Newsletter No. 1433
News-Analysis
August 5, 2009

 

TOKYO SENDING MILITARY INSTRUCTORS TO PEACEKEEPING SCHOOL IN MALI

MOFA has just published a Japanese-language announcement indicating that two GSDF officers will be deployed to serve as instructors at the Ecole de Maintien de la Paix (School for the Maintenance of Peace) in Bamako. The two officers are Lieutenant Colonel Eijiro Imamura and Lieutenant Colonel Hiroaki Takano. These two men will offer training to military men and civilians from August 24th to September 4th, and will presumably return to Japan after that.

The agreement to send Japanese military instructors to Africa was arrived at on June 30, 2008, in a meeting between then-Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon.

The same MOFA announcement indicates that, since last year, Tokyo has donated US$14.5 million to five peacekeeping schools in Africa (Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, and Rwanda). More funds have been budgeted for this year. Both military and civilian instructors have already been sent to a peacekeeping school in Egypt on several occasions.

The Ecole de Maintien de la Paix (EMP) was established in 1999 with the cooperation of the French army. It has offered training to more than 1,700 personnel from 53 countries since its founding. Last year, Tokyo donated US$2.5 million to the school.

MORE AID FOR ROAD BUILDING

In early July, a different Japanese-language MOFA announcement indicated that Tokyo was donating about US$16 million to Mali for the third stage of the project to build a southern trunk road between the Malian capital of Bamako and the Senegalese capital of Dakar. The agreement was signed in Bamako on July 7th between Ambassador Yukiko Nakagawa and Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation Moctar Ouane.

Japan has maintained an embassy in Bamako since the beginning of 2008.

We first reported on Japanese aid to the Dakar-Bamako road in Shingetsu Newsletter No. 232 (April 2006) and have heard several updates as more aid money for this project has been distributed to the two concerned governments.