UNAMID: Some aspects of success and failure
By Nasredeen Abdulbari*
The establishment of the United Nations-African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) under United Nations (UN) Security Council Resolution 1769, which was passed on July 31, 2007, occurred at an important moment in the history of Darfur. The Mission was created one year after the conclusion of the Abuja Peace Agreement signed on May 5, 2006 between the Government of Sudan and a faction of the Sudan Liberation Movement.1 The situation in the region was tense as two of the major rebel movements in the region at the time had refused to sign the agreement and very quickly established the National Redemption Front, together with the Sudan Federal Democratic Alliance. While the two agreeing parties were trying to implement the agreement, the non-signatories were still in war with the Government of Sudan; therefore, it became clear they were not going to join the agreement. Across Darfur, people wanted the destructive war to end and UNAMID’s birth while its predecessor, the 9000-person African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) was failing, gave hope to the people of Darfur that at least the violations committed by different parties against civilians would end, even if the achievement of peace and stability was obviously unattainable.
UNAMID has thus far been the second largest peacekeeping mission that works on peace-building and promotion of the rule of law. Many Sudanese and non-Sudanese have had the opportunity to first-hand experience working with the United Nations. I personally did a consultancy for UNAMID in August 2010 in El-Fasher, North Darfur. The consultancy was on facilitating a workshop the Mission organized on a legal aid bill that has not seen the light of day. In addition, I have been a regular observer of the Mission’s role in and effect on achieving peace and bringing about stability in the war-torn region of Darfur. Based on my observation and previous direct involvement with the Mission, I could make a couple of comments regarding the presence of UNAMID. More specifically, my comments have to do with the implementation of its mandate and some unintended effects. However, one caveat that one should make here is that evaluating UNAMID is somehow different from evaluating any other peacemaking or peacekeeping mission; UNAMID is unique in that it is a joint operation consisting of UN and African Union (AU) elements. It is the first hybrid mission to be established by the United Nations, and it is an apparent indication of increasing cooperation between the International Organization and regional blocs and institutions on peace and security issues 2.
Interestingly, wars and conflicts in some situations do not only create crises and tragedies; they also create and help spread ideas— good ideas and bad ideas— that fundamentally shape and change societies. In Darfur’s particular situation, the war, generally speaking, exposed the people of Darfur to relatively very new ideas and principles they have never thought they would be exposed to in such an organized and extensive way. Thanks to UNAMID and some other international organizations that operate or have operated in the region, the culture or knowledge of human rights (especially women’s rights 3), the rule of law, organized voluntary work, and peace-building have now become wide-spread in Darfur. The Mission has been playing a leading role in that. It has organized so many workshops and training courses on human rights, the rule of law, and peace-building for internally displaced persons (IDPs), civil society organizations, and law enforcement bodies, especially the Sudanese police in Darfur. In my personal perspective, the dissemination of and training on that culture is one of UNAMID’s lasting legacies in Sudan.
In addition, the Mission through its Quick Impact Project has substantially helped build or rehabilitate vital infrastructures such as schools, clinics, child centers, delivery rooms, and HIV/AIDS voluntary counselling and testing centers. Through this project, the Mission was, for example, able to build child centers, and rehabilitate the women’s section of Nyala Prison and provide it with a delivery room that saves lives of children and women. It has also built a school in the Prison that has enabled students from the Prison to sit for the elementary and secondary school exams. Furthermore, it has rehabilitated the Nyala Teaching Hospital and furnished the HIV/AIDS office of the Ministry of Health in South Darfur 4.
At the professional level, the local Sudanese and Darfuri staff members have been able to gain experiences from the international staff members. Some of those international staff members have several years of experience serving in different countries and environments around the world. When the Mission leaves Darfur, the expertise they would leave behind would certainly have some positive effect on Sudanese institutions its former local staff might join or rejoin. In addition, it would help them find employment opportunities with other international organizations in Sudan and elsewhere in the world.
Perhaps within its inexplicit obligations, the Mission organizes and gets involved in social activities such as English courses and organizes informal discussion sessions for the youth and women and football (soccer) matches for the youth in IDP camps. These activities have established good relationships between the IDPs who come from different ethnic groups, on the one hand, and between the IDPs and UNAMID personnel, on the other. However, in situations where there are shootings or attacks against civilians, in general, and IDPs, in particular, the relationship between the two—i.e. the Mission and the IDPs—becomes tense. For instance, IDPs would refuse to make any statements or cooperate with the Mission. In situations, where there are no issues on which the IDPs could possibly blame the Mission, the relationship remains good, thanks to the social activities organized by the Mission 5.
