Will tomorrow finally be the day that ends 20 long years of war and terrorism in Northern Uganda? According to Reuters,

Uganda's fugitive guerrilla Joseph Kony will meet mediators on Saturday on the Sudan-Congo border and may even sign a final peace deal, a rebel negotiator said on Wednesday.

But the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) still wants more details on how Uganda's government plans to use traditional reconciliation rituals to help him avoid prosecution for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.

But after spurning the peace process a month ago, ostensibly for very much the same reasons, Kony's credibility -- already at the level of an indicted mass murderer -- is, to say the least, suspect. Moreover, it is unclear how the "peace vs. justice" stalemate has advanced in the last month: the Ugandan government -- and even some of Kony's victims -- are willing to drop the ICC indictments in favor of means of traditional justice, but the ICC insists that Uganda is legally obliged to hand over Kony. Kony is calling for a "workshop" to address the issue, but it is unlikely that he will be appeased by anything less than getting the ICC out of the picture entirely.

In a new report, the ENOUGH project proposes the option of offering Kony exile -- while using ICC indictment as a credible stick to end his nefarious influence in the region. ENOUGH is rightly skeptical of Kony's intentions, and the report prioritizes restoring peace and security over securing a formal peace deal with Kony, which, in light of his past unreliability, seems a very sober strategy.

In addition to its tense border dispute with Ethiopia, Eritrea is involved in a heated geopolitical standoff with its significantly smaller neighbor to the south.

The tiny port nation of Djibouti, a key U.S. ally in the Horn of Africa, has urged the U.N. Security Council to take immediate action to prevent a conflict with its northern neighbor Eritrea.

In a letter to the council president circulated Tuesday, Djibouti's Foreign Minister Mahmoud Ali Youssouf said Eritrea has launched a major military buildup on their border overlooking critical Red Sea shipping lanes.

It is not yet clear how the Security Council will respond to Youssouf's appeal, and Djibouti is as yet unsatisfied with the mediation from the Arab League and African Union. According to Djibouti's president, the Eritrean and Djiboutian armies are each massed along the border, and "the situation is explosive." With Russia and Georgia also -- at least rhetorically -- sparring over the region of Abkhazia, yet another regional confrontation over territory is clearly not in the UN's interests. In the border spat with Ethiopia, though, Eritrea's government did not exactly welcome the continued presence of UN peacekeepers, eventually forcing them out of the country by withholding necessary fuel supplies. In that case, the UN had even ruled that the disputed border territory at hand belonged to Eritrea, so one can only imagine how the country would react to UN involvement in a case in which its claim to Djibouti's land seems much more dubious.

Nigerian rebels who have been attacking oil facilities in the Niger delta have claimed that they are mulling a ceasefire proposed by U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama. From Reuters:

The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) has launched five attacks on oil facilities in the Niger Delta since it resumed a campaign of violence in April, forcing Royal Dutch Shell to shut more than 164,000 barrels of oil per day (bpd).

"The MEND command is seriously considering a temporary ceasefire appeal by Senator Barack Obama. Obama is someone we respect and hold in high esteem," the militant group said in an e-mailed statement.

The prospect of an end to violence in the volatile region is certainly welcome, but there's one minor hole in the rebels' claim: as Matt Yglesias points out, the Obama campaign does not recall its candidate making any such appeal.

Writing at The Plank, Dayo Olopade provides this interesting observation.

At the time--unlike past attacks--MEND seemed to be courting American attention: "The ripple effect of this attack will touch your economy and people one way or the other and (we) hope we now have your attention," the group said last month.

Well, oil is $120/barrel--looks like you've got it. The direct link to Obama, however, seems suspect. He did attempt some high-level suasion during January's election crisis in Kenya, but I'm doubtful his grueling schedule these last six weeks has left much time for Skyping with MEND. It is notable that even the hint of the "Obama touch" has a band of saboteurs rubbing their chins about an end to a longstanding conflict.

True. And if this mysterious ceasefire appeal does indeed induce the rebels to cease their attacks, while the Obama campaign may not mind taking credit, the greatest beneficiaries will be the Nigerians suffering from violence in this oil-rich region.

