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Analysis: UN Chief Tackles Darfur

Council on Foreign Relations

January 29, 2007
Prepared by: Stephanie Hanson

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon addressed the African Union summit and reiterated his call to send a joint UN-AU peacekeeping force to Sudan's Darfur region. After months of diplomatic feints, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir seems to have accepted the idea of the so-called hybrid force, yet the Sudanese government continues aerial bombing of villages (BBC). Bashir was slated to assume the AU presidency this year, but on Monday the group awarded the position to Ghanaian President John Kufuour (Reuters) due to outrage over Darfur. At least 250,000 people have died and over three million have been displaced by the conflict, which many are calling genocide. Humanitarian access to the region has fallen significantly in recent months, as this Backgrounder explains.

Diplomatic efforts have focused on getting UN peacekeepers into Darfur, authorized by Security Council Resolution 1706. The failure of this approach has provoked increased calls for military intervention, but no country appears willing to take the political lead. The international community should avoid the “stark options of ‘Doing Nothing’ and ‘Sending in the Marines,’” writes CFR Senior Fellow Lee Feinstein in a new Council Special Report on preventing mass atrocities. He suggests bolstering the AU mission in Sudan, readying an international force now to send a signal that the world is united on sending peacekeepers, and enforcing UN flight bans. Travel bans and sanctions on the petroleum industry present other options, suggests an International Crisis Group report.

Yet these measures all remain contingent on the political will of individual countries, especially the five veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2007 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.