As the Mission spends millions of dollars every month and employs individuals from the region and Sudan, at large, as local staff members, the economic situation has tremendously improved in the cities and towns where the Mission has bases and presence, especially among merchants, real estate owners, and small businesses. For instance, Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, has today become one of the most economically vibrant cities in Sudan. Just like anywhere else in the world, the increase in income in some places in Darfur has resulted in raising the costs of living, something that has negatively affected those with limited or no incomes. In addition, the departure of the Mission without a plan from the part of the Government of Sudan to make alternative employment opportunities available to its current local employees, will, no doubt, create a serious unemployment problem.
Because there has generally been no peace to be kept in Darfur, one of the primary responsibilities of the Mission is rather to help achieve peace. In this context, the Mission has been very much involved in peacemaking rather than peacekeeping. That has been one of the positive roles of the Mission. At the leadership level, the Mission has been meeting with the leaders of the rebel movements and Sudanese government officials to encourage them to engage in dialogue with one another. However, I do not think the Mission has any political leverage over the rebels or the government. When the Abuja Peace Agreement failed and the Doha process began, the Mission played a pivotal role in ensuring that Darfuri civil society groups participated in the peace talks—that was great. However, the Mission could not independently select civil society representatives. It was severely criticized that the government was involved in the selection process. Inability to operate independently (of course to some extent) is a problem that affects the performance of the Mission on a variety of issues that were of controversial nature, especially security, political, and human rights ones. Even on providing funding to civil society organizations, it is widely believed that the Mission tries to please the government or comply with its restrictions. When the Mission started the Quick Impact Project, it provided funding to all organizations that submitted good proposals to implement sustainable projects such as building schools. However, the organizations that are now funded by the Mission are generally believed to be pro-government organizations. Civil society actors believe the government has forced the Mission to do so. This, in addition to some other issues, has created a lack of trust problem between the Mission and civil society organizations.
In this regard, the conclusion of the Doha peace talks by signing a peace document, the Doha Document for Peace in Darfur, between the Government of Sudan and the Liberation and Justice Movement (LJM) was a step towards ending the war. Although the negotiations were not inclusive in terms of the participating political organizations, the involvement of civil society organizations, regardless of how comprehensive it was, has gained support for the Document, as many people have a sense of ownership towards it. However, its implementation has become the business of the government and the parties that have signed or joined it. The majority of Darfuri civil society organizations and groups do not seem to be actively involved in the implementation process. The main movement that has signed the Document, the LJM, has split into two and that made the people of Darfur less hopeful that the provisions of the Document, with its conspicuous shortcomings, would be properly implemented. This is in addition to the fact that the pace of the implementation process itself has been too slow. In any event, the civil society organizations that have participated in the Doha Civil Society Forum and those that have not both support peace, even though they are still nascent, fragmented, underfunded, and not well represented in the institutions created by the Document. After all, civil society organizations operate well where there is freedom, and where the state abides by the essential principle of non-intervention in the work of civil society organizations. Needless to say, neither of the two conditions is existent in Darfur or Sudan today. Despite that, the Mission has contributed to building the capacity of many nascent, inexperienced local civil society organizations in the region. In addition to the overstated training workshops, the Mission has trained those organizations on proposal writing, organizational planning, and management.
However, the Mission has failed in one of the most important aspects of its mandate 6; it has failed to provide security to the civilians or contribute to the restoration of necessary security conditions to enable international and local organizations to provide humanitarian assistance to the needy across Darfur. Worst is that it has even failed to protect itself and has become under the mercy of the Sudan Armed Forces 7. This is one of the discrepancies between the Mission’s mandate and its actual performance on the ground 8. Although the expectations of the Darfuris were very high regarding UNAMID’s role, many analysts (myself included) anticipated UNAMID would not be able to provide security to the internally displaced persons. Sadly, time has proven those analysts right. Indeed, various factors are responsible for the failure of the Mission regarding security, but the most significant one is that the force is not properly equipped. Unfortunately, the United Nations is not and will not be able to do anything in the predictable future without the assistance of states that are willing and capable of making their resources available to it to implement its noble principles. But states, as we all know, have their own political and practical calculations that are not necessarily the same as those of the UN. In Darfuri’s case, the situation has been further complicated by the fact that the African Union has been effectively involved in creating and administering the Mission. The international community has not been willing to provide the kind of military assistance that the Mission needs to play its protective role effectively. The rejection by the Sudanese government of the idea of creating a pure UN force is to a wide extent responsible for that unwillingness. The African Union is an institution that makes and supports political decisions with regard to security situations, to give one example, without having the indispensable financial resources and military capacities to implement them. Without the support of donor countries such as the United States 9, many decisions of the African Union find no way to implementation. An important ramification of the differences between the Government of Sudan and the international community vis-à-vis the composition of the force is that the capable troop contributing countries (TCCs) refrained from providing enabling assets (aviation, engineering, armoured personnel carriers, etc.) to UNAMID. There are various reasons behind such reluctance. First, the Sudanese government and the African Union supported the Mission while Western nations were in support of a proper UN force 10. Second, there were many indications that the Mission was going to fail in protecting civilians, and this made many countries decide not to provide advanced military equipment to it. In point of fact, it has become clear since 2009 that the Mission has become a source of stolen weapons for militias 11. Hijacked vehicles of the Mission have also contributed to strengthening pro-government and anti-government armed groups. Thus, the existence of the Mission does indirectly contribute to the insecurity situation in the region. Third, the Mission has to obtain the approval of the Sudanese government if there is a situation or a threat with regard to which it plans to take action that requires a field visit. The most recent example is the rape incidents of Tabit village in North Darfur, where Sudanese security forces prevented the Mission from entering the village right away. Tabit has just strengthened, once again, the sentiment that the vast majority of Darfuris have that the Mission is not carrying out its protection of civilians (POC) duties.
