UN says 10,000 peacekeepers needed for Southern Sudan
By Evelyn Leopold
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 14 (Reuters) – The United Nations will recommend up to 10,000 peacekeepers for Sudan if Khartoum and southern rebels sign a landmark peace agreement to end a 21-year-old civil war, a senior U.N. envoy has said.
The Khartoum government and the southern Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement promised during a Security Council meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, last month to complete a peace pact by December 31.
The agreement, if implemented, would signal a major change in Sudan, including power-sharing in Khartoum, dividing the country’s oil wealth and integrating security forces in several areas.
“Both sides say it is possible and both say the position of the other party is completely untenable,” Jan Pronk, U.N. representative in Sudan told a news conference on Tuesday, outlining a blueprint of what should happen next.
The southern civil war has killed an estimated 2 million people, mostly from famine and disease, since 1983 when Khartoum tried to impose Islamic sharia law on the mainly animist south.
Pronk said the same issue as last summer was plaguing the talks — the size of an integrated army and who would pay for it — and “so far the parties have not moved.”
Pronk said the five Security Council powers — the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France — had to make a united approach to the Sudanese negotiators and not send a variety of diplomats to the talks with different instructions.
“Then these negotiators could also go back to their constituency and say, ‘There was no other option.'”
Pronk said the five powers also needed to make sure Sudan knew peacekeepers and development aid would be withheld if they did not sign and implement the pact.
If an agreement is completed this month, the signing should include a ceremony with heads of state 10 days later in Nairobi followed by a Security Council resolution authorizing 9,000 to 10,000 peacekeepers in stages over six months, he said.
The troops would stay for about six months but U.N. agencies would remain their longer for reconstruction, and development. Donor nations have been presented with a $1.5 billion plan once peace is in place.
MODEL FOR DARFUR
The north-south agreement is expected to have an impact in Sudan’s western Darfur region, where rebel groups are challenging the government over resources and power and where Khartoum has armed militia, accused of rape and murder and burning villages. Some 1.8 million people have been uprooted in one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
Pronk said if there were a coalition government, the former southern rebel leaders could help negotiate peace in Darfur and provide a political framework.
The situation on the ground in Darfur is deteriorating, with attacks on civilians by all groups. The African Union has provided troops and observers but has so far only fielded about 900.
Pronk said 4,000 were needed and that police were nearly nonexistent but that the African soldiers were more adept than their Western counterparts.
“The AU troops that I met are perhaps better than Western troops in a similar operation,” Pronk said. “They are more flexible. They are taking more risks. They are willing to mediate, and they are effective in mediation.”