The United Nations/African Union Hybrid Mission in Darfur (UNAMID, for short) is coming to its conclusion, marking the first major UN peacekeeping mission to finish its tasks since the United Nations Missionin Liberia in early 2018. While the mission’s mandate ended with the new year, its actual drawdown will continuethrough the spring into early summer.
UNAMID was a bold, innovative, and controversial mission. This essay will be divided into three separate parts. First, I will examine the creation of UNAMID, then I will examine UNAMID’s effectiveness during its dozen years of service, and I will conclude by examining the present security environment in Darfur.
The Creation
UN Peacekeeping was in a strange position in the mid to late 2000s. The organization was still confronted by the endemic failures that had led to the mass killing of civilians in Rwanda and in Bosnia. Major policy papers, such as the 2000 Brahimi report, had outlined a more aggressive and more robust peacekeeping strategy that the architects of UN Peacekeeping were just starting to fully implement. The UN deployed a whole host of complex peacekeeping missions in 2004, sending forces into Haiti, Timor-Leste, Burundi, and Côte d’Ivoire, adding onto missions in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.
While the UN was sending troops all over the world, they didn’t deploy to Darfur. The western region of Sudan fell into brutal violence in 2003, when mobile Arab cattle herders known as Janjaweed began raiding the villages of Black Sudanese populations, frequently massacring, looting, and enslaving the population. The Janjaweed had the support of the Sudanese government, who wanted to wipe out Black Sudanese rebel groups in the region.
By 2004, the situation in Darfur had become one of the worst human rights crises in the world. A variety ofhuman rights organizations, civil associations, and celebrities formed the
“Save Darfur” campaign and began lobbying western governments. The United States and European Union both described the crisis as a genocide, and the UN Security Council recommended charges to the ICC. While the Security Council believed UN Peacekeepers were stretched too thin at the time, African Union peacekeepers would deploy in 2004. As part of the AU Mission in Sudan (AMIS), thousands of African soldiers would deploy to the region. After several international observers questioned their ability to protect civilians and their willingness to confront the Sudanese government, the UN took over the mission in 2007, “re-hatting” the existing troops from AU green to UN blue, and deploying additional UN forces.
This marked a new innovation in UN Peacekeeping operations. Prior to UNAMID, cooperation betweenthe UN and other regional bodies was still being developed. While UN Peacekeepers had worked alongside ECOWAS forces in West Africa, and NATO forces in the Balkans, UNAMID marked a new frontier in both inter-institutional cooperation as well as a new model for cooperation going forward. The UN would provide the peacekeeping expertise and the AU would provide committed troop contributors. Furthermore, there was also a key political divide that greatly increased effectiveness: the UN would engage with western partners, with whom they had a strong rapport and the AU would engage with the Sudanase government, who the AU had experience working with.
UNAMID also was a major innovator in Protection of Civilian mandates. While all missions created in the new millennium had a Protection of Civilians mandate, UNAMID was one of the few that was primarily focused on protecting civilians. Authorized under Chapter VII of the UN charter, rather than the traditional Chapter VI,UNAMID was deployed into a situation where there was, at best, limited peace to keep. It was also faced with a deeply uncooperative government in Khartoum. UNAMID was the one of the first UN Peacekeeping missions that deployed ready to, if needed, violently engage with its host state and its paramilitary provies in order to protect civilians.
UNAMID During Operations
UNAMID’s deployment was slow. Two years in, it had only deployed 79 percent of its authorized military personnel and 71 percent of the police contingent. Part of this was caused by many countries being unwilling to deploy peacekeepers to a dangerous environment, while part of this delay was caused by the uncooperative nature of the Sudanese government. In addition, UNAMID deployed five years into a brutal conflict. It’s estimated that about 300,000 civilians had died by late 2008, mostly from starvation and disease. UNAMID was authorized too late, and once authorized, the recruitment of additional forces took too long. This consistent late reaction has been a hallmark of UN peacekeeping missions, and unfortunately UNAMID was no exception. Once deployed, UNAMID was a mixed bag. While successful with the resources that it had, it lacked the resources it needed to adequately implement its mission.
Let’s start with the good. UNAMID was mostly able to protect civilians within its area of operations. UNAMID police forces were able to create a secure environment inside of the dozens of internally displaced persons (IDP) camps throughout the region, and UN troops deterred combatants from attacking certain civilian population centers near UN bases. Furthermore, UN troops engaged in proactive protection of civilian patrols. The most notable of these were the “firewood patrols” which protected displaced women as they gathered firewood outside of the camps, a previously highly dangerous activity. UNAMID was able to protect humanitarian aid shipments, which helped alleviate someof the deep food and medicine shortages in the region.
