Sudan’s dirty war
The Daily Telegraph
LONDON, May 8, 2004 — It is a savage irony that, 10 years after the massacre of 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda, the spectre of ethnic cleansing should again be rearing its head in Africa. The locus this time is the Darfur region of Sudan, where, according to the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, sedentary farmers are being subjected to a reign of terror by Arab militias working in tandem with the Sudanese government.
The pattern is to subject villages to aerial bombardment, then release the militias, known as Janjaweed, to murder, rape, loot and burn. It is estimated that tens of thousands of civilians have been killed, 130,000 have been forced into exile in neighbouring Chad and one million have been internally displaced. The UN has spoken of possible crimes against humanity and impending famine. Its secretary-general, Kofi Annan, has not excluded recourse to military action. But so far, the world body has proved as impotent as it was when the Hutus embarked on government-backed extermination of their ethnic rivals in 1994.
That impotence has been amply evident in the UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), a Geneva-based body whose African and Arab members have combined to thwart proper investigation, or even condemnation, of what is happening in Darfur. The UNCHR has rejected calls to reinstate a special rapporteur on human rights and suppressed a report, commissioned by it, which accused the National Islamic Front (NIF) government in Khartoum of ethnic cleansing. Yesterday , the UN Security Council in New York was briefed on the situation.
Whether that will lead to forthright condemnation of President Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir remains to be seen. In the meantime, those countries, including America and Britain, that have persuaded Khartoum and the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) to talk peace in Kenya should ask themselves whether the Islamic fundamentalist government in Khartoum can be relied on to deliver.
In Darfur, the NIF, faced by a rebellion triggered by its neglect of the region, is pursuing the same vicious policy against non-Arabs as it did earlier in the Nuba Mountains and the south. Its consistent racism suggests the country will never know peace while it remains in power. The World Bank and countries such as Britain and France are ready to extend debt relief to Khartoum if a peace agreement with the SPLM is signed. They should, rather, be considering what sanctions can be imposed on a government whose contempt for the non-Arab population of Sudan appears to know no bounds.