Killing of 5 AU soldiers underscores dangers of Darfur mission
April 2, 2007 (N’DJAMENA) — Gunmen killed five African Union peacekeepers along the border between Chad and Sudan’s troubled Darfur region, the AU said Monday, the deadliest attack on the force since it deployed three years ago.
The slayings underscored the growing violence in the conflict-ravaged region and are likely to intensify pressure on the Khartoum government to drop its opposition to a more robust U.N. peacekeeping force deploying in Darfur.
The five peacekeepers were guarding a “water point” in Darfur near the border when the gunmen attacked Sunday evening, killing four of them and seriously wounding a fifth, who died Monday of his wounds, according to AU spokesman Noureddine Mezni.
He said the attackers fled the scene after AU soldiers returned fire, killing three of them. AU troops retrieved the bodies of the three attackers along with their weapons, which Mezni said were being examined in a bid to determine their identity.
It was the deadliest attack on the 7,000-strong AU force since it deployed in Darfur and took to 16 the number of peacekeepers killed since its deployment in 2004. In December, an AU officer was kidnapped and is thought to be held hostage.
The understaffed and underarmed AU force has been unable to stop the growing violence in Darfur, where more than 200,000 people have died in nearly four years of fighting. The conflict is also spilling over into the neighboring Central African Republic and Chad, where hundreds of thousands of Darfur’s 2.5 million homeless have fled.
The Darfur conflict began when members of the region’s ethnic African tribes rebelled against what they see as decades of neglect and discrimination by successive Arab-dominated governments in Khartoum. Sudanese leaders are accused of unleashing the pro-government Arab militia, the janjaweed, which is blamed for widespread attacks and rapes against ethnic African villagers.
Mezni declined to disclose the nationalities of the five AU soldiers killed, but an army spokesman in the Senegalese capital Dakar said all five were members of a 538-strong peacekeeping mission from Senegal.
“This will not make us pull out. No way,” said the spokesman, Col. Antoine Wardini.
Mezni did not know whether the “water point” the AU soldiers were guarding was a water distribution center or a well being used by refugees in the area.
“The AU mission is very concerned about the increasing number of attacks and aggressions against our troops,” Mezni said.
Sunday’s attack came a day after an AU helicopter was fired upon by at least one assailant while flying on a routine mission from Zalingei in West Darfur to El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur. The aircraft sustained some damage, but there were no casualties and it managed to land safely, according to Mezni.
Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir has rejected a U.N. Security Council plan for a more robust U.N.-African Union force totaling 22,000 military and civilian personnel to be deployed in Darfur.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Monday condemned the killing of the AU soldiers, saying it “really illustrates the necessity and urgency of dispatching the hybrid peacekeepers to Darfur.”
In a letter to Ban released earlier this month, al-Bashir said he did not agree to a proposal to send more than 3,000 U.N. military, police and other personnel, along with substantial aviation and logistical assets, to beef up the AU force in the vast Darfur region.
The annex to his letter detailed the Sudanese government’s insistence on maintaining control over the deployment of all international troops and police and on keeping the U.N. in a subordinate role to the AU.
(AP)