Through negotiation and mediation, UNAMID was able to lay down the framework for a long term peace.
But UNAMID had its flaws. The mission was never strong enough to fully accomplish its mission. Darfur is a region with the size of California and the population of Michigan. While UNAMID’s 20,000 soldiers and police officers made it one of the largest peacekeeping missions in the world, it was not large enough to fully protect a region of that size. In 2010, UNAMID would admit that it could only adequately protect half of the region's population, mostly those concentrated in IDP camps and urban areas. UNAMID was plagued with major transportation issues. Protecting civilians is a mostly reactive task, quickly deploying troops to areas where civilians are in imminent danger. To accomplish that rapidreaction capability over such large, sparsely populated areas, a peacekeeping mission requires transport helicopters. UNAMID was never able to scrounge up the helicopters it needed in order to complete its mission, with the ones it were able to requisition beingeither unsuited to the task, insufficient in number, or too short-term to make a difference.
Furthermore, the Sudanese government proved to be a nuisance at best, and a menace at worst. An agreement between the UN and the Sudanese government which allowed UNAMID to deploy with Sudanese consent stipulated that the mission must have a predominantly ‘African character.’ Khartoum would take great advantage of this provision, frequently vetoing the deployment of non-African contingents, leaving UNAMID undermanned and underequipped. As a 2014 Foreign Policy report had succinctly put it, UNAMID had ”been bullied by government security forces and rebels, stymied by American and Western neglect, and left without the weapons necessary to fight in a region where more peacekeepers have been killed than in any other U.N. mission in the world.”
UNAMID was a mixed bag. While it was successful in some respects, it failed in others. It’s failureshighlighted a continuing gap in almost all UN Peacekeeping missions between what is asked of them and the means they are provided with in order to actually accomplish that task.
The End of UNAMID
Several dramatic changes in both the Sudanese and UN situations in the late 2010s would lead to UNAMID’s eventual withdrawal. First, Omar al-Bashir, the President of Sudan since 1989, was overthrown in a 2019 military coup following months of extensive street protests.
Al-Bashir was was the one who funded the Janjaweed, and would the next year be extradited to the International Criminal Court (ICC) to face genocide charges. The new government in
Khartoum would be a hodge-podge transitional government of civilians activists and military strongmen, but theyproved to be a much better group of peacemakers than al-Bashir's regime.
The Sudan Revolutionary Front (SRF), the main opposition rebel group, would reach a peace agreement with the Sudanese government in 2020. The SRF would integrate with the Sudanese Armed Forces and they would get seats in government.
At the same time the UN was faced with a financial problem. Demands for budget cuts to peacekeeping,initially by the Trump administration and then later as a result of COVID, made eliminating one of the UN’s largest and most expensive missions a needed cost saving measure in the eyes of the Security Council. UNAMID began to hand over control of key military installations and protection of civilian missions to the newly integrated Sudanese Armed Forces in late 2020.
There are still reasons to be concerned. Violence is still common in the region, and the situation in Sudan as a whole is deeply unstable and unpredictable. Most of the military leaders who control half of Sudan's new government, and who are now charged with protecting the people of Darfur, were the same military officers who commited war crimes in the region while serving al-Bashir. But even with that in mind, it looks like Darfur has its greatest opening for peace since the war started in 2003.
While UNAMID’s withdrawl constitutes a severe reduction in the UNs presence in Sudan, it does not mark a total withdrawl. A special political mission, the UN Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in Sudan (UNITAMS) will replace UNAMID as a successor mission, with a focus on peacebuilding and engagement with the Sudanese government. It won’t have any troops, and will lack the Protection of Civilians mandate that was present in UNAMID. This transition is emblematic of Secretary-General Guterres’ peacekeeping strategy throughout his term. He has consistently favored smaller, cheaper, and more agilepolitical missions rather than larger, more capable, more expensive multidimensional peace operations.
UNAMID was a strange mission. A UN/AU hybrid, created as a result of a primarily western human rightscampaign rarely seen in peacekeeping history, it was able to accomplish some of its goals with limited support from New York. While it was not a full success, UNAMID taught UN peacekeeping as a whole vital lessons in inter-organizational cooperation, troop deployment, and Protection of Civilian missions that will hopefully be taken to heart going forward.