Pursuing Peace and Justice in Darfur: The Role of the ICC

Those misrepresenting the efforts of the International Criminal Court
will inevitably encourage Khartoum; urging expediency over justice upon
the international community will similarly embolden the regime’s
génocidaires

Eric Reeves

June 29, 2008 — Are peace and justice incompatible pursuits in responding to the Darfur
crisis? Do efforts by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to
prosecute atrocity crimes in Darfur deserve robust international support
or exhortations of caution? Is justice fundamental to a resolution of
the crisis? or is it a luxury too costly, too threatening to the
chances for peace? Would senior officials in the Khartoum regime be
more or less likely to engage in meaningful peace talks if they faced
forceful and compellingly researched indictments from the ICC? Would
international support for the Court and for justice lead Khartoum to
retaliate against civilians and humanitarians? Answers to these
questions depend upon which of Darfur’s historical realities are
accepted, which are denied or ignored.

Many insist the most basic truth of Darfur is that senior members of
the National Islamic Front (National Congress Party) are responsible for
engineering the genocidal destruction and displacement most violently in
evidence in 2003-2004, and that the regime remains deeply
complicit—and where necessary actively engaged—in sustaining the
human catastrophe in Darfur. Those so convinced, including this writer,
will find grossly expedient the efforts to trade out the claims of
justice for those of a peace that is nowhere in sight.

I am asking, in other words, “Can there be a meaningful peace that is
not a just peace?” Here we should bear in mind the very considerable
evidence bearing directly on this question: for the consequential
failure of the “Darfur Peace Agreement” (Abuja, Nigeria; May 2006)
was due not only to the fundamental failure of its security
arrangements, but to the deep inequities that defined the document,
particularly on compensation issues. Moreover, no meaningful provisions
for regional, national, or international justice were included in the
DPA—accountability was simply not an animating issue. The failure of
the DPA was sealed from the moment it became apparent that the only
rebel signatory would be the brutal and unrepresentative Minni Minawi.
There are many reasons for the disastrous fracturing of the rebel
movements in the months that followed Abuja, but none more consequential
than the failures of the DPA itself.

It is hardly surprising, then, that someone who has tried to claim
excessive success for the betrayals that defined the “Darfur Peace
Agreement”—Alex de Waal—should have recently co-authored in the
Washington Post (with Julie Flint) an op/ed insisting that the present
“course of justice” being pursued by the ICC in Darfur is badly
misguided, and that the Court’s Prosecutor needs to make a series of
expedient considerations in assessing the impact of ICC actions on the
thinking in Khartoum:

“A high-level [ICC] indictment [of those in the al-Bashir regime]
would probably damage [the objectives of peace and security].”

“[A high-level ICC indictment would] invite retaliation, including
against humanitarian agencies.”

“History shows that dictators often learn that power is their only
protection and that nothing, and no one, can be allowed to stand in
their way.”

“The risks in Sudan are so great right now that the instruments of
justice must be handled with great discretion.”

“Many crimes have been committed in Sudan. The systematic
eradication of communities today is not one of them. Bringing charges
of this nature against the highest echelons of government, at this
moment, would be gambling with the future of the entire nation.”
(“Justice Off Course In Darfur,” Alex de Waal and Julie Flint, The
Washington Post, June 28, 2008;
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2008/06/27/AR2008062702632.html?hpid=opinionsbox1)

The argument is not hard to see in the abstract, but there are two
fundamental forms of question raised by such an argument: is it based on
reasonable assertions about the recent history of Darfur, current
conditions in the region, and statements by the ICC Prosecutor, Luis
Moreno Ocampo? and if not, if facts are being distorted, what
implications are there for this supremely expedient argument about the
relationship of peace and justice in Darfur?

