UK urges support for African Union in Darfur

Jan 4, 2005 (UNITED NATIONS) — Britain urged stronger world support, including greater EU funding, for the African Union mission in Sudan’s Darfur region as a UN report highlighted the conflict’s heavy impact on civilians.

Britain’s UN envoy Emyr Jones Parry told reporters that a planned Security Council meeting on Sudan next week would be an opportunity to explore how to drastically improve security arrangements and the strategic outlook in Darfur this year.

“We really have now to prepare to make sure there’s a total continuity of involvement by the international community,” the British envoy said.

He said the council, which is scheduled to discuss Sudan on January 13, would need to explore options including turning over the peacekeeping operation in Darfur, currently operated by the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS), to the UN.

“If that means that the AU decides that … it wants to move this toward the UN, we are going to have to explore options like that,” Jones Parry said.

Jones Parry said he wants to ensure that the peacekeeping effort is more effective and continues throughout 2006, and that the European Union will continue to help fund the operation if the African Union continues to lead it.

“But all these things are interrelated. What matters is that the UN, the AU and the EU should maximize their contributions working together to improve the situation,” he said.

The British ambassador however said he did not favor deploying an additional force in the same theater of operations.

“For command and control purposes, it makes far more sense to have one mission in any given theater,” he said.

“The question is whether Sudan is going to remain two theaters or whether it should become one theater, and that’s the question that needs to be explored with the AU, because their interest is crucial in this.”

As many as 300,000 people been killed and more than two million displaced in nearly three years of conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan.

AMIS, financed mainly by the European Union, the United Nations and the United States, currently has some 6,848 personnel in Darfur, including peacekeepers, civilian police and military observers.

Meanwhile, the UN Mission in Sudan, called UNMIS, has 5,783 personnel, including 3,638 troops, in Sudan to help maintain peace between the government and former southern rebels who in January 2005 signed a peace agreement after 21 years of civil war.

UNMIS is also liaising with AMIS forces working in Darfur.

UN chief Kofi Annan has repeatedly called on the Khartoum government and Darfur rebels to reach a political settlement in the Abuja peace talks in Nigeria. But the talks have made little progress so far.

In a report released late last month, Annan said “civilians continued to pay an intolerably high price as a result of recurrent fighting by warring (Darfur) parties, the renewal of the ‘scorched earth’ tactics by (pro-government) militia and massive military action by the government.”

“The incidence of sexual and gender-based violence in and around camps of internally displaced persons remained high throughout Darfur, with reports of assaults coming in on a daily basis,” the report added.

Annan said a continuing internal leadership struggle within the main Darfur rebel movement, the Sudanese Liberation Movement/Army, and a recent influx of military deserters from Chad into western Darfur significantly contributed to violence and insecurity in the region.

War broke out in Darfur in early 2003 when rebel groups began fighting what they say is the political and economic marginalization of the region’s black African tribes by the Arab-led regime in Khartoum.