---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Eric Reeves <[email protected]> Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2011 11:40:27 -0400 Subject: "A Looming and Revealing Spectacle of UN Impotence," Dissent Magazine (on-line), August 19, 2011 To: [email protected]
"A Looming and Revealing Spectacleof UN Impotence" Dissent Magazine (on-line), August 19, 2011 http://dissentmagazine.org/atw.php?id=536 by Eric Reeves Thisweek the UN High Commission for Human Rights (UNHCHR) demanded a thorough UNinvestigation of events in South Kordofan, Sudan over the past two months.During this period the Khartoum regime has engaged in widespread ethnictargeting of Nuba civilians, using roadblocks and house-to-house searches tomake arrests and engage in widespread extrajudicial executions. Aerial attackson civilians have been reported repeatedly since early June, and the attackscontinue to this day. Butdespite the authority of an earlyJuly UN human report detailing many of these egregious human rights violations---whichonce leaked compelled the calls for investigation---and the accounts ofindependent journalists reporting from bombing sites in the Nuba Mountains aswell as hundreds of Nuba people who have fled their homes, it is highlyunlikely that China and Russia will permit a UN Security Council resolutionauthorizing the investigation to move forward. Just last Friday the UnitedStates failed to get even a much weaker, nonbinding "presidentialstatement" from the UNSC, which condemned deliberate aerial attacks oncivilians and humanitarians in South Kordofan. Both China and Russia madeclear that they would not support any mention of bombing. The UNSC ismaking clear its inability to respond to even the most authoritative reports ofatrocity crimes. Thisgives an air of absurdity to the UNHCHR'scall for an "independent, thorough and objective inquiry with the aimof holding perpetrators to account." Even if the UNSC gets around tocondemning violence in South Kordofan (and any adopted language would hardly bemore specific than this), it (specifically China and perhaps Russia) will neverauthorize an investigation without Khartoum's permission, which the regimethere will never grant. It has already prematurely expelled UN peacekeepers andofficials from the region and is now excluding humanitarian relieforganizations, journalists, and human rights investigators. The regime will notrepeat the "mistakes" that allowed Darfur to become a genocidereported in real time. TheUnited States seems unprepared for this looming and apparently inevitable momentof political truth at the UNSC. There is no meaningful compromise position, asthere appeared to be when Khartoum objected to the peacekeeping forceauthorized for Darfur in August 2006 (UNSC Resolution 1706). The UN/AfricanUnion Mission in Darfur that was eventually accepted by Khartoum---andauthorized in August 2007, by UNSC Resolution 1769---has proved a disastrousfailure in fulfilling its mission of civilian protection, but it at least hasthe appearance of responding to genocidal violence. There will be no equivalentin South Kordofan---no peacekeeping force, no major humanitarian response ofthe sort that began in Darfur during the summer 2004, and no human rightsinvestigation. The preposterous nature of the arrangement that confers UNSC veto-poweron each of the five major powers that emerged victorious in the Second WorldWar will be inescapably evident. Insome ways, this moment of moral and political clarity is an accident: it comesbecause someone deeply frustrated with UN inaction leaked the extraordinary UNhuman rights report covering events in South Kordofan through the end of June.Navi Pillay, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, has tried to minimize thefindings of the report in various ways, but the contents of the original report(not just the redacted version released publicly this week) reveal theoverwhelming cruelty and destructiveness of Khartoum's Sudan Armed Forces andits Arab militia allies. (Pillay has also dismissed the reports of Nubacivilians and journalists, includingthe New York Times' Jeffrey Gettleman,and photographic evidencefrom the Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP) that reveals whatcan only be mass grave sites in and around K adugli, capital of SouthKordofansome of what UNinvestigators had reported. Thiswasn't the first time Pillay had downplayed reports by UN investigators duringthis crisis: she and the UN Secretariat were responsible forrevising a UN report finding that actions "tantamount to ethniccleansing" occurred during Khartoum's late May invasion of Abyei. Inthe final version of the report, that language had been transformed: "TheSudan Armed Forces attack and occupation of Abyei and the resultantdisplacement of over 30,000 Ngok Dinkas from Abyei could lead to ethniccleansing...." Even at the time it was clear that far more than 30,000Ngok Dinka had been displaced; the figure used by humanitarian organizationsworking south of Abyei is now 120,000, virtually the entire Ngok population ofAbyei. Secretary-GeneralBan Ki-moon was even more abject in accommodating Khartoum’s sensibilities,saying that it was "far too early to claim that ethnic cleansing is takingplace." The evidence gathered