The Juba Post, a Sudanese newspaper, reports that former UN Envoy Jan Pronk, a liberal Dutch politician who was declared persona non grata by Sudan due to his blogging comments, has hit back at the UN for its inaction:
“Jan Pronk, former Special representative of the Secretary General of the UN, has condemned the Sudan harassment of the UN Mission in Sudan, and the inaction of his manager in New York, revealing that they never responded to the letter expelling him. Pronk reports that the UN, by persistently failing to react to breaches of arrangements, and by its attempts to negotiate with Khartoum, has undermined its own position: ‘The Security Council has failed to address violations of earlier agreements concerning peace in Darfur’. Pronk also says the UN was too divided and bureaucratic to make a response to his expulsion, which was in breach of international conventions on UN personnel. A clearly angry Pronk writes, ‘The letter sent by the Minister of Foreign affairs to the Secretary General, in which the Sudanese authorities informed the UN of their decision, has ever never been answered. It turned out that there was dispute between UN officials in New York about the tone of such an answer’.”
This summary of the Juba Post article, apparently entitled “Pronk: UN New York coward, harassment in Sudan”, was contained in a daily media monitoring report compiled by the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) http://www.unmis.org/english/2007Docs/mmr-jan18.pdf
Jan Pronk’s full remarks, dated 14 January, can be found on his own blog, which is still operational:
Weblog nr 40
January 14, 2007
“31 December was my last day as Special Representative of the Secretary General (SRSG) of the United Nations in Sudan. Since 24 October, when the Government of Sudan had declared me persona non grata, I have not been able to contribute much to policy making. I could of course no longer lead the UN Mission in Sudan itself. Moreover, the UN leadership in New York had concluded that I should also not participate in policy meetings outside Sudan. They were afraid to provoke the Government. In my view that was not a wise approach. The Government had unilaterally taken the decision to expel the highest official of the United Nations in Sudan. It thereby had violated agreements with the UN and challenged both the UN Secretary General and the Security Council. The Government had done so because I had, on behalf of the UN, criticized the Government for violations of international agreements and human rights. It seemed that the Government could do this without receiving any reaction from New York. The Security Council, always rather quick in issuing statements or press releases when Members do not yet want to adopt a Resolution, did not officially protest against the Sudanese decision. Yet the Sudanese decision had been clearly aimed at undermining the mandate given by the Security Council to the UN Mission in Sudan. The letter sent by Minister of Foreign Affairs to the Secretary General, in which the Sudanese authorities informed the UN of their decision, has even never been answered. It turned out that there was dispute between UN officials in New York about the tone of such an answer. Several drafts were considered, but finally some officials came to the conclusion that it had become too late to send an answer. They did not inform their superiors and the latter did not ask questions.” Â
[This, of course, is a profoundly liberal view of the world, based on a touchingly naive belief that those at the top are reasonable and good people who, when they act badly, only do so because they are misled by very flawed officials who fawn around in the court of the “king”. Sadly, it turns out, of course, that any leader who maintains that kind of court cannot be very much good, either.
Pronk takes this same attitude to Sudan’s President Bashir, in his last previous blog, in December: “A high official in the South once told me: ‘Bashir wants peace. He has bullet wounds in his body’. He does not want to return to war. However, he is very careful not to antagonize the hardliners. Bashir’s advisors often do not tell him the whole truth. Much information does not reach him, or only in a biased form. However, Bashir clearly does not make an effort to get to know the whole truth. He is a skilled survivor, who very well knows where his power rests. He also knows the limits of his power and how to keep the balance. Such political skills require accepting a certain degree of disobedience, turning a blind eye to atrocities, inducing para-military forces or outlaws to defend the interests of the elite and rewarding them, taking sides in a conflict between such forces and their adversaries, or instructing some of them to attack and kill potential enemies. Contacts are laid indirectly, never in the open, always in the dark, in order to avoid eschew accountability. Some leaders, even if are of good intentions in general, deliberately do not want to know everything…”
http://www.janpronk.nl/index297.html]Â
Pronk continues on his most recent blog posting on 14 January: “It was a bureaucratic, apolitical approach. The Government could only come to the conclusion that they can get away with anything. The Security Council does only talk. It does not act. The UN bureaucracy is afraid to risk friendly relations with a member state. This is exemplary for the relation between the Security Council and Sudan from the very beginning. During 2003 and the first half of 2004 the cleansing in Darfur had resulted in mass killings and in the chasing away from their homes of more than a million people. However, the Security Council had refused to put this catastrophe on its agenda, despite early requests from many witnesses not to stay silent but to act. The Council only started to discuss this in July 2004, when it was already too late to revert the situation. The US began to refer to the mass murder as ‘genocide’, only after the raping and killing had reached their height. Thereafter the Government of Sudan has put aside all demands by the Security Council that the Janjaweed would be stopped and disarmed. Indeed, the Government had any reason to believe that they could continue to allow or support the cleansing and killing without being hindered by the international community.
In my view one of the mistakes of the Security Council has been that the Members in fact are only considering one specific instrument: whether or not to send a peacekeeping mission…Everything has already been reported; enough facts have been brought to the attention of the Security Council. The fact that the demands of the Council have not been implemented is no secret, but public knowledge. In such a situation the Council should react with clear measures: diplomatic, political, legal, financial or economic sanctions against those who do not comply. There are many possibilities, but the Council has always shied away from applying any sanction. Instead of creative and vigorous multilateral diplomacy the Council has continued to discuss the modalities of a peacekeeping mission. However, because it was clear from the beginning that the Permanent Members of the Security Council – US, UK, Russia, China and France – would not be able to reach consensus about imposing a Chapter 7 peacekeeping mission, such a mission could only be sent to Sudan under Chapter 6 of the UN Charter, that is with the agreement of the Sudanese themselves. As is well known, the Government of Sudan has consistently refused to accept or ‘invite’ (terminology of Security Council Resolution 1706) such a mission. So, there was no response to the violations, neither in the form of sanctions nor a mission. So, the Security Council by its inaction is eroding its own authority…There are many conflicts in the world in which the Council has not been able or willing to enforce respect. Sudan is only one of those. On more than one occasion high political officials in Sudan have told me that they had weighed the risk of non-compliance with Security Council resolutions against the risk of compliance. Non-compliance might bring them in conflict with the Council and its members: sanctions and threats against the regime. Compliance would entail a different risk: domestic opposition and efforts to change the regime from within. They had compared and weighed those risks meticulously, they told me, and they had come to a rational conclusion: the risk of compliance would be much greater than the risk of non-compliance…
“So, in the last two months of the year in many respects the position of Khartoum has become stronger than before. The situation in Darfur has further deteriorated. Never before the number of UN staff and aid workers that had to be evacuated or relocated due to an untenable insecurity situation was as high as during these months. Despite this Khartoum is spreading the message: “there is peace in Darfur, except in some pockets, but that is due to the UN …†Time and again Khartoum has been able to get away with such a message. Harassment of the UN Mission in Sudan has intensified during the last two months. Sudanese authorities can easily resort to such harassment, because they have not been challenged by UN Headquarters in New York, nor by the Security Council or by Governments of Member States. Some weeks ago one of our officials went to see the authorities in Darfur in order to raise a number of violations of human rights. The answer was exemplary for the self-confidence of those who have chosen to disregard any form of criticism: “You better shut up. We can always expel you, as we have provenâ€.
http://www.janpronk.nl/index120.html“