DE WAAL AND FLINT: RECENT ASSERTIONS AND CHARACTERIZATIONS

The co-authored June 28 Washington Post op/ed is one in a series of
publications by de Waal and Flint, arguing very much in tandem about the
current situation in Darfur and the prospects for peace, justice, and
security. Many of their assertions and characterizations are
demonstrably false or self-contradictory (particularly their discussions
of the UN-authorized security force for Darfur, UNAMID); others are so
skewed or distorted as to constitute a shameful disingenuousness.

Neither de Waal nor Flint—nor anyone outside the ICC—has access to
the full body of evidence that ICC Prosecutor Moreno Ocampo has
accumulated since atrocity crimes in Darfur were referred to the Court
by the UN Security Council in March 2005 (Resolution 1593). But in
addition to this fundamental ignorance of what “facts” Moreno Ocampo
possesses, it is pure tendentiousness for de Waal and Flint to assert
that:

“We are worried about two aspects of Ocampo’s approach, as
presented to the UN Security Council early this month. One concerns
fact: Sudan’s government has committed heinous crimes, but Ocampo’s
comparison of it with Nazi Germany is an exaggeration.”

This is not “factual” rebuttal, but rather a distorted rendering of
Moreno Ocampo’s remarks, which in this particular instance included
parallel references to crimes in Bosnia as well as in Moreno Ocampo’s
native Argentina. Moreno Ocampo was not making a broad generalization
about genocide in Darfur and the Holocaust; rather he was making very
specific points of comparison:

“The Nazi regime invoked its national sovereignty to attack its own
population, and then crossed borders to attack people in other
countries.” (“Statement by Mr. Luis Moreno Ocampo, Prosecutor of the
International Criminal Court, to the UN Security Council pursuant to
UNSCR 1593 [2005],” 5 June 2008)

However infelicitous the historical formulation of Nazi activities from
the late 1930s through 1945, the issue foremost here is clearly the
invocation of “national sovereignty,” which has been precisely the
response of Khartoum’s génocidaires to international efforts to
provide humanitarian assistance, security, and justice to the people of
Darfur. And such assertion of national sovereignty by the regime has
been relentlessly and all too effectively made for over five years. If
we wish to understand why several hundred thousands human beings have
died in this time, why 2.7 million human beings have been internally
displaced or turned into refugees, or why the UN estimates that the
conflict-affected population in Darfur has reached a staggering 4.3
million human beings, then we must look first to the consequences of
international acquiescence before Khartoum’s relentless claims of
“national sovereignty.”

Moreover, the second part of Moreno Ocampo’s assertion is also of
specific relevance to Darfur: Khartoum has deliberately engineered the
export of ethnically-targeted violence to Eastern Chad. Here again the
comparison as actually made by Moreno Ocampo is entirely apt. Any
reasonable survey of the human rights literature confirms that not only
has Khartoum conducted a proxy war against N’Djamena by way of its
support for Chadian rebel groups, but has deployed its own military
forces across the Darfur/Chad border, and loosed its Janjaweed militia
allies to conduct ethnically-targeted attacks against civilians in
Eastern Chad as well. Before challenging in such bald fashion Moreno
Ocampo’s highly specific invocation of Nazi actions, de Waal and Flint
would do well to recall the devastating indictments by human rights
groups of cross-border violence by Khartoum, including aerial
bombardment of civilian targets and the use of deadly helicopter
gunships:

“Darfur Bleeds: Recent Cross-Border Violence in Chad,” Human Rights
Watch, February 2006, at
http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/africa/chad0206/

“Violence Beyond Borders: The Human Rights Crisis in Eastern Chad,”
Human Rights Watch, June 2006, at
http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/africa/chad0606/

“‘They Came Here to Kill Us’: Militia Attacks and Ethnic
Targeting of Civilians in Eastern Chad,” Human Rights Watch, January
2007, at http://hrw.org/reports/2007/chad0107/index.htm

“Chad/Sudan: Sowing the seeds of Darfur: Ethnic targeting in Chad by
Janjawid militias from Sudan,” Amnesty International, June 28, 2006,
at http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/ENGAFR200062006]

De Waal and Flint further declare that in his Security Council
briefing, Moreno Ocampo “described a Darfur we do not recognize,”
specifically with his assertion that:

“the entire Sudanese state apparatus has been mobilized ‘to
physically and mentally destroy entire communities’…. He outlined a
criminal conspiracy within government to destroy the social fabric of
Darfur with, as he has said, the first stage being the massacres of
2003-04 and the second the destruction of the refugee camps and the
ethnic groups housed there.”

