A blind eye to Sudan’s horrors
Editorial, the National Post
April 26, 2004 — Just when it appears the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) has set a new standard for futility and cynicism, it surpasses itself.
In recent years, recall, the body has selected Libya for its chairmanship, expressed approval for suicide bombings against Jews and delivered rants against the Middle East’s only democracy even as it turns a blind eye to abuses in the world’s grimmest dictatorships.
The problem is systemic: According to developed practice, abusive regimes champion the election of other abusive regimes to commission membership so they can shield one another from criticism. Thanks to such tactics, the commission this year failed to condemn glaring rights violations in China, Zimbabwe, Haiti and Nepal. Indeed, it could not even denounce those suspected of having bombed UN headquarters in Iraq last summer, killing 19.
This year, the commission’s 60th annual six-week session, concluded Friday in Geneva, descended into fisticuffs and farce. A Cuban government official assaulted a human rights advocate last week, following a narrow vote to censure the island dictatorship for its abuse of dissidents. UN security guards had to mace another of Fidel Castro’s delegates to keep him from helping with the beating. And Friday, it was revealed the commission had suppressed a scathing report by its own investigators of a gathering genocide in western Sudan just to avoid offending the government in Khartoum.
The UNCHR’s refusal to deal with the ongoing massacres in Sudan is especially repugnant. Muslim militiamen known as Janjaweed, backed by government troops, have engaged in ethnic cleansing of black Africans in the western Darfur provinces. Like their killers, the Darfur victims are mostly Sunni Muslims. But they are black, while the militiamen and government troops are Arab. The blacks are peasant farmers, while their enemies back Arab herdsmen who want to take over the farmers’ land for grazing sheep, goats and camels.
Since the beginning of the year, at least 10,000 Darfur tribesmen have been executed by the militias or killed in aerial attacks conducted by the Sudanese armed forces. Nearly one million more have been forced to flee. Janjaweed and government troops have used scorched earth tactics to render whole regions infertile in hopes of triggering a mass starvation. A New York Times columnist reported last month from the border regions that children are being murdered in front of their parents, in some cases burned alive.
Prospects for a Western military intervention seem slight: The area of conflict is one of the most inaccessible in the world, with little infrastructure to support modern armies. Moreover, as the 1994 genocide in Rwanda shows, the world has a hard time rousing itself to African massacres, no matter how many lives are at stake.
And yet military intervention may not be necessary to stop this burgeoning genocide. Despite its abominable record on human rights, the government in Khartoum appears to have some concern about its international standing. And upcoming ceasefire talks are the result merely of the United States, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and the European Union expressing mild diplomatic displeasure with its actions. One would expect the UNCHR to help amplify this international outcry with its own strong condemnation. But true to form, the body is more concerned with protecting bloody dictators from censure than with saving lives or protecting human rights.