The UN's Peacekeeping Mission in Darfur Willfully Concealed Information from HQ

The joint United Nations-African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur (UNAMID) purposefully withheld information from UN headquarters concerning attacks that targeted civilians and their own troops, according to the findings of an investigation.

A review team appointed by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and headed by former UN peacekeeping official Phil Cooper examined 16 incidents in the western Sudanese region and found that in five of them "the Mission did not provide UN Headquarters with full reports on the circumstances surrounding these incidents, which involved possible wrongdoing by Government or pro-Government forces," UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said in a statement on Wednesday.

"The Secretary-General is deeply troubled by these findings," Dujarric said. "He recognizes that UNAMID faces unique challenges owing to its complex mandate and operating environment. Nevertheless, keeping silent or under-reporting on incidents involving human rights violations and threats or attacks on UN peacekeepers cannot be condoned under any circumstances."

The complete findings have not been disseminated, but VICE News obtained an executive summary that was distributed to members of the Security Council.

Established in 2007, UNAMID currently deploys some 14,500 troops and 4,500 police in Darfur. Nearly 170 peacekeepers have died since its inception.

The UN estimates that as many 300,000 people have been killed and another two million displaced by fighting in the region since 2003.

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A series of revelations this year, including allegations made by former UNAMID spokeswoman Aicha Elbasri, have painted a picture of a mission in constant fear of the Sudanese government, and one that has consistently under-reported human rights violations.

Elbasri bprovided confidential internal documents to Foreign Policy magazine showing that UNAMID officials commonly spoke of the complicity of the Sudanese government in obstructing UN personnel from visiting sites where civilians were killed. Internal reports made it clear that peacekeeping officials in Darfur believed Sudanese troops were involved in ambushes on UN forces. These concerns were not made public, partly because of fear of government reprisal.

The mission also failed to report aerial bombardments in Darfur to the Security Council, reasoning that it couldn't prove them definitively — despite the fact that the Sudanese military is the only force in the area with access to planes.

The Secretary-General's review team claims that Sudanese government had also obstructed its efforts, noting in the executive summary that visas for its members arrived late, forcing them to cancel a visit to UNAMID.

"It was judged that all relevant information could be collected by video- and telephone-conference or by e-mail correspondence," the team wrote.

The review team cited UNAMID for its "stubborn" approach to releasing information to the media.

"Press releases were routinely delayed by days based on lack of verification, taking them out of the media cycle," it said, "particularly when Government and/or pro-Government forces were suspected of being involved."

"Within the Mission, the Communications and Public Information Division (CPID) was dysfunctional and deeply divided over the issue of responsibility for preparation and release of mission press statements," the investigators added.

Some UN officials privately welcomed the report.

"Regardless of the difficulties inherent in the mission's mandate, there is no excuse for under-reporting," one senior peacekeeping official with experience in Darfur told VICE News.

This sentiment was reflected in a recent communique sent by UN peacekeeping headquarters to all of its missions, reminding them of their obligation to report incidents in full. A year-long internal review of the mission, initiated prior to Elbasri's leak, is set to conclude in February 2015.

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Yet observers questioned the framing and scope of the Secretary-General's investigation, which sought to determine whether UNAMID had in fact engaged in a cover-up of crimes against civilians and peacekeepers. In a letter accompanying the executive summary (reproduced below), which was also sent to the Security Council, Secretary-General Ban said that investigators "did not find any evidence to support the allegations." But the difference between a culture of chronic under-reporting and a cover-up can be a mere matter of degrees.

"The findings' language looks slightly ambiguous," Jerome Tubiana, senior Sudan analyst at the International Crisis Group, told VICE News. "The Secretary-General's statement says the investigation did not find any evidence to support cover-up allegations, but then it says in five cases UNAMID chose not to report to UNHQ. Does that not amount to a cover-up?"

Among those cases was the bombing on September 25, 2012 of the town of Hashaba, the site of ongoing firefights between the Sudanese military and rebel groups. The documents leaked by Elbasri estimate that as many as 100 civilians were killed in the bombardment. It was followed by attacks from a government-linked Arab militia that killed and raped civilians in several nearby villages.

The Secretary-General's review team found "reasonable evidence, including as reported internally within UNAMID, that members of the [Sudanese] Border Guards were involved in this attack and went on to commit crimes and human rights abuses. This was not reported by UNAMID to UNHQ nor was there ever a public statement issued condemning the criminal action."

Elsewhere, investigators concluded that in the Tawilla area in North Darfur the mission neglected to send the UN's department of peacekeeping operations "a copy of the verification report on attacks, rapes and looting at four villages in Tawilla by pro-Government forces." Though the Security Council was aware of the incidents, they were never briefed on UNAMIDs conclusive findings.

UN officials have repeatedly stressed the difficulty of operating in Sudan, where cooperation with an intransigent government in Khartoum — itself a major party to the conflict — is unavoidable. The mission appears to have repeatedly compromised its mandate for the sake of what it perceived as self-preservation.

"In UNAMID, as in other missions, self-censorship and censorship by the hierarchy can exist at all levels," said Tubiana. "I met with local human rights officers who were censoring themselves because they thought they would be censored anyway by their hierarchy."

"The UN was aware of UNAMID's shortcomings in terms of reporting, and it could have investigated this or addressed this issue before rather than just reacting to a scandal," he added.

Dujarric's statement noted that the mission had a "tendency to under-report unless absolutely certain of the facts." UNAMID officials insisted that UN personnel had to be present at the site of an incident in order to definitively prove the details, but said that they were often unable to access sites due to government interference — interference that they failed to sufficiently convey to superiors out of fear that doing so would alienate the Sudanese government.

"From what we know from our sources, Darfur remains wrought by these incidents of government forces or government-aligned forces attacking," Akshaya Kumar, Sudan and South Sudan analyst for the Enough Project, which seeks to end genocide and crimes against humanity, told VICE News. "At a bare minimum, they should report when they are being attacked. If the government is obstructing them from doing their work, they should call the government on their bluff."

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Though it reprimands UNAMID for a lack of reporting, the investigation was limited to reviewing incidents reported internally by the mission during Elbasri's eight-month tenure — a puzzling restriction given the dysfunction that likely predated her appointment. It also failed to address concerns that some incidents simply went unacknowledged, thereby leaving no trail for investigators to follow.

The investigation was further restricted to UN documents and interviews with current or former UN staff, and did not incorporate outside reporting. It does not cite any individual UNAMID members for wrongdoing.

Tubiana said that the problems at UNAMID require an independent investigation, not one appointed by the Secretary-General that consists of former UN officials who might be sympathetic to the tacitly assumed realities of managing a challenging peacekeeping deployment.

Meanwhile, the conflict in Darfur continues to claim lives, and it remains unclear what, if anything, has changed at UNAMID.

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