It is the “second phase” that De Waal and Flint claim “not to
recognize,” that “defining today’s violations as a
‘systematic’ campaign to destroy ‘entire’ communities goes
too far.” But de Waal and Flint have deliberately misrepresented the
context in which Moreno Ocampo referred to “entire communities,”
both in his June 5 statement to the Security Council and in his earlier,
more substantial “Sixth Report of the Prosecutor of the International
Criminal Court to the UN Security Council,” December 5, 2007 (see
there especially Paragraph 40):

“In Darfur, the evidence shows an organized campaign by Sudanese
officials to attack civilians, in particular the Fur, Massalit and
Zaghawa, with the objective to physically and mentally destroy entire
communities. Over a period of 5 years, they have been relentlessly
attacked throughout Darfur. Attacked in their villages. Attacked in the
camps. Their land [usurped].

“The first phase of attacks in 2003-2004 has affected 4 million
people. Since 2005, villages are still being attacked. What is the
difference between those two phases? A simple one: there are fewer
villages left to burn and loot, [fewer] civilians to terrorize and kill.

“But the tactics remain: the Sudanese army in coordination with the
air force and Militia Janjaweed attack civilians. In 2008 alone, they
have displaced more than 100,000 civilians from the villages of Abu
Suruj, Sirba, Seleia, Aro Sharow, Kandare, Kurlongo, Sheged Karo.
Schools, markets, water installations have been hit. Homes have been
burned.

“Such attacks are sufficient to keep the entire population
terrorized. They are sufficient to demonstrate to the displaced their
total vulnerability.” (“Statement by Mr. Luis Moreno Ocampo,
Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, to the UN Security
Council pursuant to UNSCR 1593 [2005],” 5 June 2008)

What is “unrecognizable” here? Which details are inaccurate?
Which generalizations unsupportable? De Waal and Flint offer neither an
accurate account of Moreno Ocampo’s assertions nor effective or
telling criticism, either in the Washington Post op/ed or elsewhere.
Nor has the finding of genocide—the clear implication of Moreno
Ocampo’s language throughout his most recent report—always seemed so
misplaced to de Waal, who wrote in August 2004:

“This [counter-insurgency effort by Khartoum] is not the genocidal
campaign of a government at the height of its ideological hubris, as the
1992 jihad against the Nuba Mountains was, or coldly determined to
secure natural resources, as when it sought to clear the oilfields of
southern Sudan of their troublesome inhabitants. This is the routine
cruelty of a security cabal, its humanity withered by years in power: it
is genocide by force of habit.” (“Counter-insurgency on the Cheap,”
London Review of Books).

De Waal’s thinking about the nature of violence in Darfur may have
evolved, but certainly the National Islamic Front regime has not: it
comprises the very same men responsible for genocidal destruction in the
Nuba Mountains, the oil regions of southern Sudan, and Darfur.

