Darfur killings leave EU no easy options

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.

The truth of that assessment is confirmed by the experience of Lebanon, where EU troops make up the bulk of a peacekeeping mission set up after last year’s war between Hizbullah, an Islamist group that runs what amounts to a state within the state, and Israel. By peacekeeping standards, the Europeans were fairly quick to deploy in their thousands after hostilities ended, but the mission has not helped advance any sort of political solution and the country remains as divided as it was before.

The main peacekeeping problem, therefore, is politics: the politics of the peace to be kept and the politics of deploying the peacekeepers.

The decision to send police or military personnel is the domain of individual governments rather than EU or UN decision-makers and hence tends to depend on a national calculus that may have little to do with the requirements of a given situation. Off the record, UN officials will also question the willingness of certain European peacekeeping contingents to take casualties in pursuit of their mission in cases where their national interest is not engaged.

Different national governments and publics have different levels of casualty aversion. The French may be willing to incur a number of casualties in Chad, for example, that would almost certainly have prompted the Germans in the Congo to withdraw. This creates tensions within peacekeeping missions whose members may feel more accountable to their national chains of command than to the force commander.

The last few years have seen progress in UN-EU co-operation on peacekeeping missions at the operational level, most pronounced perhaps in the vastly different experiences of the first EU deployment in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2003 and the second EU deployment there in 2006. But according to Gowan, these improvements have tended to be ad hoc, depending on the personalities involved.

Military and civilian planners as well as experts in academia and think-tanks have given much thought to the sort of co-ordination problems that have plagued these missions. But again, such attention has occurred mostly at the level of individual countries or organisations; the challenge of linking it all up into a coherent system still remains, Gowan says.

The main pressure to set up functioning systems comes from events on the ground. But events on the ground also have a worrying tendency to encourage ad-hoc arrangements and hence work against the establishment of proper systems. Paradoxically, this may lead either to delays in deploying while institutional set-ups and mandates are being hammered out, or to hasty deployments amid muddled politics. Experiences gained in one mission may not be applied to another and lessons learned go to waste, a problem compounded by high staff turnover.

Dealing with state failure and political anarchy is inherently difficult, as is the rebuilding of physical and political structures after conflict. The ad-hoc response by the EU and the UN is probably not the best way to deal with that difficulty.

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.