UNAMID Staves Off Kidnappers

Michelle at the Stop Genocide blog celebrates a welcome success for the UN peacekeeping mission in Darfur. Here’s how Xinhua rather heroically depicts the incident:

darfur woman.jpg

Troops from the joint United Nations-African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur have foiled an attempted abduction of several women who had strayed outside a makeshift camp in the war-torn western flank of Sudan, a UN press release said Wednesday.

A patrol from the hybrid force, known as UNAMID, was dispatched Tuesday to the Hassa Hissa internally displaced persons (IDP) camp in West Darfur after being alerted that six women had been snatched while collecting firewood in nearby fields, the press release said.

The kidnappers released the women when they saw the UNAMID team approaching the scene, it added.

With so much attention focused on the numbers of peacekeepers deployed, it’s worthwhile to reflect on situations like this one, in which what the peacekeepers are able to do is more important that how many of them there are. Of course, with more peacekeepers, successes like this would probably occur more frequently.

(image of a Darfuri woman, from flickr user Hoisaeter under a Creative Commons license)