Editor note: The EU official made the remark at a conference organized by the European Security Round Table and under the auspices of the Presidency of the EU Council, with the theme “The path towards a comprehensive and effective EU Maritime Security Strategy”. The meeting took place in Brussels.
[Brussels-based Freelance journalist Justin Stares posted the following piece on his tumblr blog, The European Union, sideways, on May 15, 2014 – with minor editings]
Amid the chaos, death, destruction and kidnapping of young girls, there is at least one force on the African continent still capable of projecting its might across borders, according to the European Union: the Ethiopian army.
The Ethiopians “scare the hell out of everybody”, the EU’s special representative for the Horn of Africa said on May 14, because “they deliver”.
Having at least one group of men under arms capable of whipping the arse off all the ragtag, terrorist, murderous, money-grabbing extremists (the quotes are correct, all the rest is mine) that make most Africans’ lives totally miserable was “not that bad a thing”, Alexander Rondos told a gathering hosted by the German state of Lower Saxony. “No-one wants to mess with them,” he said.
On South Sudan – no doubt hell on earth and largely forgotten by the rest of the world – Mr Rondos said there was unlikely to be a solution until “three battalions of Ethiopians and Kenyans under a united Nations mandate” were sent in to knock heads together.
The EU is in fact funding “offensive actions, not just peacekeeping” – i.e. war – in Africa via its development aid budget, Mr Rondos revealed (is this public knowledge? Ed). Development aid supporters – kind of unsurprisingly – argued the money should be spent on feeding the poor, where as Mr Rondos and his kin have been arguing that there can be no peace without security.
His refreshingly candid observations extended to a warning that Yemen and Eritrea were so “fragile” there was a danger the states would collapse. Their fall to marauding bandits, and the nastiness this would unleash upon the Red Sea region, would make complaints about a few wandering pirates seem “like a picnic”, he said.
The EU and its human-rights-loving do-gooders “might not like the way countries such as Egypt treat their own people”, but perhaps we should pay more attention to the fact that the fall of these authoritarian regimes would bring on pretty negative consequences for Europe and Europeans – in particular if their replacements were to take control of the Suez Canal and cut off our trading lanes.
Voila – it would seem the EU is slowly shedding its goody two-shoes image and embracing realpolitik.
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*Updated with editor note on the top.
