Peacekeeping in Darfur Hits More Obstacles

By LYDIA POLGREEN

ABU SUROUJ, Sudan — As Darfur smolders in the aftermath of a new government offensive, a long-sought peacekeeping force, expected to be the world’s largest, is in danger of failing even as it begins its mission because of bureaucratic delays, stonewalling by Sudan’s government and reluctance from troop-contributing countries to send peacekeeping forces into an active conflict.

The force, a joint mission of the African Union and the United Nations, officially took over from an overstretched and exhausted African Union force in Darfur on Jan. 1. It now has just over 9,000 of an expected 26,000 soldiers and police officers and will not fully deploy until the end of the year, United Nations officials said.

Even the troops that are in place, the old African Union force and two other battalions, lack essential equipment, like sufficient armored personnel carriers and helicopters, to carry out even the most rudimentary of peacekeeping tasks. Some even had to buy their own paint to turn their green helmets United Nations blue, peacekeepers here said.

The peacekeepers’ work is more essential than ever. At least 30,000 people were displaced last month as the government and its allied militias fought to retake territory held by rebel groups fighting in the region, according to United Nations human rights officials.

For weeks after the attacks, many of the displaced were hiding in the bush nearby or living in the open along the volatile border between Sudan and Chad, inaccessible to aid workers. Most wanted to return to their scorched villages and rebuild but did not feel safe from roaming bandits and militias.

A week spent this month with the peacekeeping troops based here at the headquarters of Sector West, a wind-blown outpost at the heart of the recent violence, revealed a force struggling mightily to do better than its much-maligned predecessor, but with little new manpower or equipment.

Despite this, the force is managing to project a greater sense of security for the tens of thousands of vulnerable civilians in the vast territory it covers, mounting night patrols in displaced people’s camps and sending long-range patrols to the areas hardest hit by fighting. But these small gains are fragile, and if more troops do not arrive soon, the force will be written off as being as ineffective and compromised as the one before.

“We really don’t have much time to prove we can do better,” said Brig. Gen. Balla Keita, the Senegalese commander of the roughly 2,000 troops in West Darfur, just one-third of the expected total for the area.

“God gave the prophets the ability to achieve miracles so that people would believe. So people here will believe when they see improvements on the ground. And that cannot wait for more troops. We need to do better with what we have.”

The deployment of the biggest peacekeeping force in modern history in one of the most remote, hostile and forbidding corners of the globe was bound to be a logistical nightmare. Darfur is landlocked, water is scarce, the roads are rutted tracks crossed by the mud and sand traps of dry riverbeds.

A Troubled Mission

But those problems pale in comparison with the diplomatic and political struggles the mission faces.

When previous large missions were organized in Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the central governments in those countries had collapsed or were so weak that they had little choice but to accept peacekeepers. The government of Sudan agreed to accept United Nations-led peacekeepers in Darfur only after a long diplomatic tussle and under a great deal of pressure.

The progress to get the mission in place has been slow, and much of the blame for this has been placed at the feet of the Sudanese government. For months after the United Nations Security Council approved the force, Sudan insisted on limits on its makeup and independence, demanding the power to dictate which countries contributed troops, to shut down its communication systems when the government carried out offensives and to restrict the movement of peacekeepers at night.

Ultimately, the government signed a compromise agreement with the United Nations allowing the force to operate, but Sudan was successful in insisting that the vast majority of troops come from African countries, and will be supplemented by soldiers from other regions only if suitable African troops cannot be found.

This has delayed the force’s mission, because African armies are not usually able to deploy quickly with equipment and training to meet stringent United Nations standards, United Nations officials and Western diplomats said. Sudanese government officials have argued that African troops are up to the job, and that non-African troops would be seen as neocolonial interlopers.