Why has the Mission itself become a target of attacks? Why is the government hindering its work? Many in Darfur believe the Sudanese government wants to force the Mission out of the region. The government does not want to see any presence for the United Nations in conflict areas, notwithstanding its poor performance, to prevent any reporting of human rights violations, one of the few things UN officials could do—one of UNAMID’s raisons d’être. In theory, as the Mission is spending large amounts of money in the region, the Sudanese government should be very interested in and supportive of the continuation of the Mission, but the “security” considerations of the government overshadow the economic ones. Practically speaking, there are no legal consequences for expelling UN officials, although international law does not give states and governments the right to declare them persona non grata 12. Reaction to forcing UN missions to leave by creating inhospitable conditions depends upon a decision from the Security Council, but divisions within the Council further weaken the already weak role of the UN in Sudan. The truth is that the community of nations today is not interested in exercising pressure on the Sudanese government 13.
It should be noted that an important factor that has complicated the task of UNAMID is the dichotomies of Darfuri society, which is ethnically and politically divided. The movements have since 2005 been fragmenting along ethnic and clan lines. These divisions reflect negatively on the security situation in the region and indeed on the implementation of the current peace document.
In response to the insecurity situation and UNAMID’s apparent failure to do anything substantial about it, the IDPs have taken their own initiatives to cope with this weak UN/AU presence. In some areas, especially in Central Darfur and West Darfur, they have negotiated deals with pro-government militias to allow them to cultivate their land and protect them. In consideration of that, the former give a portion of their harvested crops as a tax to the latter 14. In this war economy situation, the Mission is just a spectator! The IDPs are negotiating on their own initiative, and in some cases, they are encouraged and assisted by the Humanitarian Aid Commission. They try to return to their villages temporarily or permanently depending on the security situation in their areas of return. The temporary return takes place in areas where the displaced need to farm during the rainy season to support their families, as the rations given to them by international relief organizations are continuously decreasing. In places where there is security, or the IDPs believe it is better for them not to return to their previous camps, for the sake of maintaining or restoring their land, the return takes a permanent form—this mainly happens in West Darfur 15.
In a nutshell, UNAMID has, in my perspective, contributed to promoting human rights and peace culture in a heavily polarized and divided region. It has failed in protecting civilians, but also in protecting itself. The funds used to finance the Mission, could be better used in development projects in places such as El-Fasher, El-Geneina, Buram, and Riheed Elbirdi, to mention a few examples, where there is relative stability in Darfur. That the Mission is a failure, with respect to security, is not something new in the history of peacekeeping or peacemaking missions of the United Nations. The vast majority of such missions disappointed the populations they were created to protect. The distinguishing characteristic of UNAMID is the involvement of a regional organization in both its creation and administration. In better or ideal circumstances, that should have been a strengthening factor, but here it is a weakening factor. Realistically speaking, it is unfair to expect too much from a fledgling regional organization made up of governments whose majority of leaders try as much as possible to avoid criticizing one another, especially when there is an international dimension to a local conflict or situation. The International Organization and the AU are now forced to reduce the numbers of UNAMID’S staff and forces. On February 15 through February 18, 2015, UN and AU officials held meetings in Khartoum with Government of Sudan officials to discuss the eventual exit strategy of the Mission 16. Fortunately, the Security Council has decided to extend the mandate of the Mission until June 30, 2016 17. However, the Sudanese government is currently intensifying its efforts to ensure that an exit strategy is agreed on by a tripartite committee that was set up in February 2015. The committee consists of the United Nations, the African Union, and the Government of Sudan. It is my hope that the Mission will continue to operate until the situation in the region fully stabilizes. In the current circumstances, the existence of the Mission and its operation in Darfur, despite its flaws, is, no doubt, better than its departure.
The author is a doctoral student (Georgetown University Law Center), Washington, D.C., United States. He could be reached at: [email protected]. This piece was originally written for the Brian Urquhart Center for Peace Operations, International Peace Institute (IPI), New York City.