China set to deploy peacekeeping battalion to South Sudan
Iran Press TV
Fri May 30, 2014 7:42AM GMT
China is set to deploy an infantry battalion to South Sudan with the aim of strengthening the UN peacekeeping mission in the African country.
UN peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous said on Thursday that Beijing had agreed to send a "battalion" of 850 soldiers within the next few months.
He noted that the UN is expecting, in the next two weeks, "Ethiopian troops, additional Kenyan troops, and later, Chinese." The world body has also been in the process of deploying a Rwandan battalion, according to Ladsous.
The deployment will mark the first time that China sends a combat unit to a UN peacekeeping operation.
Last December, the Security Council decided to send an extra 5,500 peacekeepers to the UN mission in South Sudan, raising the total deployment there to 12,500. Over half of these reinforcements have arrived.
On Tuesday, the 15-member council revised its peacekeeping mission in South Sudan to focus on protecting civilians rather than nation-building following brutal ethnic violence in the country. The UN Security Council authorized UN troops to "use all necessary means" to protect civilians, monitor and investigate human rights abuses, assist in delivering humanitarian aid and support a deal to end hostilities.
The political crisis in South Sudan began after President Salva Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, accused his former deputy Riek Machar, a Nuer, of attempting a coup in December 2013.
The conflict soon turned into an all-out war between the army and defectors, with the violence taking on an ethnic dimension that pitted the president's tribe against Machar's.
South Sudan gained independence in July 2011 after its people overwhelmingly voted in a referendum for a split from Sudan. The government in Juba is grappling with rampant corruption, unrest and conflict in the deeply impoverished but oil-rich nation left devastated by decades of war.
MR/HJL
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