Tough intervention needed to stop Darfur bloodshed
Editorial, by The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Mar 09, 2006 — The humanitarian crisis in Darfur, in the west of Sudan, has now gone on for three years in spite of efforts by the African Union, the United Nations, nongovernmental organizations and, to a degree, the government of Sudan itself to bring it under control.
Tomorrow, the African Union will make a decision in Addis Ababa on whether to turn peacekeeping, which it has attempted unsuccessfully to do itself since 2004, over to the United Nations.
The Sudanese government opposes this move. It has underlined this position through demonstrations in its capital, Khartoum, through unattributed death threats against the heads of the U.N. mission and the American Embassy, and through a hurried trip by a delegation to Brussels to talk to the European Union and the United States about heading it off. It has also threatened to pull out of the African Union if that organization makes such a decision.
The Darfur problem is very serious. People argue about the numbers, but thousands of people have been killed in the fighting and more than a million have been displaced from their homes. They have fled to camps established by humanitarian organizations, to be cared for by those organizations at considerable cost.
The matter has become internationalized as well. The Darfur region of Sudan is on that country’s border with Chad and the Central African Republic. Fighting has now spilled over into Chad, with both countries accusing the other of harboring anti-government tribal rebels. The Chadian government of President Idriss Deby has used the trouble as justification for breaking his country’s agreement with the World Bank to use its newfound oil wealth for development and social services. He claims he needs the money to buy arms to fight the Sudan-based insurgents.
The Darfur problem seemed first to be a problem for the African Union, in the policy context of “African solutions to African problems.” So AU troops, some 7,000 of them, were sent to Darfur. But it didn’t work, either because the African troops were badly equipped, badly led or insufficient in number. Now they are running out of money and no one — including the EU, the United States and the wealthier African nations — has stepped forward to pick up the financing of the force.
Sudan doesn’t want U.N. troops there. One reason is that they might be more effective in making and enforcing peace than the African force has been. In particular, they might focus on the government-supported janjaweed militia and put them out of business. Sudanese demonstrators are concentrating on the fact that the U.N. troops would not necessarily be Muslim and would thus potentially constitute action such as the United States has carried out in Iraq — non-Muslim forces invading a Muslim country to resolve an intra-Muslim problem.
So what to do? The obvious move would be for someone — preferably the wealthier, oil-economy African countries — to put up the cash for many more AU troops to deal with a serious African problem. Sudan has borders with nine African countries so this is definitely an inter-African problem.
The second, less attractive alternative is for the AU to approve the sending of U.N. troops in spite of Sudanese government wishes. The argument would be that the Sudanese government and the African Union have failed to deal with the problem, lots of people are still displaced and dying, and this simply cannot be allowed to go on, whatever the Sudanese government thinks of such an intervention. Then, a major effort should be made to recruit a strong U.N. peacekeeping force from Islamic countries — Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, Albania and the like. The United States and the European Union should send money.
The Darfur crisis, which some call genocide, simply cannot be allowed to go on in the world in 2006. Rwanda, with some 800,000 dead, made that point in 1994 — as if it still needed to be made a half-century after the Holocaust.