UN envoy cites Darfur failure; wants 20,000 troops

By Evelyn Leopold

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – Attempts to bring peace to
Sudan’s Darfur region have failed and a U.N. peacekeeping force
of 12,000 to 20,000 troops is needed to stop the killings and
rape, the top U.N. official in Sudan said.

Jan Pronk gave his most pessimistic assessment yet to the
U.N. Security Council on Friday. He said marauding Arab militia
were succeeding in their ethnic cleansing campaign, erasing
village after village.

“Looking back at three years of killings and cleansing in
Darfur we must admit that our peace strategy so far has
failed,” Pronk said. “All we did was picking up the pieces and
muddling through, doing too little too late.”

“At least once a month groups of 500 to 1000 militia on
camel and horseback attack villages, killing dozens of people
and terrorizing the others who flee away,” Pronk said.

The United Nations is contemplating a peacekeeping force in
Darfur, where the African Union has fielded a force of 7,000
with a limited mandate and scarce funds. But U.N. peacekeeping
officials have not planned for the high numbers of troops Pronk
suggested.

The Darfur conflict erupted into violence in early 2003
when African tribes took up arms accusing the Arab-dominated
Khartoum government of neglect. The government retaliated by
arming Arab militia, known as Janjaweed, who began a campaign
of murder, rape, arson and plunder and drove villagers into
squalid camps. Khartoum denies the charge.

Pronk proposed sophisticated mobile units able to deter
attacks on civilians and disarm militias. U.N. Secretary
General Kofi Annan said on Thursday he hoped the United States
and European nations would help.

In addition, Pronk said there had to be soldiers available
to protect uprooted civilians or they would not “dare to
return” to their villages.

The African Union and Security Council members have
accepted “in principle” of the need for a transfer to a U.N.
peacekeeping force “at some point,” Security Council President
Augustine Mahiga of Tanzania told reporters. The AU would not
make a final decision until March, he said.

Sudan so far has rejected any troops other than the African
Union’s. “Naturally what should happen is to give them the
money they want, not to complicate matters by involving another
force on the ground,” Foreign Minister Lam Akol told Reuters in
Khartoum.

But Pronk played this down and said Khartoum had previously
overcome initial objections to other steps to ease the
conflict.

He also said talks in Abuja, Nigeria, between Darfur rebel
groups would take another year or two unless security
arrangements were completed first, followed by talks on power
and wealth sharing. The rebels, he said, were “fighters not
thinkers.”

A stalled second security forum included Chad, itself
involved in border clashes with Sudan, as a co-chairman.

For more than a year, the Security Council has dealt with
the warfare in Sudan’s western region. It has imposed an arms
embargo, which all sides have violated.

It also voted last March to put an asset freeze and travel
ban on belligerents, which has yet to be imposed, partly
because of objections from Qatar and China. It has referred the
crisis to the International Criminal Court last March but Pronk
said the tribunal was working too slowly.

“That also has political consequences because people think
they can get away with everything,” he told a news conference.