The UN Security Council, acknowledging the failure of the current strategy for ending the carnage in Darfur, Sudan, agreed on Friday to deploy thousands of peacekeepers to the troubled province.
The US, which holds the council presidency this month, offered the motion, and it was approved unanimously. Officials acknowledged that winning council approval was probably the least difficult step.
The Sudanese government opposes the presence of UN troops in Darfur, and UN officials say it will not be easy to persuade member nations to contribute troops for the new Darfur force. The US has no intention of sending combat troops, officials said.
Assuming those and other challenges are overcome, the first UN troops are not likely to arrive in Darfur for almost a year.
"It's a complicated and operationally, logistically difficult mission," said John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN.
Still, said Jendayi Frazer, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, "we need to arrest the deteriorating security situation there." At least 30,000 residents of Darfur have been driven from their homes in the last month alone, UN officials said.
The violent and chaotic situation in Darfur poses significant risks that troops would be drawn into firefights with Sudanese government troops and Darfur rebels.
But under the plan, said Kristen Silverberg, another assistant secretary of state, UN troops would be better-armed than the African Union troops patrolling Darfur now. They would also be given new rules of engagement that would allow them to "protect civilians and enforce the cease-fire."
The troops will be given "a robust mandate," Silverberg said.
US and UN officials said they expected the UN force to absorb the 7,000 African Union troops already there, rearm them and then increase the total troop presence to a level between 12,000 and 20,000. More than 200,000 residents of Darfur have been killed since the violence began three years ago, and as many as 3 million rely on international aid for basic sustenance.
In 2004, the US, the UN, the EU and the African Union agreed to send African Union troops to enforce a ceasefire in Darfur, although it broke down almost as soon as it was agreed upon.
Over the following two years, troops from several African nations took up posts in Sudan. But they carried only AK-47 assault rifles and operated under rules of engagement that did not allow them to enter the conflict.
It did not take long for the government troops and Darfur rebel forces to realize that the African Union peacekeepers were a scant deterrent. Starting last summer, the violence began to pick up again. By fall, the peacekeepers became targets; four were killed in October, another last month.
One African Union officer, interviewed in a Darfur military camp in November, complained that "we are sacrificial lambs in a buffer zone."
Tens of thousands of Filipino Catholics yesterday twirled white cloths and chanted “Viva, viva,” as a centuries-old statue of Jesus Christ was paraded through the streets of Manila in the nation’s biggest annual religious event. The day-long procession began before dawn, with barefoot volunteers pulling the heavy carriage through narrow streets where the devout waited in hopes of touching the icon, believed to hold miraculous powers. Thousands of police were deployed to manage crowds that officials believe could number in the millions by the time the statue reaches its home in central Manila’s Quiapo church around midnight. More than 800 people had sought
DENIAL: Pyongyang said a South Korean drone filmed unspecified areas in a North Korean border town, but Seoul said it did not operate drones on the dates it cited North Korea’s military accused South Korea of flying drones across the border between the nations this week, yesterday warning that the South would face consequences for its “unpardonable hysteria.” Seoul quickly denied the accusation, but the development is likely to further dim prospects for its efforts to restore ties with Pyongyang. North Korean forces used special electronic warfare assets on Sunday to bring down a South Korean drone flying over North Korea’s border town. The drone was equipped with two cameras that filmed unspecified areas, the General Staff of the North Korean People’s Army said in a statement. South Korea infiltrated another drone
COMMUNIST ALIGNMENT: To Lam wants to combine party chief and state presidency roles, with the decision resting on the election of 200 new party delegates next week Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is seeking to combine his party role with the state presidency, officials said, in a move that would align Vietnam’s political structure more closely to China’s, where President Xi Jinping (習近平) heads the party and state. Next week about 1,600 delegates are to gather in Hanoi to commence a week-long communist party congress, held every five years to select new leaders and set policy goals for the single-party state. Lam, 68, bade for both top positions at a party meeting last month, seeking initial party approval ahead of the congress, three people briefed by
Cambodia’s government on Wednesday said that it had arrested and extradited to China a tycoon who has been accused of running a huge online scam operation. The Cambodian Ministry of the Interior said that Prince Holding Group chairman Chen Zhi (陳志) and two other Chinese citizens were arrested and extradited on Tuesday at the request of Chinese authorities. Chen formerly had dual nationality, but his Cambodian citizenship was revoked last month, the ministry said. US prosecutors in October last year brought conspiracy charges against Chen, alleging that he had been the mastermind behind a multinational cyberfraud network, used his other businesses to launder
RSS