Darfur dilemmas
Editorial, The Financial Times
The first United Nations deadline for Sudan over the refugee crisis in Darfur falls at the start of next week. The Security Council gave the Arab-led government 30 days to show tangible progress in disarming the local Arab militias accused of atrocities in the region and bringing their leaders to justice. A UN fact-finding mission is due to report on Tuesday on whether Khartoum is fulfilling its pledges. The UN response is expected to be to give it more time.
This will be frustrating for those in humanitarian organisations, lobby groups and elsewhere who have been clamouring for faster and more decisive international action in a crisis that has created 1.4m refugees and according to UN officials may already have claimed 50,000 lives. The July resolution, threatening unspecified economic and diplomatic sanctions if Sudan failed to comply, was more timid than many had hoped, and showed up UN divisions. China, a key oil investor and now Sudan’s dominant trading partner, abstained in the Security Council vote, along with Pakistan.
The UN is now in a cleft stick. On one hand, the Sudanese government is unlikely to do anything except under intensive international pressure. It cannot be allowed to string the UN along indefinitely. On the other, there is a risk that too much outside pressure would increase hostility towards the US and other western governments and strengthen hardliners in the ruling clique. That in turn could undermine the emerging peace deal in the long-running war over Sudan’s largely non-Muslim south, a deal involving hard-to-swallow concessions. As the Financial Times has already argued, the priority now must be to create the conditions for a broadly similar deal in Darfur. Without a political settlement there will be no long-term security for the region’s displaced communities.
Concerted lobbying – this week by Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, the latest in a succession of high-level visitors to Darfur – appears to be having some, if slow, effect. It is not certain that the kind of sanctions the UN would be likely to impose on the country – already subject to a long-standing US trade ban – would work better.
More forceful outside intervention to secure safe havens for civilians would be morally justified but fraught with risk. Any such military initiative would have to rely if not on the US – overstretched and deeply compromised by its involvement in Iraq – then on Britain or France. Sudan has been more willing to accept (although still grudgingly) an increasing presence of African troops. Africa’s record for tackling its own security issues has up to now been even poorer than the UN’s record in Africa, but for the African Union this is a test of new-found resolve. The best course now for the US and the European Union is to throw their weight behind the AU’s efforts to promote and enforce peace, with funding and logistical support if not troops. For the moment this is the most promising chance of mitigating the crisis.