Brown's Darfur triumph is also his test
Those who have exchanged fierce views on the invasion of Iraq have a fresh challenge this week: how to react to the UN resolution, tabled by Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy with support from George W. Bush, to send 19,000 peacekeeping troops to the Darfur region of western Sudan. This is one deployment of foreign troops, we trust, of which all but the most ardent pacifist or isolationist will approve. Over the past four years 200,000 Sudanese have keen killed in rebel fighting and a further two million turned into refugees. If this is not a humanitarian disaster on a scale which justifies international intervention, it would be difficult to conceive of one which did.
The abject failure of the Coalition to plan for reconstruction in Iraq has been a gift to those who claimed that the UN's failure to agree a second resolution mandating the invasion was justified. Yet the UN's total inability to enforce its will upon Saddam Hussein was one of many reasons why Mr Bush and Tony Blair, surveying the new landscape after 9/11, decided that enough was enough. The Darfur crisis presents the UN with an opportunity to prove that it is more than a talking shop and a factory for moral platitudes. The world will be a happier place if it does so and the violence in Darfur can be ended, or at least contained.
That said, nobody can pretend that the decision to back a UN force in Darfur has been straightforward, or is without risk. The fact that this campaign is backed by a UN resolution, and that only a token number of British troops will be involved, will be lost on many Islamic extremists: to them, any deployment of non-Muslim troops in a Muslim country will be excuse enough to wage war on the West. No matter how genuine is the world's desire to end bloodshed, mass rape and pillage, there will still be some who construe the entry of UN troops into the foray to be an imperialist adventure on the part of the US and Britain. As a reminder of what Gordon Brown has been up against, Sudan's president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, whose government-sponsored militias have been behind much of the fighting and who has accepted the intervention of UN troops with some reluctance, just last week accused Britain and America of 'exaggerating' what is happening in Darfur 'to hide the operations carried out in Iraq and their two countries' failure to contain the situation'. The contrast between democracy and dictatorship could not be greater: just imagine if 200,000 Britons had been drowned in last week's floods, and Mr Brown accused other countries who had offered help of exaggerating the suffering for political ends.
There is also the question of whether the UN force will be fit for purpose. Politics demands that most of the troops be African. Yet an existing peacekeeping force of 7,000 troops from the 53 nations which make up the African Union has done little to prevent Darfur's slide into civil war. Thanks to the destruction of farms, four million Sudanese are now dependent on food aid. Worse, the World Food Programme reported in June that it was unable to reach 170,000 of these hungry masses because of the fighting. The prospect of this number being added to the list of casualties is horrible, and only too real.
When it comes to intervening in a humanitarian crisis on this scale, the West is damned if it does, damned if it doesn't. If it does, it is accused of imperialism, if it doesn't, it is accused of standing by, looking after its own well-fed citizens and leaving the less fortunate to perish. Were it not for Iraq, the likelihood is that British and US troops would have been deployed on the ground in Darfur some time ago (beyond the small contingent who are currently providing logistical support for the African Union troops).
Tony Blair considered sending 5,000 British troops to Sudan in 2005, and President Bush, too, has said that he considered sending troops; but both decided against it on the grounds that it might inflame Islamic opinion further against Britain and the US. We will never know whether such an intervention could have improved the situation, but one thing is for sure: it couldn't have made things worse. Delay in international reaction has made the task of resolving the crisis much harder. Over the past year the warring militias of Darfur have splintered into a dozen factions. Intense diplomatic efforts by Jan Eliasson, the UN's special envoy in Sudan, managed to gather representatives of most of the militias to attend last week's African Union conference in Tanzania, yet still this remains a complex civil war with nearimpossible numbers of people to be brought to agreement.
While a force of British and US troops might have tackled Darfur's problems at source, the UN's force will be unable to do so. Their rules of engagement prevent them from suppressing the militias: their deployment, under chapter seven of the UN charter, allows them only to engage in the defence of civilians and aid workers. Too often, UN peacekeeping missions have found themselves in an impossible situation: unable to take pre-emptive action against a enemy they know is out to strike them.
Yet for all our reservations about the UN deployment, it is a relief that at last something is happening. Gordon Brown deserves credit for taking the initiative — as does David Cameron, for nudging the issue of Darfur up the political agenda through his visit to the region last November, dismissed by some at the time as a publicity stunt. The looming question is, what should happen if the UN deployment, in tandem with the new peace talks, fails in its mission? Does the world then stand back and watch the genocide continue? The Prime Minister has pulled off a diplomatic triumph, but one that may yet test his leadership and 'moral compass' to the very limit.
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