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analysts observe that a moral and ethical problem arises each time African populations are abandoned by peacekeepers in a bid to save the lives of peacekeepers as happened in Somalia and Rwanda (Barnett 2002).
The reason for abandoning African missions is simply that these countries are not primarily answerable and accountable to the endangered populations, but rather to their domestic electorate. Once the electorate back home disapproves of the body-bags coming from African missions, their respective governments are politically forced to abandon the poor and endangered African populations irrespective of the consequences. The ethical challenge arising from the abandonment of civilians in African missions is that the local populations usually invest their trust in the protection capacity of peacekeepers through their coming to seek refuge near peacekeepers’ bases yet the peacekeepers’ priority is preserving their own lives and not that of civilians. Once the foreign troops leave at the height of the conflict as happened in Somalia and Rwanda, the vulnerable population presents itself as a large soft target thus unintentionally facilitating their own mass killings by the unruly gunmen seeking revenge against those who had put their trust in foreign troops as exemplified in the Rwandan crisis (Piiparinen Op.Cit. :375).
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of such an ethnically, racially, religiously and economically diverse population (Ibid.). In addition those blaming the Sudanese Government for lack of political settlement,there are some who blame the respect for Sudan’s national sovereignty that impeded the launching of a robust military humanitarian operation against the perpetrators of “acts of genocide” (Weiss 2009:44).
The AU has failed to bring pressure to bear on the Sudanese president and the rebel groups in order to force them towards embracing the peace initiatives it initiated. To make matters worse, some western powers are financing and sponsoring insurgent groups fighting both the peacekeepers and the host government. Such sponsorship of rebel groups in Darfur complicates the political operating environment for the hybrid peacekeepers.
The first ethical challenge to be considered is to do with the attitude and behaviour of the Sudanese Government towards the peacekeepers. The GoS after reluctantly accepting the deployment of UNAMID deliberately complicated and at times disrupted the deployment processes and operating environment of the peacekeepers. Murithi (2009:16)highlighted examples of Sudanese Government’s interference with peacekeeping deployments such as:
refusing troops from particular countries; holding equipment in the customs warehouses from where most equipment had to be transported to Darfur; denying permission for flights at night and limiting patrol areas to UNAMID observers and peacekeepers. UNAMID land movements and patrols as well as flight requests continue to be restricted with the government citing lack of sufficient notification time, lack of government written authorization and insecurity challenges as reasons for denying planned activities (UN Doc. S/2013/22 dated 10 Jan 2013).
The GoS agreed to allow night flying on condition that the UN upgraded its airports in Darfur as the government tried to maximize its benefits from the presence of UNAMID on its soil (UN Doc S/2007/759 dated 24 December 2007).
Reporting to the UN Security Council on the situation in Darfur, Titov (2010:1) emphasized that the challenges facing Darfur must be met within a national context. He stated that, “The conflicts in Sudan, which have a primarily internal structure, cannot be solved in a peace-meal fashion or by addressing primarily external factors.” Titov noted that formal talks between the major warring parties had not been possible since some of the groups are externally handled and manipulated. Despite successes in some regions of Darfur, the hybrid force has so far failed to be more effective than its predecessor AMIS at protecting the population of Darfur. The frustrating strategies employed by the GoS to the deployment and operational activities of UNAMID reflect limited host state consent at the strategic level, which is just short of demanding the withdrawal of the hybrid peacekeepers from the country as the mission has been
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allowed limited operational space to manoeuvre. This has led Beck (2011:28) to conclude that Darfur offers a classic case of an assertive state at the operational level whose activities are enough to curtail the efficacy of the mission yet remaining out of the immediate danger of receiving international punishment or censure at the strategic level.
The second major ethical challenge is related to security concerns facing UNAMID’s operations in Darfur because there is no peace to keep in that region. The absence of a comprehensive ceasefire agreement among the belligerents creates a very dangerous operating environment for the peacekeepers. The increased proliferation of factional insurgent groups has significantly contributed to worsening insecurity of the Darfur region since these groups did not consent to the deployment of peacekeepers in the first place. This explains why UNAMID has experienced high levels of banditry, occasional military engagements, ethnic clashes and deadly attacks on its peacekeepers (UN Report 2009:7). The peacekeeping mission remains grossly ill-equipped to deal with violations of the ceasefire by both government troops and insurgent groups hence protection of civilians is seriously compromised. The best peacekeepers can do in order to protect the civilian population is facilitating their movement to internally displaced people (IDP) camps (Coulon and Liegeois 2010).
A rebel attack on peacekeepers in July 2008 resulted in seven peacekeepers killed and twenty- two others wounded. General Agwai, then commander of UNAMID blamed the heavy losses on the UN Security Council which had deployed the peacekeepers without adequate resources to protect themselves against such attacks (Anyidoho 2006). Critical to note is that the EU and US partners and other donor countries that were upbeat about deploying a robust UN peacekeeping mission in Darfur with a stronger mandate and firepower to effectively deal with perpetrators of violence in Darfur have reneged on their earlier pledges. This goes to further demonstrate that altruistic and ethical considerations regarding the protection of endangered civilians were never the primary reasons for wanting to launch a military humanitarian intervention in Darfur. If the western powers were truly concerned about the suffering of civilians in Darfur, they should have fully equipped the predominantly African hybrid mission to execute the very tasks they were planning to undertake if indeed these tasks were humanitarian in nature.
Gowan (2008:453) argues that the UN is riddled with a “systemic crisis” because its traditional framework for guiding peacekeeping deployments as well as many of its assumptions about transitions from war to peace have been found wanting in many cases involving peacekeeping
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missions. Murithi (2009:3) concurs and is also of the view that the UN has “stumbled into a series of missions in an increasingly ad-hoc fashion” the consequences of which have been the inabilities to effectively plan, prepare and deploy effective peacekeeping operations on the ground hence the failure to deliver the desired results. Whereas these observations are correct, what they miss is the linkage of these failures with organized hypocrisy practiced by the UNSC in its peacekeeping missions in Africa.
