African Union Best Placed To Deal With Challenges Facing Continent - Commissioner

(@ChaudhryMAli88)

African Union Best Placed to Deal With Challenges Facing Continent - Commissioner

The African Union is best placed to deal with the challenges facing Africa, despite South Africa's good intentions to focus on peacekeeping operations across the continent during its time as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, the union's commissioner for peace and security, Ambassador Smail Chergui, told Sputnik.

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 07th December, 2018) The African Union is best placed to deal with the challenges facing Africa, despite South Africa's good intentions to focus on peacekeeping operations across the continent during its time as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, the union's commissioner for peace and security, Ambassador Smail Chergui, told Sputnik.

"These are new threats, these are complex new actors on the ground and as you know the UN does not have the doctrinal basis, for example, to go and combat terrorism. Meanwhile, the African Union is currently giving a better solution to all these problems because, as we speak now, we have a very robust force that is doing a very good job in Somalia, combating Al Shabab [militant group]," Chergui stressed.

Chergui described South Africa's plans to make peacekeeping operations a priority during its mandate as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council next year as "pertinent" and stressed the importance of South Africa's close coordination with the African Union through the Platform of the three African Members of the UN Security Council, the A3 Platform.

However, he also said that the majority of UN deployments in Africa were facing challenges "for which the UN was not totally ready."

He also pointed at the African Union's activities within the United Nations Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO).

"We have a creative approach in the DRC where Member States initiated an African brigade within MONUSCO, which continues to do a good job in almost eliminating the M23 [March 23 Movement rebels], and now as we speak they are also dealing with [Allied Democratic Forces] ADF. This is an experience that can also be replicated in North Mali in our view," he said.

The African Union, headquartered in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, is a continental union comprised of 55 member states, which aims to achieve regional integration and increase solidarity among all African countries.