The UN Security Council, acknowledging the failure of the current strategy for ending the carnage in Darfur, Sudan, agreed on Friday to deploy thousands of peacekeepers to the troubled province.
The US, which holds the council presidency this month, offered the motion, and it was approved unanimously. Officials acknowledged that winning council approval was probably the least difficult step.
The Sudanese government opposes the presence of UN troops in Darfur, and UN officials say it will not be easy to persuade member nations to contribute troops for the new Darfur force. The US has no intention of sending combat troops, officials said.
Assuming those and other challenges are overcome, the first UN troops are not likely to arrive in Darfur for almost a year.
"It's a complicated and operationally, logistically difficult mission," said John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN.
Still, said Jendayi Frazer, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, "we need to arrest the deteriorating security situation there." At least 30,000 residents of Darfur have been driven from their homes in the last month alone, UN officials said.
The violent and chaotic situation in Darfur poses significant risks that troops would be drawn into firefights with Sudanese government troops and Darfur rebels.
But under the plan, said Kristen Silverberg, another assistant secretary of state, UN troops would be better-armed than the African Union troops patrolling Darfur now. They would also be given new rules of engagement that would allow them to "protect civilians and enforce the cease-fire."
The troops will be given "a robust mandate," Silverberg said.
US and UN officials said they expected the UN force to absorb the 7,000 African Union troops already there, rearm them and then increase the total troop presence to a level between 12,000 and 20,000. More than 200,000 residents of Darfur have been killed since the violence began three years ago, and as many as 3 million rely on international aid for basic sustenance.
In 2004, the US, the UN, the EU and the African Union agreed to send African Union troops to enforce a ceasefire in Darfur, although it broke down almost as soon as it was agreed upon.
Over the following two years, troops from several African nations took up posts in Sudan. But they carried only AK-47 assault rifles and operated under rules of engagement that did not allow them to enter the conflict.
It did not take long for the government troops and Darfur rebel forces to realize that the African Union peacekeepers were a scant deterrent. Starting last summer, the violence began to pick up again. By fall, the peacekeepers became targets; four were killed in October, another last month.
One African Union officer, interviewed in a Darfur military camp in November, complained that "we are sacrificial lambs in a buffer zone."
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