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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
RSS