| John O'Shea, Irish Examiner, 8th August 2007
The announcement of a new United Nations Security Council resolution is a cop-out for the people of Darfur.
Not only is it poorly planned and insufficiently mandated, but there is no guarantee that it will even take effect.
When will the council members be honest with the people of Darfur and admit that commercial concerns take precedence to their safety and wellbeing? That, ultimately, China and Russia's oil consumption takes precedence over the 3.5 million people in Darfur whose lives are at risk?
For four years the Security Council and the international community have allowed the people of Darfur to suffer. Every ill-considered attempt since the conflict broke out in late 2003 has tripped up on vested interests and this initiative — the proposed deployment of a hybrid UN/African Union force comprising 26,000 mostly African troops — will also fail.
Anyone with even a tender grasp of the situation in Darfur will recognise the need for a properly equipped, properly resourced international army with a full mandate to take whatever measures are necessary to protect the vulnerable people of Darfur.
Even then, there is no guarantee of success. But what the Security Council has instead ordained is almost farcical: the deployment of a hodgepodge group made up almost exclusively of African Union soldiers who have heretofore been active in Darfur and proven themselves utterly incapable of doing the necessary job.
Resolution 1769 seemingly came out of the blue last Wednesday night from the UN's plush New York skyscraper, with what nobody was expecting would be so easy: the consent of both China and Sudan. What has happened to change the minds of these two countries so sharply and so quickly, considering the commonplace knowledge that the facilitator of the Darfur genocide is China?
China buys more than 70%,0f Sudan's substantial oil output to fuel its massive growth in manufacturing and other outputs.
Sudan, with a glut of international sanctions against it, needs China's money. China, with its desperate desire to outsmart the west in the capitalist stakes, needs Sudan's oil. Therein lies the basis of Darfur's pain.
China's thirst for oil is embroiling the country in genocide. China wields a veto on the UN Security Council — along with the US, Britain, France and Russia — and it has consistently a diplomatic cover for Sudan when things heat up in the Security Council chambers. It was China's refusal to agree to any resolutions on Darfur that led to the inclusion of a clause requiring Khartoum's consent for any peacekeeping force to be deployed to Darfur. Now that they have, we must ask: at what price? And it is more than just a passive act of protection on China's part.
UN investigators have found that most of the arms fuelling the conflict and human rights violations in Darfur were manufactured in China. There is no doubt that these arms were traded in part payment for Sudanese oil. So, the very commodity that should be lifting the country out of its morass of poverty and underdevelopment is fuelling its own implosion.
The world is being led to believe that in British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy we have found two miracle workers. The Downing Street press office would have us believe that the resolution is all down to the tenacity and compassion of these two men.
But European commitments to this force — a measure of how deeply we are really prepared to see the real issues resolved — are minimal. Due to British commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, their contribution is unlikely to be much higher than a paltry 100 support staff. France, too, is remaining uncommitted to actual troops preferring to bask in the reflected glory of another empty gesture.
For our part, the Irish Army should play a meaningful role in the alleviation of suffering in Darfur. But the mandate of the proposed force is such that this is unlikely to be the case for joining an army that is entitled only to monitor a genocide, and hasn't permission to prevent it, is utterly futile. By refusing to supply troops, the Irish Government would be sending a strong message to the international community that this initiative, like all previous UN efforts in Darfur, is unlikely to succeed.
Last Friday, Defence Minister Willie O'Dea said he would consider "with sympathy" a request from the UN to provide troops for the UN/African Union hybrid force that was yesterday agreed upon by the United Nations Security Council. Since the minister said Irish troops are almost finished their tour of the Lebanon, and the mission to Liberia has finished, it is clear that he is weighing up the decision to deploy.
It is clear that Mr Brown and Mr Sarkozy enthusiastically endorse the talents of the UN in peacekeeping capacities. Yet, on hard evidence, all we have to go on are the shambolics of Bosnia, Congo, Sierra Leone and many, many more.
There is a huge element of theatrics to the developments that led up to this resolution being agreed upon. It seems rather coincidental, for example, that this resolution was announced mere hours after Mr Brown's maiden speech to the UN, portraying him as a man of action that has solved in a few weeks of office what his predecessor failed at over four years.
Darfur needs more than theatrics, shallow rhetoric and empty resolutions. It needs a commitment from the world that it is a priority — the priority — for the developed world.
John O'Shea is chief executive of GOAL, an international humanitarian organisation that has been working in Darfur for almost four years since the humanitarian crisis first came to international attention
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