Europe careful on Darfur
By Stefan Nicola
Nov 30, 2006 (BERLIN) — A recent spat over German participation in a possible stability mission in Sudan’s Darfur region underlined how unwilling Europe’s governments are when it comes to sending soldiers into yet another crisis region.
German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung said Tuesday German soldiers should take part in a possible United Nations-led peacekeeping mission in Darfur, where some 200,000 people have been killed since early 2003 as a result of fighting between rebels, government troops and the Janjaweed, a government sponsored militia.
“If there is an overall operation, then we will not refuse a request to take part,” he said.
Jung has since come under heavy fire — even officials inside his center-right Christian Democratic Union (also the party of Chancellor Angela Merkel) have criticized what they felt is a snap judgment made by the minister.
“Offering our participation for a mission of which we don’t know any specifics is not coherent with the rules we have given ourselves,” Andreas Schockenhoff, a senior conservative, told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.
On the one hand, her anger is understandable; the United Nations have agreed to a mission that builds on the African Union’s mandate in the country, but just how its rules of engagement should look and how many soldiers would be dispatched can only be determined once the Sudanese government requests the U.N. force, which it still hasn’t.
On the other hand, the anger reflects a growing unwillingness in Europe to send soldiers into potentially danger-ridden crisis zones.
“Most of the European governments aren’t really ready or willing to commit its soldiers to yet another conflict, especially as fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq intensifies,” Cord Jakobeit, a Sudan expert at the University of Hamburg, told United Press International in a telephone interview. “If German troops would blunder into casualty-heavy fighting in Sudan, pressure at home would rise very quickly to bring those troops back home.”
The German public is not used to reports of casualties — the country in the past decades has focused largely on peace keeping missions. In Afghanistan, its nearly 3,000 soldiers operate in the relatively peaceful north.
France should have an interest in a stable Sudan, as some 1,200 French troops are stationed in Chad and 300 in the Central African Republic, two nations that share borders with Darfur and where rebels have recently stepped up the fighting.
In the United Kingdom, any new conflict is approached with considerable caution, given the fact that British troops are taking heavy fire in the southern provinces of Afghanistan and in the Sunni triangle in Iraq.
“And of course there is uneasiness because Sudan does not really want U.N. troops to come,” Jakobeit said.
Sudan has rejected a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing the deployment of more than 22,000 U.N. troops to stop the violence in Darfur, which U.S. President George W. Bush has called genocide and the United Nations called the world’s worst humanitarian disaster.
Khartoum has argued that it sees a U.N. force as another invasion by the West similar to that in Iraq, but the real reasons are different, observers say.
The Janjaweed, the militia the government has sponsored and armed, are accused of having committed some of the worst atrocities against civilians.
“The Sudanese government has no interest in U.N. officials coming in, pointing fingers, and restraining the groups the government supports,” Jakobeit said.
Khartoum instead prefers a beefed up African Union peace keeping mission and has signaled it was willing to allow U.N. forces to take part in such a mission.
The exact look of such a hybrid mission has yet to be determined; African Union and U.N. officials were said to meet Thursday with Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir.
The 7,000 soldiers of the current African Union mandate tasked with restoring stability in Darfur are overstretched and ill-equipped, observers say. That mandate runs out at the end of the year. But what if the three parties don’t come to an agreement?
Jakobeit said no Western government would risk a solo attempt to save lives in Darfur, given the lessons learned from the war in Iraq.
“No government wants to lose its face by going it alone, and Iraq has proven that a quick pull-out isn’t so easy,” he said.
(UPI)