This would be the first mildly promising action taken in Darfur, since the UN entered the picture months ago except it isn’t going to happen until the end of the year - if it actually happens. In the mean time, the systematic exploitation, rape, and genocide in the Sudan will go unchecked for many more months.

A Thai battalion assigned to the United Nations peace-keeping force in Darfur could be deployed at the end of the year, the director of the Supreme Command Headquarters peace operations centre said yesterday.

The 800 troops would be part of a 14-nation peace-keeping operation in the war-torn region of western Sudan under the UN-African Union joint mission, Maj-Gen Jerdwut Kraprayoon said.

The deployment was initially scheduled for the end of last year, but was postponed because the UN and the Sudanese were unable to agree on many points. Training was complete and the troops were ready for the peace-keeping operation, he said.

To date, only Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Nigeria are commissioned to join the Darfur peace-keeping mission, known as Unamid.

They should call it Unashrug or Unawhatever for all of the effort going into this operation.

The Sudanese government has been providing air support for Janjaweed fighters for some time. This is an example of the Khartoum government taking action against civilians in Darfur without Janjaweed attack.

KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) — The peacekeeping force in Darfur said Tuesday it was still trying to evacuate those wounded in airstrikes two days earlier that an aid group reported left 12 people dead, including six children.

The U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Sudan, Ameerah Haq, called for immediate access to the wounded.

“I am deeply perturbed by the reported bombings of a school, water installations and a market where civilians, especially women and children are present,” she said in a statement.

Gen. Martin Luther Agwai, commander of the joint African Union-UN peacekeeping mission, said the bombings were “unacceptable acts against civilians” and said recent Darfur violence reflected a “total lack of commitment” by the government and the rebel groups to the peace process.

U.S.-based Darfur Diaries said six children, ages 4 to 11, were killed in an airstrike Sunday on a school it funds in the village of Shegeg Karo in North Darfur. Six more people were killed when the village’s market area was bombed.

Residents reported that a Sudanese government aircraft hovered over the area for some time before repeatedly bombing it, the aid group said.

When are we going to learn that this model does not work? The very important endeavor to feed people and provide medical assistance to displaced persons is a great undertaking and well worth any risk for the benefit it can provide desperate  people. Yet, for the vastness of its resources and the access the UN has to military assistance, it is incapable of doing anything beyond relief work in these scenarios. The model being used today is like trying to treat a .45 gunshot wound with a bandaid.

Renewed fighting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC) North Kivu province today has forced the United Nations refugee agency to halt the distribution of aid to internally displaced persons and to call off a drive to register newly displaced people in the Rutshuru area.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) suspended operations after reports of new fighting between Government soldiers and fighters from the rebel Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) near the Kinyandoni Anglican IDP site in North Kivu. Clashes on Saturday and Sunday left at least one woman dead.

There needs to be a great deal of reform in the UN itself, so that people can actually look at these issues holistically and come to some better solution from the international community.

The United Nations recently took over peacekeeping operations in Darfur because the African Union was ill-equipped to handle the scope of the operation there. The UN has been organizing food relief efforts for some time.

Despite the UN’s vast access to resources, they are incapable of mounting an effort which combines relief, peacekeeping, and force protection to any effect in the Western Sudan.

April 17 (Bloomberg) — The main United Nations food relief agency is cutting by half rations to people affected by war in Sudan’s western Darfur region because of attacks by gunmen on supply trucks, the World Food Program said.

The ration cuts will start next month when supplies should increase to cover a so-called hunger gap during the May-to- September rainy season between planting and harvesting, Rome- based WFP said today in an e-mailed statement. The number of people in Darfur needing food in that period will rise to 3 million from 2.4 million last month.

“Attacks on the WFP food pipeline are an attack on the most vulnerable people in Darfur,” WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran said in the statement.

This year 60 trucks hired by WFP have been hijacked in Darfur, where rebels and government forces have been fighting for the past five years. One driver was killed last month, 26 are missing, and 39 trucks are still unaccounted for, WFP said. The UN and international relief agencies have mounted the world’s largest humanitarian aid operation in Darfur and southern Sudan, which is recovering from a 21-year civil war.

“recovering from a 21-year civil war”?

Recovering lends a sense of things getting better - but there is not only no indication of that, the trend points to the opposite. Slavery is widespread in Sudan- blacks being treated no better than beasts at the hands of their Arab attackers. Starvation, no medicine or even a means to reach medical attention for wounds suffered by those escaping their masters. These shattered people go from those who care nothing about them to those who can do little for them.

Given that the Khartoum government has shown zero interest in doing anything other than support the enslavement and eradication of Africans in Sudan, I pose two questions:

1) Instead of calling on others to conduct “peacekeeping” operations in Sudan, why are we not aggressively prosecuting military action against the Muslim marauders in the region?

2) Why have we not intigated and supported activity directly targeting the Khartoum government?

There is no “peace” to keep in Sudan. The Sudanese government is directly coordinating and supporting activities specifically designed to kill vast numbers of non-Arab people in the Sudan. This is not my idea of peace.  This ia also not, as it has been described, an “African problem” to be solved solely by Africans. Not only has the African Union mission been completely incapable of securing peace for the victims on Khartoum’s genocidal activities, they have barely been able to provide for their own force protection. The UN is taking over the mission, but with little material differences in the scale or composition of the foces on the ground.

I am also dismayed by all of those institutions in the US, who claim to have a close connection of the soul with Africa. Aside from an abstract rallying cry of “Save Darfur”, what are they doing? Aside from the bumper stickers proclaiming a cause, how much are they working toward gaining real solution in Sudan? Where is the outrage against slavery in Africa? Where is the anger and action about a level of genocide many times worse than Srebrenica?

I am one person and I am unsure of what to do - but there are millions of us single persons doing nothing more than talking, while our government does nothing more than condemn and call on others to act.

Shame on us all.

But not where you think.

The United States has announced that it is planning to help Egypt build a border fence along the Gaza-Egypt border. Washington transferred $23 million worth of special aid to the North African nation as part of its assistance in locating smuggling tunnels.

Because there is no way we could put $23 million to use on a US border to control smuggling.

On January 1, the United Nations is set to establish a peacekeeping mission in conjunction with the African Union in the Sudan. The new mission is being billed as becoming the largest UN peacekeeping operation in the world. It is time for rejoicing because the killing of non-Muslim inhabitants of the Darfur region will come to an end, and the beleaguered 8,000 person AU mission will get much needed assistance from United Nations as the force grows to over 19,000.

Except for one small thing.

 Under Security Council resolution 1769, passed 31 July 2007, the joint African Union/United Nations Hybrid Operation in Darfur (UNAMID), is supposed to consist of up to 19,555 military personnel, 3,772 police officers and 5,105 civilians, making it one of the largest peacekeeping operations in the world.

The beleaguered and under-resourced AU force comprises around 7,000 troops and 1,200 police.

Although UNAMID comes into being on January 1, it will initially be made up almost entirely of the AU personnel already on the ground, with major additional deployments not expected for several months.

Aside from the UN’s horrible track record for peacekeeping, the other major problem with a UN solution in the Sudan is simply their inability to get off the dime. The resolution was crafted in July 2007 and it may be July 2008 before any other resources are deployed to provide relief to the AU mission.

Now, the US has gone soft-shoe on Muslims around the world (e.g. Kosovo) so there is no way we are going t help. The UN can’t help (e.g.Rwanda) even when they do get their circus tents set up.  All Khartoum has to do is exert a tiny bit of control on the Janjaweed - kill the non-Muslims a little slower; starve them out a little less aggressively - and there will be no western reprisals that Khartoum isn’t already used to.