Mr. Bush: Stand Firm on Sudan

By CARROLL BOGERT, The Wall Street Journal

May 25, 2004 — Until very recently, Sudan could be counted as one of the human rights successes of the Bush administration. Spurred by religious groups who spotlighted the Islamist government’s persecution of Christians in southern Sudan, the White House appointed former senator John Danforth to bring government and rebels to the peace table after twenty years of brutal warfare. Incredibly, peace appeared to be close at hand – when all hell broke loose in the western part of the country.

Over the last year, the Sudanese government has armed and supplied Arab militias known as janjaweed, and is now helping them to “ethnically cleanse” huge swathes of the arid western region known as Darfur. More than a million people have been chased from their homes, and thousands have been murdered, raped, and had their few belongings looted. As the rainy season gets underway this month and the janjanweed militias continue to occupy the areas they attacked, it seems less and less likely that these farming families will get back to their villages in time to plant the year’s crops. Mass starvation looms.

This puts Bush administration officials in a delicate position. On the one hand, they have made a lot of strong public statements about human rights abuse in Sudan and committed themselves to improving the situation. On the other, they have worked industriously for a peace agreement that now, at the eleventh hour, seems to be slipping from their grasp. And in the strategically important Muslim regions of north Africa, the U.S. government would like to have better friends. It looked for a while like Sudan could almost become one.

It cannot. Salvaging the peace agreement is a noble goal, but it shouldn’t be accomplished at the cost of ignoring the tragedy in Darfur. To entice the Sudanese government to the peace table, the Bush administration held out the prospect of improving US-Sudan ties. But those measures — moving Sudan off the list of countries that sponsor terror; easing economic sanctions; holding some kind of Rose Garden-ish ceremony with Sudanese leaders — all would look exceptionally inappropriate now as the killing in Darfur continues.

Many governments have muted their calls to take action on Darfur, and are pretending that the ethnic cleansing campaign is really a humanitarian problem. The world just needs to send food and blankets. The Bush administration has to face down those governments, including some close European allies, who would wait until Western Sudan’s few remaining villages are torched.

The U.S. government should insist that the janjanweed militias be disarmed, disbanded, and brought to justice. Only then can villagers safely return to rebuild their homes which were burned to the ground.

The Bush administration wants credit for doing a better job than the Clinton White House in addressing Sudan’s human-rights problems. But that credit will elude them if U.S. government officials try to pretend the Darfur tragedy doesn’t exist, or to pass the buck to countries that can’t or won’t do anything about it.

With so much effort — including the energies of the White House itself — invested in ending the human rights tragedy of the Sudanese people, this is no time to quit.

Ms. Bogert is the associate director of Human Rights Watch.