Halting the genocide in Darfur
By Elvir Camdzic, John Weiss
August 11, 2005 — The 21st century’s first genocide in the Darfur region of western Sudan has entered its third year. According to an analysis of U.N. data by Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College (see www.sudanreeves.org), since early 2003, 215,000 civilians have been killed in a campaign of ethnic cleansing of the non-Arab African inhabitants of Darfur carried out by a government-backed Arab militia known as “Janjaweed.” Approximately 200,000 more have died from disease and malnutrition, bringing the total dead in Darfur to more than 400,000. At least 2 million persons, more than half the population of Darfur in 2002, have been uprooted, and several hundred thousand have fled the country into neighboring Chad.
Our misunderstandings and inaction have, once again, given victory to the entrepreneurs of genocide. Sudan’s government in Khartoum now has what it wants: a diminished, controllable, disregardable Darfur population that it can leave to the international humanitarian organizations and their terrorized agents to maintain, culturally speaking, in a permanent vegetative state in camps along the Sudan-Chad border and throughout Darfur.
The Darfur disaster has established, once again, that every democratic country in the world opposes slaughtering large numbers of civilians and, at the same time, that no country in the world will take action to stop such slaughter if it entails any significant risk, burden or price. A Kosovo-style intervention could have stopped the Darfur genocide at any time, but the international community has chosen instead to repeat the trial-and-error pattern of policies that failed in Bosnia. The resolutions, statements of concern, empty deadlines, ineffective sanctions and observers, and deployment of troops without a mandate to protect civilians are actions that have deadly consequences demonstrated in Bosnia and elsewhere. Remember Srebrenica, where 8,000 Bosnian men and boys were massacred by Serb forces while being under the “protection” of the United Nations troops.
Why do we have to learn the same lessons again? Why waste precious time building the African Union’s capacity at the expense of Darfur lives? Why accept obviously tendentious slogans like “African solutions for African problems”? Why not accept, as a community of nations, the responsibility to protect the people of Darfur?
Some claim that the genocide has stopped because the destruction by the Khartoum government and its allied militias of a village a day has stopped. But the full effect of genocide undermines the conditions of survival of a people and radically diminishes its capacity for culture. It is not necessary to physically eliminate every last member of the targeted people.
The government of Sudan continues its campaign of genocide in Darfur by killing smaller numbers of civilians as an intended “collateral damage” of its retaliatory attacks against Darfur’s rebels and by outfitting its Janjaweed killers in uniforms and putting them in charge of the government-controlled camps for internally displaced persons, where they continue to terrorize their victims. How many people die each month from malnutrition, disease and sheer despair in the refugee camps and elsewhere in Darfur?
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s benighted remarks during and after her recent visit to Khartoum leave little hope that the Bush administration will take any effective action to stop the genocide in Darfur. Her apparent forcefulness in calling for actions, not words, and her criticism of Khartoum’s failure to stop the rapes (and what of the killings and burnings?) were undermined in four ways: 1) the failure to call for a change in the mandate of the African Union troops to allow them to protect civilians; 2) her declaration that in the Darfur crisis, the African Union “has the lead” despite that body’s evident lack of the necessary capabilities, experience and political will; 3) her silence about the evident tokenism of the NATO program to transport to Darfur no more than 50 African Union troops per day, a force not augmented by better equipped non-African troops far more trusted by the victims than those of the African Union; and 4) her dubious claim that the new unity government should be given a chance to solve the Darfur problem despite the fact that the North-South Peace Agreement, under which this government is constituted, completely ignores Darfur and contains no provisions that would enable the new government to deal with this crisis.
The callousness of the call to give Sudan’s new unity government more time, which would postpone the effective mandate-changing and force-upgrading solutions known to all, only reveals how much the Bush administration has been seduced by the arguments of Khartoum. The thread of appeasement in Rice’s trip, the real purpose of which was to “set the conditions” for further collaboration with Khartoum in the global war on terror, illustrates clearly that the Khartoum regime’s continuing terrorization of its own citizens is studiously ignored by this administration.
The death of Southern Sudanese leader John Garang de Mabior last week is a severe setback to the implementation of the North-South Peace Agreement, but also to the prospects that the international community will take any effective action to end the Darfur genocide. Just as Garang’s entry into the new government became Rice’s excuse to give Khartoum more time, so the “instability” of the country following Garang’s death will likely be used as an argument against an effective intervention. The international community will now again focus its efforts and attention on salvaging the North-South Peace Agreement, thereby giving the Khartoum regime an opportunity to reinforce its troops and proxy militias in Darfur.
To move our own words to actions, the United States should demand the immediate deployment of an international force sufficient to stop all ongoing violence and protect the people of Darfur, the refugee camps, the relief workers, the relief-transport systems, the International Criminal Court investigators and the refugees trying to return to their villages.
Elvir Camdzic is a co-founder of the San Francisco Bay Area Darfur Coalition (www.darfursf.org) and executive director of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Center of San Francisco. John Weiss is the founder of the Darfur Action Group (www.weaversofthewind.org) at Cornell University, where he is an associate professor of history.