Mon séjour en Afrique du Sud (Cape Town)

GIVEN the urgency of the need to dispatch peacekeepers to Liberia earlier this week to end the horrendous fighting, this is not assistance that SA as a regional power could easily have turned down.

Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota's reason for SA declining to send peacekeepers to Liberia was that SA was overstretched in this area.

With about 2700 troops currently assigned to peacekeeping and about 500 more to be deployed soon, SA's assertion that it has limited capacity for peace support on the grounds of manpower alone, is convincing.

Mark Malan, head of the Peace Missions programme at the Institute for Security Studies, says the past year has seen government move from talk and study into a major regional and United Nations (UN) contributor of troops for peace support.

"It is the beginning of a new and exciting phase in southern Africa," says Malan.

"It is still very early days to say that we are headed for problems or that it is a great success.

"But the numbers tell us we can't get much more involved at this stage."

Apart from manpower issues, there are two other constraints: equipment and money. In the event of a military emergency the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) would be brought under further pressure because of its external deployments.

SA's peacekeeping involvement is not a source of domestic political controversy at the moment. This could change, however, if the country's troops suffered serious casualties abroad.

Since the military's first major involvement in peacekeeping in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2000 and Burundi in 2001, there have been no combat casualties. Should this change and South African troops become more deeply involved, resulting in deaths and mounting costs to the taxpayer, the public could change its mind.

The SANDF is withdrawing from its role in internal security despite the high crime rate, and withdrawing peacekeeping forces will not automatically see troops manning road blocks in SA.

As a rule of thumb, for every soldier in the field on peacekeeping duty, the SANDF requires there to be three soldiers at home one in reserve, one preparing for a mission and one resting after having returned.

There is a further constraint soldiers who are medically unfit, some of them HIV positive, may not be used externally.

While Ghanaian and other African troops on UN duty sometimes do long tours of duty in the field, SA is, as a matter of policy, sticking to a six-month rotation period, one that is encouraged by the UN.

The total strength of the fulltime SANDF is about 60000, but the number of battle-ready soldiers who can be used on these sorts of missions is far fewer.

The army has about 10 mission-trained task forces, with about 1200 soldiers who could possibly be used for peacekeeping operations.

The issue of finance is emerging as another key constraint. SA is already out of pocket because of its spending on peacekeeping activities in Congo and Burundi.

Peacekeeping is far from cheap and usually involves heavy airlifts and capital outlays for the setting up of new infrastructure for a military deployment.

The deployment in Burundi is at the behest of the African Union (AU), a body which faces continual cash shortages.

Another problem for the SANDF is that the SA budgetary process is insufficiently flexible to deal with planning for peacekeeping operations.

Under government accounting rules, national departments are prohibited from providing for contingencies in their allocations. Supplemental appropriations must be passed after the fact, which is not conducive to good financial planning.

This year, the additional cost for the mission in Burundi will be more than R500000 about 2,2% of this year's defence and intelligence budget allocation.

In Kinshasa, for example, SANDF duties included the handling of air cargo. Because SA does not have sufficient airlift capacity, it had to pay for and insure Russian Antonov cargo planes to lift troops and equipment.

The inability of the AU to support the mission in Burundi financially has meant that Mozambique and Ethiopia, who had planned to deploy two companies along with SA forces, have not done so yet.

That puts additional pressure on SA and means that in reality the mission becomes more of a South African one rather than an African one, which gives the impression that SA is a regional power acting on its own.

SA troops in Burundi have come under mortar attack and last month SA troops shot and killed four Hutu rebels in Burundi who were attacking other rebels under the protection of the peacekeepers.

If it does get too hot for SA troops in Congo or Burundi, it is very likely that they will be pulled out. But the greater danger is one of "mission creep" into other areas, something that will have to be resisted.

In Burundi there is a risk that government forces may want to draw SA troops onto their side.

Much has run smoothly in SA's peacekeeping duties so far, partially due to diplomats ensuring that these ventures are in support of political agreements.

But numerous international examples show that things can quickly change for the worse.