The United Nations, already examining the performance of its peacekeeping troops in Abyei in May, must widen its investigations to their performance in the Nuba Mountains region of South Kordofan in June. In Abyei, Zambian peacekeepers stand accused of staying in their barracks during fighting between government forces and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). In South Kordofan, Egyptian troops are accused of actively conspiring with government forces against the Nuba SPLA – for the last several years the government’s partner in peace, but denounced by Khartoum as a “rebel group” ever since fighting erupted a month ago.

I had decided, on balance, not to write this piece. I felt it was not the moment to focus on the peacekeepers, outgunned in the new fighting and under orders from Khartoum to leave South Kordofan by July 9. More important, for the moment, surely, are the disproportionate attacks on Nuba civilians – especially aerial attacks. With some activists already taking a leaf out of the book of the Save Darfur movement, crying “genocide” and “extermination” instead of building a rigorous, fact-based case, there aren’t enough hours in the day to get the evidence needed to prove that June saw, at the very least, systematic ethnic targeting of black African Nuba in the now-difficult-to-access Nuba mountains.

What changed my mind? An image. Not of women and children torn apart by 500-pound bombs. Of peacekeepers – taking photographs of protesters in Kauda, a Nuba town attacked by Antonovs and MIG-29s eight times in June. There they are, with their digital cameras, snapping away as Nuba women rail against their “inaction” and “collaboration and connivance” with Khartoum.

It wasn’t, admittedly, as bad as Tawila in North Darfur in May 2008, when U.N. troops stood in little huddles, comparing photographs, as Janjaweed ran amok under their noses. But two days before U.N. troops treated the Kauda protest as something anecdotal, another snap for a triumphal album, a single government bomb killed and wounded dozens of civilians in Kurchi village. Photos taken by the Nuba are not family viewing – two little girls spooned in death, with a red plastic jug suggesting they were on their way to, or perhaps from, Kurchi’s water point when it was hit; a third, her abdomen a crimson flower; a fourth, cradled bloodily in a young man’s arms.

No U.N. troops took photos in Kurchi. At the time of writing they had not been to the village.

The U.N. peacekeeping mission UNMIS has been a part of the problem in South Kordofan, where many Nuba, although northern Sudanese, joined south Sudan’s war for a democratic “New Sudan.” Established in March 2005, after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement ended the 22-year civil war, the mission was headed until 2010 by a man who colleagues say was given to calling the Nuba “monkeys.” On his watch, the lack of initiative of UNMIS and perceived complicity with Khartoum was a cause of deep frustration, and anger, to its most committed staff. UNMIS was also spectacularly uninformed about the reality of South Kordofan.

In 2008, I published a report that detailed the resurgence of government-supported militias in South Kordofan – including in a village called Al-Fayd – and concluded that “many now view war in the Nuba Mountains as inevitable.” UNMIS pooh-poohed the report, which it said was “far from the reality on the ground.” Fast-forward to April this year, on the eve of war, and an attack by militia who, according to UNMIS, “killed … looted … burnt houses and raped.” The village? Al-Fayd.

How little UNMIS knew. How little it cared to know! And how it has come to haunt the mission now that its own men are, in its own words, facing increasing “intimidation and obstruction” in South Kordofan – including from the militias it said did not exist.

As a neighbor of Sudan, Egypt was expected put its bilateral relations ahead of its peacekeeping duties. However, the extent of the Egyptians’ bias has shocked even senior staff from UNMIS.

Says one former staffer: “All political interpretations of the situation came straight from the Khartoum regime and were disseminated by the Egyptian army as UNMIS position both to the local parties and the population at large. The racism that the Khartoum regime displayed openly toward the opposition SPLM the Egyptians repeated consistently and without variation.”

Another: “On many occasions when the Egyptians wanted to go someplace that was strictly forbidden to all military, they would go to the National Intelligence and Security Service, or to the army’s division commander, and after a 15-minute meeting would have clearance that was unavailable to all other military components in UNMIS. Afterward they would not report on their mission and would ignore all requests for information. Many suspected that they were actually working with the Khartoum regime while on these strange sorties.”

UNMIS is now under improved leadership in South Kordofan. But the Egyptian forces are a power unto themselves. Early in the June war, they refused to help evacuate international relief workers from Kadugli, the state capital. Without Egyptian armored personnel carriers, the Westerners had to be moved in soft-skinned vehicles. Nuba allege that the APCs were put to use barely a week later – transporting militia and the Central Reserve Police, a military force in all but name and involved in gross human rights abuses in Kadugli.

The many charges leveled against UNMIS may not all be true, but they form part of a pattern of bias and neglect that requires serious investigation and complete transparency. A starting point could be the question asked by the Nuba commander, Abdel Aziz al-Hilu, in a letter to his Egyptian counterpart three days before war began.

“We have noticed,” he wrote, “that the forces of the Central Reserve Police have chosen as their camp an area adjacent to the headquarters of your forces. The type of weapons and vehicles used by these forces indicate they are combat troops. Our question is: What is the relation between your forces and these?”

Julie Flint writes frequently about Sudan for THE DAILY STAR. Her report, “The Drift Back to War,” is available at www.smallarmssurveysudan.org/pdfs/HSBA-SIB-12-drift-back-to-war.pdf.