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ABSTRACT
Based on fieldwork carried out as part of the Making Peace Keeping Data Work for the International Community Project, this article considers how local perceptions of conflict dynamics interact or fail to interact with incident reporting in UN peacekeeping missions. Interrogating encounters of the hybrid United Nations/African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) with local populations through interview data collected among Darfurian refugees in Chad, the article posits that localized perceptions of conflict differ in important ways from interpretations by UNAMID. It further argues that in order to effectively carry out the core mandate of protecting civilians, the systematic inclusion of local knowledge into UN-produced data sets is vital for any UN peacekeeping mission.
Acknowledgements
Müller wishes to thank the people who shared their knowledge and experiences with her as well as the anonymous referee for valuable feedback. Bashar wishes to thank the research participants in Chad who shared their experiences with him.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
About the authors
Tanja R. Müller is Senior Lecturer in International Development at the Global Development Institute and the Humanitarian & Conflict Response Institute, both at the University of Manchester. She is the author of the article. Tanja has worked extensively on the Horn of Africa for about two decades, with a particular focus on Eritrea. She is a co-investigator for the MPKDW project.
Zuhair Bashar worked for two years (May 2014–May 2016) for the MPKDW project as a postdoctoral researcher. He collected the bulk of the empirical data on which this article is based.
Notes
* Interview Darfurian refugee in Djabal Refugee Camp, Goz Beida, Chad, 25 May 2015.
1 Fjelde et al., “Protection Through Presence”; Holt and Taylor, Protecting Civilians; Shesterinina and Job, “Particularized Protection”; UN, DPKO/DFS Policy.
2 Ramjoué, “Improving UN Intelligence”.
3 UN, Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations, para 68.
4 Ibid., paras 69–75.
5 Jenkins, Peacebuilding.
6 UN, Report of the Secretary General’s Internal Review Panel.
7 The ‘Human Rights Up Front’ Initiative was officially launched by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in November 2013, see http://www.un.org/sg/humanrightsupfront/ (accessed May 10, 2016).
8 Interview, head of human rights section in a UN peacekeeping mission, 5 March 2016, Addis Ababa.
9 Beswick and Minor, The UN and Casualty Recording.
10 Kurtz, “With Courage and Coherence”.
11 UN, Report of the High-Level Independent Panel, xii and 25.
12 Autesserre, The Trouble with Congo.
13 Pouligny, Peace Operations Seen from Below, 141–2.
14 In addition to the protection of civilians as its core mandate, UNAMID is also tasked with contributing to security for humanitarian assistance, monitoring and verifying the implementation of peace agreements, assisting an inclusive political process, contributing to the promotion of human rights and the rule of law, and monitoring and reporting on the situation along the borders of Darfur with neighbouring countries, see http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/missions/unamid/index.shtml (accessed May 10, 2016).
15 UNAMID was formally established through UNSC Resolution 1769 (2007), adopted on 31 July 2007, see http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/RES/1769%282007%29 (accessed May 9, 2016).
16 For a more comprehensive discussion of these techniques see UN, Understanding and Integrating Local Perceptions.
17 See Read et al., “Capturing Conflict”, a paper produced by the MPKDW project, for a more detailed discussion of this process.
18 UN, Policy on Joint Mission Analysis Centres; see also Shetler-Jones, “Intelligence in Integrated UN Peacekeeping Missions”, for a broader discussion of JMACs.
19 De Waal et al., “The Epidemiology of Lethal Violence”.
20 Abdul-Jalil, “Nomad-Sedentary Relations”; Mamdani, Saviours and Survivors.
21 Africa Confidential, 56 (14); De Waal et al., “The Epidemiology of Lethal Violence”.
22 Caparini et al., The Role of the Police in UNAMID.
23 Appiah-Mensah, “The African Mission in Sudan”.
24 International Crisis Group (ICG), The AU’s Mission in Darfur; Refugees International, Sudan: AMIS Needs New Resources.
25 Human Rights Watch, Chaos by Design, 5.
26 According to an ICG report from July 2005, based on interview data with AU officials, 75% of all verified killings in Darfur since June 2004 had been carried out by Janjaweed – type proxy militias, see The AU’s Mission in Darfur, 4.
27 De Waal, “Mission Without End?”.
28 De Waal, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa, 52–90.
29 De Waal, “Mission Without End?”.
30 Abdul-Jalil, “Nomad-Sedentary Relations”; Flint and de Waal, Darfur: A New History; Mamdani, Saviours and Survivors. In fact, both groups were predominately Muslim.
31 For a more detailed discussion see, for example, Crilly, Saving Darfur; Lanz, “Save Darfur”; Natsios, Sudan, South Sudan & Darfur; Mamdani, Saviours and Survivors.
