Canadian PM vows to ease Darfur’s suffering
By PAUL KORING, The Globe and Mail
BRUSSELS, Feb 23, 2005 — Canada will pledge “whatever is required” to a robust peacekeeping force being considered by the United Nations Security Council for Sudan’s strife-torn Darfur region, Prime Minister Paul Martin said Tuesday.
In an unexpected and passionate statement after a NATO summit that largely ignored African security issues, Mr. Martin acknowledged that African Union efforts to deploy effective peacekeeping units into the region have failed and that more is needed.
“The humanitarian crisis remains,” Mr. Martin told reporters in Brussels after a NATO summit intended to patch up rifts in the alliance over President George W. Bush’s controversial war to topple the former Iraqi regime headed by Saddam Hussein.
A senior official said it was too early to define possible Canadian military roles in any Sudan peacekeeping force but said the most serious needs were for logistics support and training.
Mr. Martin said Darfur had been a key element of his bilateral discussions with Britain’s Prime Minister and that he intended to push the issue in talks later this week with the UN Secretary General.
“We will do whatever – and that’s the point I made to Tony Blair and it is the point I will be making to Kofi Annan later in the week – that we will do whatever is required but we cannot simply sit by and watch what is happening in Darfur continue,” Mr. Martin said.
The UN is considering a peacekeeping force of up to 10,000 troops to underpin a shaky ceasefire in the long-running north-south civil war in Sudan. The pact ending that conflict is separate from the brutal and repeated, waves of ethnic cleansing and terror, including systemic rape and mass murder that many regard as a genocide in Sudan’s remote western Darfur region.
Roving armed bands of Arab militias, known as Janjaweed, continued to loot, burn, rape and pillage in Darfur. Estimates of the death toll over the last two years range up to 75,000 while hundreds of thousands have fled.
It remains uncertain whether a Security Council resolution establishing a peacekeeping force can be extended to provide a mandate that covers intervention in Darfur.
The government in Khartoum has adamantly opposed any significant presence of foreign forces in its remote Darfur region. The limited number of African Union ill-trained, ill-equipped and often ill-paid troops, has so far failed to quell the violence.
Although the African Union has sent about 1,400 troops to Darfur – an area larger than Ontario – the mission is now widely admitted to be beyond the limited ability and experience of the force.