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Sally Chin, Advocate of Refugees International just returned from South Darfur and wrote the report, “No Power to Protect: The African Union Mission in Darfur.” She speaks with Jerry Fowler about the lack of funding and resources for the African Union and her recommendations to improve their protection capabilities.
TRANSCRIPT:
NARRATOR: Welcome to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Your host is Jerry Fowler, director of the Museum’s Committee on Conscience.
JERRY FOWLER: Our guest today is Sally Chin. She is an advocate with Refugees International and is co-author of a new report, “No Power to Protect: The African Union Mission in Darfur.” She also has just returned from a trip to Darfur. Welcome to the program.
SALLY CHIN: Thanks for having me Jerry.
JERRY FOWLER: Sally; let us just start with the basics. What is the African Union mission in Darfur and why is it there?
SALLY CHIN: In 2004, a ceasefire was signed between the government of Sudan and the main rebel parties that were fighting in Darfur which are the SLA and the JEM. There was a ceasefire signed and it was signed by the African Union, and the African Union sent in a mission to help monitor the ceasefire agreement. It was a very small mission when it started out; only a couple of military observers that were sent to investigate violations of the ceasefire, but then it slowly has been growing bigger and bigger as the demands of the international community have grown in terms of trying to protect the civilians of Darfur. Right now, the African Union mission in Sudan—which is also known as AMIS—has about seven thousand personnel and that includes civilian police who are unarmed; that includes military observers who are there to observe the ceasefire, as well as protection forces, and these are the guys with the guns who are there mostly to protect the military observers and the civilian police of AMIS.
JERRY FOWLER: You title your report “No Power to Protect,” but yet you are saying that there is some expectation that they would protect civilians. How did you come to the conclusion that they do not have power to protect?
SALLY CHIN: It is an interesting situation. The United States, George Bush, Congress declared the situation in Darfur genocide, and even the United Nations did not come up with the idea of genocide, but crimes against humanity, yet the international response to Darfur, aside from humanitarian assistance, in terms of security, has been to give this to the African Union. The African Union is a really young organization; I think it is about four years old, and this is its first real big—I hesitate to use the term peacekeeping because it is really a monitoring mission—but it is really its first peacekeeping mission, whereas for example, the United Nations has had many, many years of peacekeeping experience. There are a lot of expectations in terms of what the people in Darfur need, but they were sent with the African Union which did not have a whole lot of experience. What we have seen is that this has been a real problem for the people of Darfur. The African Union has gone in; they have been able to get some troops together, but they have no money; they have no resources. Everything they need has to be given by the donor community which has been really reluctant to step up to the plate and give the funding necessary for the African Union mission to do its job. So it is there, they have the military observers, there are the protection forces, they are stationed in several areas of Darfur, but when we say “no power to protect,” it is this expectation that they should be protecting, but they are not able to, they do not have the mandate to proactively protect citizens. In their mandate, they are told to monitor the ceasefire, and they are also told that they can protect civilians but only civilians that are in immediate danger, in their immediate vicinity, in imminent danger. They also do not have the resources or the manpower. If you look at Darfur, this is an area the size of Texas or France and you have about seven thousand people spread out on this area. You have about two million people, Darfurians, who are in IDP camps, and this is just way too much territory and way too many people for such a small mission to protect. I think we also looked at the idea of “no power to protect” because very recently the states at the United Nations in September embraced the idea that they have the responsibility to protect civilians that are in danger and that their states are not protecting them. So, we the international community have given the African Union the responsibility to protect the people of Darfur without giving them the power.
JERRY FOWLER: Let us untangle those different elements that you just laid out very clearly. The first one is the mandate; you are saying that they do not really have a mandate to protect civilians. Where did they get the mandate that they have and what are the obstacles to changing that mandate?
