International community fails to stop Darfur atrocities
Security council postpones discussion of situation for a month
By Julie Flint, The Daily Star
TERBEBA, Darfur, May 14, 2004 — Ten years after the genocide in Rwanda, the international community has been examining its dismal record in failing to prevent the slaughter there. What, it is asking, could it have done to stop it? What should it have done?
Sudan, it has been said, is Rwanda in slow motion. And in Sudan, as in Rwanda, the international reaction to mass killing has been too little – and far, far too late.
Over the last 20 years, three times as many people have died in Sudan as died in Rwanda and relief agencies are warning that another 100,000 could lose their lives in the next year.
This horrific figure – corresponding roughly to 275 deaths a day – refers only to possible deaths from hunger and disease in the Darfur region of western Sudan, scene of a still-unfolding tragedy that UN officials are calling the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today.
And yet as Rwanda commemorated its dead, and a UN fact-finding mission reported finding similarities in Darfur to the “brutalities” committed in Rwanda, the UN Security Council decided not to act, and postponed discussing the matter for a month. Once again, the UN failed to act.
Time is not on the side of the victims of the Darfur conflict – the great majority African farmers who have been driven from their lands by government forces and the Arab militiamen of the Janjaweed.
By the time the Security Council meets again, the rainy season will have started in Darfur and roads that are little more than dirt tracks will be almost impassable. Delivering food and medicine to 1 million internally displaced people will become increasingly difficult, if not impossible.
Hunger and disease among already-weakened families in overcrowded, under-resourced settlements will take their inevitable toll.
It is already very late in the day to be crying foul in Darfur. The present conflict there began more than a year ago when Darfurians of African extraction took up arms to fight against the destruction of their homeland by Arab militias supported by the Islamist, Arab-centric government in Khartoum.
Finding itself unable to defeat the rebels militarily, the Sudan Army soon began attacking civilians in an effort to deprive the rebels of a support base. Reports of atrocities began to filter out of Darfur, but the international community ignored them – apparently concerned not to alienate government hard-liners whose support it wanted for the peace negotiations with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, the African rebels in the south.
As priority was given to peace in southern Sudan, rising violence in Darfur was ignored in the name of “quiet diplomacy” and “constructive engagement” with Khartoum. Confident of impunity, the Sudanese government escalated its military action in Darfur.
The first muscular reaction from the United States, the key foreign player, came only in March this year, when most African farmers had already been driven off their land.
The war in Sudan is usually described as a north-south war of Arab against African, Muslim against Christian.
This has never been the case.
The war in Sudan is, in reality, a series of multiple wars that pits marginalized groups of Sudanese – many of them of African extraction – against a small clique determined to hold on to power at all costs.
“This is a national war, in which a small group from the center of the country maintains power by any means necessary,” says John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group.
“Through its military tactics, the government in Khartoum is responsible for creating the worst humanitarian crisis in the world (in Darfur), the second largest death toll since World War II (in the conflict with the SPLA), and the world’s largest forgotten emergency (in northern Uganda, where Khartoum sponsors the rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army).”
Without strong and determined international pressure, Khartoum is unlikely to agree to a political solution to the conflict in Darfur. Without such an agreement, the war there will resume as soon as a ceasefire agreement signed on April 8 breaks down or international attention turns elsewhere – whichever comes first.
The 45-day ceasefire has not ended Janjaweed attacks. There is no evidence that the government has begun to “neutralize” militias as the agreement stipulates. Monitors envisaged in the agreement have not yet deployed.
The government’s swift and bloody crackdown in Darfur – first against the rebels and then, in the face of unexpectedly strong opposition, against African civilians from the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa tribes – reflects the unique importance of the Darfur rebellion.
For Darfur, unlike southern Sudan, is overwhelmingly Muslim – proof of Muslim opposition to Sudan’s Islamist rulers and a possible example for other marginalized groups within the Muslim north, or so the government fears.
Today the failure to take timely action against the ethnic cleansing of Darfur not only threatens a major famine in Darfur, it threatens regional stability. The war in Darfur is already spilling across Sudan’s borders, with Janjaweed crossing into Chad in apparent pursuit of refugees from Darfur and any livestock they may have saved.
In the most serious reported incident since the ceasefire came into effect on April 11, hundreds of Janjaweed on camels raided a village inside Chad on Sunday, according to Defense Minister Emmanuel Nadingar, setting off gun battles that killed 60 raiders.
Analysts believe such incidents will continue – and not just because the Janjaweed are not bound by the ceasefire agreement. Chad’s president, Idriss Deby, is seeking to amend the constitution to give himself a third term in office and there is growing speculation that domestic political opponents are forging links with the Janjaweed in hope of destabilizing his regime.
Three successive presidents, including Deby, have begun their grabs for power with ethnic militias based partially in Darfur.
Human rights groups have called for military intervention in Darfur to monitor the implementation of the ceasefire agreement and help the displaced return to their lands. This seems, at best, unlikely: the UN is already running 15 peacekeeping operations – seven of them complex and very costly – and the African Union has made it clear it will not intervene unless funding for a peacekeeping operation is guaranteed. So far, it has not been.
It is hard to see light at the end of the tunnel for the displaced people of Darfur.
“What to do?” asks Sudan scholar and historian Sean O’Fahey. “A few observers, military or otherwise, will not be enough in a place the size of Darfur, where the old order has broken down but has not been replaced by any viable system. And what country or countries are going to send the kind of military manpower needed? The Janjaweed will prove to be very tough to stop; they have a fully-developed racist ideology, a warrior culture, a plethora of weapons and enough horses and camels – still the easiest way to get around Darfur.”
“The distant genocide in Darfur will be very hard to bring to an end even if there is the will among the international community to do so,” he added.
The story of a guerrilla leader
Khamis Abdullah Abaker – once a trader, now the commander of the Masalit forces of the Sudan Liberation Army – has an arm that looks like a three-dimensional contour map. Hills and valleys of scarred flesh crossing his elbow and running down his forearm testify to heavy torture during five years’ imprisonment for rebellion.
Abaker acknowledges that he was, in the Masalit area of Darfur, one of the first organizers of “self-defense units” – small groups of villagers who attempted to defend their villages against attacks by semi-nomadic Arab pastoralists armed and supported by a succession of Sudanese governments.
“The first problem was in August 1995,” he said in an interview in Darfur. “The government gave Arab nomads guns, and the Arabs took 40,000 cattle from civilians and put them in the Serira mountains. The Arabs eventually left Serira with the cattle and on their way burned Mejmera village, killing 23 people. I began telling the people: ‘The government is against you.'”
In December 1997, as the burning of Masalit villages spread, Abaker led a group of 130 men to attack the Jebel Endia area north of Geneina from where he claims attacks were being launched against villages north and west of Geneina. He and his men sold camels to buy weapons. He claims they routed the government forces without suffering casualties.
In May 1999, Abaker was seized during an attack on his home village, Fanganta, and sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment. Before escaping early in 2003, he says, he spent four years in solitary confinement in windowless cells, beaten and in shackles. The smallest cell was reportedly only one-and-a-half meters square.
Abaker denies a suggestion that the SLA rebellion has deepened the suffering of civilians in Darfur. “There was no choice,” he said. “We are not only fighting for our rights. We are fighting for our lives.”