UNAMID boss attends celebration hosted by Darfur Janjaweed leader
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"U.N. Chief for Darfur Attends "
By Eric Reeves
February 1, 2012 — In March 2004 the U.N.’s IRIN news service reported
on the events of the previous month near Tawila in North Darfur. It
was a brutal episode, but there would be many hundreds more such:
"In an attack on 27 February 2004 in the Tawilah area of northern
Darfur, 30 villages were burned to the ground, over 200 people killed
and over 200 girls and women raped—some by up to 14 assailants and in
front of their fathers who were later killed. A further 150 women and
200 children were abducted."
Eight years later, events of a rather different sort were transpiring.
The man who had been presiding over the slaughter of civilians in the
Tawila area, Janjaweed leader Musa Hilal, was now presiding over the
wedding of his daughter to the Chadian President Idriss Déby (January
20, 2012). There were a number of ironies in this wedding, including
the fact that Déby is a member of the non-Arab Zaghawa tribe, the same
ethnic group that has been slaughtered in horrific fashion in places
such as Tawila and elsewhere in Darfur.
But more than ironic, indeed deeply perverse, was the presence at this
wedding party of the U.N./African Union Special Representative to the
peacekeeping force in Darfur known as UNAMID: Nigeria’s Ibrahim
Gambari. Newswire photographs have appeared that show Gambari in
attendance, indeed chatting it up with the leader of the Khartoum
regime, President Omar al-Bashir. Al-Bashir’s presence was both
predictable and in its grim way appropriate: It was his regime that
had released Hilal from prison (he was serving time for serious felony
convictions) and put him to work[LH1] creating militias from his Um
Jalal and other Arab tribal groups in North Darfur. The Khartoum
regime provided him with weapons, logistics, intelligence, and most
important, protection. His instructions were clear: destroy the
non-Arab people of Darfur. The Janjaweed, now often recycled into
other paramilitary or "police" forces, have continued their brutal
predations, if now on a lesser scale; they also continue to enjoy
complete impunity, total protection from international justice
efforts.
So we know why Bashir was at the wedding. But why was Gambari there,
photographed in animated conversation with Bashir? Why would he attend
the wedding festivities for the daughter of a man linked in all
credible human rights reporting on North Darfur with the very worst
atrocity crimes—in fact, responsible for directing these crimes?
Perhaps it’s appropriate to ask first how this question will be
answered by Darfuris: already deeply mistrustful of UNAMID and Gambari
in particular, they will see him now as colluding fully with the
Khartoum regime. These photographs have rapidly spread on the Internet
and we can be sure that a great many Darfuris, both in the diaspora
and within the region itself, have seen them. They already see Gambari
as responsible for the intolerable levels of insecurity that define
displaced persons camps and most rural areas. And they already see him
as the man who self-servingly insists that violence is down
dramatically, even as more than a million Darfuris have been newly
displaced since UNAMID took up its mandate on January 1, 2008. Some
400,000 have been displaced on Gambari’s watch alone (he took office
on January 1, 2010), including approximately 100,000 this past year.
Gambari clearly sees it as his main task to downplay the failure of
UNAMID to protect Darfuris, to help obscure the deepening humanitarian
crisis deriving from security restrictions imposed by Khartoum on
international relief organizations, including those of the United
Nations. And there are other silences. Gambari never mentions, for
example, the continuing avalanche of rape throughout Darfur, even as
Radio Dabanga provides almost daily accounts of one soul-destroying
attack after another. Khartoum refuses even to acknowledge that rape
has been an issue in Darfur, and Gambari is all too willing to
accommodate the regime’s sensibilities.
So what was the response of the U.N. to Gambari’s morally grotesque
decision to attend the wedding of Musa Hilal’s daughter? Dogged
reporting by Inner City Press finally compelled this response:
"The Department for Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) advises the
following: JSR Gambari attended the wedding [of Musa Hilal’s daughter]
at the invitation of President Deby of Chad, who is an important
regional partner in the peace process. JSR Gambari had no control over
the guest list and it is contrary to basic diplomatic courtesy and
African traditions to ignore greeting other invited guests."
But this disingenuous response ignores the fact Gambari certainly knew
that Musa Hilal would be present at his own daughter’s wedding: does
the U.N. really believe that "basic diplomatic courtesy" or "African
traditions" require that the chief representative of the protection
force in Darfur be present at a social occasion hosted by the most
notorious of Janjaweed leaders? A man who is subject to a U.N. travel
ban and described by Human Rights Watch as "the poster child for
Janjaweed atrocities in Darfur"?
This is not an explanation; this is the U.N. protecting its own, even
one of its most incompetent.
UNAMID is all too representative of the U.N.’s failure, of many years,
to provide anything approaching adequate protection for Sudanese
civilians, despite extraordinary expenditures and bloated (if
ill-conceived) budgets. The lack of leadership is a main reason, and
Gambari’s profoundly ill-considered decision to attend the wedding of
Musa Hilal’s daughter is emblematic of this larger failure.
Eric Reeves is a professor at Smith College and has published
extensively on Sudan, nationally and internationally, for more than a
decade.
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