Now the UN has finally announced the deployment of some 26,000 troops in Darfur. It took a long, long time coming, for the defenceless victims, including tens of thousands of women and children. One member of the Vanguard team who made his voice heard in the debate on the crisis is General Editor, Abayomi Charles Roberts(photo). He had a poem on our web site (African Union: AU is for Gold). More insightful, Roberts made the following comments on an online debate nearly a year ago:
Crisis in Sudan
Introduction
The intractable violence in Sudan’s Darfur region has led to an international movement aimed at ending the suffering.
One strong position, represented in a guest column - "We Saved Europeans. Why Not Africans?" - on allafrica.com is that the United Nations must send troops now, despite Sudan’s rejection of that option. Another view is that strengthening the existing Africa Union force and extending its mandate is the most urgent priority.
CNN’s Jeff Koinange, in Sudan, had to say, in a recent blog (http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/anderson.cooper.360/blog/), about the plight of the AU troops: "The United Nation’s top diplomat in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, told us that some of the units have to cook their own food. How are you supposed to keep the peace when you’re worrying whose turn it is to cook? They’re also seriously under-equipped in terms of firepower. And the few helicopters they have don’t even have enough fuel to fly troops in and out of difficult-to-reach places, the UN’s top man told us...The bottom line, their commander told me: He needs twice as many troops, plenty of logistics support, lots of hardware and free access to the air, something the Sudanese government is completely opposed to. And to think that these are the soldiers that stand in the way of Africa’s second genocide in a little over a decade. They don’t appear to stand a chance."
What do you think? Should both approaches be pursued? Or neither? Is there an international responsibility to protect civilians caught in conflict? If the UN acts in defiance of a member state, what kind of precedent is set? What might be the implications? If no effective action is taken, how will history judge us?
ACR’s Comments:
I’d say both options, in reversed order.
First reinforce (personnel/equipment)the AU force now while the UN prepares to send troops to complement.
Peace keeping, by international convention, requires consent from the warring parties. So the UN might have to modify/clarify its mandate before sending in troops.
Peacekeeping or peace-enforcement? That was what happened in Sierra Leone where the West African(ECOMOG) force was gradually replaced by a bigger UN contingent. It succeeded in stopping the fighting.
Also, most of the ECOMOG soldiers simply switched to Blue berets as they were later absorbed into the UN-mandate, UNAMSIL.
Still, in neighbouring Liberia, where ECOMOG was first deployed, They were enforcers who "came in shooting," to quote Charles Taylor on BBC radio that August in 1990.
It turned out to be not so successful: Samuel Doe was captured, tortured and killed as ECOMOG stood by; Charles Taylor eventually reached the capital, Monrovia, and forced an election in 1997 which he contested and was declared winner.
These are costly lessons which make me suggest an AU/UN collaboration, with the latter taking over gradually for clarity of command structure..
I support the second (UN)option because it gives the crisis the treatment it deserves: a humanitarian crisis which concerns the whole world.
The goal here is to save lives; not so much to feed egos or worry about who takes credit, AU or UN.
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