Moreover, in their 2005 book on Darfur, de Waal and Flint seem to take
seriously an August 2004 directive from the headquarters of Musa Hilal,
the most notorious and powerful of the Janjaweed leaders recruited by
Khartoum to assist in its genocidal ambitions:

“The ultimate objective in Darfur is spelled out in an August 2004
directive from [Janjaweed paramount leader Musa] Hilal’s headquarters:
‘Change the demography of Darfur and empty it of African tribes.’
Confirming the control of [Khartoum’s] Military Intelligence over the
Darfur file, the directive is addressed to no fewer than three
intelligence services—the Intelligence and Security Department,
Military Intelligence and National Security, and the ultra-secret
‘Constructive Security,’ or Amn al Ijabi.” (“Darfur: A Short
History of a Long War,” page 39)

Musa Hilal has recently (January 2008) been appointed to a senior
position within the NIF regime, charged with regaining the support of
the Janjaweed leaders who had tired of being betrayed by Khartoum, or
lost interest in a conflict in which there are indeed many fewer
civilian targets of opportunity, and much less land to appropriate (see
my analysis of the implications of this appointment at
http://www.sudanreeves.org/Article202.html). Given Hilal’s views
on “changing the demography of Darfur,” one might think his
appointment by Khartoum would be an embarrassment to the argument de
Waal and Flint make against Moreno Ocampo. They are predictably silent
on the issue, although Moreno Ocampo speaks explicitly and ominously
about the potential for current land appropriation by Arab groups
“creating a new demography” in Darfur.

A much more detailed and important account of the change from “phase
one” to “phase two” of the Darfur genocide is offered by Human
Rights Watch (which nonetheless remains unable to secure internal
consensus on the question of “genocidal intent”). HRW’s
conclusions comport much more fully with the assessment of Moreno Ocampo
than that of de Waal and Flint:

“The government [of Sudan] continues to stoke the chaos [in Darfur]
and, in some areas, exploit intercommunal tensions that escalate into
open hostilities, apparently in an effort to ‘divide and rule’ and
maintain military and political dominance over the region.” (“Darfur
2007: Chaos by Design,” September 2007 at
http://hrw.org/reports/2007/sudan0907/, page 6 ([see especially as
well pages 22, 34, 38, 41-43, 45, 51, 53-54]).

Flint and de Waal scoff at the notion that current efforts by the
Khartoum regime are “systematic,” and at Moreno Ocampo’s claim
that human destruction and displacement in Darfur are the responsibility
of “the entire Sudanese state apparatus.” Moreno Ocampo reports, on
the basis of comprehensive investigation:

“The evidence shows that the commission of such crimes on such a
scale, over a period of five years, and throughout Darfur, has required
the sustained mobilization of the entire Sudanese state apparatus:

“The coordination of the military, security and intelligence
services.
The integration of the Militia Janjaweed.
The participation of all Ministries.
The contribution of the diplomatic and public information
bureaucracies.
The control of the judiciary.”

So again, where does Moreno Ocampo err? Which element of the National
Islamic Front regime named has not been directly involved in the Darfur
genocide? Here also de Waal and Flint (who, peculiarly, refer in their
op/ed only to the “documentation” of “relief agencies”) should
recall the results of massive human rights investigating in Darfur. A
December 2005 report from Human Rights Watch (“Entrenching Impunity:
Government Responsibility for International Crimes in Darfur,”
December 2005 at
http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2005/12/09/sudan12186.htm) offers
an extraordinarily well-researched account of the mechanics of
genocide—of just how the NIF has organized the destruction of non-Arab
or African tribal populations in Darfur. It also presents substantial
evidence for what had long been clear, but in this report is established
beyond reasonable doubt: that senior NIF leadership has directly
overseen Darfur’s genocidal destruction. This remains true today,
with the especially vicious NIF presidential advisor Nafi’e Ali
Nafi’e holding the Darfur portfolio.

The Human Rights Watch report made clear that the chains of command for
military operations—as well as recruitment, supply, and direction of
the Janjaweed militias—led directly to the most senior members of the
NIF: President (and Commander-in-Chief) Omar al-Bashir; former First
Vice-President and current Second Vice-President Ali Osman Taha (who
held the Darfur portfolio from 2003-2005); the head of Khartoum’s
ruthlessly efficient security and intelligence services, Major General
Saleh Abdallah ‘Gosh’; former Minister of the Interior and current
Minister of Defense Abdul Rahim Mohamed Hussein; Major General Bakri
Hassan Salih, former Minister of Defense and subsequently Minister for
Presidential Affairs; Abbas Arabi, former Chief of Staff of the Sudanese
Armed Forces and currently Director General of the National
Communications Corporation.

