From Foreign Policy, April 7, 2014 –
“They Just Stood Watching” –
After the Darfur genocide, the United Nations sent in 20,000 peacekeepers with a single mission — to protect the region’s civilians. A Foreign Policy investigation details why they failed, and what the U.N. knew about it. –
By Column Lynch, Foreign Policy, April 7, 2014
This investigation by Colum Lynch, to be published in three parts, is based on extraordinary access to documents, photographs, e-mails, and other materials that UNAMID and the UN have chosen to keep from the world. It chronicles, in short, a shameful cover-up of failure in the face of ongoing genocide, which has for the past two years and more accelerated dramatically throughout Darfur.
Much of what is reported here has been known since last December, when Aicha Elbasri—former spokesperson for UNAMID—went public with her materials in The Netherlands. During a fifth anniversary commemoration of the founding of Radio Dabanga, and in an interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw, Elbasri gave an unsparing account of UNAMID’s massive failure to protect civilians and humanitarians—its sole mandate—and the lies and concealment by which UNAMID has attempted to keep the world from knowing the scale of this failure.
I wrote at length at the time about Ms. Elbasri’s revelations, to no evident effect (see http://sudanreeves.org/2013/12/14/dradft/). But having promised to continue to speak out about what she had seen and heard, Elbasri spoke at length with Colum Lynch, an excellent journalist formerly with the Washington Post and now writing for Foreign Policy. And with this explosive exposé in a prominent English-language venue, the international community must face up to the expediency, the disingenuousness, the withholding of information, the distortions, and the outright mendacity that has characterized not only the leadership of UNAMID, but the head of UN peacekeeping, Hervé Ladsous, and others in UN officialdom.
Lynch’s first installment ends with a paragraph that tells us all too much about the character of the UNAMID mission:
Elbasri says that she raised concerns about UNAMID’s refusal to acknowledge the government role with one of the peacekeepers’ local commanders, Maj. Gen. Wynjones Matthew Kisamba. She still remains shaken by his answer. The UNAMID forces, she recalls Kisamba saying, had to occasionally massage the truth. “You know, sometimes we have to behave like diplomats,” he told her. “We can’t say all what we see in Darfur.”
Bibliography of assessments of UNAMID performance and reporting:
For many years now I have argued that what Lynch reports does indeed reflect the character of UNAMID and its disastrously weak reporting on the situation in Darfur, as well as its almost total failure to offer remotely adequate security to Darfur’s civilians. Since initial deployment of UNAMID in January 2008, more than 2 million Darfuri civilians have been newly displaced according to UN data; and in Darfur there is an extremely high correlation between displacement and violence.
A complete bibliography of my assessments of UNAMID over the past six years would be difficult and cumbersome to assemble; but here are some of the most relevant analyses from the past year and a half:
• My most explicit criticisms of UNAMID and the UN appear in a piece of December 12, 2012, bluntly titled: “Growing Violence in Darfur Deserves Honesty Reporting, Not More Flatulent UN Nonsense”
• There are extensive accounts of UNAMID and its various failures throughout my lengthy e-Book of 2012, Compromising With Evil: An archival account of greater Sudan, 2007 – 2012 (available for downloading at no cost: www.CompromisingWithEvil.org ). The sections of the book are readily searchable for terms such as “UNAMID.”
• My monograph on aerial attacks in greater Sudan includes confirmed reports of more than 600 aerial attacks on civilian targets in Darfur, beginning in 2003. This represents in all probability only a small fraction of attacks that have actually occurred. UNAMID almost never reports on these bombing attacks, in part because they refuse to challenge Khartoum’s denial of access and because of self-imposed and impossibly high evidentiary standards (which entail disregarding eyewitness accounts by Darfuri civilians). See “They Bombed Everything that Moved”: Aerial Military Attacks on Civilians and Humanitarians in Sudan, 1999 – 2011, May 9, 2011 ” (analysis and bibliography of sources, 80+ pages with accompanying Excel spreadsheet, at www.sudanbombing.org) [extensively updated analysis and data spreadsheet, June 5, 2012]
Other pieces with a focus on UNAMID:
[1] Darfur: Violence and Humanitarian Crisis in South Sudan Further Obscure Relentless Suffering and Destruction, 12 January 2014
[2] Radio Dabanga: The Voice of Truth Amidst a Sea of UN Mendacity, 14 December 2013
http://sudanreeves.org/2013/12/14/dradft/
[3] Darfur Destroyed: A week in the life of a dying land, November 27, 2013
http://sudanreeves.org/2013/11/27/darfur-destroyed-a-week-in-the-life-of-a-dying-land/
[4] Humanitarian Conditions in Darfur: Relief Efforts Perilously Close to Collapse, in Two Parts, August 15, 2013
[5] Humanitarian Conditions in Darfur: A Climate of Violence and Extreme Insecurity, 4 August 2013
[6] “Civilians in Sudan’s Darfur region face wholesale destruction,” The Washington Post, July 28, 2013 (Sunday)
[7] The Killing of Seven UNAMID Peacekeeping Personnel in Darfur: a terrible tragedy, a clear warning, July 15, 2013
[8] Taking Human Displacement in Darfur Seriously, 3 June 2013
http://sudanreeves.org/2013/06/03/taking-human-displacement-in-darfur-seriously/
[9] Some reflections on the invisibility of Darfur, 11 May 2013
http://sudanreeves.org/2013/05/11/some-reflections-on-the-invisibility-of-darfur/
[10] Killing UN Peacekeepers: A Ruthless Proclivity of Khartoum’s SAF, Militia Proxies, 9 May 2013
[11] A Key Report on Darfur by UN Panel of Experts Consigned to Oblivion, 27 April 2013
[12] Human Security in Darfur Enters Free-Fall, 20 March 2013
http://sudanreeves.org/2013/03/20/human-security-in-darfur-enters-free-fall/
[13] UN Security Council Ignores Realities of Aerial Attacks on Civilians in Darfur, 18 February 2013
[14] Humanitarian Conditions in Darfur: The most recent reports reveal a relentless deterioration (Part 1) (Part 2 at http://www.sudanreeves.org/?p=3922 ), 10 February 2013
[15] Human Security in Darfur, Year’s End 2012: North Darfur, January 17, 2013
http://sudanreeves.org/2013/01/17/3736/
[16] Human Security in Darfur, Year’s End 2012: West Darfur
December 27, 2012
http://sudanreeves.org/2012/12/27/human-security-in-darfur-years-end-2012-west-darfur/
[17] Human Security in Darfur, Year’s End 2012: South Darfur
January 11, 2013
http://sudanreeves.org/2013/01/11/human-security-in-darfur-years-end-2012-south-darfur/