These problems have raised fears that the United Nations force would suffer the same fate as the African Union force, which was hobbled from the start by a weak mandate, which was to observe a cease-fire, not protect civilians. The thousands of troops deployed by Rwanda, Nigeria, Senegal and other nations were mainly there to protect the military observers, who were unarmed, and the unarmed civilian police, whose job it was to guard the camps for the internally displaced people.

But the original cease-fire was quickly violated, and later agreements failed to bring peace. The African troops soon were seen, perhaps unfairly, as useless note-takers who visited the scene of atrocities long after the evidence had been carried off and the dead buried, gathering testimony that seemed to disappear into a bureaucratic black hole.

A Town in Ruins

All of that has changed with the new hybrid mission. The force has a robust mandate to protect civilians. But that is easier said than done, said Maj. Sani Abdullahi, the man in charge of the single company charged with fending off roaming militias and rebels to protect tens of thousands of displaced villagers in a handful of camps and thousands more vulnerable residents of remote villages.

One Sunday morning, Major Abdullahi, 34, a wiry Nigerian officer who served in peacekeeping operations in Sierra Leone and Liberia, led a few truckloads of troops to visit Abu Sorouj, one of the towns flattened by a recent government offensive in West Darfur.

The town is just a few dozen miles away, but the drive took three bone-crunching hours. Abu Sorouj was attacked nearly a month earlier, and most of the villagers had fled, some to Chad. They said they were blocked by the Chadian authorities from reaching refugee camps. So within days, some were returning, afraid of losing their land if they became long-term displaced people living in camps.

Before the attack, Abu Sorouj was a bustling town of hundreds of mud-brick huts roofed with thatch, clumped together in sprawling family compounds. It had a cinder-block school and clinic supported by a nongovernmental aid agency.

Today, it is an apocalyptic scene of ashy ruin. The residents who have returned salvaged what they could, sifting through the blackened rubble to find cooking pots, bedsteads and buried troves of grain.

Fadila Ahmed Mahamat, a great-grandmother whose legs are withered stalks, sat amid the charred ruins of her home, digging holes in the sand with bare, gnarled hands to construct the frame of a makeshift dwelling out of branches from a pen that had been used to keep sheep.

“Everything is gone,” she said. “I have nothing.”

Surveying the scene, Major Abdullahi let out a low whistle.

“My God,” he said. “Look at this.”

A few of the town’s sheiks remained, and they clamored to tell him their complaints. Arab gunmen, whom the villagers here call janjaweed, roam the edge of town, they told Major Abdullahi, coming at dawn and dusk to steal what little remained here. The women could not go to the river to collect water. The men could not leave the town to find big branches to build shelters.

“We need security,” one said.

“Why don’t you patrol more often?” another asked. “When you come, the janjaweed stay away for two or three days.”

Major Abdullahi told them: “We don’t have the number of troops on ground we need. As soon as we do, we will spread out. We are doing everything we can to make you feel more secure.”

All talk ceased as a pickup truck loaded with government soldiers drove up. An officer jumped out, smiling with an outstretched hand. But his smile was tense, and after some pleasantries he asked why the peacekeepers had come.

“The place is secure,” said the officer, Maj. Amar Ibrahim. “Even the Arabs who ride on camels and horses and harass people, we have patrols to chase them away.”

Major Abdullahi smiled and nodded.

“We really appreciate that and commend your efforts,” he said through an interpreter. “But we really need to ask you to do more. People still do not feel safe.”

Despite the agreement giving the peacekeepers free rein, government troops complain about their presence. Major Abdullahi said he must be careful not to alienate these troops because he must rely on them to help provide security. “The reality is we need to work with them,” he said. “It does no good to antagonize them.”

Major Abdullahi checked his watch. It was noon, and already he had to think about heading back. The armored personnel carriers, which had been provided to the African Union by the Canadian government and had been battered by years of abuse in Darfur’s harsh conditions, were already acting up. Two flat tires and engine trouble had made the journey to Abu Sorouj slow. But he could not risk being stuck on the way back.

He promised the sheiks that he would return soon, but he could not say for sure how soon that might be.