32 For a more general discussion of how high-profile advocacy campaigns influence international politics see Müller, “From Band Aid to South Sudan”.
33 UNAMID operates in the context of a host state with a functioning police and security system, even if its presence might be weak in UNAMID deployment areas, thus does not have executive policing power. The only exception here is Kalma IDP camp where no Sudanese government presence exists, see Caparini et al., The Role of the Police in UNAMID.
34 Caparini et al., The Role of the Police in UNAMID.
35 Ibid.; De Waal, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa, 66; Read, “Tensions in UN Information Management”.
36 International Crisis Group (ICG), The Chaos in Darfur.
37 Interview by Müller, 5 March 2016, Addis Ababa.
38 ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ in this self-categorization are not used in a strict racial sense or based on skin colour, but as political categories. For example some ‘black African’ tribes like the Tama were seen not as ‘African’ but as allies of the ‘Arabs’ because they were not targeted in the same way as other ‘African’ tribes. Also, while ‘African’ tribes are usually referred to by their name, ‘Arabs’ are usually referred to simply as ‘Arabs’, and only after probing some more information is being revealed. ‘Arabs’ are also all those who do not farm. At the same time, those categories are ambiguous in other ways: a number of (African) informants speak about ‘Arabs’ who have lived among them for a long time and sided with them or warned them when an attack seemed imminent. This paper is not the place to engage with these ambiguities and the very complex dynamics of conflict in Darfur in more detail. A good recent overview is provided in International Crisis Group, The Chaos in Darfur.
39 Interview Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Amir Refugee Camp, 7 May 2015.
40 Interview Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Amir Refugee Camp, 10 May 2015.
41 Interview Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Amir Refugee Camp, 7 May 2015.
42 An additional trigger was the fear of rape among women. Rape as a potential weapon of war in relation to Darfur has been widely discussed elsewhere, partly also in relation to the wider debate on whether genocide happened in Darfur, see for example Amnesty International, Sudan: Darfur; Hampton, “Agencies Speak Out on Rape”; Kaiser and Hagan, “Gendered Genocide”; Miller, “Moral Injury and Relational Harm”. Rape has been mentioned indirectly in most of the interview data as a general threat, but only one woman participant admitted to being raped and one was direct witness to a rape. Rape was not an explicit focus of the interviews conducted for the purpose of this project, not least because extensive testimonies from women who experienced rape were collected in one of the refugee camps and are in the public domain. Interviews conducted for the MPKDW project in addition relied predominately on male informants, often the decision makers within family units, and focused on wider conceptions of insecurity. Rape became highly topical again in 2014 following an alleged incident of mass rape in Tabit, North Darfur, that UNAMID was subsequently prevented from investigating in detail, see Human Rights Watch, Mass Rape in Darfur. To properly engage with rape specifically as a driver of insecurity would go beyond the scope and purpose of this article. Interestingly, rape was also described by some interviewees including a woman as related to an attack on people’s wealth, ‘they loot all the money, the shops, the livestock. They attack women to humiliate men’ she said (Interview, Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Beida, Djabal Refugee Camp, 26 May 2015).
43 Interview Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Amir Refugee Camp, 4 May 2015.
44 Ateem, “The Root Causes of Conflicts”; Bashar, Local Approaches of Conflict Resolution; Flint, “Darfur’s Armed Movements”; Haggar, “The Origins and Organization of the Janjaweed”.
45 De Waal, “Darfur and the Failure of the Responsibility to Protect”.
46 Interview, Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Beida, Djabal Refugee Camp, 27 May 2015.
47 Interview, Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Beida, Djabal Refugee Camp, 26 May 2015.
48 Interview Darfurian refugee in Chad, sheikh, Goz Amir Refugee Camp, 6 May 2015.
49 Interview Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Amir Refugee Camp, 7 May 2015.
50 Interview, Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Beida, Djabal Refugee Camp, 19 May 2015.
51 Interview, Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Beida, Djabal Refugee Camp, 21 May 2015.
52 Interview, Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Beida, Djabal Refugee Camp, 27 May 2015.
53 Interview, Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Beida, Djabal Refugee Camp, 30 May 2015. Those narratives are in line with testimonies published in the wider literature on the conflict in Darfur from various sources, most prominently in books such as Marlowe et al. Darfur Diaries and Walzer, Out of Exile.
54 Interview Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Amir Refugee Camp, 10 May 2015. All interviewees said they had no contact or involvement with any rebel group, an assertion that cannot be verified. And while quite a number of interviewees mentioned clashes between government forces and rebel groups as a trigger for their decision to leave Darfur, none put any blame on rebel groups in relation to perpetrating violence. It thus may well be that interviewees were sympathizing with some of the rebels who often belonged to the same ethnicity as themselves.
