[Washington Post] The United Nations...an international organization whose stated aims of facilitating interational security involves making sure that nobody with live ammo is offended unless it's a civilized country...
, looking to modernize its peacekeeping operations, is planning for the first time to deploy a fleet of its own surveillance drones in peacekeeping missions in Central and West Africa.
The U.N. Department of Peacekeeping has notified the Democratic Republic of the Congo
...formerly the Congo Free State, Belgian Congo, Zaire, and who knows what else, not to be confused with the Brazzaville Congo or
Republic of Congo, which is much smaller and much more (for Africa) stable. DRC gave the world Patrice Lumumba and Joseph Mobutu, followed by years of tedious civil war. Its principle industry seems to be the production of corpses. With a population of about 74 million it has lots of raw material...
, Rwanda and Uganda that it intends to deploy a unit of at least three unarmed surveillance drones in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The action is the first step in a broader bid to integrate unmanned aerial surveillance systems, which have become a standard feature of Western military operations, into the United Nations' far-flung peacekeeping empire.
But the effort is encountering resistance from governments, particularly those from the developing world, that fear the drones will open up a new intelligence-gathering front dominated by Western powers and potentially supplant the legions of African and Asian peacekeepers who currently act as the United Nations' eyes and ears on the ground.
"Africa must not become a laboratory for intelligence devices from overseas," said Olivier Nduhungirehe, a Rwandan diplomat at the United Nations. "We don't know whether these drones are going to be used to gather intelligence from Kigali, Kampala, Bujumbura or the entire region."
Developing countries fear Western control over intelligence gathered by the drones. Some of those concerns are rooted in the 1990s, when the United States and other major powers infiltrated the U.N. weapons inspection agency to surreptitiously collect intelligence on Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's military.
The growing American use of drones in Pakistain, Yemen and elsewhere to identify and kill suspected bully boyz has only heightened anxieties about their deployment as part of multilateral peacekeeping missions.
U.N. officials have sought to allay the suspicions, saying there is no intention to arm the drones or to spy on countries that have not consented to their use.