UN’s Sudan peacekeeping could cost $1.7 bln a year
Sept 1, 2006 (UNITED NATIONS) — A U.N. force to halt the bloodshed in Darfur could cost up to $1.7 billion a year, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said on Friday, a step that could send the current $4.75 billion peacekeeping budget soaring.
Annan sent the estimate to the U.N. Security Council a day after it authorized a force of as many as 22,600 troops and police to protect civilians and enforce a shaky peace deal in the western Sudanese region after three years of war.
U.S. Ambassador John Bolton told reporters on Friday that France and Japan had expressed concern about the mission’s price tag but said the mission was important.
“I have no doubt our efforts will remain very energetic,” Bolton said. “We are obviously aware that the extension of the U.N. mission in the Sudan to Darfur was going to be an expensive proposition.”
The United States, as the biggest U.N. dues payer, alone pays about a quarter of all peacekeeping costs.
The planned Darfur operation is one of two missions expected to ramp up in the final months of the year, a development U.N. officials acknowledge could severely strain the budget and U.N. staff of about 600 handling mission planning, logistics, command and control, legal matters, communications and travel.
The other mission aims to enforce a cease-fire in southern Lebanon after a month of war between Israel and Lebanon’s Hizbollah. The United Nations hopes to send an additional 13,000 peacekeepers to southern Lebanon in the next few months, but no cost estimate has yet been released for that mission.
The Sudan force will not be sent into Darfur until the government gives its consent. Khartoum has so far flatly refused to let in U.N. troops.
War erupted in Darfur in February 2003, when non-Arab rebels took up arms against the government. The government responded by mobilizing Arab militias known as Janjaweed, who have been accused of murder, rape and looting.
Fighting, disease and hunger have killed some 200,000 people and driven some 2.5 million into squalid camps.
The United Nations wants to replace and absorb an African Union force already in Darfur that is short on money and has failed to halt the humanitarian catastrophe there.
(Reuters)