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SAVE DARFUR! Gordon Brown appears to have convinced the UN to authorize a 26,000 troop deployment -- 19,555 of them UN troops -- to Darfur, with a mandate to stop the massacres. The vote was unanimous, in no small part because of...the Olympics:
The vote was passed unanimously after China, the Sudanese government's main defender at the UN, dropped its objections. British officials said that China's oil interests in Sudan were eventually outweighed by anxiety about a possible international human rights backlash over Darfur aimed at next year's Olympic Games in Beijing.The UN vote will dispatch a hybrid force of 19,555 UN and African Union (AU) soldiers and more than 6,000 police from around the world. They are due to take over from a largely ineffectual 7,000-strong AU force in the western Sudan by the end of the year, and will have a much more muscular mandate. They are being deployed under chapter 7 of the UN charter which will give them the right to use force to protect civilians and assist the delivery of relief supplies.There's much to be done yet, including actually finding these troops. And there are concerns that, until the troops are deployed, the massacres could accelerate. But this is a surprisingly bold step, and in important ways, a reassertion of the role the UN can play in the world--Ezra Klein
