New UN force for South Sudan will skirt Darfur crisis

By Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 8, 2005 (IPS) — Over the next six months, the United Nations is planning to deploy a new 10,000-strong military force to monitor the recently concluded peace agreement in Sudan, which brought to an end the 21-year-old civil war between north and south.

Rebels fromt the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) wait in their base in Gellab, North Darfur, Sudan. (AFP).

The current African Union (AU) monitoring force in Darfur, western Sudan — which is expected to increase from about 900 to 4,000 — is “not big enough” and its “deployment too slow,” Jan Pronk, U.N. special representative for Sudan, told the Security Council Tuesday.

Pronk said there was a need for “a robust third-party force” to maintain the peace in war-devastated Sudan. But the new U.N. force is to be based mostly in southern, not western Sudan.

The conflict, between the government of Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), formally ended with the signing of a peace agreement in early January this year.

In a report to the Security Council, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the peace agreement puts an end to “one of Africa’s longest and most intractable wars, during which more than two million people were killed, four million were uprooted, and some 600,000 were forced to seek shelter beyond Sudan’s borders as refugees.”

“The Security Council will be ready to establish a full-fledged peacekeeping operation (in Sudan) in order to implement the north-south peace agreement,” Ambassador Joel Adechi of Benin, chairman of the Security Council, told delegates.

Of the 16 U.N. peacekeeping operations currently in force, seven are in Africa: in Western Sahara, Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire and Burundi.

Meanwhile, Pronk painted a “dismal picture” of the situation in the Darfur region of Sudan where an estimated 400,000 Sudanese have been killed in ethnic violence.

Ann-Louise Colgan of the Washington-based Africa Action told IPS that while the successful implementation of the peace accord is very important for Sudan’s future, such a huge peacekeeping force “is needed far more urgently right now to save lives in Darfur.”

“Some commentators have suggested that the deployment of a 10,000-strong peacekeeping force to southern Sudan might ultimately provide ‘peacekeeping by stealth’ for Darfur, noting that once these troops are in place in Sudan, it may later be possible to re-deploy them to meet the urgent needs in Darfur,” she said.

But this does little to help the people of Darfur in the immediate term. “It is shameful that the international community is not responding more directly and forcefully to the genocide in Darfur,” Colgan said.

She also pointed out that a much larger and more robust force is needed in Darfur than what the current African Union presence provides.

“The AU troops on the ground right now lack the troop strength, the logistical capacity and the mandate to protect the huge numbers of displaced and vulnerable civilians in Darfur,” she added.

Pronk said that pressure by the international community and the presence of the AU had had some effect on Darfur, “but not enough.”

“The conflict in Darfur was very complicated, with various dimensions,” he explained.

It was more than a civil war, he said, because the conflict encompassed an economic struggle, with environmental impacts. “The (Janjaweed) militias were strong and well-organised. And there were forces in Sudan– not in the government, but still powerful — that were capable of spreading terror on the ground,” he added.

Addressing the Security Council Tuesday, the leader of the SPLM John Garang said that having concluded its own peace accord with the government, his rebel movement was confident that this would enhance the chances for a lasting solution to the Darfur conflict as well.

“However,” he warned, “the Janjaweed militia must be reined in and eventually brought to justice after the achievement of a solution.” The SPLM stood ready to offer assistance.

In his report to the Security Council, Annan said that despite several rounds of peace talks, “the Darfur political process has not succeeded so far in bearing the hoped-for fruits.”

“This is due mainly to the complexities of the crisis in Darfur, the lack of confidence between the parties, fuelled by the continuous violations of the cease-fire and compounded by both parties succumbing to the temptation of improving their military and political positions before moving to the critical phase of the negotiation,” Annan said.

A U.N. commission on Darfur, which released a report last week, concluded that the crimes being committed in Darfur were no less serious than genocide.

The 15-member Security Council is divided on how it should deal with the atrocities being committed in Darfur.

The U.N. commission “strongly” recommended that the situation in Darfur be referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, which is mandated to try cases involving war crimes and genocide.

But the United States, which has remained opposed to the very creation of the ICC, wants a separate U.N. war crimes tribunal in Tanzania to deal with the crimes in Darfur.