UN: Sudan obstructs peace force deployment to Darfur

Dec 27, 2007, 4:04 GMT

New York - On the eve of taking over difficult duties in Darfur, the United Nations said that Khartoum was obstructing the deployment of a UN-African Union joint peacekeeping force that would contribute to peace in Sudan's troubled region.

The UN-African Union Mission in Darfur, known by its acronym UNAMID, will take over Monday from an African force to try its utmost to protect civilians, facilitate humanitarian aid operations and create an environment for peace to take root.

But on its first day at work, the joint force will have just over 9,000 military personnel instead of the authorized strength of 20,000 troops, more than 6,000 police and an additional significant civilian component.

Once fully deployed, which will take months, UNAMID will be the largest peacekeeping operation in the world.

The ethnic war since 2003 in Darfur has killed more than 300,000 people and produced more than 2 million refugees. The Khartoum-backed Arab militias and some African rebel groups have continued fighting despite peace accords and renewed UN-African Union led negotiations in Sirte, Libya.

The UN is not alone in blaming the Sudanese government for setting up the hybrid force to fail in Darfur. A group of 35 non-governmental organizations had warned that Khartoum was actively obstructing the deployment of the force.

But the UN has shown impatience in dealing with Khartoum. It said the UN Security Council received an agreement as far back as June from Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir to accept UNAMID 'without preconditions.'

'And yet the deployment of UNAMID is still facing government obstruction with respect to the force composition and bureaucratic impediments imposed by the Sudanese authorities,' the UN said in a background document.

It said the impediments threatened the deployment and detract the hybrid force from its 'potential effectiveness.'

'The persistence of these impediments cannot be attributed to a lack of consultation,' the document said.

The UN has criticized Khartoum for being selective in accepting nationalities of military personnel and deciding which countries should provide the much-needed logistical and transport facilities.

Khartoum had given its preference to African personnel only but has had to accept non-African forces. It has rejected troops from Nepal, Nordic engineers and an infantry battalion from Thailand.

The UN has been calling on governments to provide helicopters to assist UNAMID, but so far no country in the world has offered a single helicopter.

The United States has offered neither troops nor aircraft, and the UN has not asked for US contributions, knowing that Khartoum would surely object to a US presence in Sudan.

The document said that UNAMID continues to face shortfalls in military personnel generation and lacks critical ground and aerial transportation.

The non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which include major human-rights and relief organizations such as Human Rights Watch, the Save Darfur Coalition and Physicians for Human Rights, said that UNAMID is heading for failure because of what the UN called impediments.

The NGOs accused Khartoum of withholding allocation of land and resources for UNAMID bases.

'Sudan is also attempting to hamstring the force once it is deployed by inserting completely unacceptable conditions into the 'status of forces agreement,' including the right to suspend UNAMID's communications network in the case of government security operations,' the NGOs said in a report.

It said Sudan has not yet agreed to UN-AU night flights.

The status of forces agreement usually paves the way for a UN force to be deployed in any country.

'Sudan is saying 'yes' and then doing everything in its power to obstruct and undermine the hybrid force,' said Steve Crawshaw, UN advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. 'The Security Council has responded to this defiance with hand-wringing but nothing more. What will it take to make the Security Council act on Darfur?'

Amjad Atallah of the Save Darfur Coalition said: 'It's intolerable that the government of Sudan is trying to obstruct the force. But it's also inexcusable that the international community continues to stubbornly refuse to provide the helicopters UNAMID so desperately needs.'