Bigger Darfur force would need funds: AU

By Tsegaye Tadesse

ADDIS ABABA, Nov 5 (Reuters) – The African Union (AU) lacks the funds to expand its peace force in Darfur, the 53-nation body said on Friday in a reply to a U.N. appeal for more troops.

A Rwandan soldier operating under the Africa Union mandate plays with children outside the AU base in Kab Kabiya, north west of El-Fasher, Sudan.

The pan-African group added that even its existing peace monitoring operation in the Sudanese region was short of money.

The AU was responding to an appeal for more soldiers made by Jan Pronk, the U.N. envoy for Darfur, who said Darfur could fall into anarchy unless the U.N. Security Council took bold action and thousands of AU troops arrived quickly.

“The AU has no problem in sending more troops,” AU spokesman Assane Ba told Reuters. “But it has made it clear to the donors and international organisations that it requires massive financial and logistical assistance from those quarters who are calling for deployment of more than the envisaged 3,000 troops.”

Pronk said the AU, which has about 1,000 troops and monitors in Darfur, needed to send far more than the 4,000 planned for a real military operation but without any direct fighting.

“We have to speed up and enlarge the AU. They have to be everywhere where there is a lack of safety and a lack of security,” he said in New York on Thursday. “We need a military operation, not just monitoring, but to be there.”

Some 70,000 people are estimated to have died in Darfur since March and more than 1.5 million have been driven from their homes into camps.

In early 2003, two African rebel groups revolted against what they said was unjust treatment by Khartoum and Arab nomads over land and water resources. Arab militia, known as Janjaweed, helped the government retaliate and raped, killed and pillaged mainly African villagers.

Speaking at the U.N. Security Council and a news conference, Pronk said the Council, which plans to visit Nairobi on Nov. 18 and 19, had to put pressure on all the parties or “the United Nations would have no credibility.”

Several diplomats and U.N. sources in New York said privately the AU might not be able to mount any additional security operation alone.

Ba, speaking at AU headquarters in Addis Ababa, said the AU had problems with funding and logistics.

“Organisations like the U.N. must come up with the required funds and the logistics before they made such statements,” he said of Pronk’s appeal. “They know the capacity of AU, and their statements for more troops are useless unless they are supported with action.”

“The international community did not meet the $221 million budget required to deploy the over 3,000 troops. What we have generated in terms of pledges and assistance so far stands at only $114.9 million.”