The third challenge facing UNAMID is related to the ethical challenge of using force to protect civilians in Darfur. Justification for the ‘use of force’ for the sake of protecting civilians knowing fully well that some civilian casualties would occur is difficult to sustain more so when the peacekeepers themselves do not have the capacity to protect themselves from the rebels. Badescu and Bergholm (2009: 301) observed that the hybrid peacekeepers in Darfur had no peace to keep and at the same time their mandate was not to wage war, meaning that their presence was just symbolic. This view was echoed by then UNAMID Force Commander General Martin Luther Agwai who stated that even if the mission was fully equipped and resourced, “peacekeepers would not stand between rival armies and militias engaged in full- scale combat.” Adada (2008:3) emphasized UNAMID lacked five critical capabilities to enhance their effectiveness namely: surveillance aircraft for reconnaissance, attack helicopters to deal with spoilers, medium lift helicopters to support both movement of troops and for logistical support, qualified military engineers and logistical support staff.
The modern international state system is founded on the principle that sovereign nation states have a right to non-intervention and unwarranted external interference in their domestic affairs.
State sovereign immunity has been violated by UN peacekeepers in the altruistic doctrine of protecting civilians from conflict that prioritizes human security. The use of force in these circumstances has been formalised through the adoption of the doctrine and concept of responsibility to protect civilians in conflict areas as is the case in Darfur.
UNAMID peacekeepers in Darfur have remained ill prepared and insufficiently equipped for the mission of protecting civilians due to several factors that revolve around the fact that protection of civilian strangers on the African continent remains a non-priority for big powers whose main priorities are to safeguard their self-interests even if it means this is done at the expense of the local population.50 Added to this is the fact that there continues to exist an ethical
50 This point was emphasised by the DRC ambassador to Zimbabwe citing the failure of UN peacekeepers in the DRC to prioritize the protection of Congolese civilian population. In an interview in Harare on 12 November
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tension between the new norm of human security and its related doctrine of R2P on one hand and the continuing dominance of the realist doctrine that prioritizes respect for state sovereignty and promotion of national self-interests on the other. False humanitarian rhetoric as part of organized hypocrisy should be taken seriously as abuse of this altruistic term by the US led to attacks on Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011. Abuse of the ethical humanitarian justification for using military force tends to blur the distinction between genuine and legitimate exceptions to the non-intervention norm (Terry 2002)
The fourth challenge facing UNAMID is bureaucratic procedures that hinder effective decision making within the AU and UN systems. Commenting on the slow and late response of the UN to the crisis in Darfur, Human Rights Watch summed it up as “…too late, too little.”
Considering the combined AU/UN bureaucratic decision making procedures coupled by deliberate efforts by the Sudanese Government to ensure that its sub-optimal performance activities are kept in check, it is therefore not surprising to witness the logistical and operational difficulties which UNAMID is operating under that contribute to its limited success.
The fifth challenge is related to the high protection expectations of the civilian population in Darfur that the hybrid peacekeepers cannot satisfy. This results in an ethical problem in that on one hand, the internally displaced population holds the peacekeepers in high esteem and harbour great expectations regarding the peacekeepers’ ability to provide them with protection.
Some of the influential religious Sheikhs have gone to the extent of considering UNAMID as
“a powerful military ally that will help them train their self-defence militias and transform the camps into entrenched bastions from which they’ll be able to conduct military operations”
(Weissman 2008:16). On the other hand the GoS holds the peacekeepers in contempt as they are labelled as an “anti-Arab” military force that serves the interests of the anti-government rebels (Ibid.).
There are few incidences in which the peacekeepers are credited with effective protection of civilians one of which involved UNAMID troops that staved off military attacks that “could have cost many more civilian lives” (Holt, Taylor, and Kelly 2009, 358). Success stories of this
2015, his main argument was that UN peacekeeping missions constitute a lucrative business for the developed countries whose military industrialized complexes that supply weapons and ammunition used by the peacekeepers greatly benefit from continued peacekeeping operations. The same also applies to multinational corporations that supply other combat and logistical supplies. In his view, this explains why UN missions in Africa are prolonged over several years without tangible results related to the resolution of local conflicts to the satisfaction of local populations.
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nature are few and far in between. In other incidences, UNAMID exaggerates the GoS denial of access to areas requiring investigation on crimes against humanity. An example that illustrates this point is when UNAMID claimed to have been “denied access by Sudanese military at a checkpoint” when they attempted to investigate the report about 200 women that had been raped in El Fasher, North Darfur. The official UN bulletin misinformed the world that the peacekeepers had been denied access to the area when in fact they interviewed a few witnesses before they were confronted by Sudanese intelligence officials who asked them to leave after they had obtained confirmation of the crime committed (Reeves 2007). Fabrication of such lies is meant to serve a hidden agenda of UNAMID leadership while at the same time angering the government officials in Khartoum,
The existence of an undermanned and ill-equipped hybrid UNAMID mission in Darfur in reality represents symbolic gestures and face saving measures to portray a positive picture that the world community was responding to the plight of Darfur’s civilian population yet in practice little is being done to protect the civilians. Moreover, because of the tasks related to the protection of civilians, the neutrality of UN peacekeepers has increasingly been compromised as demands from concerned governments and humanitarian agents call for the effective protection of civilians, which entails that peacekeepers take military coercive action against spoilers that potentially put them on a collision course with different armed groups embroiled in the conflict (Clement and Smith 2009).