UPDATE: Apparently MEND rebels have set their eyes on another American politician to broker peace -- former president Jimmy Carter (as well as possibly UN Messenger of Peace George Clooney). What's more, Carter, who attempted to mediate the region's conflict nine years ago, seems inclined to accept.

Caught between Hamas rockets and an Israeli blockade, Palestinian refugees in Gaza are bearing the brunt of a tense geopolitical standoff. For the second time in a week, the UN has been forced to halt its provision of food aid to 1.5 million Gazans due to a shortage of fuel caused by the blockade.

Unlike the situation in Eritrea, where the Eritrean government withheld fuel out of animosity for UN peacekeepers, Israel is not deliberately trying to starve the UN of fuel. Nor, of course, is it expressly targeting Gaza's refugee population. Rather, the motivation of the blockade is to deter Hamas -- which an Israeli official accuses of "deliberately holding up supplies for its own political reasons" -- from launching rocket attacks into southern Israel. Yet the UN special envoy to Gaza, while condemning Hamas' attacks, also identified Israel's blockade as effectively "collective punishment."

Apportioning blame in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is inevitably a politically contentious endeavor. While both sides surely deserve censure, in this case it is ultimately unproductive. The ultimate losers in this battle are the million-plus innocent Gazans who rely on humanitarian relief, and both Hamas and Israel should recognize that these civilians will require some degree of cooperation to ensure that their dire needs can be met.

As if the violence on the ground in Somalia were not enough -- thousands of civilians have been forced to flee after renewed clashes in the capital, Mogadishu, recently -- the coast of the country is facing increasing danger from -- yep, you guessed it -- pirates.

These are no fanciful swashbucklers, though. The pirates have recently captured various European cargo ships, luxury yachts, and fishing boats, holding their crews and passengers hostage for one goal -- money. The attacks on the high seas, then, are not merely a re-enactment of the ancient art of piracy; rather, they are deeply connected to the instability and suffering that have long run rampant on the mainland.

Many of the pirates are formerly struggling fishermen fed up with the country's situation -- a fact that they did not hide from their captives. The BBC reports:

They frequently took the trouble to tell us that they hadn't had a proper government for about 17 years, that there were no government agencies and, as a result, they were obliged to rob to survive," says Captain Darch [of a captured Danish vessel].

Worse, though, these are not merely a few isolated fisherfolk looking to make a buck (or a euro) by, shall we say, expanding their business. Forces on land with the potential to further destabilize Somalia's conflict have noticed that this piracy could provide them with a reliable source of funding.

"Businessmen and former fighters for the Somali warlords moved in when they saw how lucrative it could be. The pirates and their backers tend to split the ransom money 50-50," [BBC reporter Mohamed Olad Hassan] says.

The UN is addressing both of these problems, fortunately. The Security Council is drafting a resolution to allow countries to pursue pirates into Somalian waters, and Spain -- one of whose ships was recently captured -- has pushed for creating a UN anti-piracy force. To deal with the persistent violence on land, the Secretary-General's Special Representative in Somali, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, has pledged that the UN will continue to work to bring the various warring factions together for peace talks.

Just a few weeks ago, a peace deal between the brutal Lords Resistance Army and the government of Uganda was as close as ever to being sealed. The peace process failed, though, when LRA leader Joseph Kony refused to attend the signing ceremony. Now, according to the invaluable Institute for War and Peace Reporting, the Lords Resistance Army is once again gearing up for another fight.

IWPR reports that over the last few weeks, the Lord's Resistance Army has kidnapped hundreds of children in the Central African Republic and Southern Sudan and transported them to military training facilities in lawless eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. The LRA, is it seems, is once again committed to war, not peace. To make matters worse, the article suggests (and I've heard experts speculate as well) that the government of Sudan is backing the LRA in an effort to destabilize Southern Sudan, which holds a referendum on independence in 2009.

In an interview with The East African Enough analyst Julia Spiegel -- who just spent a month observing the peace talks in the small border town of Ri-Kwangba -- explains what can be done to reign in Kony. The interview is not available online, but a portion is extracted after the jump.

