Negligent on Darfur
Editorial, The Boston Globe
Oct 19, 2004 — The head of the UN World Health Organization, Dr. David Nabarro, estimated last week that 70,000 displaced people in the Darfur region of Sudan have died since last March solely from conditions in refugee camps, that 10,000 more are now perishing every month, and that growing numbers of Darfur’s 1.5 million refugees are destined to die unless the international community lives up to its professions of concern. Only half of the $300 million pledged to the UN body for relief efforts has been delivered, Nabarro lamented. “We still don’t have a significant enough popular perception around the world of the enormity of the suffering,” he said. “Disease and suffering is being experienced on a quite extraordinary and inhuman scale.”
Equally inhuman is the genocidal cruelty of Sudan’s National Islamic Front, which has deliberately perpetrated crimes against humanity in Darfur in collaboration with its local allies, the marauding Arab militias known as Janjaweed. Less evident but no less inhuman has been the indifference — or cynicism — of governments represented on the UN Security Council. Because of oil interests and arms sales, China and Russia have resisted imposing meaningful sanctions on Khartoum. China has threatened explicitly to veto any sanctions.
The failure — or the refusal — of other nations to come to the aid of the doomed people in Darfur is all the more desolating because the humanitarian crisis is now known to the world, the criminals are known, the needs of the victims are known, and the means of saving those who still may be saved are known as well.
The African Union announced Friday that 4,000 of its troops will soon be joining the 500 already deployed to Darfur. Welcome as this belated increase may be, it falls far short of what is needed — and not merely because 4,500 troops without proper transport or communications gear cannot safeguard the 1.5 million refugees at risk. In a region the size of France, such a small cluster of monitors cannot stop the Janjaweed from continuing to kill the displaced men and rape the women and girls who venture outside the camps to look for firewood.
Above all, the African Union troops lack the mandate they would need to save hundreds of thousands of lives. If the members of the Security Council truly wished to save the endangered tribal peoples of Darfur, they would send a much larger and better equipped force to Darfur with a mandate to enforce a cease-fire, disarm the militias, ensure the delivery of humanitarian assistance, and enable refugees to return home and resume growing their own food.
Such a force, with such a mandate, might not only save lives but also rescue the United Nations from the cynicism of its member states.