Deathly Silence
The growing genocide in Darfur testifies to the world's disgrace
By Eric Reeves
Refugees at the Kounougo camp, in eastern Chad. Sudan's army has
vowed to fight any foreign forces sent into its western Darfur region
and called a U.N. resolution to resolve the crisis "a declaration of
war." |
Darfur continues its relentless slide into greater catastrophe, with
no adequate humanitarian or diplomatic response on the horizon. More
than 100,000 displaced Sudanese have died, and another 2,000-plus die
daily. By the year's end, the death toll could stand at more than
400,000. Conditions in the refugee camps in neighboring Chad range from
poor to appalling. Many of the displaced persons—perhaps more than 1
million—have no resources whatsoever and are dying agonizing, invisible
deaths.
The National Islamic Front regime in Khartoum, which precipitated the
genocide in response to the insurgency that began in February 2003, has
continued to impede humanitarian relief. They recently grounded U.N.
World Food Program planes, even though many children suffering from
Severe Acute Malnutrition may perish because of a single day's delay in
food.
More disturbingly, Khartoum has inaugurated a policy of forcible
expulsions from camps for the displaced. The African tribal populations
that are the targets of Khartoum's genocide are being forced, typically
violently, to return to 'their villages." But the villages of these
mainly Fur, Massaleit and Zaghawa peoples largely have been destroyed.
As numerous aid workers have observed, forced return is a death
sentence: There is no food and people returning are easy prey for the
marauding Arab militia forces, known as the Janjaweed.
Janjaweed predations continue unchecked and have reached new levels
of cruelty. Numerous reports, including from the small contingent of
African Union ceasefire monitors, offer accounts of children being
hurled serially into the flames of burning huts and buildings. One
African Union report includes a picture of the charred remains of eight
schoolgirls who were chained together. And as a new Amnesty
International report makes clear, rape continues to be used as a weapon
of war.
Khartoum's culpability in this disaster is beyond dispute. Any
lingering doubts about the responsibility of the regime were
incinerated in July by a Human Rights Watch report that revealed
internal government documents indicating Khartoum both armed and
coordinated the Janjaweed.
Despite these grim reports, the only meaningful action—humanitarian
intervention accompanied by necessary military protection—looks
unlikely. The reality of genocide has not galvanized U.S. action. A
bipartisan congressional resolution unanimously declared the killings
in Darfur to be genocide and called on the Bush administration to do so
as well. The State Department, however, continues to dither, denying
that such a declaration would change anything.
This is not true: Article 1 of the 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention
obliges contracting parties (including the United States and all
members of the U.N. Security Council) to 'prevent" genocide. Yet the
burdens and consequences of U.S. military intervention in Iraq make
U.S. leadership at this critical moment politically unimaginable. An
appropriate response from the United Nations is no more promising. An
already weak U.N. Security Council Resolution, proposed by the United
States, survived only after the removal of a meaningless threat of
sanctions against Khartoum. Both veto-wielding China and Pakistan
abstained in the Darfur resolution vote, urging that Khartoum be given
more time to disarm the Janjaweed. China is motivated in particular by
its huge investments in oil development in Sudan.
The Arab League subsequently weighed in with a similar demand, while
the Organization of the Islamic Conference fully sided with Khartoum
out of religious and anti-Western solidarity. The reality on the ground
is that more time simply makes possible greater incorporation of the
Janjaweed into Khartoum's regular military and police. The genocidaires
will control the camps. All this occurs on the 10th anniversary of the
world's shameful failure to respond in Rwanda. Peace talks between
Khartoum and the insurgency groups may begin in late August. Their
chances of yielding meaningful results are negligible, given the
appeasing words from Kofi Annan's new special representative for Sudan,
Jan Pronk, who declared in early August that he found security improving
in camps for the displaced and a regime responding in good faith—despite
massive evidence to the contrary. This is all the encouragement Khartoum
needs to remain intransigent.
Annan apparently is convinced that the Security Council will be
embarrassingly divided on Darfur and thus ineffectual in its response.
He has consequently settled on a course of expediency and is looking
for ways to ensure that the August 30 deadline of the Security Council
Resolution doesn't have the force of a true deadline. The resolution
'demands" that Khartoum disarm the Janjaweed; but this clear-cut demand
has devolved into a series of vague benchmarks that make any assessment
of Khartoum's responsiveness a matter of judgment on the part of Pronk
and Annan.
Inspired by this reaction, Khartoum promptly rejected the African Union proposal to put a significant number of peacekeeping forces on the ground in Darfur—one of the only meaningful steps contemplated so far. Obstructing international humanitarian intervention in any form remains Khartoum's highest priority. That it has so thoroughly succeeded in this strategy is a measure of the world's disgrace.
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