May 31, 2006
Darfur: A way to deal with it that will never be considered
Outsourcing to mercenaries.
SO THE UNITED STATES has brokered a cease-fire among the warring factions in Darfur, and the U.N. Security Council has authorized the deployment of a peacekeeping force. To anyone blissfully unfamiliar with history, this sounds like a decisive step that will finally end the violence that has left at least 200,000 dead and 2 million homeless.
Alas, this is not the first cease-fire agreement in Darfur. An accord was reached in 2004 and was immediately violated. There is no reason to think that the current treaty will fare any better, especially because one of the main Darfur rebel groups has refused to sign it.
Pieces of paper, no matter how promising, require power in order to be enforced. The question is: Who will provide that power in Darfur?..
If you listen to the bloviators at Turtle Bay, salvation will come from the deployment of a larger corps of blue helmets. If only. What is there in the history of United Nations peacekeepers that gives anyone any confidence that they can stop a determined adversary?
The odds are much greater that U.N. representatives will instead be taken as hostages by bloodthirsty thugs, as happened in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995 and in Sierra Leone five years later. Or that, rather than protecting the people, the peacekeepers will prey on them — as allegedly has happened in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and Congo, all places where blue helmets have been accused of a horrifying litany of sexual abuses, including pedophilia, rape and prostitution...
If the so-called civilization nations of the world were serious about ending what the U.S. government has described as genocide, they would not fob off the job on the U.N. They would send their own troops. But of course they're not serious. At least not that serious [Sen. Dallaire, Keith Martin, M.P, Jack Layton et al. take note]...
...Send a private army. A number of commercial security firms such as Blackwater USA are willing, for the right price, to send their own forces, made up in large part of veterans of Western militaries, to stop the genocide.
We know from experience that such private units would be far more effective than any U.N. peacekeepers. In the 1990s, the South African firm Executive Outcomes and the British firm Sandline made quick work of rebel movements in Angola and Sierra Leone...
Yet this solution is deemed unacceptable by the moral giants who run the United Nations. They claim that it is objectionable to employ — sniff — mercenaries. More objectionable, it seems, than passing empty resolutions, sending ineffectual peacekeeping forces and letting genocide continue.
Update: At least food rations for refugees will be increased substantially, though not enough. Here Canada is actually doing something it can usefully do. Why is this sort of thing not the focus of those demanding we "do something", rather than silly calls for the Canadian Forces to put significant numbers of "boots on the ground"? Could it be that they simply don't want those boots in Afstan?
...
Emergency cash donations from Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia allowed the UN's World Food Program to increase the ration to 1,770 calories a day from 1,050 calories, WFP executive director James Morris said yesterday...
Mark C.
Posted by markc at May 31, 2006 04:43 PM