Sudan: January 7, 2004

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UN Deputy Secretary General Jan Egeland believes that Norway should send peacekeeping forces to the Sudan. Norway has long played an active role in the efforts to end the Sudanese civil war and the rebels trust them, which would make them an ideal choice to send units like combat engineers. 

In mid-December 2003, the Norwegian Peoples Aid (NPA) organization along with the SPLM and Operation Save Innocent Lives (OSIL) launched an assessment of the minefields in the extreme southern Yei and Juba counties. The no-mans land around Juba, Lainya, Kapoeta and Lafon have many minefields, but the SPLA admittedly kept poor records (often because they had no paper to do such). 

Since the SPLA are better at detecting enemy minefields than keeping track of their own, this might provide temporary post-war employment for many former rebels and help defuse the problem of what to do with idle but armed men. - Adam Geibel