What do you think should be done to Kony in order to salvage the talks?

First, a concerted effort must be made by the Ugandan government and key international players to press Kony to make a choice about his future. He can either sign the peace deal and begin assembling his LRA forces in Ri-Kwangba; agree to a third country asylum arrangement representing exile or banishment
from northern Uganda as a consequence for his crimes, thus removing himself from the battlefield and giving peace a real chance; or walk away from the agreement and formalize his status as a regional warlord, which will trigger a regional manhunt that will leave him on the run for the rest of his life.

But ultimately, he must feel a cost for his failure to meet deadlines and uphold agreements; he has continually rejected carrots and has faced no real sticks. As a result, Kony has been able to gain time, money and medicine out of these peace efforts without making any real commitments or deliverables. Now Kony must be forced to make a choice. But this requires an effective communication channel to be made between the government, the international community and Kony himself. If he rejects these negotiation attempts in the next few months, then it will be clear that all peaceful options for resolving this conflict will have been exhausted, and thus the international community should, with regional states and UN peacekeeping missions in neighboring countries, rapidly develop a containment and apprehension strategy focused on capturing Kony and the other LRA leader's indicted by the International Criminal Court.

(Image viaDismal World)

The head of the United Nations relief agency in Gaza warned that food aid to 650,000 people and sewage and garbage collection will have to be suspended today if the Israeli fuel blockade is not lifted. A Libyan diplomat in the Security Council did not help matters when he compared Gaza to a Nazi death camp, prompting the walkout of the entire western contingent. In typical diplomatic understatement, a British official said afterwards, "A number of Council members were dismayed by the approach taken by Libya and do not believe that such language helps advance the peace process."

Meanwhile, prior to the walkout, Assistant Secretary General Angela Kane had this to say to the Security Council. From the BBC

"[The UN relief agency] Unrwa's fuel supplies will be exhausted on 24 April, and in an effort to save fuel, Unrwa has prioritised food distribution, solid waste removal, and sewage projects...

"Unless petrol is allowed in, Unrwa will discontinue its food assistance to 650,000 refugees, as well as its garbage collection services, which benefit half a million Gazans,"

"Another 500,000 Gazans are already living in 12 municipalities without any solid waste management capacity - largely due to the lack of fuel."

Hospitals and clinics will also run out of fuel within a week, she warned.

Public transport has been severely curtailed by the shortage of vehicle fuel, meaning that children cannot get to school and adults to work. Some car owners have converted their engines to run on cooking oil.

The fuel restrictions are an Israeli response to a Hamas attack on a fuel depot, which killed two Israeli soldiers.

Tensions are mounting between Russia and Georgia. Last week, Georgia accused Russia of shooting down an unmanned spy drone over Abkhazia -- a Georgian province with a large separatist movement backed by Russia. Georgia even released a video of the incident, which they say proves Russian MIGs violated Georgian airspace.

The Security Council will take up the matter today, but don't expect too much to come out of the closed-door meeting. Russia's increased activity in Abkhazia and South Ossetia follows predictably from the western decision to back Kosovo's independence. This is merely the other shoe dropping. I doubt shooting down an unmanned spy drone is all Russia has in store for the region.

Very disturbing news out of Darfur, from The Guardian:

The World Food Programme is to halve food rations for up to 3 million people in Darfur from next month because of insecurity along the main supply routes. At least 60 WFP lorries have been hijacked since December in Sudan's western province, where government forces and rebels have been at war for five years. The hijacks have drastically curtailed the delivery of food to warehouses ahead of the rainy season that lasts from May to September, when there is limited market access and crop stocks are depleted.

Instead of the normal ration of 500 grams of cereal a day, people in displaced persons' camps and conflict-affected villages will only get 225 grams from next month, the UN agency said yesterday. Rations of pulses and sugar will also be halved, giving people barely 60% of their recommended minimum daily calorie intake.

