‘Africa’s mistake in Sudan” is how African Union peacekeepers, deployed in Sudan’s Darfur region, refer to the operation they are participating in. The correct title of the 7 000-strong peaceÂkeeping mission is African Union Mission in Sudan (Amis), but the negative nickname it has acquired is not inaccurate; Amis has problems.
The poorly trained, poorly equipped and poorly motivated troops, with a weak mandate, are watching over the implementation of a peace agreement that was signed by only one of Darfur’s rebel groups and the government — and which is respected by no one. These days, it is hard to find anyone in Darfur who has anything positive to say about the people who are supposed to be there to help them.
The AU is relatively new to the world of peacekeeping and it draws, to a large extent, on outside help to try to do the job right. The veteran in peacekeeping affairs is the United Nations and the AU has been trying to get the UN to play a bigger, if not dominant role in Darfur, since the day it unloaded its first Toyota Land Cruiser in Khartoum.
So why isn’t the UN playing a bigger role? This time the problem is not simply the reluctance of the international civil servants sitting in their ivory tower in New York. The problem is in Khartoum and its name his Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese president.
Al-Bashir knows all about the UN’s experience in peacekeeping, which is one of the reasons why he doesn’t want the UN deployed in Darfur. He also knows all about the AU’s lack of experience in peacekeeping and that is why he does want Amis in Darfur. He knows that as long as the AU and its mandate remain weak, he has little to worry about.
Government forces and their allies, including former rebel leader Minni Minawi and the Janjaweed militia, continue to wreak havoc in an area roughly the size of Botswana and half of whose six and a half million people have been displaced since fighting erupted in February 2003. The number of people killed is in the hundreds of thousands.
AU observers sit in their forward force headquarters at El Fasher, the capital of northern Darfur. From time to time they patrol camps for displaced persons, or offer protection to women collecting firewood, but they aren’t able to stop the burning of villages or the widespread rape and murder. It is not in their mandate. It is likely that if they tried to be more robust, al-Bashir would stop them. As it stands, Amis patrols claim that they are often encouraged by Sudanese government forces not to patrol in certain areas.
Simple efforts to create goodwill with the locals also tend to be wasted. Recently, youth at one of the biggest camps near El Fasher banded together to create football teams and organise a tournament. A request went out to Amis personnel to create a team and take part. The request moved from office to office, eventually hitting a brick wall as AU officers said they had no authority to form a team. The public information officer on site admits to not leaving his office for months at a time.
Does this mean that Amis is a waste of time? Certainly not. It needs help. And if it is to be effective and credible in the long term, it needs help from the continent. The UN is already contributing in the form of some skilled personnel as well as physical assets, such as computers and office equipment. Canada has pitched in to cover air operations, including providing Russian MI-8 helicopters to cover the large distances in a land with little surface infrastructure, and the United States is covering most of the cost of logistics — a considerable bill considering the terrain and the job that needs to be done.
This is an area where South Africa can shine. The South African National Defence Force is already part of Amis — admittedly a small part — but its experience in the field is considerable when taking into account the role it plays in the UN’s biggest peacekeeping mission, in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as in Burundi, and it should play a bigger role in Darfur.
South Africa is the only country in sub-Saharan Africa that has the means to put relatively large sums of money into a peacekeeping budget. South Africa playing a dominant role in Amis is not necessarily going to win it friends in Abuja, where the Nigerians seem to believe that Amis is their baby, but that is a debate the people of Darfur don’t need to hear. They simply want to return home and live in peace.
David Smith is a Johannesburg-based media consultant who recently travelled to Darfur