Darfur’s final chance
By Eric Reeves, The Guardian on-line
November 30, 2007 — On Monday, UN under-secretary for peacekeeping Jean-Marie Guéhenno
raised the terrifying prospect that the UN-authorised peacekeeping force
for Darfur may well have to be aborted because of obstructionism on the
part of the Khartoum regime. Guéhenno declared that because of
Khartoum’s actions we are fast approaching a moment in which members of
the UN security council will have to ask a critical question:
“Do we move ahead with the deployment of a force that will not make a
difference, that will not have the capability to defend itself and that
carries the risk of humiliation of the security council and the United
Nations and tragic failure for the people of Darfur? ”
The question, of course, answers itself. Privately, Guéhenno and other
UN officials suggest an even gloomier picture of a mission that has
already largely collapsed and is far behind on deployment benchmarks.
To be sure, the unprecedented UN/African Union “hybrid” mission in
Darfur (UNAMID) has been badly compromised by the refusal of militarily
capable nations of the world to provide the two dozen transport and
tactical helicopters required, at a bare minimum, for security and
protection operations in Darfur. Not a single Nato country has offered
even one helicopter. Sadly, this serves as too accurate a measure of the
real concern for Darfur on the part of those whose rhetoric has been
most fulsome. But it is brazen obduracy on the part of the Khartoum
regime that has created the deepest threat that the people of Darfur
will be left entirely without protection, and that humanitarian
operations will have to be suspended throughout the region. The UN
estimates that 4.2 million people are currently in need of humanitarian
assistance.
Of course Khartoum’s obduracy has long been in evidence. Four months
after the security council authorised the present peace support
operation to Darfur under Resolution 1769, and 15 months after a
previous security council resolution authorised a similar operation,
Khartoum is still objecting to the UN/AU-proposed roster of countries
that are to provide troops, civilian police and engineering and medical
units. Khartoum refuses to grant landing rights to heavy transport
aircraft or allow night flights (critical for both civilian protection
and medivac needs). It refuses to grant adequate access to the Port of
Sudan or expedited off-loading of equipment there. And it refuses to
grant adequate land or water rights in the arid Darfur region.
What will follow from a UN decision to abort UNAMID? Utter catastrophe.
The exceedingly weak, under-manned, and under-resourced African Union
mission in Darfur will collapse entirely. This badly demoralised force
is barely functioning now and is simply trying to hold on until December
31 2007, when the AU mission is supposed to be incorporated into UNAMID
under UN auspices. But given Khartoum’s obstructionism, this transfer
will be at best symbolic: there may be UN auspices but no meaningful
deployment of UN troops or resources. And as soon as it becomes clear
that a meaningful UNAMID is not deploying, African nations will quickly
withdraw their troops, which have already endured an unconscionable
number of casualties, most at the hands of rebel groups that resent AU
impotence on the ground and political accommodation of Khartoum’s
génocidaires by AU leaders. This will leave no protection forces of
any kind, for civilians or humanitarians
Last January humanitarian organisations made clear they felt they had
reached the furthest extreme of tolerable insecurity. One open letter
came from a group of six distinguished nongovernmental organisations;
another open letter came from all 14 UN operational humanitarian
organisations in Darfur, including Unicef and the World Food Programme.
No UN humanitarian operation had previously issued such a clear and
public warning of impending collapse. These organisations, too, have
been holding on with the hope that the UN would finally provide
protection for them and the civilians they so courageously serve. If
they are disappointed in their hopes, they will leave; an already
intolerable situation will rapidly collapse into anarchy.
With no international presence – by the UN, by the AU or by
international aid organisations – there will be nothing to constrain
Khartoum or the rebels or the various armed elements and bandits that
contribute so much to present insecurity. Confrontations between
Khartoum’s armed forces, including its Janjaweed militia allies, and
camps for displaced persons are likely to escalate quickly, and may
become a series of pitched battles. Khartoum is likely to use its
Antonov bombers and helicopter gun ships in such battles, ensuring
massively disproportionate civilian casualties in and around some 200
camps.
It is intolerable that the international community seems prepared to
accept what will be cataclysmic human destruction. There can hardly be
any doubt that the UNAMID force is badly conceived, has an ambiguous
command-and-control structure, and is excessively reliant on African
nations that cannot provide adequate numbers of fully-equipped,
self-sufficient troops and civilian police per UN standards. The hybrid
nature of the mission was itself a poorly calculated concession to
Khartoum in the wake of the regime’s defiance of the previous UN
resolution authorising force to Darfur, Resolution 1706, passed on
August 31 2006.
But UNAMID is now the only arrow in the quiver: there is no other force
on the horizon, no other means for protecting civilians and
humanitarians. If Nato nations aren’t prepared to provide the 24
helicopters the UN mission requires, they are hardly likely to
participate in or provide resources for any non-consensual deployment of
force to Darfur, a nightmarishly difficult logistical and military
undertaking in any event.
UNAMID must succeed. If it does not, the only question is only how long
it will be before Darfur slides into cataclysmic destruction, with no
means of halting that slide. This is the stark choice before the
international community: is it prepared to see UNAMID fail, or will it
rally the resources and exert the pressure on Khartoum, both of which
are both critical to UNAMID’s success?
The UN secretary-general and under-secretary for peacekeeping should
send public, individual letters to every militarily capable nation
within the world body, asking why it cannot provide at least one of the
required helicopters. The public should make explicit demands of their
governments, especially countries that possess significant amounts of
military equipment, like the required helicopters: the US, the UK,
France, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa and India.
But again, the larger problem, and thus the larger task, is to exert
sufficient pressure on Khartoum to end its obstructionist ways. The key
here is China, widely recognised – including within the UN’s political
offices – as having unrivalled leverage with the National Islamic Front
(National Congress Party) regime. China alone of the major powers can
demand of Khartoum (if no doubt behind closed doors) that the broad
campaign to stall and ultimately eviscerate UNAMID must end. And yet, a
well-placed UN official recently told me that it is the consensus at
Turtle Bay that China was becoming more, not less, supportive of
Khartoum’s intransigence. After a brief but apparently successful Darfur
public relations campaign, Beijing has evidently decided that it may
resume its uncritical support of all decisions made by the NIF regime,
no matter what the consequences for the people of Darfur.
Either this changes, or there is no chance that Khartoum will be moved
by other actors. In turn, this obliges nations like Germany, France, the
US, and the UK to use the very considerable leverage deriving from their
individual bilateral relations with Beijing to push China to act.
Currently, all four of these major Western powers have moved Darfur to
the third- or even fourth-tier in bilateral relations. Germany and
France seem much more concerned about trade relations with China than
Darfur, despite the tough talk coming from Angela Merkel and Nicolas
Sarkozy. The UK under Gordon Brown seems adrift after years of vacuous
rhetoric from Tony Blair’s government. And the US places Taiwan, North
Korea, Iran, trade and international terrorism far, far above any
professed concern for Darfur. Again, civil society must play the key
role of demanding that China, vulnerably exposed host of the 2008
Olympic Games, be pushed hard to use its massive influence with Khartoum
to change the regime’s behaviour.
It’s a long shot. But the odds against protecting the people of Darfur
become greater every day, and we are now at the tipping point. Urgency
is the essential watchword: we have only days or weeks before allowing
events to be set in motion that will see many hundreds of thousands of
people die.
Eric Reeves is author of “A Long Day’s Dying: Critical Moments in
the Darfur Genocide”