The WFP said that while Sudan's government provided security for convoys on the main supply routes, the escorts were too infrequent, given the huge demand for food at this time of year. "Attacks on the food pipeline are an attack on the most vulnerable people in Darfur," said Josette Sheeran, the agency's executive director. "With up to 3 million people depending on us for their survival in the rainy season, keeping WFP's supply line open is a matter of life and death. We call on all parties to protect the access to food."

Sheeran's exhortation painfully underscores the urgent need for a larger and more robust peacekeeping force in Darfur. The parties responsible for disrupting WFP's supply lines -- government and rebel forces, as well as opportunistic bandits -- are not going to police themselves, as severing -- or appropriating -- humanitarian aid is often, perversely, the exact purpose of these groups. Protecting humanitarian supply lines, then, is one area in which a neutral peacekeeping force can have an immediate impact -- even before Darfur's sputtering peace process can achieve a sustainable political solution.

At a Global Day for Darfur event here on the Mall in Washington last Sunday, Amnesty International and Tents of Hope had set up an evocative display of little baggies containing the amount of food that each Darfurian in an Internally Displaced Persons Camp receives each day. The small piles of lentils and flour were not much, and halving even that meager amount bodes very poorly indeed for the future of Darfur's displaced.

An unnamed American official is non-too-pleased with the Bush administration's moves to normalize relations with Sudan, and so leaks to Helen Cooper documents detailing the entente. The United States, reports Cooper, is offering to take Sudan off the list of state sponsors of terror and take steps to normalize relations if Sudan agrees to cooperate more fully on the deployment of the peacekeeping mission in Darfur. Why would this official think this is such a bad idea? Roger Winter, a former USAID and State Department official with twenty-years experience in Sudan explains: "Given the fact that Khartoum has been involved in negotiations repeatedly over the years regarding Darfur and the comprehensive peace agreements and has signed documents and consistently failed to implement what they've signed, why are we discussing normalization with them?"

I think this is exactly the point. Khartoum has yet to live up to most of the agreements it has signed. The 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (which ended a 20 year civil war between the Islamist government in the Khartoum and southern rebels) is on the verge of collapse because the government has decided to unilaterally withdraw from some of its key passages, including on the boundary of the oil-rich Abyei region. The Darfur Peace Agreement was basically dead on arrival--and the government (to this day) routinely violates its obligations contained therein. The President of Sudan, Omar el Bashir has also backed down from personal commitments he has made to the Secretary General to desist from the government's campaign to retard the deployment of UNAMID.

This "is a fool me twice, shame on me" sort of situation. And we've been fooled time and time again. As John Prendergast of the Enough Campaign (and formerly of the NSC) likes to point out, Khartoum tends to respond only under pressure or the threat of pressure. For real progress to take hold in Darfur, the United States should work with the international community to press the government of Sudan to comply with the agreements it has already made--not reward a regime that has consistently failed to live up to its past agreements.

There's a new pro-Israel, pro-Peace lobby on the block called J-Street. Watch the trailer.

I, for one, would hope to see some new life breathed into the Quartet process, which the Secretary General's former representative to the Middle East admitted was just a "side-show." But so long as rejectionist voices dominate the discourse, the Quartet's job as a negotiation-promoting foursome is made much more difficult. Here's hoping J-Street can inject some much needed sanity, compassion, and rationality into the debate.

In honor of Petraeus day on Capitol Hill, I thought I'd flag two video posts on our sister site On Day One in which Cato scholars Justin Logan and Chris Preble say that the United States should swear off nation building. The lesson of Iraq, they say, is not that the United States should learn how to do nation building better, but that the United States should not do it at all. Personally speaking, I'm sympathetic to this view. That said, I still think that there is a great need for nation building and post conflict reconstruction in today's world. Enter UN Peacekeeping, which has a demonstrated (if under-appreciated) record of success in post conflict zones. Rather than trying to do a better job of invading and occupying countries, it may make more sense to broaden our support for the one organization that has some experience and expertise in this line of work.

Watch their videos and let us know what you think.

Delegates from a State Department designated foreign terrorist organization, the Lord's Resistance Army, have been granted U.S. visas so they can travel to New York to meet the Security Council. Some background: The LRA is a militia that has terrorized the population of northern Uganda for nearly two decades. A peace deal, however, is in the works--and could even be signed by the LRA's notorious leader as early as Thursday. One sticking point in the peace deal are what to do about the International Criminal Court indictments on the LRA's leadership, and the delegates are hoping to press the Security Council to stay those indictments in the interest of peace.

