Create an FP account to save articles to read later and in the FP mobile app.

Sign Up

ALREADY AN FP SUBSCRIBER? LOGIN

Can the blue helmets stop the killing in Darfur?

The good news on the recently approved U.N. mission to Darfur is that troop pledges are rolling in at a healthy clip. By design, African countries have taken the lead: The largest offers of new infantry troops have come from Rwanda, Ethiopia and Egypt, all African nations, with pledges from Burkina Faso, Djibouti, Nigeria, Tanzania, ...

By David Bosco, a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies.

August 10, 2007, 6:42 PM

The good news on the recently approved U.N. mission to Darfur is that troop pledges are rolling in at a healthy clip. By design, African countries have taken the lead:

The good news on the recently approved U.N. mission to Darfur is that troop pledges are rolling in at a healthy clip. By design, African countries have taken the lead:

The largest offers of new infantry troops have come from Rwanda, Ethiopia and Egypt, all African nations, with pledges from Burkina Faso, Djibouti, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda as well as Asians Bangladesh, Jordan, Malaysia, Nepal and Thailand, U.N. officials said. Police units are pledged from Burkina Faso, Ghana, Egypt, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nepal and Pakistan.

Pledges and deployments are not the same, however, and it will likely take several months for the force to actually arrive. Heavy airlift support from the United States will be critical.

More troubling is the weak mandate that these troops will have. Getting the force approved by the U.N. Security Council (read: China) meant watering down its instructions and removing its authority to disarm militias. U.N.-watchers should experience a twinge of déja vu at this point. Two major peacekeeping missions in the 1990s, to Somalia and Bosnia, floundered because the politicians that sent it adopted a too narrow vision of security. The force in Somalia never seriously attempted to disarm the country’s marauding warlords, and the UNPROFOR mission in Bosnia disastrously confined itself to protecting humanitarian aid even as ethnic cleansing proceeded around it (see Srebrenica, Fall Of).

The mainly Western backers of the Darfur mission have wagered that a substantial U.N. presence itself will deter further atrocities and calm tensions. It’s at least possible. But let’s be clear: this mission’s success will depend on the political calculations of the Sudanese government and the rebel forces. The blue helmets will not have the authority to impose their own solutions.

David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist