T K Vogel — research & analysis

The killing of ten African Union (AU) peacekeepers in Darfur on 29-30 September has given military planners and analysts pause to consider the dangers of a forthcoming EU deployment to neighbouring Chad.

A source of particular concern is that the EU operation in Chad will have to work closely with a contingent of United Nations police there and with a joint AU-UN military force in Darfur. Peacekeeping co-operation between the EU and the UN has steadily improved over the past few years, according to experts, but it still tends to be ad hoc, depending on personality and diplomatic alignments and hence vulnerable to misunderstandings and politics.

And then there is the classic recipe for peacekeeping disaster: deploying peacekeepers where there is no peace to keep. As the Darfur rebels have splintered, achieving a political settlement of the conflict may well be more difficult than it has ever been. Most of the UN’s thinking and planning has evolved around the number of troops needed in Darfur, says Richard Gowan, a research associate at New York University’s Center on International Co-operation, but Darfur’s collapse into political anarchy, of which the killings seem to be one symptom, means that the political basis for a deployment is absent.

“Just throwing troops into a situation will not help resolve it,” Gowan says.

Read the rest of this story here