MISSIONS
By Samantha Power, The New Yorker
Nov 28, 2005 — For the past two and a half years, the Arab-dominated government of Sudan has teamed up with sword-wielding marauders on horses and camels, known as janjaweed, to butcher, rape, and expel non-Arabs living in the western region of Darfur. In May of 2004, the United States, Europe, and Africa settled on an imperfect solution for stabilizing the region: send in the African Union. The A.U. accordingly dispatched sixty unarmed observers and three hundred “green helmet” soldiers to monitor a ceasefire between the government and the non-Arab rebels who were fighting it.
What followed was a textbook example of “mission creep.” The ceasefire collapsed, the Sudanese Air Force and the janjaweed continued their deadly raids, thousands more non-Arabs were killed, and the rebels began to splinter into rivalrous groups. In response, in October of 2004, the A.U. sent in an additional three thousand observers and soldiers. When that didn’t stem the violence, it sent more troops. By this month, more than two hundred thousand people had died and two million had been displaced, and the operation had come to include almost seven thousand people: some forty international staff; seven hundred military observers; twelve hundred civilian police; and nearly five thousand soldiers, mainly from Nigeria and Rwanda.
Initially, the African Union, the Western powers, the government of Sudan, and the United Nations all seemed to benefit from the arrangement. The A.U., which had been launched in 2002 to provide “African solutions to African problems,” capitalized on the West’s guilt over the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and received nearly half a billion dollars for the Darfur mission. (Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s President, later said, with typical bravado, that Darfur is “an African responsibility, and we can do it.”) The Western powers could claim that something noble was being done in Sudan without having to risk their own troops. The U.S., in particular, could appease noisy Darfur advocates at home-students, Christian activists, members of Congress-while forging closer counter-terrorism ties with Sudan. And the U.N., which is struggling to manage sixteen peacekeeping operations around the world, could avoid being handed yet another doomed mission.
The presence of A.U. forces undoubtedly made Darfur more stable. But that is no more consoling than Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s claims that America treats its detainees better than Saddam Hussein treated his. Darfur remains overrun with violence and banditry. On October 8th, four Nigerian A.U. soldiers and two contractors were killed by the janjaweed. The next day, eighteen A.U. peacekeepers were kidnapped by rebels, and, when a rescue mission of twenty A.U. soldiers was dispatched, it, too, was abducted-by a rival rebel faction. (They were all later released.) Just before Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick made his fourth trip to Darfur, earlier this month, fifteen hundred men allegedly torched six villages. West Darfur is so dangerous that the U.N. has withdrawn its nonessential staff. António Guterres, the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Refugees, has warned of “a very serious degeneration” in Darfur, saying, “People are dying, and dying in large numbers.”
The A.U. mission is clearly overwhelmed. Its teams, spread out across an area the size of France, manage at most three patrols per day in various sectors of the region, and African countries are hardly eager to send more soldiers. In a literal rendition of “death by a thousand paper cuts,” Khartoum has blocked the delivery of a hundred and five Canadian armored vehicles to vulnerable A.U. troops; grounded the A.U.’s helicopters by imposing arbitrary flight restrictions; and delayed visas for nato officials meant to train A.U. troops. When the A.U. patrols encounter skirmishes, they are under instructions to inform the organization’s headquarters, in Addis Ababa, but responsibility for the protection of citizens has been explicitly left to the government of Sudan.
Soon, this stopgap mission will fail not only those in need of protection but all the other interested parties as well. The Western powers have already spent more than a billion dollars feeding refugees in camps that feel increasingly permanent, and it is nearly inevitable that, as in the West Bank and Pakistan, some Muslims in these camps will be radicalized, and take up arms locally, or, perhaps, farther afield. And once the U.S. and Europe follow through on their recent decisions to slash funding for the African Union, the U.N. will be forced to assume peacekeeping duties in Darfur after all. “The A.U. is looking for a peg to hang success on so it can walk away gracefully,” one U.N. official told me.
That peg may be hard to find. The peace talks between Khartoum and an ever increasing number of rebel groups, which began last year and are now entering their seventh round, have become a farce. The prospects for stability are so dim that diplomats have begun trotting out alibis from past ethnic conflicts. “It’s a tribal war,” Zoellick said in Khartoum, on November 9th. “And, frankly, I don’t think foreign forces ought to get themselves in the middle of a tribal war.” But, if a humanitarian calamity is going to be averted, “foreign forces” will be required. Darfur’s displaced have gathered in some three hundred sites, and someone needs to protect them from the janjaweed who prowl nearby. Roads must be made safe for humanitarian relief convoys. In the longer term, a political deal must be struck between the region’s warring factions, and the majority of Darfur’s displaced must feel safe enough to return home.
These are monumental tasks that the African Union alone cannot perform. Roméo Dallaire, the U.N.’s commander during the Rwanda genocide, has said that a multinational force of up to forty-four thousand troops is needed. Other experts have said that twenty-five thousand armed troops, with a mandate to protect civilians, would vastly improve the situation. If planning starts now, within six months or so the A.U. mission could be absorbed into a far larger multinational U.N. force that could appeal for troops from such peacekeeping veterans as Canada, the Netherlands, Turkey, and Jordan.
Persuading these countries to send their troops to Darfur won’t be easy. Nor will obtaining permission from Sudan, which, in a ghastly coincidence of timing, takes over the A.U.’s rotating presidency in January. But the alternative is a far bigger African problem-with no African, or international, solution.