Tuesday's unanimous passage of UN security council resolution 1769 has received mixed, if generally positive, reviews. This was inevitable, given the nature of the resolution, which authorises (under chapter seven of the UN charter) some 26,000 civilian police and troops, with a general mandate to protect civilians and humanitarian operations.
Given the dramatic failings of the current African Union (AU) force in Darfur (which will be folded into the new "hybrid" AU/UN force), and the self-serving and expedient posturing of so many international actors, it's hard to quarrel with what appears to give promise of a significant improvement in human security.
But the shortcomings of the significantly weakened resolution have also been noted: it has no mandate to seize weapons in Darfur that have been introduced in violation of previous security council resolutions; it has no mandate to halt aerial attacks on civilians by Khartoum's savage military machine; and it was stripped of language that condemned Khartoum for its relentless war of attrition against humanitarian efforts over the past four years, efforts that have undoubtedly cost tens of thousands of lives. Nor is meaningful action contemplated to staunch the flow of ethnic violence into eastern Chad or the north-eastern Central African Republic. Moreover, the "hybrid" command-and-control structure seems a formula for confusion and disagreement.
But the biggest criticisms of the force, quite rightly, has been the dilatory nature of the time frame for its deployment, and the inevitable delays that can be expected in securing and transporting personnel for the hybrid force.
The so-called heavy support package negotiated with Khartoum by the UN and the AU is essentially a means of providing the logistics and communications and technical resources for the large follow-on force. The "heavy support package" is far from being ready, or having committed support.
And then there is the key question of who will actually provide the personnel for the hybrid force, especially given Khartoum's demand that it be essentially African in makeup. The AU is struggling to find 8,000 troops for Somalia, and has fallen behind at every stage of deployment of its evolving mission in Darfur. To be sure, there are already some volunteers, from Africa and elsewhere; but the numbers behind the offers suggest how hard it will be to reach anything like 26,000 troops and civilian police.
Nigeria may send another 700 troops, Senegal another 400 troops and police, Malawi a battalion; but beyond this, there have been only unspecific, and not especially promising, offers from Burkina Faso, Egypt, Ethiopia, South Africa, and Cameroon. Other offers are expected, but the requisite numbers are not in evidence, especially in the key area of civilian police, where the AU has been weakest on the ground in Darfur.
Non-African countries have also made commitments, though the number of countries declaring they will not send troops (the US, the UK, Canada, Germany) should give pause. France, the Netherlands, and Denmark will contribute, though numbers have not been announced and are likely to be in the low hundreds; Sweden and Norway are considering sending a joint force (Norway has indicated it could deploy 200 engineers and military logistics personnel by the end of the year); Indonesia has said it will contribute between 100 and150 civilian police.
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.
Presently, chaos reigns supreme in Darfur, and this debilitating insecurity chiefly threatens the acutely vulnerable African tribal populations (though Arab groups are increasingly victims of violence), as well as humanitarian relief workers and their operations, on which some 4.7 million people in Darfur and eastern Chad now depend.
Between the regime's own military attacks - including indiscriminate aerial assaults on civilians - the ongoing predations of the brutal Janjaweed militia, the internecine violence that has emerged from splits within the rebel ranks, and opportunistic banditry, Khartoum's earlier and more conspicuously genocidal violence has led to a grim "genocide by attrition."
For more than four years, Khartoum has been guilty of "deliberately inflicting [on the African tribal groups in Darfur] conditions of life calculated to bring about [their] physical destruction in whole or in part" - a key term of reference in the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This is how genocide in Darfur is now sustained.
We also have explicit documentation of efforts to "change the demography of Darfur and empty it of African tribes." This particular directive was sent to no fewer than three of Khartoum's ruthlessly efficient "intelligence services." And we should be aware that Khartoum's effort to "change the demography" of Darfur continues, despite the passage of resolution 1679.
A recent internal UN report, leaked to the Independent, finds that Arabs from Chad and Niger are entering Darfur in "unprecedented" numbers. As many as 30,000 ethnic Arabs have entered in the last two months, bringing their flocks and belongings, and have been greeted with Sudanese identity cards, even citizenship. They are, predictably, settling on the lands of those African tribal groups that have been displaced (total displacement is now in the range of 2.5 million, more than a third the prewar population of Darfur). Such resettlement could spark extremely dangerous violence as people seek to return to their former lands and villages.
All of this, Khartoum is orchestrating, as it will orchestrate conditions ensuring that violence threatens any deploying hybrid force: not by its regular forces, but by its various military proxies. Even as the rebel groups now are most responsible for attacks on AU forces (more than 15 AU soldiers have been killed), this will shift with a significant UN presence in the new force. Khartoum will attemp in various ways to put these new forces on the defensive and keep them hunkered down in their barracks.
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.
What remains of the rebel groups will be happily left to confront the hybrid force. Darfur and its troublesome African populations will no longer pose a threat to the regime's virtual monopoly on national wealth and power. Indeed, the greatest concern Khartoum now perceives is the expanding violence against and among Arab groups, and the move by some Janjaweed forces to switch sides, having been used and abandoned by the regime.
This is no argument against urgent deployment of 1769 as far as is practicable. Indeed, there should be an emphasis on early deployment of civilian police elements contemplated in the resolution - with adequate military protection - particularly to the most unstable camps, such as the enormous Gereida camp in south Darfur or the camps in the Tawilla and Kutum areas of north Darfur, or outside el-Geneina in western Darfur. Key civilian interlocutors among camps leaders and village sheiks should be identified on both sides of the ethnic divide. The command structure should be clarified as much as possible, and the specific tasks to be undertaken under the chapter seven mandate should be decisively identified for all troops.
But even such an effort will not disturb Khartoum's conviction that it can prevail - not without much greater international will and commitment than is presently in evidence. Belated passage of resolution 1769 is a start, but only just.
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Eric Reeves is author of "A Long Day's Dying: Critical Moments in
the Darfur Genocide"