The State Department's decision to grant LRA delegates visas seems to signal that the United States is willing to at least countenance lifting the indictments. This is not entirely unreasonable. One possible solution to the justice v peace dilemma emerging from the peace talks in Northern Uganda, after all, is to exile Kony and his top lieutenants and temporarily lift the indictments in return for full compliance with the peace accord. This solution may make the ICC Prosecutor cringe, but it shows how politically useful these indictments can be as mechanisms to enforce a peace.

Reuters gets its hands on a letter from the US Special Envoy on Sudan Richard Williamson to the Secretary General in which Williamson blames the UN for the slow deployment of UNAMID, the peacekeeping mission to Darfur. This kind of critique tends to infuriate me. The United Nations cannot waive a magic wand to summon the kind of troops and equipment necessary to make UNAMID a success. Rather, it depends on member states to pony up the cash, personnel and equipment. It is incredibly disingenuous to blame the UN for UNAMID's slow deployment when one's government is not offering troops or equipment -- nor even living up to its basic treaty obligation to financially support UN peacekeeping as a whole. (Right now, the United States is $1.4 billion in arrears in the UN peacekeeping account, which is far from chump change considering that the UN’s peacekeeping budget is only $7 billion annually).

Even if the United States does not want to send troops or equipment to Darfur -- which is understandable -- it could still help the situation by using its diplomatic clout to press for peace in Darfur. UNAMID, after all, will only be successful if there is an underlying peace to keep. One obvious way the United States could help politically and diplomatically is to make Darfur a higher priority in its bilateral relationship with China, which has close ties to Sudan. But so far, many in the United States government have found it easier to scapegoat the UN over Darfur than empower it to succeed there.

From the UN News Center:

Attacks against aid workers in western Sudan have reached unprecedented levels, jeopardizing vital relief operations in the war-wracked Darfur region, the United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator said today.

In a statement released in Khartoum by her office, Ameerah Haq said the humanitarian community operating in Sudan condemned all acts of violence taking place in Darfur, where rebels have been fighting Government forces and allied militia since 2003.

On Monday Mohamed Ali, a driver contracted by the UN World Food Programme (WFP), was shot dead and his assistant was seriously injured by unidentified assailants while traveling on the main route into Nyala, the capital of South Darfur state.

Read more.

The Agonists' Alex Thurston is apoplectic that Ban even suggested a peacekeeping force of 27,000 for Somalia.

27,000, huh Ban? Now look, I want to see stability in Somalia too. But don't you think you should be concentrating on finding the 17,000 peacekeepers the force in Darfur is waiting for, rather than hinting at new commitments? I have qualified support for the UN, but that doesn't mean I can't criticize the General Secretary when he says things that simply don’t make sense. In fact, I'm going to criticize the UN hardest when they fall flat on rhetoric, because rhetoric is the main tool in their arsenal at this point. So don't even mention troop numbers you have no hope of getting.

True, the UN is having difficulty securing the right troops and equipment for the Darfur mission. The thing is, if you read the recently released report on Somalia from which the 27,000 is drawn, it's clear that Ban is certainly not calling for a peacekeeping force anytime soon. Rather, as envisioned by the report (which the Security Council is to discuss today) before peacekeepers can even be considered, other hurdles must first be crossed. For example, the security situation would have to permit the UN to move its Somalia headquarters into Somalia. Then, at least 70% of the factions would have to sign onto a cease-fire. Following that, a broad-based political agreement would have to be forged. Only after these conditions have been met does the Secretary General contemplate a peacekeeping force for Somalia.

This is a reasonable and cautious way forward. Member states are likely to be more forthcoming with troop contributions should there be a viable political process to uphold. On the other hand, the problem with generating troops for Darfur is in part due to the fact that there is no peace to keep.

