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Darfur's "Genocide in Slow Motion" Described in UN Basement, But No Doctor Heal Thyself

Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at the UN: News Analysis

UNITED NATIONS, June 17 -- In a fluke of scheduling, the conference room in the UN basement where Mia Farrow and Rich Williamson spoke about Darfur at 3 p.m. on Tuesday had been the scene minutes before of a question from the Deputy Permanent Representative of Sudan, about the failures of the UN's preventive diplomacy.  Before the Press was excluded from the Darfur session, Williamson painted a different picture of UN inaction, of UNMIS peacekeepers sitting in their base while, he said, 25 feet away Sudanese homes were being burned and looted in Abyei. "We pay one billion dollars a year for UNMIS," Williamson said. And yet they stood by while 52,000 lives were shattered and nearly 100 dead. When he said that the UNMIS South Sudan mission is under Chapter Seven of the UN Charter, several reporters looked puzzled. Then they were asked to leave, as Mia Farrow began.

    Williamson called Darfur a "genocide in slow motion," saying there've been more than 300,000 dead and 2.5 million people displaced. Meanwhile, he said, in the past six months only 585 additional peacekeepers have deployed, to add to the 6894 "re-hatted" African Union troops.

   But in the Zamzam IDP camp outside El Fasher just last week, Inner City Press interviewed a group of Gambian peacekeepers who complained at how little they have been allowed or directed to do since being in Darfur. Asked about the World Food Program trucks being hijacked on the road from El Obeid, they said, let them patrol. But instead they sat surrounded by barbed wire in a camp of Italian-made trailers, for which Lockheed Martin has been paid over $190 million dollars in the last nine months alone.

Rich Williamson at the UN, no-bid contracts not shown

   While Williamson did not mention this, sources in Sudan said not only the UN but also the U.S. are trying to get Sudan to grant another three month extension to Lockheed's no-bid contract, set to expire in July. Sudan for its part has said the game is over, visas will be pulled.

News analysis: The point here is not to callously equate no-bid contracts and "genocide in slow motion." Rather, just focusing on specifics as Williamson advises, why doesn't the UN deploy what peacekeepers it has to defend at least some of the trucks? Why did the UN bend if not break it own rules to continue a U.S. contract to Lockheed Martin, putting itself in the position of pleading with Khartoum to allow the deal to continue? Said otherwise, doctor heal thyself.

Footnote: At least three Council members were represented by the highest, Permanent Representative level: the UK, Panama and Indonesia. That Deputy Permanent Representative Wolff represented the United States was understandable, reporters said, since it was he and not Zalmay Khalilzad who went on the Council's trip to Darfur and Chad. But where, some asked, was French Ambassador Ripert?

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These reports are usually also available through Google News and on Lexis-Nexis.

Click here for a Reuters AlertNet piece by this correspondent about Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army. Click here for an earlier Reuters AlertNet piece about the Somali National Reconciliation Congress, and the UN's $200,000 contribution from an undefined trust fund.  Video Analysis here

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