A year after Kabila declaration on darfur: 200,000 deaths
By STEPHANIE NOLEN, The Globe and Mail
JOHANNESBURG, Mar 19, 2005 — A year ago today, Mukesh Kapila, the United Nations’ humanitarian co-ordinator in Sudan, declared the violence and forced displacement of people in Darfur to be “the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis.”
The phrase has since been used by the UN Security Council and by almost every Western leader about the conflict in Sudan’s western region.
But despite the strong rhetoric, two million people in Darfur have now been uprooted from their homes — twice as many as when Mr. Kapila declared the disaster.
No one has returned home.
Just six weeks ago, another 10,000 people fled in South Darfur after attacks by armed militias.
The death toll in the region is now estimated at more than 200,000, which is to say that 170,000 people have died since Mr. Kapila declared the disaster and pleaded for international help.
The UN estimates that 10,000 people a month are dying of malnutrition and disease.
The International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based research organization, says at least 70,000 have been killed in fighting and executions in the region.
One year, four Security Council resolutions, a UN Commission of Inquiry, an international observer mission and several abortive rounds of peace talks later, no significant steps have been taken to disarm the militias known as janjaweed. No punitive action has been taken against the government of Sudan, which armed the militias.
“They have failed to stop the killing,” senior ICG vice-president Mark Schneider said in an interview yesterday. “They have failed to disarm the paramilitaries or establish protections for civilians, and they have failed to hold accountable those responsible for atrocities.”
The Darfur conflict began in 2003 when Sudan’s Arab government, seeking to crush a small rebel movement in the west, organized Arab tribesmen into the janjaweed. It armed them and sent them out against the farmers with whom they had long-standing conflicts over land and resources, saying the farmers were backing the rebels.
The janjaweed sweep into villages, shoot men, rape women, burn houses and crops, and steal cattle and possessions. Their leader says the government backs them, although the government denies this. It has proved unwilling, and possibly unable, to stop them.
Some things in Darfur are substantially different. Mr. Kapila’s BBC interview a year ago was the strongest statement by an international official to that point, and set off sustained media attention. Today there are letter-writing campaigns and fundraising concerts for Darfur. Western countries have sent senior government figures to the area; Prime Minister Paul Martin visited Sudan, although not Darfur, in November.
A year ago, there was virtually no international presence in the area. Today almost every major relief organization and many smaller ones are on the ground. Government restrictions made it almost impossible at first to move aid workers or supplies into the area; most have now been removed.
But lack of funds, logistical challenges and insecurity are still preventing aid agencies from reaching hundreds of thousands of people. In January, only half of those entitled to food rations received them. Others do not even appear on agency lists because they have sought shelter in inaccessible places. Many camps for displaced people lack water, fuel, and protection from violence.
“There are still two million displaced, still insecurity problems in the area,” said Sally Austin, deputy director for the agency CARE in Sudan, which is feeding 400,000 people in Darfur. “We’re past the ’emergency’ emergency, with provision of food and water, and we’re slowly looking at education and recreational activities for the kids [in camps].
“That’s good, but it means that people are not in their homes and their villages. They have missed the planting season this year, so it will be at least nine months until people would consider moving back.”
An African Union mission is supposed to be monitoring a ceasefire in the conflict. But it has fewer than 2,000 observers to cover a region the size of France.
“They have no teeth,” said an aid worker in Sudan who did not wish to be identified lest her organization face government curbs. “When they do see human-rights violations, how do they make a difference? . . . . They see things, but they don’t have a reporting mechanism. They don’t have any idea how things are dealt with, or not, after they record them.”
A year ago, the war in Darfur was the smaller of two conflicts in Sudan. But on Jan. 9 the government signed a peace deal to end its 21-year war with rebels in the south. It promises wealth- and power-sharing — the same demands that led the Darfur rebels to take up arms. But the deal only includes the south.
In ceasefire talks concerning Darfur, the government has made five separate promises to neutralize the janjaweed. It has kept none of them because it is determined to keep control of the western area, where it believes the rebels still have sympathy and a network, and because no pressure beyond rhetoric has been applied from outside.
“The human atrocities that have taken place — the killings, torture, rapes, bombing of unarmed civilian communities — should drive the world community, not just to step-by-step action but to determined action to disarm and to halt it,” Mr. Schneider said.
The makeup of the UN Security Council works against strong resolutions, he added. China and Russia, both permanent veto-holding council members, have significant oil interests in Sudan. So does Pakistan, which was a temporary council member last year.
Many believe atrocities committed in Sudan should be prosecuted at the International Criminal Court (ICC). Mr. Kapila invoked the memory of the genocide in Rwanda when he spoke a year ago. “It is more than just a conflict,” he said then. “It is an organized attempt to do away with a group of people. This is ethnic cleansing, this is the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis, and I don’t know why the world isn’t doing more about it.”
But the United States — another permanent council member — is opposed to the ICC.
The ICG says a council resolution with teeth is the only thing that will make Sudan take action. It calls for targeted punitive measures such as freezing overseas assets of companies controlled by the ruling party, a travel ban on key officials, a no-fly zone over Darfur, an expanded arms embargo and a boost to at least 10,000 in the AU monitoring force.