U.N. chief suggests robust force in eastern Chad
Source: Reuters
By Evelyn Leopold UNITED NATIONS, Feb 20 (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recommended on Tuesday peacekeeping operations of up to 11,000 personnel for Chad and the Central African Republic to stanch the spillover from the Darfur conflict in Sudan. Sudan and Chad have been supporting each other's rebels. The Janjaweed militia, blamed for much of the killing in Darfur, chase Sudanese into refugee camps in Chad and anti-government Sudanese rebels recruit men and boys from the same camps. Eastern Chad is marked by "uncertainty, vulnerability and victimization of the local communities" with 232,000 Sudanese refugees and 120,000 Chadians uprooted from their homes, Ban said in a long-awaited report to the U.N. Security Council. The 27-page report laid out two peacekeeping options. The first would number 6,000 troops backed by aircraft and engineering units. The second option would number about 10,900 troops and include aircraft, and is favored by Ban as better suited to protect civilians, although it might severely tax the overburdened U.N. peacekeeping department. In addition, Ban suggested deploying 260 U.N. police in 12 refugee camps in eastern Chad. But because of the difficulties of recruiting international police with appropriate language skills, his report suggested 800 local police be seconded to the United Nations and placed under its operational command. In the Central Africa Republic, Ban recommended a "security presence" of about 500 personnel as well as 20 U.N. police and political officers. Even though security has improved somewhat, Ban noted that more than 70,000 people were still displaced and are living "under threat of indiscriminate violence." Security Council members had been pressing for a report since they visited Sudan in June and then surveyed the arid desolate camps in Chad. In December, the peacekeeping department and then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan had recommended against deployment, saying it was too risky. But council members asked experts to return because fighting had prevented them from surveying eastern Chad. Still, the United Nations is concerned about recruiting more troops in addition to the 18 existing peacekeeping operations around the globe with about 100,000 personnel. This figure does not include the planned Darfur mission of some 17,000 troops and 500 police. The Khartoum government has not yet agreed to a "hybrid" African Union-United Nations force to augment the 7,000 African troops now in Darfur. Ban outlined the dangers, saying an open-ended deployment of a U.N. peacekeeping force carried "serious risks" among those who might view a U.N. force as interfering with their military agenda. And he said that Chadian President Idriss Deby, who had requested international help for months, now was reluctant to approve a military force rather than civilian police.
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