FEATURE-AU force too weak to stop Darfur atrocities

By Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 1, 2005 (IPS) — Armed with a mandate to stop the widespread atrocities in the violence-prone western region of Darfur in Sudan, a militarily weak African Union (AU) monitoring force is finding itself weighed down by a shortage of troops, funds, logistical support and communications equipment.

African Union ceasefire monitor Maj. Panduleni Martin from Zambia, center, talks with Commander Abdul Waheed Saeed, center-left, who is in charge of a military unit calling themselves variously the Border Intelligence Division, Second Reconnaisance Brigade, or the Quick and the Horrible, also believed to form part of the Janjaweed militia, at the weekly animal market in Mistiria in North Darfur, Sudan, Tuesday, Oct 5, 2004.(AP)

To date, only about half of the 3,320 promised personnel — all of them from Africa — have arrived in Darfur, whose massive humanitarian crisis was described by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan last week as “little short of hell on earth.”

“The expanded AU force was promised in October (last year),” Adrian McIntyre of the international relief agency Oxfam, told IPS. “Every day they’re not deployed means another day that hundreds of thousands of civilians in Darfur remain vulnerable to violent attacks.”

Emira Woods, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, says the AU is woefully under-resourced. “It is as if the international community is setting up the AU to fail,” she said.

Liberia, a country of three million people, has the largest U.N. peacekeeping mission in the world, amounting to about 15,000 troops.

Meanwhile, the African Union has barely over 1,000 for a region the size of France. “This is unconscionable,” Woods told IPS.

Ambassador Baba Gana Kingibe, AU’s special representative in the Sudan, told the Security Council last month that every effort is being made to accelerate the current programme of full deployment of the total strength of 3,320 troops by the middle of April.

But he said he was expecting “continuing indispensable material and financial support from our partners” — especially the United States, the European Union, Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Germany, among others.

But the assistance apparently has been slow in coming — or not coming at all.

When he was in Europe last month, Annan told members of the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) that the AU is desperately in need of assistance. “Please, help,” Annan was quoted as saying.

“It wasn’t to take over from the African Union; it was to support the African Union (in Darfur),” U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard told reporters.

The AU force includes troops from several African countries in the region, including Nigeria and Rwanda, with additional troops from South Africa and Chad to join later.

In a statement released Monday, Oxfam said that “the world has failed to provide sufficient support needed to protect civilians in Darfur…Atrocities have been committed on massive scale and more suffering is being inflicted on a daily basis.”

At least 300,000 people are reported to have died in Darfur, with over two million displaced, since early 2003.

“We’ve seen that an AU presence helps to reduce threats of violence in the limited areas where they are deployed,” said Caroline Nursey, Oxfam’s regional director for the Horn of Africa.

“But the current AU mission needs more resources and personnel to do the job properly. A fully expanded AU mission in Darfur, including additional troops, cease-fire monitors and civilian police, must be deployed at once,” she added.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a spokesman for an international relief agency told IPS that it’s not necessarily true that African countries are reluctant to send troops (“although many troops would probably prefer to join a U.N. peackeeping force since salaries are better”).

The biggest problem seems to be logistical capacity and a lack of experienced personnel, he said. Some individual countries might be willing to send troops but lack the ability, and perhaps the funding, to recruit, train and deploy the right kind of people fast enough.

“And it’s not just troops that are needed: better management, planning and use of information to get the AU mission up to snuff. We’re told that there simply isn’t the administrative capacity in Addis Ababa (the headquarters of the AU) — not to mention at the field level — to manage a mission of the size/scope requires,” he added.

The AU also needs to overcome its pride and be willing to ask for help. The slogan “African solutions for African problems” is great, in principle, but only if the solutions available stand a chance of addressing the scale of the problem, he said.

Asked what’s needed, Woods said, first and foremost, financial support to the AU. She pointed out that the EU and the United States have given some minimal funding, yet funds promised to date fall far short of what is needed.

The administration of President George W. Bush had an excellent opportunity to help bring justice to Darfur by allotting funds for the African Union in the supplemental budget put forward last month, she said.

Yet the bulk of U.S. funds are being directed to southern Sudan; reimbursing accounts of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID); reimbursing Title II food aid; and contributing to a proposed Sudan War Crimes tribunal by the United States, which vehemently opposes referring atrocities in Darfur to the Hague-based International Criminal Court.

The limited funds allocated for support to African Union peacekeeping have been carved up with significant portions remaining in the United States through the use of private military contractors like Pacific Architects and Engineers, Woods said.

These contractors not only drain scarce resources but also, in the case of Darfur as elsewhere, have been over-priced, inefficient and late to deliver contract items.

The AU needs logistical support for a region that has few paved roads; aerial operations to prevent the unending government bombardments; transport and logistics to accommodate a full force; as well as satellite and other technical support to protect civilians.

“The international community seems unwilling to deliver these key resources,” Woods said. She also said that the AU mission must eventually be handed to a U.N. force that is able to establish a more permanent presence in Darfur, as it soon will in southern Sudan.

Last week, Annan told the Security Council that the proposed 10,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping force in southern Sudan, which will monitor a peace agreement that followed a 21-year-old civil war, will cost about one billion dollars in the first year of operation.

But this force will not be involved in any peacekeeping mission in Darfur in western Sudan.

Meanwhile, in a report released last month, the New York-based Human Rights Watch said that that eyewitnesses in south Darfur asserted that government-backed Janjaweed militias attacked villages and singled out young women and girls for rape.

Male relatives who protested were beaten, stripped naked, tied to trees and forced to watch the rape of the women and girls. In some cases, HRW said, the men were then branded with a hot knife as a mark of their humiliation.

These reports of rapes, torture and mutilation by government-backed militias underscore how the Security Council must take urgent action to protect civilians and punish the perpetrators, HRW said.

But the 15-member Security Council has been dragging its feet over tough new sanctions both on the Sudanese government and the militias primarily because some of the veto-wielding members are keen on protecting their political, economic and military interests.

Woods said the international community has chosen instead to placate the Sudanese government, threatening sanctions month after month, yet not backing these threats with any action.

Last year, a move to impose sanctions on Sudan generated reservations from at least four members of the Security Council: China, Russia, Pakistan and Algeria.

Both China and Russia have strong economic and military interests in Sudan. Sudan, which produces about 250,000 barrels of oil per day, has contracted to sell some of it to China. Both China and Russia are also major arms suppliers to Sudan.

The frontline fighter planes in the Sudanese air force include Russian MiG-23s and Chinese Shenyang MiG-17s. Sudan also has Chinese-made Silkworm missiles and battle tanks, along with Russian-made armored combat vehicles.