Also of particular importance in sustaining the Darfur genocide is the
grotesquely named Humanitarian Aid Commission (HAC). HAC is little more
than an extension of Khartoum’s security forces and the Ministry of
the Interior, but provides the official means by which the regime
continues its immensely debilitating war of attrition against UN and
nongovernmental humanitarian organizations in Darfur. It would be
difficult to overstate the consequences of this policy of
obstructionism, which has evolved steadily and mercilessly, even as the
world’s largest humanitarian effort is set to enter its fifth year.
And yet despite the enormous consequences for civilians, and the growing
potential for large-scale humanitarian withdrawal because of insecurity
either abetted or permitted by Khartoum, de Waal and Flint give only a
passing nod to operations that sustain some 4.3 million human beings,
people who would be terrifyingly vulnerable if those operations were to
collapse or continue to be severely curtailed by HAC:

“Yes, there are great obstructions of relief efforts and much
violence around the camps (not all of it by the government). Government
functionaries and soldiers abuse civilians with impunity. But….”

This is woefully inadequate, even in the brief scope afforded,
particularly since HAC’s efforts of obstruction are so
“systematic,” and the issue of this paragraph from de Waal and
Flint’s op/ed is precisely Moreno Ocampo’s use of the adjective
“systematic” to describe Khartoum’s efforts of destruction. It
should also be noted here, in response to the parenthetical comment by
de Waal and Flint, that Moreno Ocampo, repeatedly—in all his
Statements—makes clear that he well understands that not all violence
is the responsibility of Khartoum. Any fair rendering of his views and
those of the ICC would acknowledge, for example, that the Court is
investigating rebel violations of international law, and is likely to
indict those responsible for the attack on African Union forces in
Haskanita, North Darfur (September 2007).

The dismissive language that de Waal and Flint offer here—“yes,
humanitarian aid is being obstructed, but…”—is deeply disingenuous,
since both know that such obstruction is enormously consequential, and
that the human stakes are rising even as HAC accelerates its efforts to
harass, abuse, and impede humanitarians. Notably, HAC has become the
means by which Khartoum has callously suppressed, for months, a number
of key malnutrition reports by the UN and nongovernmental humanitarian
organizations. It is on the basis of such reports that humanitarians
must plan and allocate what are already inadequate resources. HAC and
Khartoum’s security services have also obstructed the gathering of new
and critically relevant data pertaining to malnutrition, actions that
could cost tens of thousands of lives during what all now acknowledge
will be the most difficult “hunger gap” since large-scale
humanitarian access was secured in July 2004. The period between spring
planting and fall harvest looks extraordinarily grim, and humanitarian
officials predict that August and September will be extremely dangerous
months for huge numbers of civilians weakened by more than five years of
war and violence.

Many will starve, and yet UN humanitarian organizations in Darfur are
reduced to pleading with the regime and HAC to permit them to do their
work. In a June 22, 2008 statement revealing of how desperate they are,
the operational UN humanitarian organizations in Darfur felt they said
as much as they dared by asserting, inter alia:

“In order to monitor, assess and alleviate the impact of these
factors [shortages of food, water, and sanitation], it is essential that
humanitarian workers have safe access to all communities. Such
monitoring can only succeed if aid agencies are able to undertake and
release the results of surveys and assessments in a timely manner and
without restrictions.”

