Group wants intervention timetable for Sudan’s Darfur
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, May 17, 2004 (IPS) — The Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) and the U.S. Committee for Refugees (USCR) are the latest to urge the international community to act quickly to stop what Human Rights Watch (HRW) earlier this month called “ethnic cleansing” against the African communities of Sudan’s Darfur region.
“Khartoum may be betting that the world is too preoccupied with Iraq to care what happens in Darfur,” said Gareth Evans, the former foreign minister of Australia who heads the ICG. “If Sudan ignores a (United Nations) Security Council resolution, the international community must be ready to show that this is not the case by providing the necessary political will and military resources to hold it comprehensively to account,” he added in a statement.
At the same time, and amid reports of continuing violations by government-backed Arab militias of a cease-fire in Darfur, USCR Executive Director Lavinia Limon called on U.S. President George W Bush to act unilaterally, if necessary.
“One million internally displaced persons and refugees are facing starvation as a result of Sudan’s atrocities and denial of unrestricted access for humanitarian relief,” she said. “In a few weeks, the rainy season will make the roads impassable, and hundreds of thousands may starve to death.”
“The president must not let this happen,” Limon declared in a statement. “He should act to ensure that massive amounts of food and relief supplies reach everyone in Darfur who needs them, and that unimpeded access is not merely requested but immediately achieved.”
Both groups noted that U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned last month during the 10th anniversary memorial of the genocide in Rwanda, “the international community must be prepared to take swift and appropriate action” if humanitarian access continued to be denied. Moreover, he said explicitly that, by action, he meant a continuum of steps culminating in “military action.”
In that connection, the ICG’s Evans called for a new Security Council resolution that would impose targeted sanctions, such as the freezing of overseas assets, against specific Sudanese leaders, and raise the prospect of international legal action against their crimes as a last and final resort before the Council authorises military force. He said Khartoum should be given three weeks to comply.
The conflict in Darfur, which began in earnest 15 months ago, pits the Arab-speaking militias called the Janjaweed (“men on horseback”) who have been armed and supported by government forces, against members of three African ethnic groups — the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa — who together make up the majority of the region’s settled population. All sides in the fighting are Muslim.
Approximately one million people have been uprooted in the conflict that began when two loosely allied rebel groups, the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), attacked government military installations to protest raids by the Janjaweed against their communities, as well as Khartoum’s neglect of the region.
Fleeing Janjaweed raids, in which government forces have also taken part, according to independent human rights and relief groups, some 120,000 of the displaced have sought refuge in neighbouring Chad, where the United Nations has established refugee camps.
But the vast majority of the displaced remain within Darfur, unable to safely return to their homes, let alone plant crops, despite the last month’s cease-fire between Khartoum and the two rebel groups.
In its May 7 report, ‘Darfur Destroyed,’ HRW depicted the region inhabited by Masalit and Fur farmers in West Darfur as having been subject to a scorched-earth campaign in which wide swathes of the area, among the most fertile in Sudan, were burned and depopulated.
“Villages have been torched not randomly, but systematically — often not once, but twice,” the report said, noting that most of the civilians have now been driven into camps and settlements outside the larger towns, “where the Janjaweed kill, rape, and pillage — even stealing emergency relief items — with impunity.”
The report, which includes testimony from victims, found that the Janjaweed almost always outnumber regular soldiers during attacks, but that the government forces “usually arrive first and leave last.”
When the HRW report was released, U.N. officials were also mulling the report of an inter-agency team that visited Kailek camp in South Darfur, which houses thousands of people who had been forced to flee their homes. It described the team’s participants as “visibly shaken” by the conditions in which they found the residents, adding it had found evidence of “a strategy of systematic and deliberate starvation being enforced by the (government) and its security forces on the ground.”
Such reports, as well as the increased media attention to the crisis, have clearly heightened concerns about the situation.
In a letter last Thursday, Annan urged Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir to immediately disarm the militias.
Bush, who has been silent about the situation for the past month, demanded in early April that Khartoum also “immediately stop local militias from committing atrocities against the local population … and provide unrestricted access to humanitarian aid agencies.”
U.S. negotiators are hoping to help conclude a peace agreement between Khartoum and a 21-year-old insurgency in the southern part of the country, although the White House warned that full normalization of ties between the two countries could not be achieved without an improvement in Darfur.
In her statement, USCR’s Limon praised Bush’s remarks, but noted that it “and other steps haven’t succeeded in stopping the atrocities and gaining access to one million people who are facing starvation now.” She warned that Bush’s failure to take action “would be a mistake of historic proportion for which you would be remembered.”
In its statement, the ICG said some members of the U.N. Security Council — including Britain and France — have been “dragging their feet” on approving stronger actions against Khartoum to press it to follow through on promises to ensure that relief aid can be delivered to those who need it