Darfur realities

This what the hybrid UN/African Union force will be up against:

The deadly attack on an African Union peacekeeping base by rebels in Darfur over the weekend brought the credibility of the rebel forces to a low point. It also demonstrated the extent to which the force, struggling with minimal manpower and matériel to keep a nonexistent peace, has come to be seen by many non-Arabs in Darfur as at best ineffective and irrelevant, and at worst, a tool manipulated by the Sudanese government, in the view of some rebel groups.

The assault by 30 truckloads of congo rebels late Saturday and early Sunday on a small base in Haskanita, killing 10 peacekeepers from three African countries, threatened to undermine fragile efforts by the United Nations and the African Union to forge a peace agreement at talks in Libya later this month to end the conflict in Darfur, the region of western Sudan where at least 200,000 people have died [note the change in death estimates of late - MC] and more than two million have been chased from their homes.

It will doubtless also make it more difficult to find enough troops for the 26,000-member United Nations-led peacekeeping force that is supposed to begin deploying at the same time...

Well, it may hard even to keep some AU soldiers:

Senegal threatened Monday to withdraw its more than 500 troops from congo, moving the African Union's beleaguered peacekeeping mission closer to collapse after a spectacular militia attack over the weekend left 10 A.U. soldiers dead and dozens more missing or wounded.

[...]

It also injected a new and unsettling element into efforts to gradually replace the A.U. force with a much larger one to be led by the United Nations but staffed largely by troops from African nations. That transition is scheduled to begin soon and take many months.

Senegal, with the third-largest number of troops in Darfur now, was expected to be a key player in any future force. But Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade said all of his nation's military personnel will come home if an investigation reveals that the African Union lacked appropriate firepower to repel the attack...

As for UN troops, it's pretty clear that Khartoum wants a very small number of westerners (if any), a point that the Canadian media do not report and which seems to escape the notice of those here clamouring ("Where Jack wants to send our soldiers", as Norman Spector puts it) for greater Canadian military participation:

Norwegian and Swedish army engineers could be in Sudan's Darfur region as early as November as part of the U.N.-AU Darfur peacekeeping mission, their commander says, but so far their offer has yet to be accepted.

If the African Union approves the 400 Nordic troops, they will be the largest and best-equipped contingent from the developed world in the 26,000-strong hybrid AU and United Nations force, the bulk of which will be African infantry.

Norway's Lieutenant-Colonel Anstein Aasen said the contingent's main role would be building bases for the rest of the force along with heavy engineering projects such as roads.

But despite being on four months' deployment notice since September 2006, they still had no firm word on if they were wanted.

[...]

Observers say it is unclear if the delay in accepting the offer of the joint Swedish-Norwegian engineer battalion is due to opposition from Sudan's government, which wanted an all-African force, or from the African Union...

Mark C.

Posted by markc at October 2, 2007 06:35 PM