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As UN Council Heads to Darfur Camp, Questions of Mandate, Abyei and Changing Beliefs

Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press in Africa: News Analysis

SUDAN, June 5, updated 4 p.m. Darfur -- As the UN Security Council heads for a day of talks in Darfur, the UN's limitations and weaknesses in The Sudan are front and center. Despite the UN's tens of thousands of personnel in South Sudan, it stood by as civilians fled Abyei. In the North, the UN ostensibly knows near nothing about the Justice and Equality Movement's incursion with hundreds of armed pickup trucks to the outskirts of Khartoum in Omdurman last month, nor about the child soldiers Sudan says it has been holding since then.

    The night before the Council's Thursday visit to Darfur, U.S. Ambassador Alejandro Wolff told Inner City Press that he believes the UN Mission in Sudan already has the legal authority to get between combatants in Abyei, to protect civilians. Meanwhile the U.S. consul in Juba, and charge d'affaires for all of the Sudan, has a different view, that a new Security Council resolution would be needed.  Inner City Press asked him if he thinks a resolution under Chapter VII of the UN Charter would be needed, as opposed to UNMIS' current Chapter VI mandate. I'm not a lawyer, he answered.  

   He lives in one bedroom of a three bedroom house, his deputy works and sleeps in another of the bedrooms. They have a swimming pool, one of only two in Juba, which he says they describe to the State Department as a water storage facility. Another savvy U.S. diplomat charged new curtains as "security screening." As with the UN Mission in Sudan, whatever it takes.

  Ambassador Wolff told Inner City Press he would be presenting his interpretation of UNMIS' mandate to the Special Representative of the Secretary General Ashraf Qazi. What Qazi would do next is anyone's guess.

UN in Darfur: nothing but smiles, but night patrols still lacking

Sudan's Ambassador to the UN Abdalmahmoud Abdalhaleem Mohamed took issue with the fact that Qazi's legal advisor allegedly spoke against the press tour of captured pickup trucks and weapons in Omdurman. "We were going to take strong action against him," the Ambassador said.  Qazi acknowledged but did not answer Inner City Press' questions about the child soldiers Sudan says it is holding, which UK Ambassador John Sawers said the UN in Sudan is investigating.

 After more than three weeks it is time for conclusions. If JEM and Chad recruited them, action is needed.  In any event, 12-year old children should not be captives.

  In Darfur on June 5, the Council will first visit with the Wali of North Darfur, and UNAMID's senior leadership including Rodolphe Adada and General Martin Agwai, Henry Anyidoho, Hocine Medili, Michael Fryer, Wolfgang Weiszegge, Aminata Thiaw and "UN Country Team Representative" Oluseyi Bajulaiye.  

   This will be followed by a one hour whirlwind visit to a camp for internally displaced persons. Although the which camp will be visited has presumably been known to a variety of Sudanese interlocutors, Inner City Press will leave the location and tribal makeup unidentified until the delegation has left. It is a camp, however, which UNAMID police have yet to patrol at night, one patrolled by armed personnel of the SLM/A Minni Minawi faction and closely watched, the UN says, by the Government of Sudan.

   Back at the ARC Compound -- whether any of the $250 million the UN awarded to Lockheed Martin on a no-bid basis has been used for the compound remains to be seen -- there will be a closed briefing: "media representatives will take photographs and then leave the room." Then representatives of the humanitarian community and the UN Country team will "make presentations to the Council and interact with them." The NGOs listed included Malteser, Action Contre la Faim, Oxfam and Partner Aid International. [Names of individuals have been removed, tellingly due to their expressed fear of being targeted.] Not on the list of organizations to be be with were SUDA, Relief International, CHF, Plan Sudan and, most strikingly, the Sudanese Red Crescent.

  Inner City Press on Wednesday asked a major figure in the NGO community in Sudan if she deals with Ahmad Harun, the minister of humanitarian affairs who has been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court. We deal with the ministry, I probably shouldn't say any more than that, she replied.

  Perhaps relatedly, earlier on Wednesday Inner City Press was ejected by uniformed UN Development Program guards from a UNDP workshop held at a spacious hotel in Khartoum. The sign outside said "Sudan Competency Workshop." No answer was even given about what training was being offered. Subsequently, a UNDP representative explained it was UNDP's training entitled "Emotional Intelligence: Empowering Self to Serve Others!" She had flown in from New York to give the training. "My work is cutting edge," she said. The 10-page hand-out among other things encourages UN personnel in Sudan to "release beliefs that no longer serve us" and "step out of the 'right / wrong' or 'good / bad' dualistic thinking." Whether this is what is happening with the UN in Darfur remains to be seen. Watch this site.

Footnotes:  UNMIS computers are unable to play the two CD-DVDs which the Sudanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs gave  entited "The Chadian Forces and its [sic] Aggression on Omdurman, Sudan" and "The Terrorist Justice and Equality Movement." Those urging more ICC action on Sudan, on the other hand, have put their materials streaming on the Web, including this week a 17-minute film just put online by the Aegis Trust showing blurry-faced survivors of attacks on three towns in Darfur naming Ahmad Harun as providing money and orders to Ali Kushayb, to directed looting and killing. Click here to view the film. On this we will have more as well.

  We will continue to ask, what now is the UN's role inside Sudan? While Security Council members met with officials of the Sudanese government on Wednesday, UN staff facilitated the transmission of that government's message to the traveling press. It went beyond translation, to promises to provide official numbers of the dead at Omdurman. "The UN is providing propaganda," one attendee muttered. While Inner City Press now thinks that reasonable minds can differ on this, probably the Ministry of Foreign Affairs could and should have found its own translator and even facilitator for this material. In shepherding Security Council members around on Thursday, a different UN / UNAMID approach is anticipated. 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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