solana, the representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, who has been crowded out of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations by Washington. "It's very much a French operation with token political and military participation by a few others," an Irish source said.