Sorry for the serious delay in posting. Between research, work, Telders, and moving, this week got a little out of hand. And we also still don’t have internet at the apartment yet. Less than three weeks until I come home for a visit!
From The Age

The articles coming out on the UNAMID hybrid force set to deploy in January say things like “less than half” the troops expected to complete the project will be available to begin the mission. Actually it’s even less than a third. 6,500 out of 20,000 troops and 6,000 police will arrive in January for certain and possibly another 2,000 police will be available. Almost all of the 6,500 will be AU peacekeepers, the force that has already been conducting operations there.

The UN has accused Sudan of dragging it’s feet by stalling the entry of important equipment for the troops, and not providing agreements on the scope of the force’s activities as well as complicating the entry of non-African troops. Sudan has, of course, denied any of this and the has said that the SG’s statements are “unfair” The foreign minister states Sudan will make an official statement tomorrow regarding the force.

The force is also lacking critical equipment such as helicopters to provide to the troops. This has been atributed more towards lack of will power among SC members.

“While helicopters alone cannot ensure the success of the mission, their absence may well doom it to failure,” he said in a letter to Council members.

With only three weeks left before the 26,000-member U.N.-African Union force is scheduled to start deploying, Ban lamented the U.N.’s failure to get a commitment for even one helicopter.

Ban said he had personally contacted every country with the potential to contribute a helicopter — from industrialized to major developing nations — “to no avail.”

He said he was sending two high-level envoys to a summit of European Union and African leaders in Lisbon, Portugal, this weekend “to directly engage with as many key leaders as possible on this subject.”

“We are at the critical moment for Darfur,” Ban said. “Member states have spoken clearly about what must be done. It is time for them to walk their talk.”

The Sudanese government has also recently been dealing with the release of the British teacher accused of insulting Islam and the refusal to hand over officials suspected of war crimes to the ICC. Not that I have much sympathy for these loads their plates.

In the US, while these events may not directly effect the events above, they are related. H.R. 2489 has gone to President Bush for his signature. The Genocide Accountability Act expands the US’s power to prosecute those suspected of genocide. It expands the law as follows:

An amended U.S. Genocide Code expands U.S. ability to prosecute genocidaires in its borders. The current U.S. law is too narrow to provide adequate accountability for individuals in the United States who have committed genocide. According to the Genocide Intervention Network, the U.S. Justice Department has identified individuals who participated in the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides and currently live in the United States. Under current law, these individuals cannot be arrested or prosecuted because they are not U.S. nationals and the genocides they perpetrated did not take place in the United States.

A U.S. role in prosecuting genocidaires - even those who commit crimes outside of the U.S. - helps enforce an international code of justice. For example, the amended U.S. Code could allow for some of the worst perpetrators of genocide to be prosecuted in U.S. Courts. The current gap in the law has proven problematic; former U.S. officials have stated that the United States wanted to arrest and prosecute Cambodian dictator Pol Pot but couldn’t because of gaps in the U.S. criminal code.

H.R.2489 moves the U.S. toward a complimentary legal system. Under the Genocide Convention, State Parties are obligated to prevent and punish genocide wherever it occurs. These jurisdictional gaps under the U.S. Genocide Code must therefore be addressed for complementarity as well as impunity reasons-the U.S. must contribute to preventing and punishing the crime of genocide by ensuring jurisdiction over every scenario of an offender committing this crime. -From CGS

Lastly, a Times article came out today stating that the Senate is considering cutting money to the Millenium Challenge Corporation citing progress being slower than anticipated. Not that there hadn’t ben any progress, just that it had been too slow.

Eyeing the unspent billions [the money promised to go to the fund], the Senate has proposed that Congress provide no more than half the money up front for future five-year projects, which typically come with a price tag of $250 million to $700 million. Such projects are now fully financed at the start to make sure countries have the wherewithal to finish what they start…

By changing how its projects are financed, “then M.C.C. becomes like the World Bank and all the other countries using overseas development aid in stop and go fashion,” said John A. Kufuor, the president of Ghana, who heads the African Union. “The aid is spread so thin that at the end of the day the necessary difference is not made.”

The article also discusses some of the potential consequences of cutting this aid, citing the example of Burkina Faso, which has undergone lengths to meet the requirements to receive aid under the Millenium Challenge Corporation:

If the agency gets the lesser Senate amount, under the current rules requiring the money up front, Burkina Faso, a West African country that has spent more than two years qualifying for and drafting its $560 million to $620 million plan, will get nothing, agency officials said. Tanzania and Namibia are ahead of it in line.

Burkina Faso has gone to great lengths to meet the agency’s good governance standards. The agency gave it a $13 million grant to improve girls’ education, which the country used to build, among other things, schools with day care centers so school-age girls do not have to stay home to look after their younger siblings.

Identified by the International Finance Corporation as one of the most difficult places in the world to do business, Burkina Faso has also halved the number of days it takes to start a business, and reduced by a third the cost of registering property.

“What type of message does that send to Burkina Faso, a country that has spent a huge amount of political capital and money on this process?” he asked. “What does that tell the Togos, the Nigers that want to become eligible? It tells them: Do everything like Burkina Faso, make all these reforms, spend millions of your own money, and then maybe at the end we might be able to sign a compact with you — or maybe not.”

Now the article ends there, forcing readers to decide for themselves what the actual consequences of the promising aid and then not delivering it are. As the US has been slacking on aid to Africa (and the Millenium Challenge Corporation affects more than African nations), other countries like China have been stepping in to take’s its place, namely China. In a time when our reputation is so damaged internationally, making promises we chose to back out of won’t help us to become a more effective diplomatic force whether we are pushing for an international peacekeeping force in Darfur or for assistance in our own work abroad.

Off to Chernivtsi.

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