Sudan’s shame
Editorial, The Boston Globe
June 20, 2005 — Mediators from the African Union have been conducting peace talks between rebel groups in the Darfur region of Sudan and the Sudanese government in Khartoum. In the abstract, the peace talks are a good thing — provided they are not used to prolong the agony of people targeted for extermination. The talks are based on an assumption that the ”ethnic cleansing” of non-Arab peoples in Darfur — estimates of the death toll range from 180,000 to 400,000 — are caused by a civil war and so can be ended by diplomacy that produces a peace treaty.
There is nothing abstract, however, about the genocide. It has been going on for 28 months, and the pattern of actions by the National Islamic Front bespeaks a steely determination to bring about the annihilation of as many people as possible from among the more than two million uprooted villagers ill or suffering from malnutrition in refugee camps in Darfur, Chad, or at Darfur sites that are inaccessible to relief workers.
The recent arrest of two senior officials of Doctors Without Borders, who are among 3,300 of the group’s medical relief workers in Darfur, sends an unmistakable message. Seen against the background of Khartoum’s refusal to protect humanitarian aid workers trying to keep alive the survivors of raids that destroyed their villages, crops, and livestock, the arrest of the medical relief officers reflects the regime’s willful attempt to prevent outsiders from halting its campaign of genocide.
In the same vein, the government has ignored a UN Security Council resolution demanding that it disarm its genocidal allies, the Arab militias known as the Janjaweed.
The regime has also refused to hand over to the International Criminal Court any Sudanese indicted for war crimes or crimes against humanity in Darfur. And in a transparent effort to avoid embarrassment after the UN Security Council referred the Darfur case to the ICC, the Khartoum government announced it would hold its own trials of 160 suspects and that those trials would obviate the need for prosecutions at the Hague. UN officials, recognizing this as a flimsy ploy, affirmed that no legal make-believe in Sudan would cancel the cases to be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court.
If the leaders in Khartoum wanted to end the genocide, they could stop harassing humanitarian aid workers, disarm the Janjaweed, allow a security-enforcing mandate for the 2,400 African Union monitors now in Darfur, and approve a sizeable expansion of their numbers. They could do these things before they reach a peace accord with rebel groups in Darfur. But everything they have done until now suggests that their idea of peace is to exterminate the population that gave birth to the rebels.