A Ukrainian police officer serving in Kosovo died today from wounds sustained during Monday's riots in Mitrovica, a frequent flash point. The lightly armed UNMIK police were forced to withdraw from the city when the riot gained steam, and were replaced by NATO troops. Ban condemned the riots. Serb authorities blamed NATO of using excessive force. This video from Russia today gives you a sense of the scale of destruction visited on Mitrovica yesterday.

The recipient of the International Criminal Court's first-ever indictments may avoid the dock in the Hague. Via Opinio Juris (the best international humanitarian law blog out there) Ugandan President Youweri Museveni says that he will no longer hand Joseph Kony, leader of the notorious Lord's Resistance Army, over to ICC authorities for an international trial. Instead, Museveni will pursue a local form of justice akin to a traditional truth and reconciliation process against Kony, who recently signed a landmark peace agreement with the government.

This has to be disappointing to the ICC. Kony is certainly deserving of jail time. His militia terrorized the Acholi people of northern Uganda for more than two decades. On the other hand, the ICC deserves some credit for bringing Kony to the negotiating table. It was not until the ICC began its investigation and issued indictments that the LRA began to seek a peace agreement with the Ugandan government in good faith; the ICC indictments provided the critical leverage to get the peace process going. So what to do about this peace v justice dilemma? The Enough Campaign says so long as the peace process remains on track, the Security Council should invoke the ICC charter and suspend the indictments in favor of local forms of justice. Makes sense to me.

We've known for a long time how bad the situation in the Central African Republic is for women and girls there. The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, which has an open investigation into crimes committed during CAR's 2002-2003 civil war, has even said that the number of suspected rapes far exceeds the number of extra-judicial killings during that war. Still, it is a shock to the conscience to see a statistic like this:

Over 15 per cent of women and girls in the violence-ridden north of the Central African Republic (CAR) are victims of rape and other forms of sexual violence, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said today.

Reports coming in on a weekly basis describe such incidents as two 12-year-old girls being raped while searching for firewood in the bush and a 13-year-old girl assaulted on her way to sell palm oil at a market.

"Sexual violence is a disturbingly common feature of the insecurity in the north of the Central African Republic," said UN Emergency Relief Coordinator John Holmes. "We must ensure that those responsible are brought to justice."

Read more. And visit Amnesty International to learn more about war against women in the C.A.R.

Via Hilzoy comes this great bit of news

"With whoops and backslaps, Uganda's government and Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels signed a ceasefire on Saturday, a big step towards a final peace settlement to one of Africa's longest-running wars.

"It is the laying down of arms. It is the end of the war," U.N. envoy Joaquim Chissano said after the parties signed the "permanent ceasefire" agreement during their fast-progressing talks in southern Sudan's capital Juba.

With only a demobilization deal left to be agreed on, negotiators and mediators like Chissano are predicting a final accord will be reached next week to end one of the world's most macabre and least-understood conflicts.

Fortunately, on UN Plaza last week, I enlisted the help of the Enough Campaign's Julia Spiegel to help me, and viewers, understand the conflict. As she points out, it is actually not that complicated: an outlaw group that receives support from abroad terrorizes the population of northern Uganda. Government forces, in trying to suppress rebellion, commit atrocities of their own. The people of Northern Uganda lose. Until now, that is.

At a lunch on the lawn of the Executive Mansion in Monrovia, Liberian president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf offered this happy toast to the health and prosperity of the American president and his country, which she described as Liberia's "number one partner." Liberia was the final destination on Bush's six-day tour of Africa, and he received accolades there echoing the praises sung to him in his previous stops in Benin, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana. Beninese can now even celebrate a day named after President Bush -- his trip there was the first ever by an American president -- and Ghanaians can drive on a highway named in his honor.

Undoubtedly, President Bush deserves compliments for much of his work in Africa. His administration has greatly increased assistance to combat HIV/AIDS and malaria and has invested significant sums in promoting development. Humanitarian aid, however, is not a sufficient policy on its own, particularly in a society still experiencing the tensions of 14 years of civil war. The billions of dollars that the U.S. contributes to fighting disease, as well as the millions of textbooks that Bush has promised to provide for Liberia's educational system, must be supplemented by concrete contributions to maintaining peace and stability in Liberia. Unfortunately, President Bush's budget proposal falls almost $50 million short of meeting the needs of the UN peacekeeping force in Liberia, which, as we've mentioned before, was critical to Liberia's dramatic turnaround and will continue to be central to its stability in the future.

