Darfur seems to be an inexhaustible source of bad news. The latest is that it will take much of this year before the planned 28,000 joint UN-AU force (UNAMID) can be deployed. Meanwhile, though UN negotiators are putting a brave face on it, talks with the Sudanese authorities on the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) are dragging out —— and this makes everything dangerous.
Khartoum has rejected any non-African contingents. While at one level it is easy to understand why Sudan would be reluctant to have Western troops within UNAMID, its insistence on exclusively African troops looks thoroughly contrary. If the AU was unable to put together sufficient forces to make its original mission successful, how can the same countries now be expected to furnish soldiers for what is supposed to be the UN’s largest-ever peacekeeping force? Why shouldn’t the Omar Bashir administration welcome contingents from elsewhere in the world, particularly from Asia and the Indian Subcontinent?
In addition, the SOFA terms already reached preclude permanent communications for UNAMID and ban night flights. For the force to successfully cover an area larger than France without such rights seems unrealistic. A nighttime assault by rebels or militiamen on a UNAMID position or on each other could not even be reported, let alone responded to until daylight. This seems absurd. African governments still thinking about committing troops to UNAMID will very rightly conclude that they are going to be putting their servicemen in harm’s way without, at times, an adequate and standard level of protection and support.
Meanwhile, nothing gets better in Darfur. After five years of agony in which 2.2 million people have been turned into refugees by the violence, the communities from whom the rebels draw their support and recruits are sinking into despair and anger. Discipline among different rebel groups is breaking down. Refugee camps are reportedly awash with weapons. Time and again in Third World civil conflicts, we have seen how the man with the gun becomes top dog, to the exclusion of the cause against which he is supposedly rebelling and to the detriment of the safety and rights of the people he is supposed to be “protecting”.
Unless an effective international policing action can be mounted now, the lawlessness will spiral out of control and the plight of all the people of Darfur will fall to even lower and more unspeakable levels. With every passing day on which no serious UNAMID presence arrives, the job of the force, when it finally becomes fully operational, will be that much more difficult.
It seems inconceivable that Khartoum cannot see this. This was a rebellion that began simply because the Sudanese of Darfur felt that they were being totally neglected by the central government. That neglect seems still a part of the government’s actions. Had it addressed the issue with the same statesmanship it used with the rebel South, tragedy could have been averted. Now the administration seems intent only on making the tragedy worse.
