The African Union wants the United Nations Security Council to authorise the deployment of the continental body’s peacekeepers in Burundi in light of continued violation of human-rights and the political instability that has rocked the country for nine months.

AU Chair Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said the situation in Burundi needs unity of purpose and action by the international community. She appealed to AU member states to strive to promote and defend African positions as articulated by the Peace and Security Council to send 5,000 troops to Burundi.

“The members of the Security Council expressed deep concern about the continuing escalation of violence,” said Dr Dlamini-Zuma.

“There is an urgent need to resume the intra-Burundi dialogue and to authorise the deployment of the African Prevention and Protection Mission in Burundi (Maprobu).”

A 20 member team of the UNSC is to visit Burundi to urge the government to resume the talks mediated by Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, and assess the security situation to determine whether Maprobu should be deployed.

The Burundi parliament had earlier unanimously rejected the deployment of peacekeepers, warning that doing so would violate the country’s sovereignty.

The debate in parliament, which focused on Maprobu and claims of genocide in the country, saw all the MPs denounce what they called propaganda by some “self-proclaimed Burundian leaders” for selfish interests.

The African Union Peace and Security Council passed a resolution to send 5,000 peacekeepers to Burundi for an initial renewable mandate of six months to protect civilians.

That followed a report by the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights that recorded cases of arbitrary and extrajudicial killings, targeted assassinations as well as arrests, detention and torture in Burundi.

According to the United Nations Human Rights Office, more than 300 people have been killed and thousands have fled the country after violence erupted last April, when President Pierre Nkurunziza announced his intention to run for a third term in office.

Burundi is currently experiencing relatively quiet nights but assassinations have continued as three government officials were shot dead by an unknown armed group in Bwiza, a Bujumbura suburb, early in the week.

The Burundi National Dialogue Commission (CNDI), which was formed by President Nkurunziza, began talks in the northern town of Kirundo with the government pledging inclusivity.

“We are set for the talks and we have said time and again that our government is ready to talk to all peaceful stakeholders as it was stated in the resolution of the Security Council,” said Foreign Affairs Minister Alain Nyamitwe.

“We have invited the Ugandan facilitator to come to Burundi and agree with all the stakeholders in Burundi on the way forward.”

The United Nations Security Council travels to Burundi on Thursday in a bid to quell political violence in the tiny African state amid fears it may slide back into ethnic conflict.

Some council members hope to persuade President Pierre Nkurunziza to accept a 5,000-strong African Union peacekeeping force to end violence that has rattled a region where memories of the 1994 genocide in neighbouring Rwanda are still raw.

“There needs to be some kind of international force with a protection of civilians mandate present on the ground in Burundi,” said United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, who is leading the trip with France and Angola.

But diplomats say its members are divided on how to deal with Burundi and how much pressure to bring to bear.

Angola’s UN Ambassador Ismael Gaspar Martins said it was the state’s responsibility to protect citizens and “we’re not necessarily going to say (AU) troops have to be there.”

But he said there needed to be a stronger presence of AU observers on the ground to “convey to the international community what is objectively the situation in Burundi.”

Violence erupted when Nkurunziza announced his bid for a third term, which he secured in a vote in July boycotted by most opponents. The opposition says the move was illegal. Loyalists cite a court ruling that found he could run.

UN estimates put the death toll at 439 people but says it could be higher. More than 240,000 people have fled abroad.

French U.N. Ambassador Francois Delattre said a top priority was to “to break the cycle of violence and to prevent the genie of ethnic violence from getting out of the bottle.”

Burundi’s civil war that ended in 2005 had pitted the army, at the time led by minority ethnic Tutsis, against rebel groups of the majority Hutus, including one led by Nkurunziza.

“It’s a very sensitive region … everybody’s suspicious,” said Russia’s Deputy UN Ambassador Petr Iliichev.

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights urged the council to press Burundi to accept peacekeepers and cited “indications of ‘ethnicization’ of the crisis”.

“The longer the delay, more forces and a more robust mandate will be needed,” it said in an informal note seen by Reuters.

The African Union announced plans for a 5,000-strong force in December, but Nkurunziza has rejected the plan.

Burundi’s government dismisses charges of ethnic violence, and says it adheres to ethnic quotas in government that were established by the peace deal that ended the 12-year civil war.

