United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has announced that fresh peace talks to resolve the conflict in Darfur will start next month in Libya.
"There must be an end to violence and insecurity, a strengthened ceasefire supported by the incoming Hybrid Operation [an AU-UN peacekeeping force to be known as UNAMID], as well as an improvement in the humanitarian situation and greater prospects for development and recovery for the people of Darfur," Ban said.
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When news outlets reported that a chemical weapons agent named phosogene was found in a storage facility maintained by UNMOVIC--the UN weapons inspection team for Iraq--the regular herd of UN bashers used this seemingly embarrassing story to advance their own anti-UN agenda.
Take Claudia Rosett:
[t]here is, of course, much more to the UNMOVIC story itself. Along with such questions as who carried phosgene into the U.S., and then into the UNMOVIC office in midtown Manhattan, and how, I keep wondering what on earth these weapons inspectors for Iraq have been doing for most of the past decade? [snip] Whatever else this phosgene flap is about, it's one more glaring example of why it's insane to give any more money to the UN before demanding a full, independent stock-taking that would tell us, for the first time ever, what they're really doing with what they've already got.Of course, today we learn the answer to Rosett's first question about who brought the phosogene to New York: no one. The "chemical agent" was really just an over the counter commercial cleaner. The answer to Rosett's second question about what UNMOVIC has been up to since the invasion of Iraq is easily researchable. UNMOVIC, you see, has to brief the Security Council quarterly. And in its last report [pdf] to the Security Council before UNMOVIC's mandate was terminated in June, we learned that UNMOVIC had 34 staffers, including some of the world's foremost experts on WMD detection. Among other things, these experts have been busy briefing the US government on bio-weapons detection systems, conducting multiple weapons inspection training courses throughout the world, and monitoring the use of chemical agents in terrorist attacks in Iraq. So, contra Rosett it would seem that in the past five years since the invasion of Iraq, UNMOVIC had, in fact, found things to do.
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon met with just a few of the hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Darfur, bringing a message of "hope, peace, security...and water."
Mr. Ban spoke with Rodolphe Adada, the Joint UN-AU Special Representative to Darfur and the head of the current AU mission to the region (known as AMIS), after arriving earlier today in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, UN spokesperson Michele Montas told reporters. Mr. Adada will then head the hybrid force (UNAMID) once it takes over from AMIS at the end of this year.More
Radhika Coomaraswamy, the Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, has began a visit to Côte d’Ivoire; she will focus on the follow-up of action plans aimed at releasing children from armed groups and reintegrating them into their communities.
Ms. Coomaraswamy will also examine the issue of sexual violence against children in the aftermath of the conflict in Côte d’Ivoire, which has been split between the Government-controlled south and the Forces Nouvelles-held north since 2002.More
The provisional list of speakers for the general debate of the 61st Session of the General Assembly has been released. With 15-minute allotments, it's easy to figure out when your favorite Head of State (HS), Head of Government (HG), Deputy Foreign Minister (DPM), or Foreign Minister (FM) will speak. See the schedule after the jump.
By Joel Selanikio, MD, co-founder of DataDyne.org (UNF-Vodafone partnership)
Masaiti District, Zambia, July 2007 -- The vaccination assessment team from the capital city of Lusaka listens intently as a village official describes local participation in the recent measles vaccination campaign. He believes that all eligible children in the village were taken to the vaccination posts, but urges the team to verify this for themselves. In a nation where many households have no phone and no address, collecting health data is a daunting task.
Today's New York Times write-up of Ban's first visit to Sudan underscores a dilemma faced by the proposed African Union-United Nations hybrid force for Darfur. Namely, that for the peacekeepers to deploy to Darfur, there must first be some semblance of a peace to keep. Of course, this requires foremost the cooperation of the central government and Darfuri rebels. But in Darfur the peace process is complicated by the fact that the militias opposing the central government are fractious.
When the rebellion broke out in Darfur in 2003, the rebels were largely unified. But since then, the rebels have split into various factions with disparate leadership and command structures. For a comprehensive peace agreement with Khartoum to take hold, the rebels first must make peace among themselves. To that end, the Times reports that Ban offered UN support for talks on rebel unity.
Mr. Ban said he would extend an invitation to the eight major rebel groups involved in the fighting in Darfur for a "full-fledged peace conference" this fall. The groups met last month in Arusha, Tanzania, and came up with a framework for sharing power and resources that the United Nations says lays a basis for talks with the government.The UN is certainly the right platform to convene such a meeting. But member states too should be ready and willing to make this conference successful by incentivizing rebel unity. It is only when a political process between the rebel groups is underway that talks between the government and Darfuri rebels can make real headway.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon arrived in Sudan yesterday to check on the progress made in Darfur.
"I want to see for myself the plight of those we seek to help, and the conditions under which our peacekeepers in Darfur will operate," Ban said.
Mr. Ban's visit comes just weeks after the Security Council authorized a hybrid force, which will have some 26,000 peacekeepers at full deployment, to quell the violence in Darfur, where at least 200,000 people have died and more than two million others forced to flee their homes since 2003 because of fighting between rebel groups, Sudanese Government forces and allied Janjaweed militias.More