Mick Hartley

Eric Reeves pours some cold water on the latest UN initiative on Darfur:

A total of 26,000 troops and police seems a very long way off, particularly if the essentially “African character” of the mission is to be preserved. And this is what Khartoum counts on. For the regime quite understands these difficulties, as well as the massive logistical challenges to deployment in Darfur.

And it has learned over the past three years just how easy it is to undermine the effectiveness of AU forces: denying (or commandeering) aviation fuel, imposing arbitrary curfews, demanding pilot and aircraft recertification in ways designed to diminish the number of aerial patrols; and impeding investigations of atrocity crimes.

With such clear ambitions on Khartoum’s part, the most likely scenario for the AU/UN hybrid is a painfully slow deployment of force elements, along with insufficiently timely provision of logistics, aviation and transport resources and communications capacity.

And this is so without Khartoum playing its trump card: its insistence that it be part of a tripartite committee (along with the AU and UN) that determines the appropriateness of given deployments. This card is unlikely to be played early on, but will certainly become significant if the hybrid force threatens to become the dominant source of authority in Darfur. […]

The view from Khartoum, then, is that while resolution 1769 is thoroughly unwelcome, it is so belated, so hedged and weakened -particularly in having no chapter seven authority to seize illegal arms – and so unlikely to find the resources, human or material, that it will make little difference to the regime’s genocidal ambitions. Indeed, a year from now, Khartoum may welcome the force as a means of consolidating demographic changes and the fundamental shifts in economic ownership throughout Darfur.