The Task Ahead

It is unclear how exactly the deployment of troops in Darfur can be speeded up, give the built-in constraint that African troops be used first. Western activists concerned about Darfur say the Sudanese government is primarily responsible and have demanded that China, Sudan’s main trading partner and one of its suppliers of weapons, join other countries to press Sudan to allow troops of any origin the troops to deploy quickly.

While the Sudanese government has been blamed for some of the delay, United Nations requirements have also slowed the force, some diplomats and political analysts say.

The deployment “is not principally being delayed by the Sudanese government,” said a senior Western diplomat in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, who is not authorized to speak publicly. Other problems, like the United Nations bureaucracy and the reluctance of troop-contributing countries, were as much to blame, the diplomat said.

There is certainly no lack of money. Rodolphe Adada, of the Congo Republic, the mission’s civilian chief, said the force had a budget of $1.7 billion. What it needs is troops and equipment, and neither has been easy to get. More pressure on the Sudanese government, he said, would not help matters. “What more pressure can be put on the Sudanese government,” he said. “All the decisions have been taken. There is nothing left to say. What we need to do is act.”

Some countries are reluctant to commit troops in an active conflict with no peace agreement or even a working cease-fire.

“The international community had two choices — get a peace accord and deploy the mission after, or send the mission anyway,” Mr. Adada said. “It chose the latter. But how do you keep the peace when there is no peace to keep?”

Chaos in Darfur on Rise as Arabs Fight With Arabs

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

NYALA, Sudan, Aug. 28 — Some of the same Arab tribes accused of massacring civilians in the Darfur region of Sudan are now unleashing their considerable firepower against one another in a battle over the spoils of war that is killing hundreds of people and displacing tens of thousands.

In the past several months, the Terjem and the Mahria, heavily armed Arab tribes that United Nations officials said raped and pillaged together as part of the region’s notorious janjaweed militias, have squared off in South Darfur, fighting from pickup trucks and the backs of camels. They are raiding each other’s villages, according to aid workers and the fighters themselves, and scattering Arab tribesmen into the same kinds of displacement camps that still house some of their earlier victims.

United Nations officials said that thousands of gunmen from each side, including some from hundreds of miles away, were pouring into a strategic river valley called Bulbul, while clashes between two other Arab tribes, the Habanniya and the Salamat, were intensifying farther south.

Darfur’s violence has often been characterized as government-backed Arab tribes slaughtering non-Arab tribes, but this new Arab-versus-Arab dimension seems to be a sign of the evolving complexity of the crisis. What started out four years ago in western Sudan as a rebellion and brutal counterinsurgency has cracked wide open into a fluid, chaotic, confusing free-for-all with dozens of armed groups, a spike in banditry and chronic attacks on aid workers.

United Nations officials said tribal and factional fighting was killing more people than the battles between government and rebel forces, which, except in a few areas, have declined considerably.

Though the recent round of clashes between the splintering groups has not come close to taking as many lives as the thousands who were dying each month during the height of the conflict in 2003 and 2004, many aid officials say they fear that the situation is getting out of control.

“The fragmentation of armed groups is among our major concerns,” said Maurizio Giuliano, a spokesman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs for Sudan. “This is making the situation even more complex, and more difficult for civilians as well as for humanitarians trying to help them.”

The rising insecurity is spelled out in two color-coded maps taped to Mr. Giuliano’s wall in Khartoum, the capital. One is from May 2006 and has only a few pockets of orange and yellow danger zones. But on the map from this June, the danger zones are everywhere.

United Nations officials say the militias may be jockeying for power and trying to seize turf before the long-awaited hybrid force of United Nations and African Union peacekeepers begins to arrive, perhaps later this year. Today’s battlefields are superimposed on yesterday’s, with the Arab militias killing one another over the same burned villages and stingy riverbeds where so much blood has already been spilled.

