Japan to send military mission to Sudan to help UN
June 30, 2008 (TOKYO) — Japan will send military personnel to Sudan to join U.N. peacekeeping operations in the country’s first military dispatch to the African nation, Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said Monday.
Fukuda announced the move at a joint news conference with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, who is visiting Japan as part of his two-week official trip to Asia.
“With regards to Africa, we will contribute self-defense force personnel to the headquarters of the U.N. mission in Sudan,” Fukuda said, referring to Japan’s military. He gave no further details.
Ban was quick to welcome the news, saying he appreciated Fukuda’s offer as well as Tokyo’s financial support for U.N. peacekeeping operations in Sudan.
But a Japanese defense ministry spokesman said no details have been decided on the mission, while Kyoto News reported that only two or three military personnel would go to Sudan.
Japan is restricted to peaceful activities by its postwar, pacifist constitution, but has a large military and is gradually becoming more assertive. The country upgraded its Defense Agency to ministry status last year.
Japan, a key U.S. ally in Asia, backed the U.S. invasion of Iraq and provided ground troops for a noncombat, humanitarian mission from 2004 to 2006 in southern Iraq, marking the first deployment of Japanese troops in a combat zone since World War II.
In Sudan’s Darfur region, the U.N. estimates that up to 300,000 people have been killed and more than 2.5 million driven from their homes during five years of bloody attacks. Rapes, enslavement and other war crimes have been rampant.
Ethnic African rebel groups accuse the central Arab-dominated government of marginalization and discrimination. But Sudan denies backing militias consisting of Arab nomads who are accused of the worst atrocities in the five-year war.
(AP)