[Peace-discuss] Darfur colonized by peacekeepers?

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Thursday 2 August 2007
	Darfur: colonised by ‘peacekeepers’

The new 26,000-strong UN force being sent to the war-torn western 
province of Sudan is likely to stir up further tensions rather than 
deliver peace.

Philip Cunliffe

The United Nations (UN) Security Council yesterday passed resolution 
1769. It establishes another peacekeeping mission in Sudan, UNAMID, for 
Sudan’s war-torn western province of Darfur. With a total authorised 
strength of 26,000, UNAMID is expected to be the largest UN peacekeeping 
operation in the world by next year. What’s more, UNAMID peacekeepers 
will deploy under the terms of ‘Chapter VII’ of the UN Charter, which 
legally entitles them to use force beyond self-defence. In other words, 
this will not be a neutral, monitoring contingent, but a militarised 
force and de facto protagonist in Darfur’s conflict.

The creation of UNAMID comes on top of the two other peacekeeping 
missions already in Sudan: the 7,000-strong African Union force deployed 
in Darfur, and the 10,000-strong UN peacekeeping force policing a 
ceasefire in south Sudan since 2005 (UNMIS). In June this year, the 
European Union also began planning its own 3,000-strong peacekeeping 
operation to police the border between Sudan, Chad and the Central 
African Republic. Further south, Africa is already host to the world’s 
largest UN peacekeeping operation, the 18,000-strong MONUC operation in 
the Democratic Republic of Congo. There are some further 36,000-odd UN 
peacekeepers scattered across the continent (see the table below). In 
light of all these multinational forces descending on Sudan and already 
stationed across Africa, it is unsurprising that some analysts have 
pointedly asked whether Africa is in the process of being ‘re-colonised’ 
by the UN (1). The reality is more complex, however, though no less 
disturbing.

The UN’s latest peacekeeping plan for Darfur is designed to quell the 
strife that erupted in the province in 2003, when local rebels took up 
arms against the central government in Khartoum. The conflict is 
complex, with a variety of interlocking factions and ethnic groups whose 
political antagonisms and struggle with the central government gird 
longstanding rivalries over the region’s depleted resources (2). But it 
is not only regional politics and economics that represent a barrier to 
peace – the international community’s involvement in the conflict has 
served to prolong and escalate the bloodshed.

Evading the bloody involution of the American crusade to liberate Iraq, 
a swathe of Western politicians, human rights groups and liberal 
intellectuals have tried collectively to regroup around Darfur (3). 
Dictated by a desire to cohere the agenda of international 
interventionism, these groups have systematically portrayed the conflict 
in Darfur as a genocide launched by racist, fanatical ‘Arabs’ against 
victimised ‘Africans’ (4). For the incoming governments of Gordon Brown 
and Nicolas Sarkozy in Britain and France, a joint focus on Darfur – 
complete with a promise to visit the refugee camps – has helped to 
dissociate them from the disaster of Iraq, while simultaneously 
affirming their moral authority to dictate affairs around the globe (5).

This skewed presentation of the conflict has warped its dynamics, by 
offering Darfuri rebels the tantalising prospect that they could 
opportunistically convert international sympathy into military 
intervention in their favour. According to a State Department official a 
few years back, the rebels ‘let the village burnings go on, let the 
killing go on, because the more international pressure that’s brought to 
bear on Khartoum, the stronger their position grows’ (6). Transfixed by 
the moral gaze of the international community, the Sudan Liberation 
Movement splintered, with various factions jostling for advantage and 
demanding international guarantees and troops, thereby wrecking last 
year’s peace negotiations (7). One African analyst described the 
background to the earlier 2005 peace negotiations: ‘Unlike many 
liberation movements in Africa, which had to depend on the people to 
build and plan with them, these rebels have too many willing regional 
and international actors indulging their delusions of grandeur.’ (8) If 
this were not enough, the intense international pressure on Khartoum 
also encouraged other rebels – this time in eastern Sudan – to renew 
their war against Khartoum, further destabilising Africa’s largest 
country (9).

Peace negotiations are supposed to restart before the deployment of the 
new UN force. But given that the insertion of this new force into Darfur 
is the logical extension of the previous internationalisation of the 
conflict, there is no reason to think that the UN presence will not 
further upset the local balance of forces, as each belligerent 
reorganises their strategy around the new military presence on the 
ground, with rebel factions potentially goading the UN into military 
action on their behalf.

The more that African governments – or indeed would-be revolutionary 
movements – cede their own authority to a shimmering and remote 
international community, the more that ordinary Africans’ lives are 
beholden to more distant and unaccountable powers in place of their own 
governments. Under the auspices of the UN, wars are no longer treated as 
political affairs, with peace founded on Africans’ own efforts, but as 
‘conflict management’ activities to be administered by bureaucrats and 
jet-setting international diplomats.

Although the substance of political independence in Africa is 
undoubtedly being eroded by the relentless expansion of peacekeeping, 
the UN is much too ramshackle to represent anything like a real empire. 
The growing intrusiveness of the international community represents not 
colonialism but a new form of international hegemony – albeit one that 
is no less alarming and in many ways more insidious. Under colonialism, 
by annexing and conquering territories, imperialist powers assumed 
direct political responsibility for their colonies – a system that at 
least had the benefit of making clear who was oppressing whom. Today, 
the international community preaches human rights instead of racial 
supremacy, and it compromises a variety of actors: states, 
state-sponsored mega-NGOs, the UN and other international and regional 
organisations.

Not only are there no clear lines of institutional accountability in 
this decentralised network – there is also no single agent that is 
willing to be held responsible for particular outcomes. This moralised 
multilateralism lends itself to passing the buck: states blame the UN, 
the UN blames states, and both blame Africans for their corruption and 
backwardness… In these circumstances, the scrambling of political 
responsibilities is usually resolved by greater coercion: sanctions, 
Security Council resolutions and punitive international laws. And, of 
course, by the deployment of more and more peacekeepers, more heavily 
armed. This new international system can only bode badly for Sudan and 
Africa as a whole.

[peacekeeping statistics]

Philip Cunliffe is co-editor of Politics Without Sovereignty: A Critique 
of Contemporary International Relations (UCL Press, 2007).
_____________________________

(1) Martin Plaut, The UN’s all-pervasive role in Africa, BBC News 18 
July 2007

(2) Mahmood Mamdani, The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, 
Insurgency, London Review of Books, 8 March 2007

(3) On the wide variety of political groupings supporting intervention 
in Darfur, see Mahmood Mamdani, The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil 
War, Insurgency, London Review of Books, 8 March 2007

(4) Mahmood Mamdani, The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, 
Insurgency, London Review of Books, 8 March 2007

(5) BBC News, Brown and Sarkozy vow Darfur trip, 20 July 2007

(6) Cited in Roberto Belloni, ‘The trouble with humanitarianism’, Review 
of International Studies, 33:3, July 2007, p461

(7) Alex de Waal, I will not sign, London Review of Books, 30 November 2006

(8) Alex de Waal, I will not sign, London Review of Books, 30 November 2006

(9) Mark Doyle, Sudan’s interlocking wars, BBC News, 10 May 2006

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3697/

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