Rwanda threatens Darfur pull-out

 

July 25, 2008
 
NEW YORK: Rwanda has threatened to withdraw its 3000 peacekeepers from a mission in Darfur, Sudan, if the United Nations refuses to retain an alleged Rwandan war criminal as its second-ranking commander there, US and UN officials have said.

The UN has tried to persuade Rwanda's Government to replace Emmanuel Karake Karenzi, a major general and deputy force commander of the joint African Union and UN peacekeeping mission in Darfur. A Spanish judge indicted Karenzi and 39 other Rwandan officers in February for alleged war crimes in the mid-1990s.

Rwanda rejected the request, saying the allegations are groundless and Karenzi had performed with distinction in Darfur. Its UN envoy, Joseph Nsengimana, sent an unsigned memo to the UN on Monday threatening to withdraw the peacekeepers if Karenzi were pushed out, a senior UN official said.

The US has sided with the Rwandan Government, citing concerns that a Rwandan withdrawal would cripple the already hobbled peacekeeping mission.

The Bush Administration says the peacekeepers provide the best hope of protecting Darfur's civilians from a government-backed counterinsurgency that has led to the deaths of more than 300,000 civilians and driven nearly 3 million more from their homes.

But the Administration is now in the position of backing a suspected war criminal as the second-in-command of a mission that is trying to halt mass murder.

"It is dismaying if some governments still believe that they can pick and choose alleged perpetrators of war crimes on the basis of political expediency," said Steve Crawshaw, a UN representative for Human Rights Watch.

On Saturday the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, told the US ambassador to the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad, to inform its Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, that "the US Government urges the renewal of Karenzi's contract without discrimination" , a US official said.

A spokesman for Dr Khalilzad declined to say if the ambassador had done so.

Karenzi, who was Rwanda's intelligence chief, had command responsibility for a series of political assassinations and massacres, including the "elimination" of Hutu populations in the towns of Nyakinama and Mukingo between 1994 and 1997, the Spanish indictment says. He declined to comment.

The Washington Post