The top United Nations peacekeeping official has warned the Security Council that the new, critically under-manned and under-equipped mission in Sudan’s strife-torn Darfur region faces “probably the greatest risk” to a UN operation in more than 10 years.
Lack of a clear signal from the parties that they want a robust mission and the mission’s own “tragic” lack of essential resources gives concern about the force called UNAMID.
– We have three factors which put UNAMID at great risk, probably the greatest risk since the 1990s, said Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Jean-Marie Guéhenn, Wednesday.
Under-manned UN missions in the 1990s were unable to prevent the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the massacre of Bosnian Moslems in Srebrenica in 1995. Mr. Guéhenno stressed that UNAMID was a peacekeeping force not designed to function in a war zone.
UNAMID, a hybrid UN-African Union (AU) force has only 9,000 troops out of its mandated strength of 26,000.
