Darfur is heading for a cliff

The just-concluded Arab League Summit in Khartoum has produced an empty gesture with regards to Darfur.

Arab leaders have agreed to pay for the African Union (AU) peacekeeping force in the Sudanese region of Darfur.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir had asked the Arab League to meet the cost of the mission from October this year, when its current funding runs out.

Agreement on payment was reached at a summit in Khartoum but it is unlikely the Arab leaders will have to pay out.

The AU has agreed in principle to hand over peacekeeping to the United Nations from September.

The Sudanese government is quite opposed to having UN troops in Sudan. In fact, on March 10 the African Union decided to kick the can down the road and extend its mission in Darfur till the end of September in part because of Sudanese opposition.

However, the African Union is indeed in need of funds, as even the AU itself admits.

An Arab offer to fund African Union forces in Sudan’s Darfur region from October is too late as troops need immediate cash to help stop escalating violence there, an AU official said on Wednesday.

"This is medicine after death," said Baba Gana Kingibe, the head of the AU mission in Sudan. "We need the assistance now in order to be able to resolve the crisis."

Worse, the African Union troops in Darfur are woefully inadequate to the task of monitoring the ceasefire there, a ceasefire which is falling apart like wet tissue paper. The AU troops don't have the firepower nor the mobility to be effective.

Hostilities between Chad and Sudan are escalating, with both sides using militias and rebels in the Darfur region against the other. Again, AU troops are powerless.

The humanitarian crisis in Darfur is growing worse, with civilians at the mercy of marauding gangs. The Arab Janjaweed militia receives support from the Sudanese government. The Sudanese government uses these militias against rebel groups and non-Arab ethnic groups in Sudan, so it has an interest in letting these militias continue to operate. Sudan also has an interest in letting its proxy fight against Chad continue. For these reason, Sudan is reluctant to let UN troops in, and the crisis worsens.

The UN and NATO, and along with them Europe and the United States, are not sending strong signals that they will force the issue with the AU and Sudan.

Here is a view of the situation from Eric Reeves:

Security has essentially collapsed in large areas of Darfur, and as a result humanitarian operations cannot reach hundreds of thousands of desperate civilians; ethnically targeted destruction is expanding unchecked into eastern Chad; and remaining rural populations are completely vulnerable to ongoing predations by Khartoum’s regular and militia forces. The prideful yet cowardly African Union decision to maintain its control of the current mission in Darfur for another six months ensures that conditions will deteriorate rapidly and precipitously.

The consequences of the AU decision, which effectively forecloses robust international humanitarian intervention for the foreseeable future, are also implicitly articulated by Egeland:

“As a result of [deteriorating insecurity], Egeland said, UN relief officials and relief organizations cannot reach more than 300,000 people on the Chad border in western Darfur and the central mountainous region of Jebal Marra because they are too dangerous. These unreachable areas, he said, ‘will soon get massively increased mortality because there is nothing else but international assistance.’ He expected deaths to increase markedly within weeks.” (Associated Press [dateline: United Nations], March 13, 2006)

Additional hundreds of thousands of civilians are inaccessible in South Darfur and North Darfur states. Egeland declared that “Darfur is returning to ‘the abyss’ of early 2004 when the region was ‘the killing fields of this world.’ ‘We're losing ground every day in the humanitarian operation which is the lifeline for more than 3 million people.’” In fact, aggregated UN estimates for the conflict-affected population in Darfur and eastern Chad now total approximately 4 million human beings. Tens of thousands of these people will certainly die in the coming weeks and months; the number of deaths could easily range into the hundreds of thousands over the full course of this rapidly accelerating catastrophe.

Darfur cannot afford to have the status quo continue till October.

It is going to be a long summer in Darfur.