Adopt-a-Peacekeeper
By Nicholas Thompson, The Boston Globe
March 6, 2005 — A group OF students at Swarthmore, the liberal arts college in Pennsylvania founded by Quakers in 1864, believe they have found a way to help stop what is perhaps the worst humanitarian crisis since the Rwandan genocide 11 years ago: pass around the hat for a coalition of African soldiers.
Last November, the students started the Genocide Intervention Fund (GIF) with the goal of raising money from private citizens to support the African Union troops currently trying to bring peace to Darfur, the region of Western Sudan where a nomadic Arab militia closely linked to the Sudanese government has terrorized black Africans, causing the death of as many as 300,000 civilians and displacing more than 2 million.
Swarthmore senior Mark Hanis, the organization’s president, said most of GIF’s work has involved ”lots of all-nighters in front of Google, emailing people in the thousands”-academics, activists, political figures, anyone the students thought might be likely to support GIF’s cause. So far GIF has won sponsorship from six congressmen, several top Africa officials from the Clinton administration, and Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, the commander of the UN mission in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide.
The Swarthmore students have also organized a coalition that they say includes 70 other universities and high schools. ”They have that student fire that could result in this becoming something big,” said Gregory Stanton, president of the Washington-based Genocide Watch.
GIF’s main attraction is giving ordinary citizens a tangible way to help prevent genocide. Rather than waiting for governments to act (or counting on indirect measures like campaigns to divest from companies doing business in Sudan), a donation to GIF can buy a walkie-talkie for a peacekeeper who might need to call in support to fend off a massacre.
”It’s the extreme edge of humanitarian work,” said Gayle Smith, the former senior director of African affairs at the National Security Council under Clinton, now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, who is setting up the contract and mechanism for transferring the money to the African Union troops.
So far, however, GIF has earned more praise than money. Up until the start of a major fundraising drive a week ago, the students had raised only $3,000. They say they have more than doubled that number since the drive began-but that’s still barely a drop in the bucket compared with the $200 million annual budget of the AU mission in Darfur.
But dollars aren’t necessarily the point, which may simply be to help prod the United States government to act. Ricken Patel, a fellow at Res Publica, a group that works to support refugees in Darfur, said the students’ work could well ”be effective in shaming governments to ante up.”
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Still, is funding a military force for a foreign intervention, even with the best of humanitarian intentions, really the business of private citizens?
”I question their street-smarts,” said Chester Crocker, assistant secretary of state for African affairs during the Reagan administration, pointing out that the students face challenges ensuring oversight of where their money goes. Crocker also noted that opposition to action in Sudan doesn’t come from the United States but from ”the many other UN member states who prefer to respect Sudan’s sovereignty and who resist Western humanitarian intervention.”
There’s also the issue of the AU troops themselves. Organizations like the US Army and the United Nations have long-established rules and procedures to deal with abuses committed by soldiers. But according to Deborah Avant, a professor at George Washington University, the African Union doesn’t have the same quality of oversight. Avant points out that much of the AU force in Darfur is made up of troops from Nigeria, a country with serious corruption and difficulties regulating troops inside its own borders, much less those involved in peacekeeping abroad. (In operations in Sierra Leone and Liberia in the 1990s, Nigerian peacekeepers committed vast plunder and abuses.) In Darfur, Avant said, ”All the problems that come with Nigerian troops will be prevalent, only more so.”
The Swarthmore students recognize that danger, and the Genocide Intervention Fund insists that its money will not go toward buying weapons. According to Mark Hanis, this has been an important element in winning support from liberals with a gut dislike of armed action.
But the logic of the group, if taken further, raises a possibility that might be even more disturbing to peace activists. If stopping genocide is important enough that it’s worth entrusting to the not entirely reliable or accountable AU force, why not go all the way and support a group of mercenaries?
Mercenary groups, often composed of ex-soldiers from industrialized nations, can be extremely well-trained and effective. In 1995, the government of Sierra Leone hired mercenaries from a firm called Executive Outcomes to join government soldiers in fighting insurgents who were on the verge of winning a civil war. Within a month, the mercenary force had halted the war. (The group left when its contract expired, and the war restarted.)
There are legal challenges to hiring mercenaries given that international law-particularly the UN’s International Convention Against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries-prevents private soldiers from working to overthrow foreign governments.
But the Department of Defense spends billions of dollars annually for private security firms that assist the military in Iraq and elsewhere, though they are prohibited by US military regulations from engaging in most combat operations. According to Patel, one mercenary group offered to help his organization in protecting humanitarian relief supplies brought to Darfur.
The Swarthmore students, for their part, oppose funding mercenaries on practical grounds. ”If a mercenary army comes in, fights, stops the atrocities, and then pulls out, then that doesn’t solve the problem,” said Hanis.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that the AU troops are going to stay until the situation has stabilized. But to the Swarthmore students, that prospect is less important than the conversation they hope to spark about what the richest nation on earth can do to stop horrific slaughter in the world’s poorest corners.
”If we raise one dollar,” Hanis said, ”it makes people think.”
Nicholas Thompson is a senior editor at Legal Affairs.