Attempts to bring peace to Sudan's Darfur region have failed and a U.N. peacekeeping force of 12,000 to 20,000 troops is needed to stop the killings and rape, the top U.N. official in Sudan said.
Jan Pronk gave his most pessimistic assessment yet to the U.N. Security Council on Friday. He said marauding Arab militia were succeeding in their ethnic cleansing campaign, erasing village after village.
"Looking back at three years of killings and cleansing in Darfur we must admit that our peace strategy so far has failed," Pronk said. "All we did was picking up the pieces and muddling through, doing too little too late."
"At least once a month groups of 500 to 1000 militia on camel and horseback attack villages, killing dozens of people and terrorizing the others who flee away," Pronk said.
The United Nations is contemplating a peacekeeping force in Darfur, where the African Union has fielded a force of 7,000 with a limited mandate and scarce funds. But U.N. peacekeeping officials have not planned for the high numbers of troops Pronk suggested...
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