55 Interview, Darfurian refugee in Djabal Refugee Camp, Goz Beida, Chad 21 May 2015.
56 Daniel, “The Refugee: A Discourse on Displacement”, 279.
57 Adami, “Future Perfect?”.
58 Read, “Tensions in UN Information Management”.
59 See also de Waal et al., “The Epidemiology of Lethal Violence”.
60 Read et al., “Capturing Conflict.”
61 The following discussion is predominately based on interview data collected by Bashar among former UNAMID staff as explained in more detail in the methodology section.
62 Telephone interview, former UNAMID staff, 27 February 2015.
63 Interview by Müller, 5 March 2016, Addis Ababa.
64 Face-to-face interview, former UNAMID staff, 1 February 2015, in a UK city.
65 Telephone interview, former UNAMID staff, 11 October 2014.
66 De Waal et al., “The Epidemiology of Lethal Violence”; Holt and Taylor, Protecting Civilians.
67 Interview by Müller, 5 March 2016, Addis Ababa.
68 Telephone interview, former UNAMID staff, 13 October 2014; Interview by Müller, 5 March 2014, Addis Ababa.
69 Interview Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Amir Refugee Camp, 10 May 2015.
70 De Waal et al., “The Epidemiology of Lethal Violence”.
71 Interview Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Amir Refugee Camp, 10 May 2015. UNAMID also worked with local interpreters and whilst those predominately came from the local communities, there were instances when local populations suspected interpreters to in reality work for the government and quasi act as ‘spies’ (Interview, Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Beida, Djabal Refugee Camp, 22 May 2015).
72 Interview Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Amir Refugee Camp, 5 May 2015.
73 Interview, Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Beida, Djabal Refugee Camp, 27 May 2015.
74 Interview, Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Beida, Djabal Refugee Camp, 23 May 2015.
75 Interview, Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Beida, Djabal Refugee Camp, 19 May 2015.
76 All UN peacekeeping missions rely on co-operation with respective host governments, and when considering the fraught relationship between the UN and the GoS, expectations of UNAMID and its potential impact were always bound to be too high, see also Holt and Taylor, Protecting Civilians.
77 Interview, Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Beida, Djabal Refugee Camp, 22 May 2015. These widely inflated expectation of what UNAMID troops would actually be able to do were partly engrained in the way the mission was framed, see De Waal, “Darfur and the Failure of the Responsibility to Protect”.
78 Interviews Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Amir Refugee Camp, 7 and 8 May 2015. It seems in fact that this particular incident took place in 2007 and it were thus AMIS and not UNAMID troops involved. When this was further probed with one of the interviewees he said to him these were the same anyway, and he did not remember the exact date.
79 Interview, Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Beida, Djabal Refugee Camp, 25 May 2015.
80 Interviews Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Amir Refugee Camp, 4 May 2015.
81 Interviews Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Amir Refugee Camp, 6 May 2015.
82 Interview, Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Beida, Djabal Refugee Camp, 21 May 2015.
83 Interviews Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Amir Refugee Camp, 8 May 2015.
84 Interview, Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Beida, Djabal Refugee Camp, 21 May 2015.
85 In concrete, interviewees were asked: ‘How do you score UNAMID in terms of making people feel safe and protected?’, using a 10-points scale from 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest).
86 Concrete scores were as follows: 37 participants: 1; 4 participants each: 2 and 3, respectively; 2 participants: 5; 1 participant: 7.5 and 4 participants declined to give a score.
87 Interview, Darfurian refugee in Chad, Goz Beida, Djabal Refugee Camp, 23 May 2015.
88 UN, Report of the High-Level Independent Panel, 65–6.
89 Ibid.; see also Pouligny, Peace Operations Seen from Below.
90 Abilova and Novosseloff, “Demystifying Intelligence”, 11; UN, Understanding and Integrating Local Perceptions.
91 These include the Peace Studies Centre at the University of El Fasher, the Peace Studies and Research Centre at the University of Nyala, and the Centre for Peace and Development Studies at the University of Zalingei.
92 Informal conversation by Müller with staff from the centres in El Fasher and Nyala at a workshop in Khartoum, 20 January 2015.
93 Interview by Müller, 5 March 2016, Addis Ababa.
94 It goes beyond this paper to discuss this last issue further. This is the topic of a forthcoming paper from the MPKDW project that focuses on security threats to local staff who worked for UNAMID, see Müller, “Collateral Damage”.
95 Abilova and Novosseloff, “Demystifying Intelligence”; see also Pouligny, Peace Operations Seen from Below.
96 See Elbasri, “We Can’t Say All that We See in Darfur”. Whether Elbasri’s critique is justified or not is beyond the scope of this article.
97 For a more general argument in favour of relating different narratives of conflict from different vantage points to each other see Mac Ginty and Firchow, “Top-Down and Bottom-up Narratives”.
98 UN, Special Report of the Secretary-General.
99 Ibid.