Inner City Press -- Investigative Reporting From the Inner City to Wall Street to the United Nations

On Abyei, Susan Rice Says UN Should Have Flown in from S. Sudan w/o Permission

By Matthew Russell Lee, Exclusive

UNITED NATIONS, August 8 -- As three Ethiopian peacekeepers lay injured by a land mine in Abyei last week, the UN asked Khartoum for permission to fly in a helicopter from Wau in South Sudan.

 "That's a different country," Sudanese authorities reportedly replied. By the time a medical evacuation helicopter arrived from Kadugli in Southern Kordofan, considered Sudan proper, the peacekeepers had died.

Outside a UN Security Council meeting on the subject on Monday, Inner City Press was told by sources that US Ambassador Susan Rice inside was saying that the UN should not have "given Sudan a veto" over flights into the "no man's land" of Abyei, but should just have flown.

When Ambassador Rice left the meeting, Inner City Press asked her, "should they have flown from Wau without waiting to get permission?"

"Yes, in my opinion," Ambassador Rice said.

She paused then continued, "there's a risk involved in that and we all have an interest in the security of peacekeepers. But at a certain point you gotta weigh the risk of the helicopter crew, if they had been notified that it was coming and the tail number, then the government would have been responsible if it had done something untoward."

In Wau, Susan Rice on the mic, opinion personal?

"It's not beyond them to do something untoward," Rice said. "But the loss of these peacekeepers may have been prevented."

Again she paused, for emphasis. "That my personal opinion, I expressed it in there, but it's my personal opinion."

But when the US Permanent Representative to the UN makes a point in the Security Council, is it a personal opinion? Watch this site.