Darfur peacekeeping force at risk of failing, already

By Lydia Polgreen

Sunday, March 23, 2008
ABU SUROUJ, Sudan: As Darfur smolders in the aftermath of a new government offensive, a long-sought peacekeeping force, expected to be the world's largest, is in danger of failing even before it begins its mission because of bureaucratic delays, stonewalling by the Sudanese government and reluctance from troop-contributing countries to send peacekeeping forces into an active conflict.

The force, which officially took over from an overstretched and exhausted African Union force in Darfur on Jan. 1, has just over 9,000 of an expected 26,000 soldiers and police officers, and will not fully deploy until the end of the year, United Nation officials said.

Even the troops that are in place, the old African Union force plus two other battalions, lack essential equipment - like sufficient armored personnel carriers and helicopters - to carry out even the most rudimentary of peacekeeping tasks. Some even had to buy their own paint to turn their green helmets United Nations blue, peacekeepers here said.

The peacekeepers' work is more essential than ever. At least 30,000 people were displaced last month as the government and its allied militias fought to retake territory held by rebel groups fighting in the region, said United Nations human rights officials.

For weeks after the attacks, many of the displaced were hiding in the bush nearby or living in the open along the volatile border between Sudan and Chad, inaccessible to aid workers. Most wanted to return to their scorched villages and rebuild but did not feel safe from roaming bandits and militias.

This month, a week spent with the peacekeeping troops based here at the headquarters of Sector West, a wind-blown outpost at the heart of the recent violence, revealed a force struggling mightily to do better than its much-maligned predecessor, but with little new manpower or equipment.

Despite this, the force is managing to project a greater sense of security for the tens of thousands of vulnerable civilians in the vast territory it covers, mounting night patrols in displaced people's camps and long-range patrols to the areas hardest hit by fighting.

But those small gains are fragile, and if more troops do not arrive soon the force will be written off as being as ineffective and compromised as the one that preceded it.

"We really don't have much time to prove we can do better," said Brigadier General Balla Keita, commander of the roughly 2,000 troops in West Darfur, just one-third of the expected total for the area. "God gave the prophets the ability to achieve miracles so that people would believe. So people here will believe when they see improvements on the ground. And that cannot wait for more troops, we need to do better with what we have."

The deployment of the biggest peacekeeping force in modern history in one of the most remote, hostile and forbidding corners of the globe was bound to be a logistical nightmare. Darfur is landlocked, water is scarce, the roads are rutted tracks crossed by the mud and sand traps of dry riverbeds.

But those problems pale in comparison with the diplomatic and political struggles the mission faces.

When previous large missions were organized in Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the central governments in those countries had collapsed or were so weak that they had little choice but to accept peacekeepers on their territory. But the government of Sudan agreed to accept United Nations-led peacekeepers in Darfur only after a long diplomatic struggle and under a great deal of pressure.

The progress to get the mission in place has been slow, and much of the blame for this has been placed at the feet of the Sudanese government. For months after the United Nations Security Council approved the force, Sudan insisted on limits on the force's makeup and independence, demanding the power to dictate which countries contributed troops, to shut down the force's communication systems when the government carried out offensives and to restrict the movements of peacekeepers at night.

Ultimately, the government signed a compromise with the United Nations that allowed the force to operate, but Sudan was successful in insisting that the vast majority of troops come from African countries, and will be supplemented by soldiers from other regions only if suitable African troops cannot be found.

That stipulation has delayed the force's mission, because African armies are not able to deploy quickly with the equipment and training to meet stringent UN standards, United Nations officials and Western diplomats said.

Sudanese government officials have argued that African troops are up to the job and that non-African troops would be seen as neocolonial interlopers.

The problems have raised fears that the United Nations force would suffer the same fate as the African Union force, which was hobbled from the start by a weak mandate, which was to observe a cease-fire, not protect civilians.

The thousands of troops deployed by Rwanda, Nigeria, Senegal and other nations were mainly there to protect the military observers, who were unarmed, and the unarmed civilian police, whose job was to guard the camps for the internally displaced people.

But the original cease-fire was quickly violated and subsequent agreements failed to produce peace. The African troops soon were seen, perhaps unfairly, as useless note-takers who visited the scene of atrocities long after the fact, gathering testimony that seemed to disappear into a bureaucratic black hole.

All of that has changed with the new hybrid mission. The force has a robust mandate to protect civilians. But that is easier said than done, said Major Sani Abdullahi, the man in charge of the single company charged with fending off roaming militias and rebels to protect tens of thousands of displaced villagers in nearly a dozen camps, along with thousands more vulnerable residents of remote villages.

It is unclear how exactly the deployment of troops in Darfur can be speeded up. Western activists involved in the Darfur issue have demanded that China, Sudan's main trading partner and one of its weapons' suppliers, pressure Sudan to allow the troops to deploy quickly. While some of the blame for the delay has been placed in the Sudanese government, United Nations requirements that the troops meet a certain standard have also slowed the force, according to diplomats and political analysts.

The deployment "is not principally being delayed by the Sudanese government," said one senior Western diplomat in Khartoum, Sudan's capital, who is not authorized to speak publicly. Other problems, like the United Nations bureaucracy and the reluctance of troop-contributing countries, were as much to blame, the diplomat said.

There is certainly no lack of money. Rodolphe Adada, the mission's civilian chief, said the force had a budget of $1.7 billion. What it needs is troops and equipment, and neither has been easy to get. More pressure on the Sudanese government, he said, would not help matters.

Some countries are reluctant to commit troops in an active conflict with no peace agreement or even a working cease-fire. "The international community had two choices - get a peace accord and deploy the mission after, or send the mission anyway," Adada said. "It chose the latter. But how do you keep the peace when there is no peace to keep?"