Survivors and victims of genocide deserve justice

By Elvir Camdzic and John Weiss
The San Francisco Chronicle,

July 23, 2008 — Last Monday, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, made history by charging the president of Sudan, Omar Hassan el-Bashir, with genocide in Darfur.

Several commentators in America and Europe have questioned the wisdom of the court, an independent entity based in the Hague, Netherlands, that was established by an international treaty in 2002.

The pundits argue that el-Bashir will show his anger at the charges by retaliating against civilians, aid workers, and the small, helpless contingent of international troops in Darfur. The result will be, as some members of el-Bashir’s regime have menacingly predicted, “more violence,” as well as starvation after aid flights are blocked.

The displaced populations of Darfur and those trying to help them are certainly vulnerable. Although the killings, rapes, and expulsions that produced 2.5 million refugees in 2003 and 2004 have tapered off, Khartoum’s agents are still doing damage, still attacking villages. The best estimates are that an additional 100,000 people have been driven from their homes since January.

But if one listens to the Darfuris themselves, one hears only praise for the prosecutor’s decision, coupled with fear that China, the African Union, or the Arab countries will pressure the United Nations Security Council to “freeze” the indictment, a possibility provided for in the statutes that set up the International Criminal Court.

The Darfuris want justice as much as, or more than, they want food, shelter and medical aid. The indictment of el-Bashir lends them hope and a sense of worth, satisfaction and a sense of being recognized by the world as victims of genocide. Their welcome of the indictment demonstrates their willingness to endure further privation, threat and uncertainty if it is accompanied by the prospect of bringing the perpetrators to justice.

The critics of the prosecutor’s decision should also consider how future generations would have regarded a failure to charge el-Bashir with genocide. Since coming to power by a military coup in 1989, el-Bashir and his accomplices have committed genocide and crimes against humanity against at least 10 different peoples of Sudan, beginning with the attacks in the Nuba Mountains in 1991.

El-Bashir’s repressive military dictatorship is the longest-running genocidal regime in modern history. A failure to charge el-Bashir with genocide would have come to represent the final triumph of impunity.

Those expressing alarm over the indictment of el-Bashir have also warned that it will now be much more difficult, if not impossible, to negotiate with the Khartoum regime in order to restart some kind of peace process. The bedrock assumption behind those warnings is that, unless we are prepared to go for an all-out regime change, no end to the genocide can be reached without the willing participation of el-Bashir’s regime in the peace arrangements. This assumption is deeply flawed.

The history of international efforts to end the Darfur genocide has been nothing but a continuous saga of attempts to sustain fruitless negotiations with the el-Bashir regime, resulting only in delays, broken promises and bureaucratic masquerades that have come at a very high human cost in Darfur.

All efforts to rescue Darfur to date have been grounded in transparent hypocrisy in which it is evident that none of the international organizations, or any of their individual members, has been willing to take the slightest political risk in order to end the crimes they repeatedly condemn.

“Constructive engagement,” of whatever form and in whatever forum, with the el-Bashir regime will never make any progress whatsoever in reversing the radical diminishing of the Darfuri people. In fact, the history of the 20th century clearly shows that dealings with genocidal regimes unsupported by the capacity for effective force and the willingness to apply it have never produced stable peace in the long run.

A different kind of peace process, one that neither requires nor seeks el-Bashir’s participation, should be pursued. The central goal of such a peace process should be to arrange an assembly of a truly broad range of Darfuri leaders, without the presence of Khartoum’s representatives, to work out their destiny in relative freedom from Khartoum. They might then return to Darfur and, with international assistance, enforce upon Khartoum, for the first time in Sudan’s history, a truly federal system that gives Darfuris the degree of autonomy they wish.

The critics of such a peace process argue that it would require a complete military defeat and expulsion of the el-Bashir regime. Such an all-out regime change, although welcome, would not be necessary. A rescue plan could be successfully enforced by setting Darfur off-limits to all the agents of Khartoum’s power, as the genocide’s victims have long demanded. A judicious combination of military and political action, including an enhanced no-fly zone coordinated with a robust implementation force on the ground, operating without the need for Khartoum’s consent or U.N. authorization, would accomplish this goal.

Such actions involve risks, but our willingness to take them paid off in the past. In 1999, NATO stopped a genocide-in-the-making in Kosovo despite the refusal of the United Nations to authorize the intervention and the objections that it violated Serbia’s sovereignty. Kosovo was set off-limits to all the Serbian forces, and the Kosovars were given an opportunity to decide their destiny free of Belgrade’s interference.

At the height of NATO’s campaign, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia indicted Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic for his role in masterminding the genocides in Bosnia and Kosovo. Despite the skepticism many expressed at the time, Milosevic was arrested and tried by the tribunal shortly after the downfall of his regime.

If the International Criminal Court’s indictment of el-Bashir encourages those considering this kind of a genocide-ending plan, it will have provided Darfur with the single best opportunity to end the five-year genocide, the long, searing abridgment of its hope and its humanity.

Elvir Camdzic is a co-founder the San Francisco Bay Area Darfur Coalition ( www.darfursf.org). John Weiss is the founder of the Darfur Action Group ( www.weaversofthewind.org) at Cornell University, where he is an associate professor of history.