Some within the UN community objected to such a weak and merely
implicit accusation, given the urgency of the current situation; others
feared that Khartoum might retaliate if stronger language were used.
The statement continued:

“The Government of Sudan must urgently enact its agreement to release
the results of technically cleared humanitarian surveys—including
nutritional and crop surveys—and minimize delays in publishing future
survey findings.” (“UN Statement on the Humanitarian Situation in
Darfur,” 22 June 2008)
(See my analysis of this statement,
http://www.sudanreeves.org/Article217.html)

The language may be timid, but given the millions of civilians
dependent upon the international aid effort in Darfur, we must see
Khartoum’s continuing obstruction of humanitarian surveys as a
“systematic” instrument of destruction, deliberately targeting
those made most vulnerable by previous ethnically-targeted violence.

THE ABANDONMENT OF JUSTICE IN THE INTEREST OF PEACE?

It is by ignoring so many of Darfur’s realities that de Waal and
Flint make their argument against Moreno Ocampo’s expected indictment
of at least one senior member of the National Islamic Front. But
despite such a distorted representation of conditions in Darfur, is the
logic of their argument still sound?

“The risks in Sudan are so great right now that the instruments of
justice must be handled with great discretion.”

“Many crimes have been committed in Sudan. The systematic
eradication of communities today is not one of them. Bringing charges
of this nature against the highest echelons of government, at this
moment, would be gambling with the future of the entire nation.”

Let us first of all be clear what de Waal and Flint are urging: it
doesn’t matter whether Moreno Ocampo has overwhelming evidence of
genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity committed by Minister
of Defense Abdul Rahim Mohamed Hussein (also former Minister of the
Interior during the most violent years of the genocide)—the senior NIF
official most likely to be indicted. The ICC Prosecutor should simply
sit on this evidence, no matter how compelling, and allow Khartoum to
contend only with the April 2007 indictments of junior interior minister
Ahmed Haroun and Janjaweed leader Ali Kushayb (the “colonel of
colonels”).

But of course Khartoum has long insisted, falsely, that the ICC has no
jurisdiction over atrocity crimes in Darfur (see Paragraphs 10-15 of
Moreno Ocampo’s December 5, 2007 Statement to the Security Council),
and that it will never surrender any Sudanese to the Court, either as
witness or indicted person. The regime contemptuously flouts the ICC
and has recently gone so far as to declare that Moreno Ocampo is a
“terrorist” because of his Darfur investigations. At the same
time, a recent, and unanimous, UN Security Council statement is unlikely
to change Khartoum’s calculations unless specific consequences are
attached to non-compliance; indeed, the statement is all too likely to
convince the regime yet again that they face nothing more vigorous than
moral exhortation:

“The Council urges the government of Sudan and all other parties to the
conflict in Darfur to fully cooperate with the court, consistent with
resolution 1593 (from 2005), in order to put an end to impunity for
crimes committed in Darfur.” (UN Security Council statement, June 16,
2008)

What we see here—and in the argument de Waal and Flint offer—is not
a serious pressuring of Khartoum, but rather forms of accommodation. In
the sixth year of unfathomable violence, destruction, and displacement,
“urging” Khartoum to “cooperate” seems little more than a cruel
sop thrown to the people of Darfur. In the case of de Waal and Flint,
such accommodation of Khartoum extends to an expedient abandonment of
justice in the interest of rendering Darfur somehow manageable, a
situation requiring certain forms of acquiescence—at the very least
not the site of ongoing genocidal destruction. In part, they argue
disingenuously against Moreno Ocampo’s reports because to acknowledge
the fundamental truth of his investigations—the all but declared
finding of continuing genocide—would make expediency seem too
appalling, even for de Waal and Flint.

REALITIES

What will Khartoum’s response be to an indictment of Minister of
Defense Hussein? We can’t know, although there is compelling evidence
that behind its public obduracy, the regime’s génocidaires are a good
deal more fearful of the ICC than they let on publicly (see an
extraordinarily revealing article by Wasil Ali of The Sudan Tribune,
which is based on intelligence provided by a “senior Sudanese
official,” at http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article27639). But
there is certainly no peace process to be compromised; indeed, Khartoum
still insists that the “Darfur Peace Agreement” is the only basis
for new negotiations, a non-starter for all the rebel groups (this is
yet another dimension of failure represented by the DPA). But what
about Khartoum’s ability to curtail further the deployment of the
UN/African Union “hybrid” force in Darfur (UNAMID)? What about the
possibility of retaliation against humanitarians that de Waal and Flint
point to?