SALLY CHIN: They got their mandate through their discussions at their Peace and Security Council of the African Union. Sudan sits in the African Union; it is a member of the African Union and is part of deciding what type of mandate the African Union mission in Sudan would have. The African Union decided itself that this was the most that it could do and in terms of international support, it has not really been pushed by the international community to expand its mandate to proactive protection of civilians. The mandate has slowly been expanding since the beginning. As I said, when it first started it was very much a small contingency that were there to monitor the ceasefire, and slowly more troops were added, with this protecting civilians in immediate vicinity in imminent danger, but with the understanding that the real protection has to come from the government of Sudan. I think there has been a lot of discussion with the African Union, within the international community about expanding this mandate. I was in Darfur, I was in North and West Darfur in September, and I just got back from South Darfur where I spent a lot of time talking to the African Union officers on the ground who felt really constrained and frustrated by this mandate. I spoke with a Rwandan officer who said, “We are here to prevent genocide. We came from a place where there was genocide. How can we do anything in Darfur if our hands are tied by this mandate, if we cannot protect civilians proactively?” I think that is the sentiment you feel amongst a lot of the African Union officers; that they feel frustrated. On the political level though, the African Union political people know that it is going to be really difficult to get a stronger mandate out of the government of Sudan, which has to agree on what the African Union is there to do.
JERRY FOWLER: It does seem an anomalous situation where the government of Sudan in the first instance had responsibility for protecting civilians, and they are not fulfilling that responsibility, but yet, you have to get their agreement for somebody else to assume the responsibility.
SALLY CHIN: One of the scenarios that we are not seeing for Darfur is basically an invasion. Basically, whether it would be a NATO or some other kind of international force coming into Darfur against the will of the government of Sudan and saying, “This is what we are going to do. We are going to protect the civilians. We are going to, whether you like it or not,” which we have seen happen in other areas of the world. The way that the international community has been handling the situation has been to give the responsibility to the African Union. There has been a lot of talk about “African solutions to African problems.” I think the African Union is just too weak to be able to deal with the government of Sudan, to be able to forcibly say, “Look, we need to be able to do more, to have better access, to have more people on the ground.” You can see this happening in January for example, is the African Union summit. This will be happening at the end of January, and it is being held in Khartoum because it rotates around from region to region of Africa. This time around, it is being held in Khartoum. There has been a lot of pressure that there is no way that the African Union summit could be held in Khartoum considering what is going on in Darfur. And the presidency of the African Union is supposed to go to the government of Sudan as well. People are saying that this is not going to happen, that it is impossible for it to happen, and it is true that if it did happen, if there was not some sort of compromise—whether it would be Obasanjo, the Nigerian President keeping the presidency of the African Union or some other kind of way where the government of Sudan is not responsible for what is going on in terms of the mediation for Darfur—it is going to be a really big problem for the credibility of the African Union.
JERRY FOWLER: You mentioned in your summary of the African mission, the mandate was one problem; they do not have the mandate to protect civilians, and I know in your report you recommend an expanded mandate. But you point out also that an expanded mandate would require more troops. What is needed in terms of the size of this force?
SALLY CHIN: I would hesitate to put a real number on how many troops would be needed. I think that there has not been a real mathematical formula of this many troops are needed… What is definitely true is that they definitely need more troops. A number of seven thousand people on the ground in Darfur is just not enough. When you are on the ground, and when you are patrolling with the African Union, and you are seeing how they can get out and where they are visiting camps you can just see how they do not have enough people. They are only sending out maybe two patrols per day per site. Things are really spread out. You have to travel for hours to get to certain villages, to talk with the leaders, to find out what is going on. There are more and more demands for things like convoys because humanitarian agencies are being attacked on the roads, so they are asking for African Union protection. With their convoys, the humanitarian community is asking for more patrols around the IDP camps, and even more night patrols—trying to have a twenty-four hour presence. The African Union—you can see it, the humanitarian community knows it, the African Union knows it, the international community knows it—they just do not have enough people to do this. In their planning, the African Union and the donor community have thought of a number of twelve thousand, five hundred as a phase three. I think this is a number they should be trying to shoot for, and after that see if they need to go even higher. One thing is for sure that this seven thousand, seven hundred number is just not enough.
JERRY FOWLER: My understanding—and correct me if I am wrong—is that nobody is really talking about phase three now. At least what I hear now is a general consensus that there really are not more African troops on the continent to be committed to Darfur, so they do not have the capability to get up to that twelve thousand, five hundred.
