The United Nations Security Council is expected to authorise up to 26 000 troops and police for Darfur but implementation will take months providing the world body finds enough personnel and Sudan cooperates.
On Wednesday, Britain, France and Ghana circulated a draft resolution for a joint African Union-UN force, which also threatened force against those who attack civilians, relief workers and obstruct peace efforts.
The resolution, expected to be adopted this month, allows the UN to formally recruit troops for the mission.
Estimated to cost more than $2-billion in the first year, the operation is an effort to quell violence in Sudan’s western region where more than 2,1-million people have been driven from their homes and an estimated 200 000 have died.
The UN now has the uphill task of recruiting troops and police, a task not expected to be accomplished until well into next year. Sudan, which has approved the deal after months of reservations, still needs to find enough land and water for the building of new barracks.
Infantry troops are expected to be drawn mainly from African nations. The new operation, called the United Nations-African Union mission in Darfur, or Unamid, will absorb the 7 000 African Union troops currently in Darfur. Engineers and headquarters personnel are expected to be drawn from other nations.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, at a conference on democracy in Latin America and Africa, urged African governments to ”hold Sudan accountable”.
”We must not let the government of Sudan continue this game of cat-and-mouse diplomacy, making promises then going back on them,” Rice said in an apparent reference to Khartoum’s months of hesitation.
The resolution would allow the mission ”to use all necessary means”, a euphemism for a use of force, ”in the areas of deployment of its forces and as it deems within its capabilities”.
Force could be used to ensure the security of the mission’s personnel and humanitarian workers and ”to protect civilians under threat of physical violence” as well as to seize or collect arms.
Specifically, the text would authorise up to 19 555 military personnel and 6 400 civilian police.
A touchy point of the new so-called hybrid force is command and control, with some UN troop contributors hesitating until that is clarified.
The draft ”decides that there will be unity of command and control which, in accordance with basic principles of peacekeeping, means a single chain of command, and further decides that command and control structures and backstopping will be provided by the United Nations”.
In practice, UN peacekeeping officials have said the AU would have operational day-to-day control but the United Nations would step in if it disagreed.
The civilian head of Unamid is Rodolphe Adada, the The Democratic Republic of Congo’s former foreign minister, and the military commander is General Martin Agwai of Nigeria. – Reuters