Stop the slaughter in Sudan

By Dan Connell, The Gloucester Daily Times

April 28, 2005 — One day last year more than 400 armed members of the janjaweed militia attacked the western Sudanese village of Donki Dereisa . They killed 150 civilians, includin g s ix young children, aged 3 to 14, who were captured during the assault and burned alive later that day, according to the Washington-based human rights group Refugees International.

A man who tried to save the children was beheaded and dismembered. Eyewitnesses say a military aircraft bombed the village during the attack and that Sudanese army foot soldiers joined in the fighting on the ground. Afterward, government sources denied any involvement and downplayed the incident – a response pattern that typifies the ongoing crisis in the embattled Sudanese province of Darfur .

In the face of such disclaimers, journalists, relief workers and human rights monitors say as many as 300,000 civilians have been killed, hundreds of villages destroyed and more than 2 million people displaced in a b rutal campaign that has devastated Darfur since 2003. This has led U.N. officials to term this “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.”

Both President Bush and Senator Kerry characterized the killing as “genocide” during the campaign last year, but neither the President nor Congress has taken action to stop the carnage. In fact, for all the public hand wringing, precious little action has resulted from any quarter – which is why we brought President Clinton’s top Africa adviser, John Prendergast, to speak on this ongoing human catastrophe at the Cape Ann Forum earlier this month.

The roots of the crisis
The Darfur crisis, often described as tribal warfare between Arabs and Africans, is both more and less than that, as Prendergast pointed out – and as I have seen for myself while in Sudan to report on the civil war there over the past decade.

The frontline combatants and their victims on this warfront – one of several in this strife-torn East African state, Africa’s largest – are mainly of Arab or African descent, though it is often difficult to distinguish them face to face. But the janjaweed themselves are more a rampaging gang than an organized militia. Even their name is merely a colloquialism for “horsemen with guns,” and they do not in any organized way “represent” the Arab tribes in western Sudan .

Those who are raping and pillaging under the janjaweed name are drawn mainly from pastoral herders who compete with the settled farmers they are attacking for access to land and water. This longstanding contest escalated into today’s catastrophe when Sudan ‘s central government, controlled by Islamist extremists and fearing a popular uprising in Darfur after the emergence in 2003 of two small rebel groups, stoked the resource rivalry by unleashing the janjaweed as a proxy army.

But this “militia” is not an army in the traditional sense – it is a mob of armed thugs cashing in on the opportunity to loot at will, while securing political objectives set by their handlers: the quashing of a revolt that could not only threaten the government’s hold on this region but also kick off new protests in the restive east and north.

Nor is the nature and scope of this disaster unique within Sudan . It is the outcome of a decades-lon g s trategy of divide and rule that successive governments – all drawn from the fractious elite that resides in and around the capital, Khartoum – have used to put down numerous other challenges, notably a decades-long civil war in the oil-rich south.

What needs to happen
The challenge to the international community is to approach Darfur from the standpoint both of how to stem the violence today and how to resolve the issues that drive this and other conflicts across Sudan in order to avoid a repetition.

The most pressing need is security, without which not only will the violence get worse, but the humanitarian emergency will spin out of control. Last summer, the African Union (AU) sent 133 observers to monitor the shaky ceasefire between rebel groups and the government, with 300 more troops to protect the monitors, but they have been overwhelmed by the task of operating in an area the size of Texas that contains an at-risk population of five to seven million . Another 3,500 AU troops and monitors have since joined them, but observers say that at least three times that many are needed.

Meanwhile, famine looms.

The widespread theft of animals and grain stores, the razing of villages and crops, and the inability of war victims to sow any seeds over the summer will leave million s at risk of starvation until the end of the next crop cycle in the fall. When the rainy season winds to a close and transportation routes reopen next September, there will be a need to protect relief convoys so that there is not a repeat of the Somali crisis of the early 1990s, in which armed bands hijacked incoming aid and built their militias with it.

Beyond these humanitarian efforts, there must be accountability for the mass murder and looting, as Prendergast, who recently visited Darfur with “Hotel Rwanda” star Don Cheadle, pointed out. So far the government’s much-touted arrests of men they claim are janjaweed have mostly turned out to be common criminals already imprisoned for months or even years. The authorities may even execute some to make it appear they are acting decisively.

As is now well-established, however, it was not just janjaweed doing the killing. Extensive firsthand testimony and Sudanese government documents obtained by Human Rights Watch indicate that Sudanese regular army and air force units were directly involved. The local gangsters simply took advantage of the opportunity when it was thrust upon them.

A time to act

To ignore the longer history and focus only on the resolution of recent grievances, as the Bush administration has done, is folly. Yet the administration seems paralyzed between the pressures it feels from contending lobbies. On one side are right-wing evangelicals, initially drawn to this issue by the presence of Christian victims in the north-south conflict elsewhere in Sudan . They favor stepped-up U.S. intervention, ranging from stiffer sanctions to direct military involvement.

Pulling in the other direction are oil companies and other corporate interests that argue for “constructive engagement” in order to soften the regime’s rough edges – and reopen the country to American investment, blocked since the Clinton years. ” China , India , Malaysia and some European countries are dramatically expanding business ties with Sudan , taking advantage of U.S. sanctions that bar American companies from operating here,” warns a recent front-page story in the Bush-friendly Washington Times.

In the face of these conflicting imperatives, the administration has been increasingly strident in its criticism of the Khartoum government, while pledging tens of million s in aid to reconstruct the oil-rich south now that a truce has been negotiated there, but taking no other action toward Sudan beyond pushing modest sanctions in the U.N. Security Council.

It is time now for Bush administration to put up or shut up on this issue – as it is for Republicans and Democrats alike who have taken a stand on Darfur and then turned away while the killing continued.

To term the slaughter in Sudan as “genocide” while doing nothin g s ubstantial to stop it is as unfathomable as it is unforgivable. If our politicians don’t get this, it is time for us to remind them what a politics of “morality” really is.

East Gloucester resident Dan Connell teaches journalism and African politics at Simmons College in Boston and chairs the Cape Ann Forum (www.capeannforum.org).