Deal on Darfur

The African Union and the UN have agreed on a way to continue ineffectual peacekeeping operations in Darfur, all while Sudan looks at ways to further marginalize the operations.

Sudan says it welcomes the United Nations' support for the African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur but denies the UN will take command.
Sudan has always rejected plans to replace the AU force with a larger, stronger UN mission.

On Thursday, UN chief Kofi Annan had said a compromise had been reached for a hybrid UN-AU force, to break the deadlock over the Darfur mission.

More than 200,000 people have died in three years of conflict in the region.

I don't fault the AU's efforts, mind you, because they're doing a thankless job that no one else wanted to do. The UN had to be pushed and prodded into taking action, despite the fact that we've been witnessing genocide in Darfur for more than two years now.

Even now, Kofi cannot utter the word genocide because that would require the UN taking immediate action. Thus, we get euphemisms for genocide and the mass murder perpetrated in the region. Some estimate the number of dead to be significantly higher than this tally - 270,000 being a number mentioned earlier this year.

The level of violence continues to escalate despite the fact that the janjaweed have essentially depopulated the region. The region has been ethnically cleansed by the janjaweed, which has lately been subsumed into Khartoum's militias. Now, the fighting has spilled over into neighboring Chad, which has threatened military action against Sudan if they don't begin controlling the border.

Of course, the millions of refugees are stuck in the middle.

But the diplomats at the UN can claim a diplomatic victory. That's cold comfort for the dead and displaced.

UPDATE:
This is what the UN had to say about the situation in Darfur and Chad:

Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland returned to Khartoum today, two days earlier than scheduled, after he was denied permission to travel beyond Darfur’s state capitals by the Government of Sudan, for unspecified security reasons.

Gee, we've seen this before. The Sudanese government doesn't like it when outside observers get to see what's going on inside Darfur because the reality is just too damning.

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports continuing displacement along the volatile Chad-Sudan border, with recent refugee arrivals from Darfur as well as thousands of Chadians being forced to flee ongoing violence. This morning, UNHCR staff in eastern Chad began moving the first of some 1,500 newly-arrived Darfur refugees away from the Sudanese border to a UNHCR camp near the Chadian town of Guereda.

Meanwhile, in Kenya, UNHCR will begin airlifting emergency supplies this Sunday for thousands of refugees made homeless by massive flooding in Kenya’s Dadaab region.

The UN is more than helpful after the fact, but with a swift intervention at the onset of the violence, the spread of violence into Chad could have been minimized, if not completely averted. Kudos to the UN once again for screwing the pooch.

Technorati: darfur, dafur, UN, sudan, chad, somalia, ethiopia, eritrea, african union, janjaweed, and Kofi Annan