Though many Western diplomats and a seemingly endless supply of advocates have blamed the Sudanese government for arming Arab militias in the first place, an accusation the government denies, several independent observers in Sudan said the government was not driving this phase of the conflict.

“The government is no longer arming the janjaweed,” said Col. James Oladipo, the African Union commander in Nyala, in South Darfur. The problem now, he said, is “bandits and factions.”

Some aid workers say Darfur is beginning to resemble Somalia, the world’s longest-running showcase for AK-47-fed chaos. Highwaymen in green camouflage — rebel fighters? local militia? janjaweed? — routinely flag down trucks and drag out passengers, robbing the men and sexually assaulting the women. Newly empowered warlords are exacting taxes. The galaxy of rebel armies — the Greater Sudan Liberation Movement, the Popular Forces Troops, the Sudan Democratic Group, to name a few new arrivals — keeps expanding, and ideology seems to fade away. Despite peace talks among them in early August, the rebels, mostly non-Arabs, are now also battling themselves.

Among Arabs, one of the most egregious examples of the recent infighting happened on the morning of July 31 near Sania Daleibah, in southern Darfur. Terjem leaders said hundreds of Terjem had gathered to bury an important sheik. Then they were suddenly surrounded. It was Mahria tribesmen, and according to United Nations reports and witness accounts, the Mahria opened fire with rocket-propelled grenades and belt-fed machine guns and mowed down more than 60 Terjem.

“It was a massacre,” said Mohammed Yacob Ibrahim Abdelrahman, the top Terjem leader. “By our brothers.”

The Arab-Arab violence is impeding the slow recovery process that had begun in some parts of Darfur. Around 2.2 million people are stuck in displaced persons camps, though some had been taking the first steps to leave, like villagers from Jimaiza, north of Nyala, who left their camp in July to go back to plant their peanut fields. They were not worried about Arab militias raiding their village, they said. Those days seemed over. But then the Terjem-Mahria feud erupted.

“It was strange,” said Abakar Ahmed Abdul Rahman, a leader of the Fur tribe, which is non-Arab and the biggest in Darfur. “A few days after the fighting, a Mahria elder came up to me and said: ‘Tell your people not to go back to the camp. They’re safe in the village. We don’t have a problem with you.’ ”

But Mr. Abakar shook his head and laughed.

“I know these people,” he said. “They killed my wife and burned my hut. I’ll never trust them.”

Not all Arab tribes joined the bloodletting when Darfur exploded in 2003. But according to United Nations documents, the Mahria and the Terjem did.

The Mahria are nomadic camel herders from northern Darfur, rugged people of the desert whose militias have helped the Sudanese government patrol the long, sandy border with Chad. The Terjem are farmers and cattle herders who lived closely with the Fur. The Mahria knew how to fight. The Terjem knew where the Fur lived.

Together, the two tribes massacred many Fur villagers, according to United Nations officials and Fur survivors. Then they divvied up Fur land. But the partnership broke down late last year, when, Terjem leaders say, the Mahria kidnapped a 14-year-old Terjem boy. For their part, Mahria leaders say the Terjem started it by stealing Mahria animals, an act that had to be answered.

Juma Dagalow, a Mahria sheik, said that after one ambush in which Terjem gunmen killed many Mahria, he called other sheiks by satellite phone and rallied the troops.

“We went to that funeral to attack them, to finish the account,” the sheik explained, adding that his people were “a little aggressive.”

It was then that the wali stepped in. The wali, or governor, of South Darfur called a peace conference and urged neutral tribes to mediate a cease-fire.

The wali, Ali Mahamoud Mohammed, said in an interview that such clashes were “just a natural part of the life of the tribes” and something he had witnessed growing up in Darfur in the 1970s.

Mr. Ali said the fighting began in December, when the Mahria headed south on a seasonal migration with their camels and trampled through Terjem territory near the Bulbul River. The fighting predictably resumed in July, he said, when the Mahria trampled back.