At a lunch on the lawn of the Executive Mansion in Monrovia, Liberian president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf offered this happy toast to the health and prosperity of the American president and his country, which she described as Liberia's "number one partner." Liberia was the final destination on Bush's six-day tour of Africa, and he received accolades there echoing the praises sung to him in his previous stops in Benin, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana. Beninese can now even celebrate a day named after President Bush - his trip there was the first ever by an American president - and Ghanaians can drive on a highway named in his honor.

Undoubtedly, President Bush deserves compliments for much of his work in Africa. His administration has greatly increased assistance to combat HIV/AIDS and malaria and has invested significant sums in promoting development. Humanitarian aid, however, is not a sufficient policy on its own, particularly in a society still experiencing the tensions of 14 years of civil war. The billions of dollars that the U.S. contributes to fighting disease, as well as the millions of textbooks that Bush has promised to provide for Liberia's educational system, must be supplemented by concrete contributions to maintaining peace and stability in Liberia. Unfortunately, President Bush's budget proposal falls almost $50 million short of meeting the needs of the UN peacekeeping force in Liberia, which continues to provide essential security in a country still rife with weapons and threatened by violence.

Though she did not suggest "drinking lustily" to UN peacekeepers in this specific toast, Johnson-Sirleaf has been very outspoken in her support of the UN's accomplishments in Liberia, which include organizing the free elections that brought her to power and bringing former dictator Charles Taylor to justice. President Bush too should greatly appreciate the efforts of these blue helmets, who greatly eased the concerns of his security detail by patrolling the streets of Monrovia during Bush's visit.

President Bush's commitments to fund development efforts in Africa are more than welcome to the Africans who have cheered him in their capitals, and they should be appreciated by Americans of all political stripes as well. However, President Bush cannot shirk from the U.S.'s responsibilities to contribute to peacekeeping efforts. Speaking from Rwanda earlier on his trip, Bush suggested that the delay in deploying peacekeepers to Darfur rests solely on the shoulders of other nations. The U.S. enjoys tremendous influence on the international stage, and it should use its position to both fully fund UN peacekeeping missions and to exert concentrated diplomatic pressure on countries like China, Russia, and Egypt that have been slowing the deployment of the force in Darfur.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Samantha Power chose an auspicious day to give her first "Sergio talk" -- a discussion of her new book, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World, Tuesday afternoon at The New America Foundation. Power's book is a chronicle of the life and influence of Vieira de Mello, the career UN diplomat tragically killed in August 2003 after a suicide bombing of the UN's headquarters in Baghdad. While the UN has bravely continued to operate in Iraq, the staff of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) -- the agency to which Vieira de Mello dedicated much of his career -- has until now worked almost entirely out of Amman, Jordan. Wednesday, however, High Commissioner Antonio Guterres announced that he would send the organization's first representative to Baghdad since Vieira de Mello's premature death.

The weight of UNHCR's responsibility -- dealing with over 2 million refugees in Syria and Jordan, as well as an even greater number displaced within Iraq, all with a Baghdad staff that will soon increase to just five -- underscores the courage with which the UN has conducted its mission in Iraq. Despite a persistent lack of security, the UN has nonetheless taken on some of the greatest challenges in Iraq and contributed to some of the country's most tangible successes. As Power reminded listeners at yesterday's talk, the indelible images of Iraqis proudly showing their purple hands, stained with the ink from their ballots, trace directly back to the UN's crucial role organizing Iraq's landmark elections.

The difficulties faced by the UN in Iraq echo the problems with which Sergio Vieira de Mello grappled throughout his career. He believed deeply that the key to the UN's success was its impartiality; yet he learned, through one experience after another, that this impartiality is extraordinarily difficult to assert and maintain in situations of catastrophic violence and flagrant human rights abuses. Moreover, while the UN's aims may transcend borders, it must always work intimately with the particular concerns of its individual Member States.

