Darfur End Game: Peace or Justice in Sudan

BY Eric Reeves

February 17, 2009 — The impending International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant charging
Khartoum’s President Omar al-Bashir with atrocity crimes gives
critical force to a central question: does ending the Darfur conflict
really demand that we make a ghastly choice between peace and justice?
How we conceive this choice will determine a great deal about how we
confront other decisions amidst ongoing genocidal destruction in Darfur.
For if we put “peace” before justice, if ICC prosecution is
delayed, then we are giving priority to al-Bashir’s putative role in
vaguely possible peace negotiations, conveniently convening in Arab
League member Qatar, even as he is responsible for so much of Darfur’s
ethnically-targeted human destruction. In choosing “peace” over
justice we are obliged to ignore the fact that this massive destruction
continues apace precisely because of an environment of almost total
impunity. The choice of “peace” on any terms will cripple the
pursuit of justice and efforts to end impunity in Darfur.

Impunity sustains human destruction in Darfur, and has from the
beginning of conflict going back to the 1990s. Efforts to end this
impunity cannot simply be sacrificed in order to encourage deeply flawed
peace negotiations with a regime that human rights organizations have
conclusively demonstrated is the party responsible for creating this
climate of impunity— and for orchestrating human destruction defined
all too fully by the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment
of Genocide. Were the Security Council to suspend for a year ICC action
against al-Bashir, it would be with the bizarre hope that yet further
impunity in Darfur will finally yield peace. We are being asked by the
proponents of a “peace process,” however flawed, to believe in the
good faith of a brutal security cabal that has, in 20 years of power,
never honored any agreement made with another Sudanese party. We are
being asked to believe that this time a deal with these canny
survivalists—who wrested power from an elected government by military
coup—will be different.

* 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