Ban Gives U.N.-AU Mission in Darfur a Year to Shape up
U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon is proposing a one-year test period to determine whether the troubled U.N.-AU mission in Sudan's Darfur can be salvaged, in a report released Friday.
In the special review to the Security Council, Ban said the 15-member council will face "hard decisions" if the mission remains ineffective after a year.
There have been growing calls from Khartoum for the 15,000-strong UNAMID to pull out after the mission demanded access to a village to investigate claims of a mass rape of women and girls by Sudanese troops.
The secretary general proposed that during the one-year period, "efforts to address troop- and police-contingent shortcomings would be redoubled" to improve mobility and patrols.
President Omar al-Bashir's government "would be called upon" to cooperate, and denials of access to the U.N.-AU force would be immediately reported to AU and U.N. headquarters, Ban said.
The U.N. chief laid out three scenarios after the one-year period including streamlining the mission, strengthening peace-building or considering "hard decisions on the future of UNAMID" if no improvements result from the changes.
UNAMID's future will be discussed next week when Security Council envoys travel to AU headquarters in Addis Ababa as part of a tour that will also include stops in the Central African Republic and Burundi.
The council will then hold a meeting on UNAMID in New York on March 17.
Deployed since 2007, the mission has been plagued with problems mostly over its dual-command structure by which the United Nations and the African Union are both running operations.
The mission is tasked with protecting civilians and securing humanitarian aid in the western region of Sudan, where more than 300,000 have been killed in 11 years of conflict.
More than two million people have been forced from their homes, but the mission has often been barred from accessing conflict areas and its forces have been targeted in attacks.
In November, an internal U.N. probe of allegations that UNAMID was covering up crimes by Sudanese forces against Darfur civilians found that there was an under-reporting of crimes.
But the special review team which looked at 16 incidents, some of which involved possible wrongdoing by Sudanese government or pro-government forces, concluded that there was no evidence of a willful coverup.
UNAMID announced in late February that it was cutting 770 jobs to streamline its operations.
Source: Agence France Presse
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