SALLY CHIN: I am not an expert in knowing what is going on in all of these African militaries, but even in some of the conversations I have had, I do not think it is true that there are no more troops to be committed. There are a lot of countries that have not been tapped. If you look at the troops that are there now, you have Rwandans, you have Nigerians—that is the bulk. You also have some Senegalese. The South Africans have not contributed the troops that they promised. Pressure needs to be put on South Africa to come up with those troops to get them up. I could list other countries—Ghana, other countries that do have troops that are not committing the numbers. So, I think to say that there are not enough troops; I think that that is not necessarily the case.
JERRY FOWLER: Then what do you see going forward? Do you that it is just a question of generating a bigger contribution out of African countries? Or is this going to have to involve augmentation by non-African forces?
SALLY CHIN: I think what is going on right now—and I think people are trying to make these decisions—I think there is a feeling that the African Union is providing some kind of security on the ground and needs to be supported. I think there is this real hesitancy by the donor community because at the end of the day it is all about what kind of money donors like the United States and the European Union are going to put behind the African Union. I think there is a lot of hesitancy to continue to fund the African Union, and so the donor countries are thinking, “It might be time for the United Nations to step in.” I think there are a lot of reasons why the United Nations should step in, in terms of the long-term peacekeeping capacities of the United Nations versus that of the African Union, but I think there is a real risk now of a security vacuum being set up where if the donor community decides that it is tired of putting money into the African Union, and then the space between that and when the United Nations could possibly step in which would probably not happen for another six to eight months, after a decision was taken for that to happen. What you hear from the donors is that they are tired of this and they want more burden sharing. They are referring to the fact that contributions to United Nations peacekeeping missions are assessed across the board, as opposed to the African Union, which basically has the donors coming up with month to month funding requirements and putting together money this way.
JERRY FOWLER: With regard to funding, one thing we have seen just recently is that the United States Congress was asked by Secretary of State Rice to provide fifty million dollars for funding the African Union force and they did not appropriate it. What is going to be the effect of that?
SALLY CHIN: I think this is an incredibly shocking development. If you think about fifty million dollars, in the scheme of all the things that are being budgeted for, it is such a drop in the bucket, but it is such an important amount of money for the African Union. I think the African Union is set to run out of money in a couple of months. The United States contribution is about a third of the running costs, so this fifty million dollars could help the African Union run until May or June. If you think about that the African Union is the only entity this is capable right now of providing some type of security. Humanitarian agencies have said that they cannot imagine working without the African Union on the ground, for all of its weaknesses, or problems, or things that need to be fixed, they could not imagine what the security situation would be like if it was just the government of Sudan on the ground with the rebel groups and the constant tension and fighting. I think for an administration, for a Congress that last year declared Darfur a genocide, and this year cannot find fifty million dollars, I think it shows to what extent we just do not care about Darfur. That is the message that is going across to the government of Sudan. We will talk the talk, but we will not walk the walk.
JERRY FOWLER: Did you get a sense when you were in Darfur most recently, and on your earlier trips, that there is a perception there, whether among Sudanese government officials or among the Darfurians themselves that the United States does not care about what is happening?
SALLY CHIN: I think the government of Sudan knows that the United States is engaged, and that there is a feeling that they care a lot about what is happening on the North-South, what is happening with the Comprehensive Peace Agreement for the North and South. They have really been very successful with keeping journalists out of Darfur; without images of what is happening in Darfur on front pages on television screens, I think they are very astute in knowing that the United States public is really not as aware as they used to be about what is going on in Darfur which means that the United States government does not have to be accountable to its people because people in the United States are not clamoring for more action as they were before.
JERRY FOWLER: Let me ask you this then, since you just came back from Darfur; we do not have a lot of images on the evening news or in the newspapers, for Americans, if we were there, if we were in your shoes, what would we see? What did you see when you were there?
