UN's most expensive mission exposed as farcical shambles
By Steve Bloomfield
the Independent
June 11, 2008
Almost six months after the United Nations launched its largest, most expensive and most hyped peacekeeping mission, promising to send 26,000 peacekeepers to Darfur, the operation is failing to protect the people it was sent to save.
Just one third of the military personnel and one quarter of the police have been deployed in what has been billed as the biggest and most important mission in the UN's 60-year history. It is now threatening to turn into its most catastrophic failure. No new equipment has arrived. Peacekeepers have had to paint their helmets blue (or put blue plastic bags over them, tied on with elastic).
To cap it all, the general leading the force, Martin Luther Agwai, revealed he had considered quitting because "I thought the world didn't care about us". Only after reading a self-help book, Stop Worrying and Start Living, did he decide to stay.
To date, not a single additional soldier has arrived since the joint UN and African Union mission was born at the start of the year to help protect seven million Darfuris in Sudan's western province from militia and rebel attacks, and banditry. The joint mission took over from its under-resourced and under-funded AU predecessor, Amis.
"At the moment we are Amis with blue helmets," said the force commander, General Agwai.
But even the helmets are not new. Most soldiers had to paint their green helmets blue. Much-needed equipment, such as helicopters and new armoured personnel carriers, has not arrived. The vehicles the mission does have, inherited from Amis, are falling apart – four years in the desert takes its toll. Most of the vehicles still bear the legend "Amis".
On the civilian staff there are splits between the old AU officials and the new UN ones. The UN staff are "arrogant" and "superior", according to several AU officials; the new UN recruits in turn accuse some AU staff of "laziness" and "incompetence". "They play solitaire all day and have a nap in the afternoon," said one UN appointee.
