Task force leader evaluates four years ofpatient peacekeeping, writes Hans Pienaar
Brigadier General John Musonda laughs like a soldier, a booming, guttural noise just right for the barracks bar. “It’s hilarious,” he says, holding his palm to his temple, “they all salute me.”
Then the smile vanishes abruptly. “This is a serious thing,” he says. The salutes are from children in Darfur’s huge and overcrowded refugee camps.
“What these children now all have in their heads are …” and he struggles for the right word “… military thoughts.”
Ironic comments to come from the joint chief of staff of a multinational force of 7 000 soldiers. But then Musonda is on the verge of retirement and his thoughts are turning more to sports matters. And why not? He is the head of the Zambian national soccer association whose team beat Bafana-Bafana 3-0 this month.
Musonda has been making decisions on the deployment of the African Union Mission (Amis) troops in Darfur for the past year, but on December 31, Amis will be disbanded and its members absorbed into a “hybrid” peace force.
About 700 South African defence force members and police have been serving in the much-maligned Amis contingent, established in 2003 after tens of thousands of people had died in scorched-earth campaigns by state-supported militia in a bid to rout rebels in the four Darfur states of Sudan.
Musonda ascribes the failure of the Darfur peace process to poor leadership from African leaders, who “have an ostrich in the sand” approach to crises on the continent.
“They fail to see the truth. In Zimbabwe there is a problem, but they ignore it. We are more prone to attack the West than ourselves,” he told a recent human rights seminar in Johannesburg.
His observations came as officials from various bodies and countries said the four-year-old intervention by the international com- munity had overseen only increasing numbers of refugees, many of whom spilled over into neighbouring countries, and a steady count in civilian deaths.
He believes that African leaders have been shielding Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir just as they are shielding Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe from the opprobium of the world.
The decision of the AU not to appoint al-Bashir as the AU chairman in 2005 when it was his turn, and again the next year, is a case in point – far from reprimanding him, this prevented al-Bashir from having to face the intense media spotlight that he would have attracted had he been elected, says Musonda.
Equally forthright is Musonda’s admission of what has hitherto been attributed to “sources” or “unnamed observers” – al-Bashir is calling for Amis to stay on in Sudan because he knows he won’t be able to manipulate a United Nations force as easily as he can the Africans.
Musonda is sure: “The new force will only bring joy to the people of Sudan. We’ll see a big reduction in atrocities.”
So how did Amis get klapped about so easily? Sandstorms, smiles Musonda, showing a photograph of a tsunami of churning black dust approaching the Amis headquarters at Al Fashir, the capital of North Darfur.
The conditions under which Darfuri people have to live are terrible, he says. He explains that Amis was simply too badly equipped to deal with either the adverse conditions – temperatures regularly hit 50°C – or the ferocious antagonism of the belligerents – on both sides.
He comes close to saying Amis was set up for failure.
“The main problem in Darfur is that the civilians were led to believe that Amis would provide protection to them. With the mandate it got, this could never be the case.”
Misled into believing that peace was at hand, the civilians let their guard down, creating opportunities and giving excuses for Janjaweed militias, aided by Sudanese government bomber aircraft or other belligerents, to attack them. This has raised the level of distrust considerably, which was already high before the outbreak of civil war in 2003.
When Amis was formed late in 2003, the force barely totalled 3 000 soldiers for an area as large as France. They were equipped with second-hand rifles and little else. The few helicopters, sagging like old women on the tarmac of the airport at Al Fashir, looked dangerous – for whoever would fly in them – when I visited it earlier this year.
Amis’s brief was limited: they were to escort AU observers, who themselves were finding their feet in the shifting sands of the complex conflict.
Musonda becomes slightly agitated as he spells out the implications: “This means that when you want to shoot some people, you call me [Amis] to come and watch. I am not allowed to do anything, just write a report.”
It is in the nature of peacekeeping that not resorting to arms during a conflict goes against the grain of soldiers’ training. But this seemed to go to absurd extremes in Darfur. On occasion, Amis unwittingly became a weapons supplier.
“You don’t have weapons, so what do you do? You ambush an Amis patrol and relieve them of their arms,” Musonda explains. And he shows photographs of sheepish Amis soldiers being surrounded by Fur tribesmen.
Among the targets were a Grahamstown regiment, which lost 46 rifles last year without a shot being fired – a humiliation that still rankles among some tough SANDF members.
Yet the AU, in trying to keep the peace process “African”, began talking up the “rag-tag” force, which was also dogged by pay scandals and the refusal of scared soldiers to leave their tents.
African leaders began echoing al-Bashir, Sudan’s ruler since 1992, by saying that the African force was sufficient, and that anything else was western neo-imperialism.
The world’s governments chose to go along, for reasons of their own. The United States, for instance, has a split approach to Sudan – slapping sanctions on Khartoum but lauding it for co-operating with Washington in the war on terror.
Just how dangerously irrational this relationship is was demonstrated by US air strikes on innocents in Somalia – apparently using Sudanese intelligence.
Another example is China, which wanted to stick to its non-interference policy on African matters, but then became nervous about the “genocide Olympics” label its economic presence in Sudan was attracting to the big event in Beijing in 2008.
First it echoed al-Bashir in rejecting western soldiers, and then expressed support for the hybrid force.
But as Amis bumbled along, the West was building up the UN side of the new peacekeeping force. In this respect, Sudan’s antagonists were the real winners. While Sudan might have fooled itself that it was standing up to the West, the planners of the hybrid force were steadily making ground behind the scenes, negotiating a 9 000-strong force.
During Khartoum’s next renegement, it was escalated to 12 000, larger than the Monuc peace force in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In successive stages it went up to 16 000, and at the end of last year stood at 20 000. Now everybody is speaking of 26 000.
Similarly, while al-Bashir thought he was successfully stalling by demanding an AU command, the leaders had already been appointed – the top structure was an all-African one.
The clumsy “hybrid” appellation will probably be dropped.
Musonda is adamant that Amis will stand down on December 31. The troops will remain, but they will be reassigned to Unamid, the existing peace force in southern Sudan, which has been overseeing Sudan’s transition to a power-sharing dual state.
In addition, a European Union force has been put together for Chad and the Central African Republic. Sudanese activists say eastern Chad is in upheaval as new infrastructure is installed to accommodate the force. The activists believe that the EU force would be used to protect refugees, and not to intervene in Darfur.
Already the planners are talking about 4 000 members for the EU force. Central to pacifying the region is air capability, which Amis lacked. This might be stationed at the EU bases in Chad, under the more efficient command of the French.
Musonda reiterates his delight in the arrival of the hybrid force. He hopes he will be asked to take part.
But it clearly rankles him that those successes that Amis did clock up, against all odds, will go to the credit of the new force. Anyone who knows anything about peacekeeping and the slow, patient work that it takes to remove misunderstanding, forge links and make quiet appearances at the right time will recognise the worth of Amis’s list of achievements, low-key as they are.
Within its limited mandate, Amis did succeed in bringing peace to parts of Darfur. These were crucial, says Musonda, in preparing the ground for peace talks, which everybody says are essential if the hybrid force is to succeed.
The tragedy is not what Amis did or did not do but that it has taken four years to get to the stage where a proper international force – which will take another six months to be installed – is brought to bear on Darfur. It has already bred the conditions for further conflict in the future.
“All those children, they want to become like me,” Musonda muses.
One can only hope that this means they will also become soldiers of peace, be prepared to speak the truth, even if it means casting themselves in an unflattering light, and try to vanquish foes on the soccer field rather than on the battlefield – just as Zambia did with Bafana-Bafana. –
