European unlikely to meet UN Darfur goal
December 7, 2007 (BRUSSELS, Belgium) — European nations look unlikely to meet an urgent U.N. call to provide military helicopters for a peacekeeping force planned for Darfur, saying their armies are already stretched by missions in Afghanistan, Kosovo and other hot spots.
More than 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million uprooted from their homes in Sudan’s western Darfur region since a rebellion broke out in 2003, and many European governments have said they support deploying the peacekeeping force.
Despite the verbal support, no one has offered any of the 24 helicopters sought by U.N. officials.
“There’s something like 12,000 military helicopters in Europe, so it’s bizarre that not one has been found available so far to commit to this force,” said Thomas Cargill, Africa program manager at Chatham House, an international affairs think tank in London.
He said European countries risk undermining their credibility “if they commit themselves to resolving a crisis but then can’t commit themselves to providing the necessary hardware.”
The joint United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force of 26,000 soldiers is scheduled to take over from a smaller AU force in three weeks.
But U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Thursday that it is essential the force be equipped with 18 transport helicopters and six light attack helicopters. Without them, he said, the force will not be able to protect its own soldiers, let alone civilians.
John Kotsopoulos at the European Policy Center, a think tank in Brussels, said Darfur is taking a back seat to other priorities for Europeans. “The rhetoric does not often match the practice. Once again we are seeing this here,” he said.
Ban sent two high-level envoys to lobby at a meeting of leaders from the European Union and Africa Union nations this weekend in Lisbon, Portugal.
“We need helicopters,” said Brig. Gen. Solomon Giwa-Amu, a spokesman for the Nigerian army, which has 3,500 soldiers in the current Darfur force and plans to send more to the new mission. “If we have six helicopters, that will be of great help for the troops because of the terrain.”
Publicly, European government ministers have said they are doing everything they can to get the Darfur mission off the ground, along with a separate, 4,000-strong EU peacekeeping mission in Chad and Central African Republic, which border Sudan.
But officials said Friday they cannot meet the U.N. request.
Poland said it is sending four transport helicopters and four attack helicopters — similar to those the U.N. wants for Darfur — to Afghanistan.
“These helicopters were long ago tabbed for the Afghanistan mission,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Piotr Paszkowski said. “We aren’t particularly rich in helicopters.”
Germany, too, will not increase its commitment to the Darfur mission beyond the ground transport it already has provided because its military is busy elsewhere, said a Defense Ministry spokesman, Thomas Raabe.
“That’s just the way it is,” Raabe said. “We have no capacity for this concrete mission.”
He noted Germany has the third-largest contingent in Afghanistan and is the largest contributor of troops to the peacekeeping force in Serbia’s Kosovo province.
Earlier in the week, Britain’s minister for African affairs, Malloch Brown, said the British military is unable to contribute helicopters because its reserves are deployed in Afghanistan. Britain has given $151 million to help fund the operation.
While the U.N. scrambles to find helicopters, Sudan’s government also is putting up roadblocks.
The U.N. Security Council agreed the new peacekeeping force should be predominantly African — at Sudan’s insistence. Since then, the Khartoum regime has refused to approve non-African units from Thailand, Nepal and the Nordic countries, even though 90 percent of the force’s ground troops and 75 percent of its total troops are from Africa.