The governor said he sent troops to Bulbul to quell the fighting. But the Arab-Arab bloodshed, fueled by an overflow of guns in Darfur and a breakdown in the traditional order, seems to be spreading faster than anyone can control. Several tribes have recently fought over land, livestock and the right to extort money along certain trade routes. Among those fighting: Hotiya versus Rizeigat (the Rizeigat are a huge tribe that includes the Mahria); Rizeigat versus Habanniya; Habanniya versus Salamat.

Tribal feuds that used to be reconciled by sheiks before the body count reached into the hundreds are now turning into tribal wars.

And there may be a connection to the rampant banditry, which seems to spare no one — not aid workers, villagers or even Sudanese government officials.

“As these groups split,” said Colonel Oladipo of the African Union, “banditry becomes the source for weapons, money and food in order to sustain their factions.”

The 50 miles of asphalt running between Nyala and the neighboring town of Kas, which cuts straight through a Terjem stronghold, have become bandit boulevard. On a single day in late August, there were six attacks. Traveling by road has become so dangerous in Darfur that the United Nations now uses helicopters to fly even 12 miles.

“There’s absolutely no law and order in this place,” said Annette Rehrl, a spokeswoman for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The insecurity has driven away some aid workers, United Nations officials said, with 12,300 working in Darfur, 16 percent less than last year.

It has also cemented tens of thousands of Terjem, who traditionally roam with their animals for part of the year, in internally displaced persons camps where they are not free to move. Out here, newly widowed women lie in plastic huts, flies exploring the corners of their eyes. Once proud sheiks have been reduced to carrying sacks of sand on their backs for work. A Terjem baby with a three-inch, bubbly scar at the base of her spine — a recent gunshot wound — howled her head off.

“We just sit here, hating ourselves,” said Mariam Mohammed, a wisp-thin Terjem woman who said her husband had been shot dead in front of her. “Just look at me. I’m half of what I used to be.”

Sudan says Darfur rebels killed 41 in Kordofan attack

Sat Sep 1, 2007 8:34AM EDT
By Simon Apiku

KHARTOUM, Sept 1 (Reuters) - Sudanese rebels from war-torn Darfur killed 41 people in an attack earlier this week on a base for government forces in the neighbouring Kordofan region, Sudan's interior ministry said in a statement on Saturday.

"Information shows there were 41 martyrs, including people from the area," the ministry said, without saying how many of the dead were members of its forces.

On Wednesday, Darfur rebels from the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Army's Unity faction (SLA Unity) said they had seized an army base in Wad Banda in North Kordofan State.

The interior ministry said the attack was on a base for central reserve forces, a branch of the police.

The fighting came just days before U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was due to arrive in Sudan to try to set a timetable to revive Darfur peace talks between the government and rebels after a May 2006 deal faltered.

The rebels said the base they attacked was the logistical and supply centre for ongoing attacks in South Darfur, where rebels say an aerial bombing campaign has driven thousands of people from their homes over the past month.

Ban, due to arrive on Monday, has deplored the recent surge of violence as "simply unacceptable" and has condemned the government bombardment as a violation of a U.N. Security Council resolution.

The Sudanese interior ministry statement said that following the Kordofan attack, a combined force of police and armed forces pursued the rebels and captured a number of them in an ambush. It did not say how many rebels it captured.

"They will face justice and these measures will apply to all those who supported this criminal act," the ministry said.

It added that it would also prosecute anybody suspected of inciting or abetting the attack and anybody else who gave sanctuary to the rebels.

JEM commander Abdel Aziz el-Nur Ashr denied any of the group's men were arrested: "That's not true ... The battle is over and we defeated the armed forces."

The U.N. and AU hope to launch peace talks in October and both voiced concern about the impact of the attack on Wad Banda on the peace process.

"The attack could undermine the efforts of the U.N. and AU special envoys at a time of serious and sensitive consultations to launch the renewed peace talks on Darfur," the U.N. Mission in Sudan said in statement on Thursday.

