THE UNITED NATIONS
Abou Ag Ahiyoya, MA ’12, is intimately familiar with the dynamics of the current violent conflict in Mali, both because it is his home country and because he has held high-level police positions in that country, as well as in Darfur (the latter with the UN’s African Mission).
police force dispatched to the Darfur area of Sudan by the African Union from 2005 to 2007. For a while, Ahiyoya was the acting chief of police operations under the African Union, serving a vast refugee population and supervising almost 1,000 officers from about 25 African countries. Toward the end of his tour of duty in Darfur, he worked as a member of the transition team preparing for the UN’s African Mission in Darfur. In Darfur, Ahiyoya dealt with killings, rapes, and other crimes on a daily basis. He saw children growing up without families, and tens of thousands without real homes. “I witnessed the consequences of war – I don’t want this to happen to any community or country,” he recalled in a 2011 interview at EMU. By 2008, Ahiyoya was deputy director of the national police academy in Mali and the director of the UN’s training program for police and peacekeepers within the Ecole de maintien de la paix in Mali. He also was a consultant and facilitator at the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre in Canada. When Ahiyoya was earning his CJP master’s degree as a Fulbright Scholar during 2010-12, his heart was heavy with the knowledge that his country was spiraling into bloody chaos, without the international community seeming to care. As he feared then, the situation has worsened over the last several years. Belated intervention by the military of France on Jan. 11, 2013, did not bring peace to Mali. Now there is a UN-supported “stabilization mission” comprising more than 10,000 military person-
nel and 1,440 police, plus staff providing humanitarian assistance, but they are trying to operate in a dangerous, volatile situation. “The AQMI [Saharan fighters inspired by al-Qaeda] are recruiting lots of our youths because they don’t have jobs,” Ahiyoya told Peacebuilder in an interview published in the spring-summer 2011 issue. “We need to address the causes of terrorism and solve problems from the bottom up.”
UN is cumbersome, but irreplaceable Sometimes the UN system is criticized for being a large, confusing bureaucracy that is hard for those outside of its structures to understand. As an example, the DCPSF (the UN program Ntambara worked for in Darfur, beneath the UNDP's umbrella) partners with numerous other agencies and organizations, including UNAMID in Darfur, itself a specific collaboration between the United Nations and the African Union, which is known as UNOAU, where Kamal Udin Tipu serves as a police planning advisor. As confusing as the system may seem, Tipu says the United Nations nevertheless has “been very active in keeping peace” around the world, and is refining, improving and strengthening its approach to peacebuilding by addressing the root causes of conflict rather than simply intervening in violent conflict. And, he says, consider the alternative: “If there’s no UN, what else do we have?” — Andrew Jenner PHOTO by Jon Styer
peacebuilder ■ 23 emu.edu/cjp