Expectations of UN Peacekeeping in Darfur...
Peacekeepers Without a Peace to Keep
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
October 14, 2007
IF anyone needed proof that Darfur has degenerated into a peacekeeper’s nightmare, 30 truckloads of armed men forcefully delivered it two weekends ago.
They stormed a small African Union garrison in a dusty village, Haskanita, and massacred 10 African peacekeepers, looted their equipment and torched their base. The attack came as the African Union was preparing for a critical peace conference on Darfur and the United Nations was rushing to assemble a beefed-up force that will total 26,000 soldiers under joint U.N.-African Union command — the largest peacekeeping mission in the world.
Is the intervention too late? Or maybe, as some experts argue, too early?
The problem with Darfur is that it is not a Kosovo, an East Timor, or a Cyprus, all places where United Nations blue helmets have stepped between well-defined warring parties and stopped the bloodshed. Darfur is experiencing a different, messier kind of war.
Though often simplified, the situation in Darfur has become a chaotic free-for-all with many warring pieces, Arab versus Arab, rebel versus rebel, bandit versus bandit, all fighting one another in a desiccated, burned-out wasteland overrun with weapons and increasingly lethal for aid workers and peacekeepers.
If anything, Darfur resembles Somalia in the 1990s, when the failure of American-backed United Nations peacekeepers to subdue teenage gunmen in flip-flops ushered in 16 years of chaos that rages on today.
“Unless Unamid,” the abbreviation for the United Nations-African Union Mission in Darfur, “develops a strategy, wises up very fast to the complexity of the conflict in 2007 and gets out of its fortresses, which is more unlikely than ever post-Haskanita, it will very soon become a major part of the problem,” said Julie Flint, a London-based journalist and co-author of “Darfur: A Short History of a Long War.” She cited the amount of water peacekeepers would consume — up to 40 times per person what a typical Darfurian uses, the burden on already broken roads and communications, and the huge expectations the force’s arrival will create.
“Darfurians are expecting to be saved by Unamid, to have roads opened, the janjaweed disarmed and banditry ended,” she said. This, she added, is “mission impossible,” however well the troops perform.
Impossible or not, some experts emphasized that if the force is to have any chance of success, it must be willing to fight robustly and take casualties.
Read the full article ...
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
October 14, 2007
IF anyone needed proof that Darfur has degenerated into a peacekeeper’s nightmare, 30 truckloads of armed men forcefully delivered it two weekends ago.
They stormed a small African Union garrison in a dusty village, Haskanita, and massacred 10 African peacekeepers, looted their equipment and torched their base. The attack came as the African Union was preparing for a critical peace conference on Darfur and the United Nations was rushing to assemble a beefed-up force that will total 26,000 soldiers under joint U.N.-African Union command — the largest peacekeeping mission in the world.
Is the intervention too late? Or maybe, as some experts argue, too early?
The problem with Darfur is that it is not a Kosovo, an East Timor, or a Cyprus, all places where United Nations blue helmets have stepped between well-defined warring parties and stopped the bloodshed. Darfur is experiencing a different, messier kind of war.
Though often simplified, the situation in Darfur has become a chaotic free-for-all with many warring pieces, Arab versus Arab, rebel versus rebel, bandit versus bandit, all fighting one another in a desiccated, burned-out wasteland overrun with weapons and increasingly lethal for aid workers and peacekeepers.
If anything, Darfur resembles Somalia in the 1990s, when the failure of American-backed United Nations peacekeepers to subdue teenage gunmen in flip-flops ushered in 16 years of chaos that rages on today.
“Unless Unamid,” the abbreviation for the United Nations-African Union Mission in Darfur, “develops a strategy, wises up very fast to the complexity of the conflict in 2007 and gets out of its fortresses, which is more unlikely than ever post-Haskanita, it will very soon become a major part of the problem,” said Julie Flint, a London-based journalist and co-author of “Darfur: A Short History of a Long War.” She cited the amount of water peacekeepers would consume — up to 40 times per person what a typical Darfurian uses, the burden on already broken roads and communications, and the huge expectations the force’s arrival will create.
“Darfurians are expecting to be saved by Unamid, to have roads opened, the janjaweed disarmed and banditry ended,” she said. This, she added, is “mission impossible,” however well the troops perform.
Impossible or not, some experts emphasized that if the force is to have any chance of success, it must be willing to fight robustly and take casualties.
Read the full article ...
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