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On Darfur, Mia Farrow Pans Ban, Calls for UN Action, Says JEM and Chad's Acts Less Important

Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at the UN: News Analysis

UNITED NATIONS, June 13 -- Last week in Darfur, next to the cafeteria in the UN's El Fasher camp, Emilia Casella of the World Food Program told Inner City Press that WFP is delivering "forty two percent less calories per day" to those displaced by violence, because its trucks are being hijacked. Seventy-six trucks have been hijacked, of which 50 are still missing. Thirty-six drivers have not been heard from since their hijacking, Ms. Casella said. She said that the Sudanese government should be protecting the trucks from "bandits."

   Just around the corner but out of the media spotlight, Inner City Press was approached by a group of UN peacekeepers from the Gambia. One, giving only his first name Toure for fear of retaliation, said that they were frustrated at not being allow to go outside the camp and provide protection. His colleagues loudly agreed, one clutching a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

   On June 12 in front of the Security Council chamber in New York, Inner City Press asked UN humanitarian chief John Holmes if consideration is being given to using what peacekeepers are there to protect the trucks and food, and if the Sudanese government has thrown up any obstacles to this. Holmes said it is being considered, and that Sudan is not blocking it, to his knowledge. Video here. On June 13 Inner City Press ask the UN spokesperson where this "consideration" stands, but did not get an answer.  Video here.

   Mia Farrow that day held a small breakfast meeting with the Press, in a hotel restaurant high across from the UN. While at times going off the record, she spoke at length around Darfur, which she compared to Rwanda, site of genocide in 1994.  Inner City Press asked her, should the UN peacekeepers that are already in Darfur be protecting the WFP's trucks? Of course, she said. "They should protect every humanitarian convoy."

   Inner City Press asked, "how would you assess Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's performance on the Darfur issue?"

            "What performance?" Mia Farrow shot back. While she asked for off the record treatment of her assessment of, for example, U.S. envoy Richard Williamson and South Sudan president Salva Kiir, when compared to John Garang, she made no such request regarding Ban Ki-moon. "We have to demand more from the UN," she said.

Mia Farrow at the UN, call for mercenaries not shown

   One UN system official for whom Ms. Farrow had praised was International Criminal Court prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo. She disagreed with analyses, such as by Alex de Waal, that Ocampo's indictments and statements may make peace in Darfur harder to come by. "He knows too much," Ms. Farrow said. "He's bogged down."

   Similarly, when Inner City Press asked for her view of the assault on Khartoum by the Justice and Equality Movement, Ms. Farrow said that to focus on that was to miss the point. You have to step back, she said. This is a government that is killing its own people. She repeatedly opposed any "moral equivalence" between the Sudanese government and the rebels. "You want to root for the best rebels," she said, after calling JEM's attack, stopped at Omdurman, an "error" not reflective of most rebel groups.

  Ms. Farrow, who is a UNICEF ambassador, confirmed that UNICEF has visited child soldiers the Sudanese captures from the JEM forces in Omdurman. She was asked, shouldn't JEM and perhaps Chad or other backers be prosecuted for recruiting child soldiers?

  "I think they're all doing it," she said. She said she's "seen children in the Chadian Army not more than twelve years old."

   Again she was asked whether she would support sanctions or other measures against child soldier recruiters in the Chadian or JEM side, if nothing else that to show balance, something demanded, the questioner said, by the Russians in order to support actions on Sudan.

  No, Ms. Farrow said. You have to look at the reasons the rebels form.  But what if Chad is funding them? To this Ms. Farrow did not answer. They will have an announcement next week, at the meeting on Darfur arranged by the U.S. Mission to the UN. Watch this site.

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These reports are usually also available through Google News and on Lexis-Nexis.

Click here for a Reuters AlertNet piece by this correspondent about Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army. Click here for an earlier Reuters AlertNet piece about the Somali National Reconciliation Congress, and the UN's $200,000 contribution from an undefined trust fund.  Video Analysis here

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