Darfur fighting to recur without peacekeeper support – UN
June 22, 2006 (KHARTOUM) — The peacekeepers in Darfur require urgent and effective support from the U.N. to prevent a new round of fighting later this year, African Union and U.N. officials reported Thursday.
“There is a risk of major violence,” the U.N. head of peacekeeping, Jean-Marie Gehenno, told reporters at the end of a two-week assessment mission to Darfur. “The risk of fragmentation, of a new cycle of violence, after the rainy season, is quite real, very real.”
Gehenno, the African Union’s peace commissioner Said Djinnit, and about 40 officials from both organizations were mandated by the U.N. Security Council to study the prospects for replacing the A.U. peacekeeping mission in Darfur by a larger, better equipped U.N. force. They held hundreds of meetings in the western Sudan region.
The A.U. has 7,000 troops in Darfur, but they have been unable to halt the killing and looting that has resulted in the deaths of about 200,000 people and the displacement of another 2 million since the conflict began in early 2003.
The A.U. force needs “a more robust mandate, but also more robust support from the United Nations,” the A.U.’s Djinnit said at the press conference with Gehenno.
The message of Gehenno and Djinnit recalls that of the only rebel leader to sign the May 5 peace accord for Darfur, Minni Minnawi, who warned last week that the agreement will collapse if U.N. peacekeepers are not deployed to implement it.
But Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has ruled out any U.N. deployment in Darfur. He said Tuesday he would personally lead the “resistance” if U.N. troops came to Darfur, accusing them of being neo-colonialists.
“The U.N. is not in the business of colonizing any country,” Gehenno said Thursday, a day after he met al-Bashir.
Gehenno pointed out that most of the U.N.’s 100,000 peacekeepers and police officers came from developing countries which had overcome colonization in the past.
The U.N. Security Council has said it hopes to see the U.N. force take over from the A.U. by early 2007, but Gehenno stressed the peacekeepers would not come to Darfur without Khartoum’s approval.
“As long as the government of Sudan does not accept a (U.N.) mission, there will not be one. It’s as simple as that,” he said.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Thursday that he hoped al-Bashir would change his mind.
“The talks continue, and I hope ultimately we will be able to convince them to accept a U.N. force,” Annan told reporters in Geneva.
Gehenno said the immediate priority was to support the A.U. troops in Darfur, and hinted this could be the door to the U.N.’s entry.
“The idea of U.N. peacekeepers supporting an African Union mission would be something that has never been done before,” he said.
The May 5 peace agreement between al-Bashir’s government and one of the rebels factions had created “a window of opportunity for peace” in Darfur, but more needed to be done, Gehenno warned.
While clashes between pro-government forces and rebels have largely ceased since the agreement, fighting among the rebel factions has increased, he said.
There have also been clashes between members of rival tribes, the Fur and Zaghawa, in North Darfur, the U.N. said in a statement Thursday.
Minnawi, the commander of the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement who signed the accord, comes from the Zaghawa. The leader of a breakaway faction of the SLM, Abdelwahid al-Nur, comes from the Fur tribe and he rejected the agreement.
Many members of the Fur in the refugee camps of Darfur have criticized the accord as failing to compensate them for their displacement and the loss of their properties.
Minnawi has blamed the recent clashes on rival SLM factions. Aid workers in Darfur say his troops are loosing ground to supporters of al-Nur.