Khartoum’s shame – and ours
By Frida Ghitis, The Phiadelphia Inquirer
Jan 13, 2005 — The streets of Juba, in southern Sudan, filled with joyous celebration Sunday. The thousands who came out to march and chant their happiness could hardly believe the moment had finally arrived.
After decades of fighting, one of Africa’s longest-running, bloodiest conflicts had officially come to an end. Across the border in Kenya, officials from around the world had gathered to witness the signing of a peace deal ending a war that killed at least two million people and left millions more homeless. Mwai Kibaki, the president of Kenya, called it “the beginning of a new, brighter future for the people of Sudan.”
Really? We may want to set aside that Nobel Peace Prize just for now.
In fact, rather than praise and commendation, the names of government leaders in Khartoum belong on indictments in war crimes tribunals. Instead of shaking hands and exchanging back slaps with the world’s politicians, these leaders’ limbs belong in shackles. If ever there was a country deserving of regime change, Sudan is the one. And, as is often the case, powerful people around the globe have shielded and protected them, allowing their record of genocide to continue even to this day.
We can only hope that the treaty just ended a war – the one in southern Sudan, a war between the Muslim central government and Christians and animists in the south. Because most of the victims were Christians, and the territories are rich in oil, the world eventually took the conflict seriously and exerted the necessary pressure to bring a resolution.
While the celebrations over the peace deal unfolded, however, the systematic slaughter in Darfur, in western Sudan, continued. There, the war sets Muslim against Muslim. But the government and its supporters are Arab Muslims, and their victims are ethnic Africans, not Arabs. Despite many lofty speeches, many threats and ultimatums, the world appears unwilling – and definitely unable – to do anything meaningful to stop the killing.
Let’s be clear about this: Responsibility for the outrages in Darfur, where at least 70,000 have died and some two million have been forced from their homes, lies squarely with the Sudanese government and the nomadic Arab militias they support, the janjaweed. But the international community, from the speechifying society of the United Nations Security Council to that exclusive dictators’ club known as the Arab League, has shown little interest in stopping the slaughter. Through their inaction – our inaction – we have become accomplices.
The peace treaty in the south provides for a sharing of the land’s riches between the dictatorship and the people. The excruciatingly poor people of the region now have a chance at a measure of prosperity. The government will no longer enforce Muslim law there, and in a few years, the area will presumably be allowed to vote on full independence. But the strongmen in Khartoum are cleverly distracting the international community. They have learned their lesson, working much more quickly to tighten their control and “Arabize” Darfur than they did in the south.
Practically all the grievances against the government that created the conflict in the south are still the order of the day in Darfur. The killings started after rebels said their region, too, is marginalized, does not receive enough resources from the central government, and should have a say in its own affairs.
Sunday’s peace treaty shows that this regime, which once harbored none other than Osama bin Laden, does respond to international pressure. Sadly, where Darfur is concerned, the international community has been unwilling to impose even an arms embargo on Khartoum, when much stronger sanctions are fully justified.
Life for the people of Darfur has become a slow-motion nightmare of death and devastation. The only way to stop that is to impose strict sanctions on the regime, and to push forth with a much stronger presence of armed peacekeepers than the minimal force now in place from the African Union. Otherwise, we are not only complicit in the horrors, but we risk a full unraveling of last weekend’s peace treaty. After all, as a former Soviet refusenik once said, we should never trust a government that doesn’t trust its own people. If the killing in Darfur does not end, the joy in Juba could be short-lived. And we’ll have ourselves, in addition to the perpetrators, to blame.