Why UN won’t call it genocide
By Jonathan Curiel, The San Francisco Chronicle
Feb 6, 2005 — A man’s eyeballs are gouged out. A classroom of school girls is violated in public. Babies are tossed into fires as their mothers watch. Other victims are crucified, dragged on the ground by horses and shot in the head. The United Nations’ report — 176 pages in all — is filled with many more such horrible details of rapes, killings, assaults and plundering. All of these are crimes — but do they constitute “genocide”?
No, according to the U.N. report, which examined the extent of atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan, where government-backed militia called the Janjaweed (“devils on horseback”) and government soldiers have terrorized civilians for more than a year. Released last week, the finding became an immediate point of contention for those who want the United Nations to do more to halt atrocities in Darfur. Avoiding the g-word is significant because if the United Nations officially labels the Darfur violence “genocide,” it’s required by its own charter to intervene more forcefully. Critics lashed out at the U.N. commission for soft-pedaling the suffering in Darfur.
“We stand by the conclusion that genocide had been occurring in Darfur,” said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, “and we think that the continued accumulation of facts on the ground, the facts that are reported in the commission’s report, supports that conclusion that we’ve reached.”
It’s easy to stay mired in this rhetorical standoff — to quickly take sides in the question of what constitutes genocide — but to do so would ignore what may be the most important element of the U.N. commission’s report: Its gripping narrative of the Darfur violence. Here is a study that explains all the complexities and contradictions of the ongoing abuses.
Media reports from Darfur make it seem that the conflict is strictly a battle between Khartoum’s Arab military and militia and the Sudanese blacks who are the subject of atrocities — that this racial and ethnic divide is the sole factor in Darfur’s mayhem — but the U.N. study relays these important facts:
— Many Sudanese Arabs oppose the Janjaweed, and some of these opposition Arabs are fighting alongside rebel groups to defend the black Sudanese who’ve lived for generations in Darfur’s western provinces.
— Many non-Arabs, including black Sudanese, support the government in Khartoum, and some of these black Sudanese are serving in Khartoum’s army.
— War crimes have been carried out by government and government-backed militia and by the rebel groups operating in Darfur (though the rebels’ acts pale in comparison).
— The Darfur conflict is tied to Khartoum’s long-standing conflict in southern Sudan. This North-South war, which started in 1983, created a vacuum of soldiers that — at least in Darfur — was filled by the Janjaweed and even volunteer militants from neighboring countries. The North-South war was rooted in disputes over religion (the north is more Islamic than the Christian and animist south), oil (Khartoum claimed areas of southern Sudan that had large petrol deposits) and other issues.
— Drought and limited economic opportunities have fueled the Darfur violence. Most of the people of Darfur live in small villages and hamlets, and make their living from farming and cattle herding. The land is arid. Combined with drought, the desertification of the region has led to increased skirmishes among tribes and foreign herders looking for pasture and water — skirmishes that Khartoum settled on its own legal terms, ignoring traditional tribal laws. This helped create a climate of animosity that prompted Darfur’s rebel groups to fight Khartoum.
Adotei Akwei, the Africa Advocacy Director for Amnesty International’s United States office, said in a phone interview, “Our organization has not termed (the Darfur violence) genocide. Others disagree with us (but) we don’t have time to debate (whether genocide is technically taking place in Darfur). We need to protect people. It’s important to debate what the nature of the violations is, but it’s not going to save lives ultimately whether this is called genocide or not.
“What’s going to save lives is the actual changing of behavior on the ground in Darfur. The nature of the crimes in Darfur are all serious enough to merit a more robust response from the international community and by the United Nations.”
The U.N. report is online at www.un.org/news/dh/sudan/com_inq_darfur.pdf. For those who want to focus on the question of genocide, pages 124-132 are crucial.
There, the U.N. commission explains why it believes the word “genocide” cannot be applied to Darfur. The commission says that the Janjaweed and Khartoum’s forces have not killed or harmed every civilian they’ve encountered in Darfur — that their actions (however gruesome) have not resulted in an intentional annihilation of an entire people. In other words, Darfur is different from Nazi Germany, where whole categories of people (Jews, Gypsies, etc.) were deliberately targeted because of their religion, race, ethnicity or nationality, and Darfur is different from Bosnia-Herzegovia, where Muslims were targeted in masse.
The U.N. commission wasn’t trying to absolve the atrocities committed by both sides in Darfur. In fact, the report states unequivocally that the perpetrators of violence in Darfur should be prosecuted to the fullest extent possible. On this point, there is no debate at all.
E-mail Jonathan Curiel at [email protected]