Troubled Paradise: The Mixed Success of the African Union’s Intervention in the Comoros

Located at the northern end of the Mozambique Channel off the east coast of the Africa, the Comoros Islands – Ngazidja (Grande Comore), Mwali (Mohéli), Nzwani (Anjouan), and Mahoré (Mayotte), as well as the minor islets – enjoy a mild, tropical climate. But unlike Africa's two other archipelagic states – São Tomé and Príncipe and Cape Verde, both of whose democratic politics and development progress have been chronicled in this column – the Eden-like appearance of the Comoros belies the tumultuous reality of its 711,000 people and their rent social and political fabric, one which an African Union (AU) intervention last week managed to patch over, if only for a moment.

Strategically situated at the crossroads of Indian Ocean – the Union of the Comoros is the only country to belong simultaneously to the African Union, the Arab League, the Indian Ocean Commission, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference – the islands were first visited by Phoenician sailors some centuries before the birth of Christ. The ensuing centuries brought successive waves of Polynesian, Melanesian, Asian, African, Arab, and Persian settlers. Politically, the archipelago was fragmented in multiple statelets, with as many as a dozen sultanates presided over by descendants of the Shirazi Arabs who had brought Islam to the islands at about the same time Europeans began arriving in nearby waters. In 1841, France proclaimed a protectorate the Mawuti Maore sultanate on Mahoré (the corruption of the name of the territory gave rise to the French name for the entire island, “Mayotte”), beginning a process which led to the 1912 annexation of the entire chain as a dependent territory under the governor-general on Madagascar. During World War II, the British invaded to overthrow the colonial administration loyal to Vichy France, handing the islands over to General Charles de Gaulle's Free French Forces, who administered them separately from Madagascar. After the war, the islands became an overseas French territory with representation in the French National Assembly.

In 1973, France reached an agreement with the islanders to grant them independence by 1978. An independence referendum in December 1974 passed overwhelming except on Mayotte, where 63.8 percent of the population voted to stay French. When, on July 6, 1975, the islands parliament voted for a unilateral declaration of independence, the deputies from Mayotte abstained. As a result, notwithstanding the new country's claim to the island, Mayotte has remained French (a decision ratified by 99.4 percent of its population in a February 1976 plebiscite) and prospered, both as strategic base for the French military and as a favored tropical tourist destination, with its GDP nine times that in the independent islands.

Things could not have been more different in the Islamic Federal Republic of the Comoros (as the independent islands were officially known until recently). The islands have experienced some twenty coups or attempted coups, including no fewer than four led by the legendary French mercenary, Colonel Bob Denard (born Gilbert Bourgeaud), who overthrew the first Comorian president Ahmed Abdallah just one month after independence only to restore him several years later. Tired of the political domination of the largest island, Ngazidja, the two other islands, Mwali (Mohéli) and Nzwani (Anjouan), attempted to secede in 1997 and begged France to take them back, only to be rebuffed by the former colonial power and eventually subjugated by troops from the central government.

The weakened government, however, soon fell to a coup staged by its erstwhile defender, the military chief of staff, Colonel Azali Assoumani, who took control in April 1999. Under pressure from the then Organization of African Unity and the Francophone Union, a national reconciliation agreement, the so-called “Fomboni II Accord” (named for the capital of Mohéli), was reached in 2001 which wrote a new constitution for the “Union of the Comoros” adopted by voters in December of that year. The new charter created a truly federal arrangement with the three major islands being largely autonomous, each governed by its own president (with a five-year term), with a union presidency to be rotated every four years between the islands. Elections in April 2002 returned Colonel Azali as the head of state and an erstwhile putschist, Major (later Colonel) Mohamed Said Bacar, as president of Anjouan. A subsequent national accord, reached in the capital of Moroni in December 2003 under South African mediation, further spelled out the implementation of the devolution of the central government's powers.

The May 2006 elections, which rotated the union presidency to Anjouan, were won by Ahmed Abdallah Mohamed Sambi, a Sunni Muslim cleric known as “Ayatollah” because he did part of his theological training in Iran, who received 58 percent of the vote. The following year, however, Anjouan's Mohamed Said Bacar, refused to stand down at the end of his five-year term of office and, instead, held a June 2007 poll which he won handily with some three-quarters of the votes for an unconstitutional second term. Both the central government and the AU proclaimed the move illegal and reached an agreement with France in last November to establish an embargo on goods and people bound for Anjouan and suspending all air and sea links to the island until Colonel Bacar accepted new elections.

As the conflict prolonged, union authorities began calling for support for a military solution. After months of renewing its exhortations and sanctions, a February 20 meeting of the AU Peace and Security Council reiterated its “commitment to the unity, territorial integrity of the Comoros” and “mandated that the African Union Electoral Security and Assistance Mission to the Comoros deploy in Anjouan in order to facilitate the restoration of the authority of the Union in Anjouan.” Libya, Senegal, Sudan, and Tanzania volunteered troops for the mission and France offered to transport the Senegalese and Tanzanian contingents. Tanzania ultimately contributed 750 soldiers to the effort, with the other three African countries sending more modest numbers to join the 1,000-strong army of the Comoros in facing off the estimated 300 members of Anjouan's gendarmerie.

