The thousands of UN peacekeepers trying to stave off disaster in South Sudan already have a tough, clear mandate: to protect civilians by any means necessary.
Their track record, however, shows that they have not always been able or willing to do that.
When civil war broke out in South Sudan more than two years ago, the UN took pains to tell the world that its peacekeepers in the country had opened their compound gates and given refuge to tens of thousands of civilians.
Illustration: Mountain People
Since then, however, the troops have faced blistering criticism for not taking steps in time to head off an ethnic massacre in a camp for displaced people; for being unable to protect women who were raped when they ventured outside camps to gather firewood; and for being confined to their bases as new spasms of violence over the weekend led to the deaths of even more civilians.
With the nation still reeling from deadly clashes between rival South Sudanese factions over the weekend, the UN Security Council on Wednesday met to discuss whether to send more troops and give them new orders.
Whether the council will move to impose an arms embargo on the warring parties, as many human rights advocates have pushed for, remains to be seen, as does whether council diplomats will offer a political strategy to make the peacekeepers’ job any easier.
There are 13,000 troops and police officers on the ground, nearly half of whom are assigned to protect displaced people sheltering in their bases, known as protection of civilian sites.
Over the weekend, UN troops were under lockdown in their bases in Juba, the capital, as government forces put up checkpoints and thousands of civilians poured in. Humanitarian aid could not be delivered. Gunmen opened fire at civilians trying to enter the UN bases, which came under fire. Two peacekeepers were killed inside a base, along with at least eight civilians, and aid workers could not be taken to safety.
Even on Tuesday, as a new ceasefire took hold, very few peacekeepers were seen patrolling the streets.
“Something is fundamentally wrong with the mandate of the UN mission here,” Zlatko Gegic, Oxfam country director, said by Skype from Juba this week. “They were victims themselves, being completely unable to move.”
Some of South Sudan’s neighbors are calling for the mission to be fortified with a special unit that could intervene militarily, as peacekeepers were allowed to do against a militia in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
However, it is a far trickier proposition in South Sudan, as an intervention could embroil UN troops in an incendiary ethnic conflict.
The challenge in South Sudan is part of a broader identity crisis for UN peacekeeping. Globally, the program is bigger and more expensive than ever, with the US picking up more than one-fourth of the US$8.3 billion budget.
However, peacekeepers’ limitations are also on stark display, especially when it comes to their ability to protect civilians. The shadow of UN failures in Rwanda in 1994, and in Srebrenica in 1995, during the Bosnian war, still loom large.
In South Sudan, the world’s newest country, not only have peacekeepers been unable to ward off what UN investigators call crimes against humanity committed chiefly, although not entirely, by government forces, but their own so-called protection-of-civilians sites have not always been reliable sanctuaries.
The peacekeeping mission has drawn its harshest criticism over its failure to prevent an ethnic massacre at a camp in the strategic city of Malakal in mid-February.
Two separate investigations for events in Malakal, by panels appointed by the UN, suggested that some peacekeepers had retreated from their posts and that others had waited for written instructions from headquarters. Both acts contravened the mandate set by the Security Council: to protect civilians, by deadly force if necessary.
While the troops dithered, according to one of the investigations, gunmen threw grenades into the camp, singled out civilians based on their ethnicity and went on a looting and burning rampage.
When peacekeepers finally advanced, 16 hours after the attack began, and fired into the air, the gunmen withdrew. By then at least 30 people had died and at least 123 had been wounded.
The Malakal massacre has emerged as a test of the UN’s recent pledges to ensure that peacekeepers are held accountable when they do not do their jobs.
“While some peacekeepers performed bravely, some of those with the responsibility to protect civilians did anything but that,” US Ambassador to the UN for Special Political Affairs David Pressman said in an e-mail shortly after a closed-door Security Council meeting on what happened in Malakal.
“This was a horrific event,” he said. “It merits a serious response and accountability, certainly for the uniformed perpetrators who killed innocents but also for peacekeepers who may have failed to carry out their responsibilities.”
Medecins Sans Frontieres said in a report of its own that the UN had “failed in its duty to safeguard the people at the site and could have averted many fatalities.”
South Sudan is a vast, largely roadless country of rivers and swamps — and of deadly ethnic fault lines. A full-scale civil war broke out in December 2013, when soldiers loyal to South Sudanese President Salva Kiir took up arms against followers of Vice President Riek Machar.
Kiir’s loyalists belong mainly to his Dinka ethnic group, while Machar is a Nuer. The two men signed a peace accord in August last year, but it remains, for now, limited to words on a page.
About 2 million people have been forced from their homes, with nearly 200,000 living inside UN bases that were never meant to become camps for so many people for so long.
One of the camps was in Malakal. According to one of the internal investigations, a copy of which was obtained by the New York Times, someone cut a hole in the fence that encircled the camp, about 15m from a UN sentry post staffed by Ethiopian soldiers. Two Dinka men tried to smuggle in two Kalashnikovs through the hole, plus 58 rounds of ammunition. Peacekeepers tried to detain them, but the smugglers escaped.
Through that hole in the fence, over the course of the next day, most of the camp’s ethnic Dinka residents left.
Uniformed soldiers loyal to Kiir assembled on the edges of the camp. By late that second day, clashes broke out inside. The peacekeepers deployed one platoon to try to disperse the crowd. The soldiers fired tear gas.
It was not enough to deter the troublemakers. A grenade was thrown into an ethnic Shilluk section of the camp. A fire broke out in the Nuer enclave. The Dinka sections were left intact.
By morning on the third day, the report said, witnesses saw South Sudanese troops inside the camp, along with armed men in civilian clothes and white scarves masking their faces.
The report concluded that the attack “seems to have been well planned and orchestrated by local authorities.”
As for the UN forces, only at 2:30pm did they respond with force, advancing in four armored personnel carriers and firing into the air.
The second internal inquiry recommended “decisive action” against units that were unwilling to use force, including by repatriating entire units or individual commanders.
As always, the tricky part for UN is confronting countries that contribute armed forces for its missions, especially countries that send lots of troops, without whom peacekeeping operations could not exist. Countries that had contingents in Malakal — Ethiopia, India and Rwanda — are among the largest troop contributors.
In a measure of the political difficulties, UN Undersecretary-general for Peacekeeping Herve Ladsous told reporters in middle of last month that some of the soldiers would be sent home. He declined to reveal their nationalities.
A month later, none of the troops had been repatriated, and given the latest surge of violence, it is unlikely any of them will be anytime soon.
Now, as the Security Council tries to strengthen the UN mission, the question remains: What can peacekeepers be expected to do in South Sudan?
“The argument for keeping the mission in place is that, by guarding civilians at its protection sites, it mitigates the overall violence,” said Richard Gowan, an analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “But a lot of the sites seem to be insecure, and the risk of a large-scale massacre at a UN base is serious.”
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