After a month of brutal fighting in South Sudan that has killed an estimated 10,000 people so far, the United Nations peacekeepers have finally got their first reinforcements: a small advance party of 25 soldiers from Nepal.
The cavalry was supposed to be charging into South Sudan to rescue it from imminent disaster, but it now seems that its arrival will be slow and much delayed. And even when the soldiers are all in the country, they are unlikely to be numerous enough to make a big difference.
The UN had been hoping to get 5,500 fresh troops into South Sudan by mid-January to reinforce its beleaguered mission of 7,000 troops – a peacekeeping mission that has the impossible task of trying to protect civilians across a vast and chaotic country as big as France, with poor transportation links and few paved roads.
Instead, due to a lengthy process of bureaucratic and political approvals, those military reinforcements are now expected to be delayed until March. The small unit of two dozen Nepalese soldiers, who arrived on Wednesday, are the only reinforcements on the ground so far.
While the UN peacekeepers have been slow to materialize, the intervention from the African Union has been even slower and weaker. Despite its rhetoric about African solutions for African crises, the AU has done little to help South Sudan during the latest bloodshed, aside from issuing an occasional statement deploring the violence and pleading with the two sides to stop fighting.
The AU has long promised to create an "African Standby Force" and a rapid-reaction system to ensure that it can send troops swiftly into any war zone on the continent to defuse the fighting. Countries such as the United States, Britain and Canada have poured tens of millions of dollars into the training of African troops for duties in the "Standby Force" and other peacekeeping missions.
Yet the African force is still nowhere to be seen. African defence ministers discussed the Standby Force at meetings at the AU headquarters in Ethiopia this week, but they talked vaguely about trying to have the force operational by next year.
Instead, in major crises such as Mali and the Central African Republic over the past year, it has been the neo-colonial power, France, that has sent troops into the war zones to stabilize the situation. France has responded much faster than the UN or the AU, but its rapid troop deployment has caused much unease about neo-colonial intervention.
In South Sudan, while the UN and the AU are dithering and delaying, the quickest intervention has come from two authoritarian governments: Uganda and Sudan, two neighbours with a financial and economic interest in the stability of the fledgling nation.
Uganda confirmed this week that it has already sent its troops into South Sudan to fight on the side of government troops against rebel fighters. Khartoum, meanwhile, has promised 900 technicians to help run the oil fields near the Sudan border that are crucial to the economies of both countries. But because of their financial interests, neither Uganda nor Sudan are properly neutral forces for protecting civilians and stabilizing the country.
The UN, to be fair, has protected thousands of civilians by allowing them to take shelter inside the walls of UN compounds across South Sudan. After four weeks of fighting, some 65,000 civilians are still inside the UN bases, their lives protected by the UN presence – although gunfire did blast through the walls of a UN camp in the town of Malakal during clashes this week, killing one civilian and injuring dozens of others.
The UN compounds are not enough to protect most of the fleeing civilians, however. More than 400,000 civilians have fled from their homes in South Sudan because of the fighting in the past month, and only a small fraction of them can shelter at the UN bases. Many have scrambled into the mountains or the bush, where nobody knows if they are safe.
There is perhaps some irony that the UN is struggling with its responses to South Sudan and the Central African Republic on the 20th anniversary of its shameful inaction during the terrible events at the beginning of the Rwandan genocide.
It was 20 years ago this week when Canadian general Romeo Dallaire, military commander of the UN mission in Rwanda, sent a fateful fax to the UN headquarters in New York to warn of the growing signs of an impending catastrophe. He noted that Tutsis were being forced to register themselves in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, and a source feared that their "extermination" was being planned. The fax was largely ignored, and the genocide erupted.
At a sombre event at the UN on Wednesday to mark the Rwanda anniversary, Deputy Secretary General Jan Eliasson said the UN had drawn lessons from its "collective failure" in Rwanda in 1994.
"The United Nations must respond early to the risk of mass atrocities so as to prevent their occurrence," he said. "We already have grave violations of human rights in the Central African Republic and South Sudan. We must stop them from turning into mass atrocities."
Mr. Eliasson acknowledged that the lessons of Rwanda have not always led to action. "Since the tragedy in Rwanda, hundreds of thousands of people have died in mass atrocities and tens of millions have been displaced," he said.
"Over the last few weeks alone, men, women and children have been slaughtered not only in South Sudan but also in the Central African Republic and in the nightmare of Syria."
He warned of the "deeply worrying" ethnic and religious divisions that seem to be growing in many nations. "The demonization of people of different faiths or ethnic belonging is one of the most toxic deeds of which human beings are capable," he said.
The rhetoric at the UN this week was lofty, and the sentiments were noble. The question now is whether the world community can support stronger action by the UN to ensure that civilians are protected from ethnic and religious killings and the rampages of brutal fighters in South Sudan and elsewhere.
Geoffrey York