The AU said the attack happened when the U.N., AU and "the entire international community have converged all efforts toward upcoming peace negotiations."

International experts estimate 200,000 people have died since mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms in early 2003 accusing the central government of neglecting the region. The Sudanese government denies the charge and says 9,000 have died in Darfur.

Sudan agrees to meet with rebels

The move involving groups that rejected a 2006 accord is called 'a serious step forward' for peace in the Darfur region.
By Maggie Farley
Times Staff Writer

July 16, 2007

TRIPOLI, LIBYA — In an international summit Sunday to push peace in Sudan's troubled Darfur region, the Sudanese government agreed to soon meet rebel groups that thus far have refused to join peace talks.

If the agreement holds, it will be an important step in re-launching a peace process that has stalled since those key rebel factions rejected the widely unpopular Darfur peace agreement struck last year. The so-called non-signatories will meet the first week of August to prepare a unified position for talks with the government in late August or September.

"We've made a serious step forward," said Jan Eliasson, the United Nations' special envoy for Sudan. He and African Union representative Salim Ahmed Salim have devised a blueprint to whittle down competing peace proposals in order to have the government and multiple rebel factions discuss a single plan for peace in Darfur by the end of the summer.

After weeks of shuttle diplomacy, leaders from the five permanent members of the Security Council, the European Union, and neighboring and donor nations gathered in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, to endorse the move.

At issue is the four-year conflict between rebels and the government that international experts say has resulted in more than 200,000 deaths and the displacement of more than 2 million people. The government is accused of arming Arab militias, known as janjaweed, to attack civilians and rival tribes to crush the uprising.



Rival proposals

Before Sunday, Sudan's neighbors, Eritrea and Libya, had been promoting peace initiatives that highlighted their own interests in the war-torn region, but the countries were persuaded to step back and let the U.N. and AU take the lead. The rival plans had given the government of Sudan a chance to play one against another, diplomats said.

"Now we are all going the same direction," Eliasson said. "It's like herding cats, but we did it."

At the end of the first day of the two-day summit, they announced that they had achieved their main goals, but were still refining the wording of the agreement.

The rebel groups opposing the government had splintered into nearly a dozen factions with varying influence, making it difficult to conduct negotiations with Khartoum.

"What we need is the non-signatories to come to some sort of agreement," said Elsamani Elwasila, Sudan's minister of state for foreign affairs. "They have too many different leaders and changing demands."

In a sign of solidarity, five factions said Saturday that they would unite and join the U.N.-sponsored peace process.

The new alliance, calling itself the United Front for Liberation and Development, came together during a meeting in the Eritrean capital, Asmara.

The groups said they had joined to present a united front for peace negotiations with Khartoum and appealed "to all other movements to unify efforts."

But major groups, including the Sudan Liberation Movement and the Greater Sudan Liberation Movement, remain outside the new alliance.

Representatives from some of the outside groups were on the sidelines of the summit Sunday. They met with AU and U.N. officials but did not take part in the proceedings.



What's on the table

Negotiators will tackle tough issues that include how much to compensate families driven from their land, how to protect them when they return and how to disarm roving militias.

"They need a political settlement," said Andrew S. Natsios, the U.S. special envoy for Sudan, "and then we need peacekeepers. People are not going back to their villages unless there is security. "

Meanwhile, at the United Nations, the Security Council is debating a resolution authorizing a joint AU-U.N. peacekeeping force of up to 20,000 troops to help stabilize the region, which is the size of France. Sudan grudgingly agreed to accept the force after seven months of negotiations, on condition that it is nearly entirely made up of African soldiers and led by African commanders.

Elwasila, the Foreign Ministry official, said that the troops should not be allowed to use force, and that the Security Council should reward Sudan's compliance by removing the threat of sanctions.

"It is high time now to send positive messages rather than threatening proposals," he said. "We are not in a confrontation with the U.N."

maggie.farley@latimes.com