These are real possibilities, and given the implicit “go-ahead”
recently signaled to the ICC by the Security Council—even if in the
painfully weak language of “urging” the regime to “cooperate”
with the Court—there is no reason to expect Moreno Ocampo to back
down.

But to ask only these questions—now—about UNAMID and the safety of
humanitarians is implicitly to accept the logic of international
inaction of the past five years: “don’t offend Khartoum, don’t
threaten—work cooperatively, patiently, deferentially, and allow these
men to preserve their dignity.” This approach has been a manifest
failure and yet continues in the reflexive attitude of accommodation
that is embodied in de Waal and Flint.

Here it is instructive to recall that on July 30, 2004 the UN Security
Council declared that it,

“Demands that the Government of Sudan fulfill its commitments to
disarm the Janjaweed militias and apprehend and bring to justice
Janjaweed leaders and their associates who have incited and carried out
human rights and international humanitarian law violations and other
atrocities.” (UN Security Council Resolution 1556, Section “Acting
under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations,” Paragraph 6)

Four years later, this “demand”—long contemptuously ignored by
Khartoum—is more robustly embodied in the impending indictments of ICC
Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo. It is highly likely that in addition to
Minister of Defense Hussein (who certainly has had considerable
“association” with the Janjaweed), Musa Hilal will also be served
(in absentia) an arrest warrant for a wide range of atrocity crimes
(though let us recall that the notorious Janjaweed leader is also now a
senior NIF official). In the four years since Resolution 1556 was
passed—under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, conferring enforcement
authority—not only have the Janjaweed not been disarmed or brought to
justice, there has not been even a show of an attempt by Khartoum.

During this time hundreds of thousands of people have died, many tens
of thousands of women and girls have been raped, more than one million
people have been violently displaced, millions of lives have been turned
into ghastly exercises in day-to-day survival, humanitarians have been
killed by the scores—and Khartoum has paid no price for continued
deployment of the Janjaweed. The argument that the regime should
continue to receive deference, should continue to be accommodated,
should continue to rule with impunity, should continue to be insulated
from the demands of justice—in Darfur and throughout Sudan—is
perverse and fundamentally counter-productive. The argument that we
should accept all that has occurred and pretend—“right now,” “at
this moment,” as de Waal and Flint would have it with their peculiarly
delicate sense of historical timing—that we serve the people of Darfur
by continuing as we have, without the disruptions of ICC indictments for
genocide or crimes against humanity, ensures only that the past will
define the future.

The status quo in Darfur is simply unacceptable; monstrous crimes
against humanity are perpetuated amidst a climate of impunity that is
acknowledged by all. The question is not whether indictment of a senior
National Islamic Front official will provoke retaliation against
humanitarians or further obstruction of UNAMID. The real question is
what the international community—and in particular specific member
states of the UN, and most particularly of the Security Council—will
do to forestall not just immediate or short-term retaliatory responses
by Khartoum, but to secure long-term security for all Darfuris.

De Waal and Flint read history as showing “that dictators often learn
that power is their only protection and that nothing, and no one, can be
allowed to stand in the way.” This is certainly Khartoum’s fully
justified reading of recent history. But the imperative that emerges
here is not to abandon justice because a brutal handful of serial
génocidaires think that theirs is the only power; the task is to
demonstrate forcefully the power that resides in the international
commitment to justice. If such power is non-existent, no force will
long protect the acutely vulnerable civilians of Darfur or the
humanitarians upon whom they depend in such terrifyingly vast numbers.

* Eric Reeves is author of A Long Day’s Dying: Critical Moments in the Darfur Genocide. He can be reached at [email protected]. www.sudanreeves.org