Darfur: Where is the will?
By Elvir Camdzic, John Weiss, The San Francisco Chronicle
September 20, 2006 — The history of the world’s response to the genocide in Darfur has been a sad tale of calculated naïveté, self-deception, pious platitudes, constructive engagement with genocidaires, conscious adoption of ineffective policies and diversionary strategies such as “awareness-raising,” divestment and fundraising for humanitarian aid.
The would-be rescuers of Darfur — politicians, diplomats and activists alike — kept espousing the rhetoric of ultimate causes while practicing the art of minimum risk. They all deplored genocide, but refused to take the risks necessary to stop it. None of them cared enough to put their nonviolent purity or their clean-solution sainthood on the line.
The surviving victims of the Darfur genocide seem likely to remain indefinitely in an archipelago of destitute camps spread across that distant region. A population of 2.5 million, driven from more than 1,000 destroyed villages, lingers in disease, starvation, their fears confirmed by daily violence and their hopes abridged by the accelerating departure of aid organizations.
Since the signing of the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) at the beginning of May, not a single Darfuri has been given peace.
Violent attacks by armed groups, especially government-supported militias, have increased, by some accounts to double their pre-signing level. Armed groups from rebel factions who signed the agreement have also repeatedly attacked civilian supporters of factions who refused to sign.
Major riots against the signing of the DPA have occurred in the large IDP camps. Inhabitants of the camps, inside Darfur and in Chad, have always favored strong interventions, by NATO, the United States or a seriously empowered and equipped U.N. force. But few would-be rescuers or policy analysts take into account the expressed wishes of these victims.
Emboldened by our risk-aversion, the longest-ruling genocidal regime in modern history, run by Omar al-Bashir and his co-conspirators, has launched its Final Solution for Darfur. After rejecting U.N. Resolution 1706 on Sept. 6, which “invited” it to accept a U.N. role in Darfur, the regime has started a full-court press of indiscriminate bombing, burning, raping and expulsion. According to sources on the ground, 30,000 government troops and government-supported militias have engaged in this final offensive.
It is painfully obvious that no effective remedies will come from the United Nations. Any move to act in Darfur without the permission of the Khartoum government, whether through a no-fly zone or the intervention of ground troops with the capacity to enforce a protect-and-return mandate, will be opposed by a rogues’ gallery of states determined to display their respect for the principle of inviolable national sovereignty.
But what if it were Canadians or white Europeans now facing the Final Solution that the Sudanese government launched? Would we continue to promise that no violation of Sudan’s sovereignty would ever occur? Would we continue to relinquish our “responsibility to protect” fellow members of the human race victimized by their own government?
It is morally reprehensible to seek the permission of the perpetrators to protect the victims of their crimes. Instead of seeking their consent, we should be neutralizing them.
Until recently, very few diplomats publicly suggested that anyone would intervene without the consent of the government of Sudan to stop the killing and dying, restore an atmosphere of security and begin the rebuilding of cultures and peoples that constitutes the true reversal of a genocide. French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy gave a glimmer of hope to those who would take “nonconsensual” action when he told a Paris news conference on Sept. 8: “Do we go there, in spite of them? That’s not on the table, nobody has asked the question like that. But it’s a real question.” That question has, of course, been asked since at least the summer of 2004 by different individuals and organizations.
Realistic plans that put together a coalition that ends the genocide with a judicious combination of military and political action, without U.N. authorization or Khartoum’s consent, are already in the in-boxes of at least two of the major U.N. members. While such a coalition is being assembled, immediate warning over flights of Darfur and possibly the Khartoum area by American or French planes would be a very effective credible threat to the government of Sudan that stronger action is coming. Make no mistake. Such plans involve risks. We would have to be willing to take them. In 1999, Europeans and Americans stopped a genocide-in-the-making in Kosovo despite the refusal of the United Nations to authorize the intervention.
But in a world where all but a tiny minority of would-be Darfur rescuers have never heard a shot fired in anger, never worn a uniform, never lost a friend to a genocide (or been a witness to this crime as it was happening), or even missed a meal they did not want to miss, a political-military plan that involves risks, complicated options and a need for imagination has little appeal. When you have experienced one or all of those things, however, developing that plan in an atmosphere of criticism and debate seems a compelling task. It has, in fact, already begun.
* Elvir Camdzic is co-founder of the San Francisco Bay Area Darfur Coalition and trial director for the International Citizens’ Tribunal for Sudan. John Weiss, an associate professor of history at Cornell University, chairs the Darfur Action Group.