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POLITICS: U.N.’s Darfur Force Left Stranded, Critics Say

Omid Memarian

UNITED NATIONS, Jul 31 2008 (IPS) - As the U.N. Security Council debated the wording of a resolution extending the peacekeeping force in Darfur, Sudan for another year, a coalition of human rights groups and NGOs criticised the world body and the international community for failing to back up the mission with basic equipment.

Wrangling over the resolution continued Thursday as diplomats considered delaying a potential indictment of Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmad Al-Bashir by The Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC), whose chief prosecutor earlier this month presented evidence of his role in war crimes and genocide in Darfur.

“It is reflective of the failure of political will across the board on everything that has to do with Darfur and Sudan,” said Amjad Atallah, senior director of international policy and advocacy for the Save Darfur Coalition, which released a report this week on the persistent logistical challenges facing the U.N. mission in the troubled region.

A year ago Thursday, the Security Council voted unanimously to deploy U.N. peacekeepers under the auspices of the joint U.N.-African Union Hybrid Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) to protect civilians there. This vote, which came after negotiations with the Sudanese government, raised hopes that after four years of mass killings and displacements, the international community would finally live up to its responsibility to protect millions of Darfur residents driven from their homes by conflict.

However, as of June this year, the UNAMID troop level was still at only 11,359 personnel, far below the target operational force of 26,000. And of the 18 transport helicopters required by the force, not a single one has yet been offered by U.N. member states. This compares to an estimated 350 such helicopters in use in Iraq, activists say.

The report, titled “Grounded; The International Community’s Betrayal of UNAMID”, focuses on the failure of troop-contributing countries to provide helicopters for UNAMID to enhance its mobility and preparedness. It sets out for the first time which states have the necessary helicopters and estimates how many are available for deployment to Darfur.

It identifies a number of countries – including the Czech Republic, India, Italy, Romania, Spain and Ukraine – that have large numbers of helicopters that meet the required specifications and are not in mission rotation elsewhere. Many of these helicopters are gathering dust in hangars when they could be saving lives in Darfur, the report charges.

Thomas Withington, an international aviation expert and author of the report, said in a conference call with reporters Wednesday that helicopters represent a very simple and essential concept – mobility. “It means a way of responding timely to incidents as they occur around the Darfur region, and the troops can respond rapidly to incidents when they are developing,” he said.

Sudan’s Darfur region covers an area of some 493,180 square kilometers – roughly the size of France.

“It is becoming very difficult to help Darfuris on the ground, who are suffering from continual attacks,” he noted.

Withington said that helicopters are also important in terms of casualty evacuation. “People who are familiar with operations in Iraq and Afghanistan would know that the lives of soldiers and civilians and chances of surviving from injuries improve dramatically [with access to helicopters],” he said.

Since the conflict broke out in February 2003, the U.N. estimates that as many as 400,000 people have been killed and another 2.5 million displaced from their homes. Entire villages have been destroyed, and thousands of women and girls raped.

“The member states of the Security Council, and especially the P5 [Britain, France, Russia, China and the U.S.] have authorised the ICC to investigate the killing in Sudan, they’ve authorised the hybrid protection force, they’ve authorised Ambassador Salim to launch a peace process that would conclude with an agreement for Sudan,” said Atallah.

“In each case, however, when required to provide back-up efforts, it failed, and the failure to provide helicopters has direct consequences for the people on the ground and for the peacekeepers,” he said.

“It’s now seven months since the force was operational,” he said. “No heavy lift helicopters have been transferred or provided making it impossible for the force to be mobile, confront aggression or even defend itself,” Atallah added.

“Since January first, according to the secretary general, 190,000 Darfuris have been displaced, and nine people have lost their lives,” he said. “From the perspective of the coalition, it is outrageous that the members of the Security Council send troops into a conflict zone without the minimum of the equipment needed to protect themselves.”

The report identifies more than 20 countries with surplus aircraft that could be made available for the mission, and notes that NATO member states alone could jointly provide 104 such helicopters, almost six times the requirement.

“I encourage European governments and the United States to come forward and tell the world what they’ve got available and what they can make available,” Withington said.

Writing in the International Herald Tribune Wednesday. Salim Salim, a former prime minister of Tanzania and, until recently, the African Union’s chief mediator for Darfur, said, “If the international community is serious about fulfilling its responsibility to protect civilians in Darfur, it can start by providing the basics that UNAMID urgently needs.”

“Such support could have saved some of those peacekeepers who died this month gallantly trying to protect civilians. The least we can do in their memory is to make sure that no more civilians or peacekeepers perish because of resource constraints,” he wrote.