CONGO: The blue and white pre-fabricated cube headquarters in the courtyard of the French Defence Ministry is an appropriate symbol for Operation Artemis, Europe's first military intervention outside the Continent. It was quickly assembled, is working efficiently and is, above all, temporary.
The deployment in the Democratic Republic of Congo is officially called the Interim Emergency Multinational Force (IEMF), but even the three Irish officers stationed at the Paris headquarters, and Gen Frank McKevitt, the Irish delegate to the EU's Military Committee in Brussels who toured the installation yesterday, use the French name Artemis. For despite the 15 national flags painted on the side of the building, one of them an Irish tricolour, this is a French-led operation, with Paris providing 85 per cent of the 1,900 men on the ground.
The French commander, Gen Bruno Neveux, "has ensured there are no visible weapons within Bunia or around it", Gen McKevitt said. "From the beginning, it was made clear this operation was restricted territorially and for a certain time, in order to give MONUC, the UN force, a chance to reinforce and establish itself in the area," he explained.
In other words, the EU came to the rescue of the UN. MONUC was established two years ago, but has been unable to extinguish the tribal wars that have taken 3.3 million Congolese lives since 1998. The EU knows its limits, and merely committed to securing the north-eastern town of Bunia between June 16th and September 1st, when 3,000 Bangladeshi soldiers from MONUC are to take over.
France has always been the keenest advocate of a strong European foreign and defence policy, and saw the crisis in Bunia as a way of furthering that goal. Three and a half years after the Helsinki European summit decided to make 60,000 European soldiers available on 60 days' notice, sending 1,900 men to Africa may seem like slow progress, but the French see Europe's first out-of-theatre deployment as a big step.
"Is it getting across that this is a European operation?" I heard a French officer ask a colleague during yesterday's presentation. Lest anyone doubt it, the side of the pre-fab was decorated with Europe's yellow stars on a blue field, and the words "O.H.Q. Artemis" - Operation Headquarters - in English.
"The working language is English," explained Lieut Col Cormac Lalor, who previously served at UN military headquarters in New York. Col Lalor's job in the "J-7" function is to draw lessons from the operation. Though he speaks French, all exchanges with Bunia and the logistics base at Entebbe are in English - an amazing concession for the French.
The practical choice of the English language explains why two other Irish officers, Sgt Roland Bent and Sgt Niall Gorey, were chosen as watch NCOs, tracking incoming and outgoing communications and updating boards in the command centre.
Dublin would doubtless have preferred a more prominent role - the Defence Minister, Mr Smith, had expressed Dublin's willingness to send Rangers - but Mssrs Lalor, Bent and Gorey are delighted to work through the summer in Paris. "We like to be part of Europe," Gen McKevitt said. "The Defence Forces are very happy to be involved."
"From the beginning, this has been a very complex operation with high risks," said the Finnish army general Gustav Hägglund, who heads the EU Military Committee in Brussels. He, Gen McKevitt and the committee's other delegates are to report back to the EU's Political and Security Committee on Artemis.
"But the alternative was not good either," Gen Hägglund continued. "It would have been to stand aside and let a probable genocide continue ... So far it has gone very well. We haven't had any casualties."
There has been speculation that Washington may ask the EU to contribute soldiers to post-war peacekeeping in Iraq. French officials have said they would consider involvement only under a UN mandate, a subtle way of chiding the US for going to war without a mandate in the first place. But Gen Hägglund seemed taken aback when I asked him how the EU would respond to such a request.
"We are always willing to consider everything," he said. "But I don't think it would be very likely. The Iraq operation is too big."
