Should General Martin Luther Agwai also shake hands with the Devil?
blurb:isstoday9Sep08Darfur
9 September 2008: Should General Martin Luther Agwai also shake hands with the Devil?
Since taking command of the joint United Nations African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID), General Martin Luther Agwai has never missed an opportunity to alert the international community to what Unamid requires to effectively implement its mandate in Darfur. This clarion call from the general is getting louder,yet the international community is grappling with other matters, including the indictment of President Omar al Bashir. It does not seem to be giving much attention to the general’s warnings on why the Darfur operation is likely to fail.
In anop-ed published in South Africa’s Mail & Guardian and several other media across the world entitled “What Peace is There to Keep in Darfur?” General Agwai outlined the constraints facing the Darfur peacekeeping operation and enumerated his recommendations for a smooth mandate implementation.
According to him, the Darfur operation is currently under-manned and poorly equipped. Instead of the authorised strength of 19,555 military personnel and 6,432 police, the mission only has 9,563 total uniformed personnel, including 7,605 troops, 154 military observers, and 1,804 police officers. This represents just about a third of the strength of an operation designedto be the world’s largest peacekeeping operation. Given the size of Darfur, a region comparable in size to Spain, and the complex nature of the situation, this has dire implications for the effectiveness of the mission.
Besides the mission being under-manned, it is also under-equipped, as none of the helicopters required for the operation has been made available to the force. In an interview aired on CNN recently, the general did not mince his words in requesting the international community to come to his aid with 18 helicopters and 8 fighter helicopters. These helicopters are for the purposes of effective patrolling remote and inaccessible parts of Darfur, and also to prevent peacekeeping fatalities such as the ambush against peacekeepers in Um Hakikah in which 7 peacekeepers were killed whilst on patrol.
These concerns vividly reminds one of similar calls of despair that General Romeo Dallaire made to the international community during the Rwandan Genocide when he was in command of United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) -a mission meant to aid the implementation of the Arusha Accords. At the time, instead of responding to his plea, the international community was engrossed in a semantic grapple over the appropriate description of the killing of Tutsis and moderate Hutus. By the time it could be agreed that the situation was a Genocide,it was too late. The international community had to express regret and committed never to permit a reoccurrence of such a tragedy. Around 800,000 people were massacred in the presence of an ill-equipped and under-manned UNAMIR under the command of general Dallaire. As Dallaire later narrated in his popular books and documentaries, his experiences and those of his force were synonymous to “shaking hands with the devil”.
The events in Rwanda had a profound psychological effect on General Dallaire. He had witnessed the massacre of so many people without being able to do what he had been trained to do best simply because he was not given the necessary means by the powers that sent him there.
This time round, another general is appealing to the international community for assistance to stem another situation that has not escaped the world’s description as Genocide. And it is clear that the Darfur operation needs to be adequately manned and equipped before it can deliver the mandate entrusted to it by the United Nations (UN). It needs this to prevent the force from been overpowered by rapidly splintering rebel groups which may lead to further fatalities among the peacekeepers.
If these needs are not met, General Agwai has warned the world that the mission will fail. One would hope that the international community would not act like the Biblical Egyptian taskmasters who demanded bricks without providing straw.
It is true that the UN, as a body, grapples with financial constraints and Darfur is no exception. Understandable as this can be, the world body has put its hands to the plough and cannot look back - perhaps because the international community agrees that another Genocide cannot go down againin the annals of history. Meanwhile the general’s pleas are still unanswered and we can rightly ask whether we are not pushing another general to shake hands with the devil?
Andrews Atta-Asamoah, Training for Peace Programme, Institute for Security Studies, Nairobi Office