In Iraq, the UN faces a double bind: even as it rightly touts its independence from the occupying powers as the essence of its usefulness, it must often rely on foreign military personnel to maintain security -- and thereby risk damaging the impression of its neutrality.

Despite the unavoidable tension of its position, the UN is still appreciated as a neutral moderator in Iraq, emphasized by the Iraqi Parliament's recent decision to request UN assistance in organizing the country's upcoming October elections. As both the U.S. and the UN encounter further challenges in Iraq, Power's insightful and well-articulated book provides an valuable insight into how one of the UN's most fervent supporters dealt with the issues that make its mission so difficult -- yet so very important.

This weekend finally saw the much anticipated declaration of independence by Kosovo. We've been predicting this moment for a couple of months, so back in November we asked United States Institute of Peace scholar Daniel Serwer to help us anticipate some of the immediate consequences of a Kosovo's declaration of independence. At the time, he was quite pessimistic.

What would be the fall-out [from Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence?] It could be bad. You could have efforts by Belgrade to grab the northern piece of Kosovo, which has a Serbian majority, and declare its own independence. And perhaps even Republika Srpska (the Serbian half of Bosnia) as well. Belgrade is in a position to make a lot of trouble in the aftermath of a Kosovo declaration of independence.

So far, things are relatively stable in Republika Srpska. But this is certainly not the case in the northern part of Kosovo, where Reuters is reporting that mobs of Kosovar-Serbs torched border crossings and a police station in protest. The New York Times even quotes one unnamed western diplomat, saying "we are minutes to partition." Kosovo, a very small country, may soon become even smaller--and more ethnically homogeneous.

In an op-ed in Tuesday's Washington Post, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, confident in the steps that Iraqi leaders are taking to solidify their country's sovereignty, called on Congress to support negotiations of a "normal bilateral relationship" between the U.S. and Iraq. The U.N.'s authorization of American presence in Iraq is set to expire at the end of the year, and Rice and Gates, anticipating a longer-term need for U.S. troops, advocate for developing a renewed "status-of-forces" agreement -- which dictates the terms under which troops act -- directly between the U.S. and Iraq.

Critics have contested that this sort of agreement would amount to forming a treaty while conveniently bypassing the Senate's treaty-ratification prerogative. Rice and Gates contend that, rather than hamstringing the next president, this agreement will actually give him or her more leeway in pursuing US interests in Iraq. Nonetheless, this proposal is sure to make some Democratic lawmakers uncomfortable. Iraqis' political progress is far from an established fact, and the prospect of a prolonged American engagement in Iraq -- particularly one orchestrated by an administration in its last year in office -- rankles those opposed to the war.

What Rice and Gates fail to discuss is the the UN's role in Iraq (a prospect that we've frequently addressed). They dismiss the current UN authorization as out of step with normal diplomatic convention and out of touch with Iraqi leaders, but they fail to stress the critical neutral role played by the U.N. and its invaluable and stabilizing humanitarian work (in particular with regard to refugees). While currently a relatively small political mission, the U.N. Assistance Mission in Iraq has performed admirably, and, as Iraq progresses politically, it will continue to need the UN's valuable political assistance and ability to maintain peace and support stable governance. It will need resources (particularly from the U.S.) to do so.

In a day-long open meeting at the UN, officials discussed ways to finally end the terrible scourge of child soldiers. From the UN News Center

The Security Council must "take concrete and targeted measures" against those parties that persistently use or abuse children during armed conflicts around the world, the United Nations envoy on the issue said today, urging that well-meaning words be transformed into effective actions.

Addressing the Council during a day-long open debate, the Secretary-General's Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict Radhika Coomaraswamy noted the ongoing impunity for those persistent violators that use or abuse children during wars.

From the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to Myanmar and from Sri Lanka to Uganda, parties to armed conflicts kill, maim, abduct or sexually assault children; deny humanitarian access to children in need; and recruit and use child soldiers. In total, at least 58 parties are known to be offenders.

Read more. Edith Lederer is also on the story.

(A child