SALLY CHIN: What I saw mostly when I went out to North, West, South Darfur were miserable, miserable, miserable IDP camps. People have been living in these camps for about two years. These are people that lost their homes because they were chased out of them; their homes were burnt. They have been moved to different areas where they have been living in camps. The humanitarian community has done everything I think that they really can to try and provide the services for the displaced persons but it is just not a place you would want to live for this many years. People are cramped together. I think one of the camps we visited in North Darfur, Abu Shouk, is so densely populated—I think it is actually calculated as the most densely populated place on Earth. If you think about people living on top of each other, in little huts—peoples live are on hold, people are sitting around, they are afraid to leave their camps. At night time, the security situation is absolutely awful. We were in one of the camps in South Darfur where we were talking to women who were just on the outskirts of the camp and they were collecting grass and firewood and we were talking to them about their situation and they said they are absolutely terrified to leave the camp, they have to go out to try and find grass and other things for their donkeys. The last time they had gone out, they had been attacked, their donkeys had been stolen, their clothes had been stolen—it is just real insecurity. I think there is this sense that the situation in Darfur is stabilized, that you are not having bombardments of villages, that you are not having people being killed, but the fact is that there are attacks happening daily in Darfur. The situation is so insecure that humanitarian agencies in West Darfur are not working. You have people now in camps, outside of the main city that are not receiving any assistance because the United Nations and NGOs cannot get out there. It is a really bleak, bleak existence with no real signs of improvement.
JERRY FOWLER: Who is committing these attacks?
SALLY CHIN: You have everybody committing attacks. You have the government of Sudan and the government of Sudan police. You have the rebel forces. You have the Janjaweed, which were the nomad militias that have been armed by the government of Sudan committing these attacks. So you have a ceasefire that is just not being respected whatsoever. This is something that is very problematic for the African Union because it is supposed to be there as a force to try and dissuade or deter these kinds of attacks and their presence is just so minimal in some areas that people know that they can go attack with impunity.
JERRY FOWLER: I take it that even where they have been present there have been attacks against the African Union itself in recent weeks.
SALLY CHIN: This has been a trend that has been very worrying. It started really this August/September and has continued over the past months where the African Union has been attacked, soldiers have been wounded and even killed. Most recently there were some Nigerians that were killed and from the reports that I heard, they were not just killed during an attack, they were also mutilated. There was a real signal to the African Union by the varying warring parties. I think that this was probably an SLA attack. Not only were they going to attack, but they were really going to scare the African Union, and since then the African Union has been pretty jittery, has been quite nervous about going on patrols and making sure they have enough protection forces with them to go on those patrols.
JERRY FOWLER: To bring it back to your report on the African Union, what are the major bullet points that you are recommending as steps that need to be taken?
SALLY CHIN: Despite some of the weaknesses or problems that the African Union has had in Darfur, I think it is absolutely critical that the international community continues to support the African Union and ups its support in terms of finances and resources. The African Union mission in Sudan is the only entity that is able to provide any security in Darfur right now, and if we are at all concerned about providing security for the civilians and for the humanitarian workers of Darfur, then these kinds of resources have to happen. Political pressure as well to get the troops up—I think that is more what the situation is in terms of why there are not more troops being committed by countries. I think there is a lot of pressure that has to happen on these countries, as well as the resources. There is still a resource question. The countries cannot contribute troops without having more resources. I think there was a report out just today or yesterday by Jan Egeland, the Emergency Relief Coordinator at the United Nations who said it is absolutely—I cannot remember the exact words he used—but the fact is that there are humanitarian workers than there are people responsible for security in Darfur right now. That is a ratio that has to change. I think the mandate is still an issue that should not be ignored. I think there also need to be some real thinking about how to successfully transition from the African Union to a United Nations peacekeeping mission in the long-term. There is a United Nations mission right now in Sudan which is dealing with the North and South—UNMIS—and they have been opening offices up in Darfur and there have been human rights monitor staff coming into Darfur from this mission. So, I think there is a transition that is happening, it is up to the donors now, it is up to the African Union to make sure that this can happen smoothly and that there is not a security vacuum.
JERRY FOWLER: Sally Chin, thank you so much for joining us.
SALLY CHIN: Thank you.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about the genocide emergency in Darfur, visit our website at www.committeeonconscience.org.
