FEATURE: World unwilling to intervene in Sudan’s Darfur
By OLIVIA WARD, The Toronto Star
Feb 10, 2005 — In the decade since the genocide in Rwanda, there’s been little progress toward containing mass murder across the world, says international human rights advocate Gerald Caplan.
“When you ask what we learned from Rwanda, you have to conclude that humanity’s capacity for technological progress has not been matched by its moral progress,” said Caplan, who will speak at a Couchiching Institute Round Table today at the University of Toronto’s Faculty Club.
Today in Sudan’s Darfur region, mass murder is being committed with impunity, Caplan points out. As with Rwanda – where Hutu extremists incited the slaughter of 800,000 mainly Tutsi people – the ongoing slaughter “demonstrates the capacity of the world community to be complicit in, or completely indifferent to terrible deeds.”
Those who ignore mass murder, Caplan says, “face a complete lack of penalty for their sins of omission.”
In Darfur, some 2 million people have been driven from their homes by Arab militias allied with the Sudanese government, and 70,000 have been murdered or have died of starvation and disease since 2003. The United States government has declared it genocide, but last week a United Nations special commission said that less sweeping war crimes, and crimes of humanity had been committed.
But, said Caplan, the decision revealed nothing new and was unlikely to spark international action: “Does the label really matter? We once thought that declaring genocide would automatically mean intervention, but that hasn’t proved true. Now it might have the effect of mobilizing political or religious factions (in the West). But so far it hasn’t done that either.”
It would be a mistake for countries to wait until genocide was charged to intervene in bloody conflicts that take the lives of thousands of innocent people, Caplan said.
In Darfur, where the Sudanese government and two rebel groups have been fighting for the past two years, a ceasefire agreement has failed and civilians continue to be attacked, raped and killed on a daily basis.
“There are all sorts of conventions countries can call on if they want to act,” said Caplan. “The problem is, they don’t want to.”
At the United Nations, Canada has pushed for a doctrine of “responsibility to protect,” allowing countries to intervene in cases where governments attack their own civilians, or fail to protect them from mass murder.
“The debate on intervention is going in a positive direction,” Caplan said. “But there are two big problems. Firstly, the nations most anxious to intervene are doing so for their own political and economic interests. Secondly, all the rules in the world won’t make any difference if there’s no will to intervene.”
Countries like Canada, the Netherlands, and others that promote human rights do not have the military muscle to quell serious violence in troubled parts of the world, Caplan pointed out.
“The group of `nice’ countries that are genuinely interested in peacekeeping and humanitarian causes are the ones without the capacity to do something about it. That leaves the “big five” (permanent members of the U.N. Security Council) who alone have the military might to intervene.”
But there is little sign that powerful countries want to send troops to Darfur, in spite of much political rhetoric, Caplan added.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called for urgent action to stop the killing in the desperately poor region, where the Sudanese military has attacked civilians from the air, in addition to continuing ground assaults by the Janjaweed militias.
Annan urged Security Council members to impose sanctions on Sudan, and to see that suspected war criminals were prosecuted at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The U.S. said it would push for an embargo on Sudan’s oil industry, a measure that failed last year.
Meanwhile, Washington opposed the move for international prosecution, opening a new debate with human rights advocates. The American government opposes the international court, fearing that U.S. citizens might be indicted there.
“The U.S. is creating a deadly delay for the people of Darfur by attempting to block the U.N. Security Council from referring Darfur atrocities to the International Criminal Court,” said New York-based Human Rights Watch, in a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Instead, Washington favoured setting up a new tribunal in Tanzania, using the facilities of the international court now prosecuting perpetrators of the Rwanda genocide.
But, Human Rights Watch objected, saying “it would be a time-consuming and complicated process (which) requires creating a new statute and rules, recruiting staff and electing judges.
“Even if the physical structures (of the Rwanda court) were used, it could take more than a year to get the new tribunal off the ground.”