UN Security Council envoys starting an African peacekeeping tour face dilemmas ranging from how to improve massive but struggling missions, to deciding whether to stay put or pull out elsewhere.
In Somalia in the east, the problem is whether to send in the UN blue helmets; in Liberia in the west, the problem is how soon to take them out; in between, in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan, there are problems of how existing forces can cope with the challenges they face.
All these issues feed in to the wider question of how UN forces can fulfill their mandate of protecting civilians in countries where — with the possible exception of Liberia — the combatants have not really decided to stop fighting.
“Millions have suffered the disastrous effects of armed conflict in each of these African countries,” Georgette Gagnon, Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said this week. “The Security Council should urgently address serious human rights abuses with national leaders and the African Union [AU].”
The envoys from the 15 Security Council states, who were to arrive in Addis Ababa late on Friday, will meet the AU’s Peace and Security Council before traveling on to Rwanda, Congo and Liberia. They will not go to Somalia or Sudan but will discuss those countries with the AU.
No country dramatizes the UN’s challenge better than Congo, which has 17,000 blue helmets, the world body’s largest force. But after a decade of peacekeeping, it remains mired in violence fuelled by politics, ethnicity and mineral wealth.
The conflict has left 5 million dead since 1998.
In the short term, the UN wants to boost its force, known as MONUC, to some 20,000 following criticism that it failed to curb violence and protect civilians last year.
Reinforcements were approved in November but, apart from some Bangladeshis, Egyptians and Jordanians, they, and helicopters needed to support them, have been hard to find.
Assuming gains made ending a Tutsi rebellion hold, the UN now talks about drawing down and handing over to civil agencies, possibly after national elections due at the end of 2011.
“I hope the consolidation of the security situation in the east will allow us in the near future to progressively reduce MONUC’s presence across the whole country and prepare our departure,” MONUC chief Alan Doss told the council last month.
But UN troops remain committed in the east to supporting government operations against Rwandan Hutu and Ugandan rebels, which have provoked further accusations of failing to protect.
Consequently, UN officials say any pullout is still some time away.
“It’s very, very fragile still,” one said. “If pressure is not put on the [Hutu] FDLR and other groups, and if the government doesn’t step up with pay for the [Congo army] forces, we’re not declaring victory and starting to pack.”
Not surprisingly, the Security Council has been reluctant to yield to African calls for peacekeepers in another hornets’ nest — Somalia, where 130 civilians died in clashes between Islamist rebels and the Western and UN-backed government this week.
The AU is likely to renew that pressure this weekend.
“They will have their view and we will have ours,” one Western envoy said.
UN peacekeeping chief Alain Le Roy told the council on Wednesday that sending in peacekeepers would be a “high-risk operation” likely to fail unless the situation calms.
Peace prospects seem equally bleak in Sudan’s western Darfur region.
A UN/AU peace force is gradually deploying and is now approaching two-thirds of its planned strength of 26,000 soldiers.
By contrast, Liberia looks a relative success story as it seeks to rebuild following a devastating 1989 to 2003 civil war.
That has led some in the Security Council to suggest the 10,000 UN peacekeepers still in the West African state could be rapidly withdrawn.
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