AFRICA: CAUGHT BETWEEN PEACEKEEPING AND DEVELOPMENT
Thalif Deen
NEW YORK (IPS) - The beleaguered UN peacekeeping mission in Sudan, handicapped by lack of troops and helicopters, has come under fire for its unusually high costs.
Alpha Oumar Konare, chairman of the African Union Commission, says it is "scandalous" to spend 2.0 billion dollars annually on the upkeep of a proposed 26,000-strong joint African Union-UN Mission in Darfur (UNAMID), when Africa's urgent needs are elsewhere.
Speaking to reporters during a UN debate on the unmet development goals of Africa, the former president of Mali said he "really regretted" that "enormous sums were being poured into conflict prevention in Africa, which could be better used to address the continent's development challenges."
UNAMID's mega budget, one of the largest in UN peacekeeping history, was "scandalous", he said, considering the fact that the key to solving the problem in Sudan rested "with us".
He admitted, however, that there was an "African responsibility" to deal with peace and security problems in the continent.
"We have set up institutions and we must give them the power and the means to take appropriate and timely action," he told reporters Monday.
Last month, Ambassador Wang Guangya of China, a country which is a close ally of Sudan, told the Security Council that "poverty and backwardness are the root causes of the issue of Darfur."
By its very nature, he said, "this is a question of development".
He also quoted Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon who has said that "disputes over water resources are a major cause of the conflict in Darfur".
The Chinese envoy said, "Only improving people's lives on the ground will fundamentally remove the cause of the conflict and improve the security environment."
But the United States has said the killings in Darfur are tantamount to "genocide".
According to UN estimates, the four-year-old conflict in Darfur has claimed the lives of more than 200,000 civilians, and reduced over 2.2 million to the status of refugees or internally displaced persons.
The new UNAMID hybrid force, which began operations on Dec. 31 last year and is described as potentially one of the world's biggest peacekeeping missions, will have an initial mandate of 12 months and incorporates the former African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS), which was in Darfur since 2004.
But AMIS itself suffered from a shortage of troops and financial resources.
Meanwhile, the 2.0 billion dollar budget for UNAMID ranks ahead of the 1.1 billion dollars the United Nations is spending annually on its peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC).
Of the 20 current peacekeeping missions, eight are in Africa: in Western Sahara, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Liberia, Cote d'Ivoire, Burundi and Chad/Central African Republic.
So far, UNAMID has raised only about 9,000 troops and is also short of helicopters and ground support equipment.
While the 53-member African Union argues that it should be primarily responsible for conflict resolution in the continent, the Sudanese government has been insisting that UNAMID troops should be virtually all-African.
The government of Sudan has already rejected troops from Norway and Sweden. At the same time, it has expressed reservations over military units from Thailand and Nepal.
Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Jean-Marie Guehenno said last month that when the Security Council adopted a resolution last July to create a 26,000-strong UNAMID, it said the force should be "predominantly African in character".
"To have a force that is exclusively African in character is another matter," Guehenno told delegates. And "there are a number of important reasons why a broader mix of troop contributors is necessary."
As a compromise, the UN Secretariat has expressed its willingness to "prioritise deployment" of troops from two African countries, Ethiopia and Egypt, "with the u (END)