After Ouagadougou, wherever next? For the second time in two months, foreigners and locals have been slaughtered in a West African city hotel by a clutch of jihadi gunmen. On 20 November 2015, the target was the upscale Radisson Blu in Bamako, Mali. On Friday, it was the turn of the Splendid Hotel and the nearby Cappuccino cafe in the heart of Burkina Faso’s capital.

Both attacks have been claimed by Al-Mourabitoun, an Al-Qaeda-affiliated militant group founded by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, an Algerian commander, who first came to international notoriety after an assault and hostage seizure at the In Amenas gas processing plant in Algeria in January 2013. That left at least 40 victims dead.

But Algeria has a powerful security apparatus and military machine. Today, it is increasingly across the countries of the Sahel—the southern fringe of the Sahara—that the intimidating threat of jihadi terrorism is most acutely felt. These are among the world’s poorest nations, short of natural resources, investment and jobs, their traditional smallholder agriculture and pastoralism vulnerable to drought and under pressure from high rates of population growth and climate change. Moreover, this is a region whose traditionally tolerant if conservative interpretation of Islam is increasingly influenced by more fundamentalist preaching, particularly in urban areas.

Yet it would be wrong to view jihadi attacks across the Sahel as primarily the product of deep social and economic grievances, popular frustration at the inadequacies of health and education, anger over corruption among political elites or business dealings with foreigners. For this is a region that has also seen significant progress in development, economic growth, literacy and life expectancy. There is a long and mostly positive history of international engagement, with NGOs heavily involved in grassroots rural projects, numerous personal and community connections to Europe, and a Western presence that is mostly unostentatious and well-integrated locally.

In attacking a capital city hotel, cafe or restaurant—as also happened in Bamako in March 2015—the jihadi groups are assaulting not only foreigners but those locals who work and socialize with them: educated, liberal and internationally aware, a social community that typifies the increasingly close interaction between West Africa and the wider world. In that sense, today’s extremist ideology is not an indigenous outgrowth of either traditional or modern Sahelian life and it is certainly not a reflection of the predominant local popular attitudes to Europe or the US.

Complexities

However, it would be self-deluding to regard the persistent extremist threat across the Sahel as a purely alien phenomenon, imported from North Africa or spawned solely by the global upsurge in radical jihadism.

Certainly, it is true that today’s threat first developed from the aftermath of Algeria’s bloody civil war between the state and Islamist militants. As that conflict faded, some fighters moved down into the Sahara and over the border into northern Mali. There, weak security forces, growing drug traffic and a long history of sporadic rebellions by local Tuareg nomads created a comfortable environment for the emergence of a group that soon took the name Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), appending its loyalty to the global jihadi franchise. It soon began to generate a rich revenue stream from a share of the narcotics trade and by seizing Western hostages for ransom in both Mali and Niger.

AQIM was still mainly Algerian-led when it linked up in late 2011 with a local Malian politician and former rebel, Iyad Ag Ghaly, who had founded his own Islamist armed group, Ansar Dine. Briefly collaborating with secular Tuareg separatists, whom they soon elbowed aside, the militants gained control of the northern half of Mali in early 2012—a task facilitated by the collapse of morale in the army, whose disenchanted troops then seized power in a putsch in March 2012. The radicals’ military campaign was also aided by a huge influx of weapons and fighters from Libya, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Muammar Gaddafi regime.

The intervention of French and West African forces in Mali in early 2013 rapidly brought the jihadi territorial control of northern Mali to an end, and many militants were killed. But many others dispersed into the Sahara, where they gradually reorganized and began to stage attacks on the international forces and elements of the Malian state.

That violent extremism continues today. And it is not purely the work of foreigners. Groups such as AQIM and Al-Mourabitoun are a blend of outsiders and local recruits, while Ansar Dine and the Macina Liberation Front—which staged several attacks in central Mali in 2015—are largely indigenous. Local factors remain a crucial influence. The militant activity in the Sahel and Sahara is quite distinct from the long-running campaign of Boko Haram, which is rooted in northeast Nigeria.

Jihadi violence is not a new phenomenon across the Sahel, but the wider international environment has infused it with renewed momentum. Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is confined to pockets of northern Libya and has not so far penetrated across the Sahara. But the south of the country is a vast ungoverned space, where various militant factions train and resupply.

Moreover, the Bamako and Ouagadougou attacks appear in part to be a deliberate statement by Al-Mourabitoun, endorsed by AQIM—who are keen to show that despite the international spotlight on ISIS, they too remain capable of staging major assaults on Westerners and those that associate with them.

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