THE ROLE OF GAMBIAN POLICE OFFICERS IN SOUTH SUDAN
5 min readToday we look at the roles and contributions played by Mustapha Ceesay former member of the Gambia Police Force. Mustapha was deployed to the United Nations Mission in Sudan in May 2007 as part of an 18 men contingent to South Sudan. After completing his initial induction training in Khartoum, he was deployed to the regional Headquarters in Juba where he was part of the team that set of the South Sudan Police Service SSPS registration database. After the successful establishment of the project which was officially launched by the SSPS Inspector General on June 22nd 2007, and after training the local police officers on the operations of the database, Mustapha was briefly redeployed to Juba team site to supervise the registration of the SSPS in the Central equatorial State, a state of over 7,000 officers.
But even before Mustapha’s transfer became effected, he was again redeployed to the Mission Headquarters in Khartoum by the UNMIS police commissioner Kai Vittrup on 18th July on the recommendations of the Reform and Restructuring Coordinator Surendra Sharma to be part of a 5 man team to set up the UNPOL Strategic Analysis Cell within the R&R Unit at MHQ. The team’s role was to among other things access, evaluate and analyse the impact of the UNPOL conducted activities on the South Sudan Police Service as well as to monitor and access the activities of the UN police in line with Mission mandate Implementation Plan. This was a new unit ever to be set up in any peacekeeping mission. The team was to be compiling quarterly Strategic Evaluation Reports which will highlight successes to be replicated, challenges and lessons learnt. Their first SER was to be published by the end of August in accordance to the police commissioner’s Directive 25 that set up the unit. Other members of the team were R&R Coordinator Surendra Sharma (Indian), Ary Laksmana Widjaja (Indonesian), Ignacio Cumigad (Philippine) and Emmanuel Ruvurajabo (Rwanda).
Though a daunting challenge with no previous baseline to start on, Mustapha and his team worked day and night and draw on personal experiences and knowledge of the environment (Sudan) to meet this dateline. His personal role of compiling and collating every report on the south, on daily sitreps, flash reports, MHQ weekly, incident and training reports helped to provide sufficient data for the team to interpret, translate and analyse to draw conclusions for the first strategic report at the end of August which was to look at the SSPS from 2005 to July 2007.
The publication of this first ever strategic Evaluation Report by SAC did not only gained the team recognition within the UNMIS leadership but even by UN DPKO in New York who wasted no time in marking it as a best practice and uploaded it into its website after an After Action Review for viewing and replication by other missions around the world.
In December 2007, Mustapha was again featured by the UNMIS Police in Action newsletter magazine after the police commissioner presented them with commendation certificates following the production of his team’s Democratic Policing Index DPI on the South Sudan Police Service. The DPI was introduced by the SAC team to evaluate and place the South Sudan Police on a scale of 1-100 on Democratic and International Policing Standards. The index looks at key areas of policing such as operations, administration logistics, Community Policing, Human Rights amongst others. This index show SSPS on 14% in terms of democratic and citizen focus policing. It was a very useful tool which was even welcomed by the SSPS leadership in helping them to reorganise a police force the majority of whom were former SPLA combatants with little or no training or education.
In April 2008, Mustapha was again part of the team that produced the SSPS 3 years Strategic Development Plan covering June 2008 to June 2011. The other contributors to the plan were the UNDP Rule of Law Office in South Sudan. The document which was produced on the request of the SSPS leadership highlighted the key development needs of the South Sudan Police which required urgent attention. No sooner than the plan was published, it caught the attention of the South Sudan Multi Donor Trust Fund which came to sponsor key projects highlighted in the plan such as Gender and Community Policing. The plan was as well uploaded in the UN Best Practices intranet following another After Action Review. This was the 3rd time Mustapha’s contributions were being recognised by the DPKO and UN Best Practices, highlights were uploaded on their respective intranets for viewing and replication by other missions.
On April 24th 2008, Mustapha was delegated by the UNMIS Police Commissioner to address the visiting Technical Assessment Team from the UN Headquarters at the mission HQ in Khartoum on behave of the UNPOL on the successes of UNPOL in Reforming and Restructuring the Police Service in South Sudan. The team was in Sudan as part of its annual inspection of UN peacekeeping missions around the world. Having a young Gambian officer to address this important team was not only a pride for him and his colleagues in the mission but the entire Gambian nation. This lecture was attended by all contingent commanders in UNMIS as well as other senior military and civilian official.
His Tour of duty was due to end by November 2008, but due to being a key member in the production of the quarterly Strategic Evaluation Reports and the Democratic Policing Index, the fifth volume of which was to be published by end of the month, a technical extension was requested for him to complete this task. As a result he could only be released by December 08. Throughout his deployment at the mission headquarters, he was a key lecturer at the UNPOL Induction Cell on Police Reform and Restructuring and Community Policing. These were mandatory subjects that must be attended by all newly deployed peacekeepers. He used to conduct training programmes for UNPOL officers throughout Sudan and was even once invited to carry out a training programme for UNAMID officers in El-Fasher Darfur in March 2008.
On his return from Sudan in December 2008, he was posted to Police headquarters in Banjul where he used to work prior to his deployment. He also served in Fatoto PIU before resigning voluntarily from the police in 2009.
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