How to stop Hotel Darfur
After our costly failure to act in Rwanda we must not let anything – even Iraq – hold us back in Sudan
By JONATHAN FREEDLAND, The Guardian
March 30, 2005 — Hotel Rwanda, still playing to packed cinemas across the country, has one hero and plenty of villains – though the most powerful is never seen. The hero is Paul Rusesabagina, who turned the Kigali hotel he managed into an unofficial sanctuary for men, women and children fleeing a killing spree that would come to be known as the Rwandan genocide, eventually leaving 800,000 civilians dead. The visible villains are the Interahamwe militia, chanting about Hutu power as they rampage through villages looking for “Tutsi cockroaches” to slaughter.
But the target for much of the audience anger is unseen. It is the rest of the world, the “international community” who stood by in 1994 and let this whirlwind, 100-day genocide take place. Their inaction is heard via radio news broadcasts or telephone conversations, as Paul is repeatedly told that he is not going to be rescued – that he and the people clinging to him for survival are on their own.
The closest we get to an explanation comes from the Canadian general leading the tiny UN force which stayed behind in Rwanda when everyone else pulled out. “You’re dirt,” he tells Paul, consumed with shame. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, Paul and his fellow Rwandans – fellow black Africans, for that matter – are dirt. Their lives do not matter; they can be slaughtered with impunity.
The scene carries an extra charge because it is no historical tableau. The same words could be said today, at this very hour. For the murder and rape of African civilians goes on – and the world still does nothing.
Now the location is not Rwanda but Darfur, the blighted region of western Sudan where tens of thousands of people have been killed during an 18-month onslaught of brutality. The victims are chiefly black Muslims, the perpetrators the Arab Muslim Janjaweed militia, aligned with the Islamist government of Khartoum. Estimates vary, but the most conservative speak of around 80,000 dead, in addition to the 180,000 who have been killed by hunger and disease during the past 18 months. Close to 2 million people have been displaced.
The evidence of cruelty has piled up in report after report: the creation of rape camps, keeping women permanently naked and violating children as young as eight; men tortured to a slow death.
Hearing all this, the United Nations leapt into action – and launched a five-month debate on whether the events in Darfur constituted genocide or not. This debating society response to tragedy is familiar ground. Hotel Rwanda shows Rusesabagina hearing a US spokesman on the radio, explaining that while “acts of genocide” may have been committed in Rwanda, it was not US policy to call it “genocide”.
As it turned out, the UN decided last month that Darfur did not meet the g-standard. That mattered because if it had ruled the other way there would have been an automatic obligation on the international community to intervene to stop it.
Officially, then, there is no such obligation. Nevertheless, the UN report hardly let the Janjaweed and its Khartoum backers off the hook. It said that ethnic cleansing, war crimes and possible crimes against humanity were all happening in Darfur.
So where does that leave us, “the rest of the world”? Are we happy to stand by while the killing, maiming and village burning continues?
The arguments against intervention are all ready and waiting to be deployed. If it’s not a semantic seminar on the true nature of genocide, it’s a “realist” lecture on the absence of British interests in a faraway place such as Darfur. If our direct concerns, our own people or money, are not at stake, then why should we bother?
If that is the mentality of the anti- interventionist conservative right – a philosophy embodied by the Balkan lethargy of Douglas Hurd in the 1990s – then the left has its equivalent. It begins with a recitation of the dismal history of past western interventions. So, the Rwandan genocide was partly the product of a Belgian colonial legacy which left the society divided between Hutus and Tutsis. British meddling in Sudan pitted the north against the south, a conflict that endures to this day. Nor can we comfort ourselves that our intentions are so much nobler than those of our colonial predecessors: Britain plunged into Africa in the late 19th century partly in the name of fighting a “war against slavery”.
To make matters worse, there is now a new obstacle in the way of those who would act to stop the killing even in the remotest, least profitable regions: Iraq.
The war’s first impact is practical. Both Britain and the US are simply too overstretched in Iraq to do anything anywhere else. Even though the US has branded the Darfur calamity a “genocide”, it’s in no hurry to act. It doesn’t have the men or kit to spare.
More importantly, the invasion of 2003 has tainted the very notion of humanitarian intervention. In 1999, when Nato took action against Slobodan Milosevic’s ethnic war in Kosovo, a new doctrine of liberal interventionism seemed to be forming. Articulated in Tony Blair’s Chicago speech of that year, it suggested that the realpolitik inertia that had allowed both the Balkans and Rwanda to become killing fields would be replaced by an international refusal to tolerate such slaughter ever again.
Blair could deliver no such speech today. Nor could he wage a Kosovo-style war ever again. The public, which accepted the moral case he made against Milosevic, would be too deeply sceptical. They would want to know Blair’s real motive; they would wonder how bad this alleged brutality really was – or whether it had been “sexed-up” by political operatives bent on war. The sentiment is voiced best by Peter Hallward, author of Absolutely Postcolonial: “Fresh from an illegal and deceitful war of aggression, Anglo-US forces now have only one moral responsibility: to stay at home.”
We can nod our heads at that, just as we can wallow in our post-imperial guilt – but that doesn’t do much for the eight-year-old refugee burnt out of her home in Darfur. She’s still scared out of her wits. Somehow we need to get past the failures of recent and more distant history and find a way to act which might save the lives that are left to be saved. Patrick Smith, editor of Africa Confidential, suggests not some grand invasion but help – in the form of equipment and expertise – for the tiny, “totally inadequate” African Union force already on the ground. Proper surveillance, including planes flying overhead, “works wonders”, says Smith, spooking those who would otherwise feel free to murder. He and others also reckon the threat of a war crimes prosecution at the international criminal court, currently blocked by the US, would stay the hand of Darfur’s murderers.
We cannot say we didn’t know, and we cannot say there was nothing to be done. We must act – unless we plan on mixing tears with our popcorn all over again, as we settle down sometime in 2015 for a screening of a new, acclaimed movie: Hotel Darfur.