Notwithstanding a last-minute effort by South African President Thabo Mbeki forestall military action to allow time for further negotiations, the intervention force landed on Anjouan at dawn on March 25, taking the airport at Ouani in a seaborne assault before going on to seize Mutsumadu, capital of the island of 275,000. According to official sources, at least eleven civilians were wounded in the ensuing clashes. Colonel Bacar, reportedly dressed as a woman, fled the island and sought sanctuary on Mayotte, 60 kilometers away. French officials, rebuffing demands to hand over the rebel, flew him to the French island of Réunion while they considered his request for asylum.

The intervention on Anjouan was undoubtedly an operational success, on which the AU was quick to trumpet. Last Friday, El Ghassim Wane, head of the AU's Conflict Management Center, declared it “extremely successful” and noted that “everything seems to be under control” and “the population of the island is relieved by the outcome.” Coming in the wake of the AU's struggles in Somalia, where, as I noted last week, less than one-fourth of the promised African peacekeepers have ever shown up, and Sudan, where, as I reported in December, the AU-United Nations hybrid force in Darfur (UNAMID) is woefully lacking in resources, the easy victory in the Comoros rescues the regional organization's standing from total ignominy. However, it also raises some significant questions.

First, the very fact that the only operational success the AU's leaders can point to is overrunning a tiny island whose economy is dependant upon the production of aromatic ylang-ylang oil (an ingredient oriental floral-themed perfumes and cosmetics) underscores the weakness of the organization as such.

Second, having intervened, will the AU have the wherewithal to sustain even a limited role on Anjouan? Otherwise, given the history of the Comoros – Anjouan alone has attempted secession twice in the last decade – the AU can expect to be called back sooner rather than later. In a paper published last month, Chrysantus Ayangafac, an Addis Ababa-based senior researcher with the Institute of Security Studies Direct Conflict Prevention Program, warned that “military intervention is not a viable option” for the AU in the Comorian situation, arguing: “Military intervention will have high diplomatic, human and financial cost implications for the AU, which it can ill afford… Besides, any sustained military intervention in the country will have to be followed by a robust reconstruction effort, which neither the AU nor the union government can afford.”

Third, one cannot help but notice that spearheading the intervention was Tanzania, which has challenges of its own on its own semi-autonomous island of Zanzibar (see my report in September 2006 on the rise of Islamism there), backed up by Sudan which, as I reported here earlier this year, is trying to prevent the self-determination of South Sudan and other regions under its sway. Especially given the lack of a common historical unity among the islands and islets of archipelago, it does not require much to wonder, as I did in a column last year with respect to the former Somalia, if the intervention was another example of African rulers' canonization of the status quo while refusing to address the fundamental question of the legitimacy of the their system of territorial states itself, “legitimacy being understood not as a normative judgment about juridical right or moral virtue but in the social and political sense of whether or not the structures of a given polity have evolved endogenously within a society and its institutions can claim some historical continuity.”

Finally, while it has to be acknowledged that Ahmed Abdallah Mohamed Sambi's 2006 election to the union presidency was entirely constitutional and democratic procedurally, his rule has raised concerns even among his supporters about the direction he is taking the Comoros. While 95 percent of the islanders are Sunni Muslim, the first year in the presidency of the Iranian-trained Sambi saw the observance for the first time ever in the Comoros, of the Shi'a festival of Ashura, which marks the death of the Prophet Muhammad's grandson Husayn ibn Ali at the Battle of Karbala. Even government-aligned Al-Watwan newspaper reported the protests which the self-flagellating “celebration” incited from the Sunni ulema in the capital. One opposition leader, Said Kamal of the Chuma (“Fraternity and Unity”) Party, denounced what he called the “increasing Iranization” of the Comoros, citing the presence of Iranians, including some who are reportedly training the Comorian military and security services. Another opposition political party, the Convention for the Renewal of the Comoros (CRC), denounced the president's signing of a deal which gave Iran fishing rights in Comorian territorial waters. While the CRC was careful not to level any concrete charges, its spokesman noted that the ties with Tehran would “give Comoros the condemnable image of a terrorist hideout.” Certainly Sambi could have been more subtle than he was when he handed over the Moroni premises and management of a small business center created by the European Union to the Imam Khomeini Relief Foundation last May. Although none of this is yet evidence of increased threat, it certainly is less than reassuring and, as Amir Taheri pointed out in an op-ed in this past weekend's edition of the Wall Street Journal: “The claim that al Qaeda and the Khomeinists, not to mention other terrorist groups operating in the name of Islam, would not work together simply because they have theological differences is both naive and dangerous.”

Given all this, it may be a little premature to celebrate what is likely to be only a temporary respite in the ongoing state failure and downward spiral of the Comoros.

J. Peter Pham is Director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C., as well as Vice President of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA). In addition to the study of terrorism and political violence, his research interests lie at the intersection of international relations, international law, political theory, and ethics, with particular concentrations on the implications for United States foreign policy and African states as well as religion and global politics.

Dr. Pham is the author of over two hundred essays and reviews on a wide variety of subjects in scholarly and opinion journals on both sides of the Atlantic and the author, editor, or translator of over a dozen books. Among his recent publications are Liberia: Portrait of a Failed State (Reed Press, 2004), which has been critically acclaimed by Foreign Affairs, Worldview, Wilson Quarterly, American Foreign Policy Interests, and other scholarly publications, and Child Soldiers, Adult Interests: The Global Dimensions of the Sierra Leonean Tragedy (Nova Science Publishers, 2005).

In addition to serving on the boards of several international and national think tanks and journals, Dr. Pham has testified before the U.S. Congress and conducted briefings or consulted for both Congressional and Executive agencies. He is also a frequent contributor to National Review Online's military blog, The Tank.