meant nothing to Ban. He went as far as toclaim that "Khartoum pledged to pave the way for thousands of residents toultimately return to their homes." Of course, no Ngok Dinka have returned,nor will they in any foreseeable future. The very slow deployment of an armoredbrigade of Ethiopian peacekeepers (the thirdUN-authorized peacekeeping force in Sudan) has no human rights mandate and isunable to secure an area as large as Abyei for returning Ngok civilians, whowill be acutely vulnerable to Arab militia attacks. Fortunately,among the generally cowardly UN officials, the deputy high commissioner forHuman Rights, Kyung-wha Kang, has been impressively outspoken, including duringa recent trip to Darfur. Of South Kordofan she is reported to have said that"despite the difficult conditions and restrictions on access to areasaffected by the clashes in South Kordofan, information availed reveals seriousviolations of human rights." She has also used the phrase "crimesagainst humanity," of considerable significance as a term of art ininternational law. Her push for a human rights investigation may be much morevigorous than Pillay's, but it will encounter the same obstacles: an obdurateKhartoum and a fully supportive, veto-wielding China. Khartoum'sfirst response to an officialcall for an investigation was predictable: "The Sudanese ForeignMinistry rejected on Tuesday [August 15] the UN report on violation of humanrights in the state of South Kordofan. Mona Rishmawi, the head of Sudan's Ruleof Law, rejected the UN report as baseless and malicious." Khartoum'ssecond response was to initiate an "investigation" of its own, headedby an Orwellian-sounding ad hoc office: "Mohamed BusharaDaus, Sudan's Minister of Justice, formed a committee on Monday to assess thehuman rights situation and international humanitarian law in the state of SouthKordofan. The minister was assigned the chairmanship of the committee on thedecision of advisory council of the Office of Democratic Institutions and HumanRights (ODIHR)." If UN demands are doomedto irrelevance, what of U.S. officials and human rights organizations? Willthey demand a non-consensual deployment, which, given China's stance, wouldnecessarily be without UN authority? Or calls for sanctions of the sort thatwere supposed to have confrontedKhartoum whenever it violated UNSC Resolution 1591 (March 2005), banning allmilitary flights over Darfur? In fact, there have beenhundreds of such attacks, mainly againstcivilian targets in Darfur, over the past six and a half years. But Beijing hasbeen hostile toward the UN Panel of Experts on Darfur, created by the sameResolution 1591 to monitor aerial military flights and uphold a ban on armsflowing into Darfur. This might be because the panel, which is to makerecommendations to the UNSC "sanctions committee for Darfur," foundthat large quantities of Chinese weapons and ammunition---manufactured afterMarch 2005---have moved into the region, in violation of the embargo. Therehave thus been no UN-authorized sanctions against Khartoum, The victims of massatrocities of South Kordofan, like those in Darfur, are now also subject to thebroken political instrument that is the UNSC. China continues to ignore the"responsibility to protect" civilians endangered by their owngovernment, even though its delegation was part of the unanimous vote for thelanguage of the "Outcome Document" of the September 2005 UN World Summit, where all member statesdeclared that they were "...prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner,through the Security Council, in accordance with the UN Charter, includingChapter VII, on a case by case basis and in cooperation with relevant regionalorganizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and nationalauthorities manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, warcrimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity and its implications,bearing in mind the principles of the Charter and international law." Thislanguage was ratified unanimously in UNSC Resolution 1674 (April 2006). But wehave long known the Chinese are shameless hypocrites, happy to vote only forresolutions that are meaninglessly hortatory. Thereal issue here is what the world will do when China vetoes or forestallsinvestigation of atrocity crimes in South Kordofan. Guided by an absurdlyself-serving principle of "non-interference" in the internal affairsof other nations, China has no compunction about such action. And because thereis no fig-leaf "compromise" possible here---there either is or is notan independent and unfettered human rights investigation in SouthKordofan---this could bring a rare moment of real moral and political clarityin world affairs. What will democratic governments do in this moment? Thequestion, sadly, forces a number of unhappy answers. [EricReeves has published extensively on Sudan, nationally and internationally, formore than a decade. He is author of ALong Day's Dying: Critical Moments in the Darfur Genocide.] _____________________________ Eric Reeves Smith College Northampton, MA 01063 [email protected] 413-585-3326 Skype: ReevesSudan www.sudanreeves.org -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "JFD info" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/jfdinfo?hl=en.
