Darfur and the Completion of the Naivasha Negotiating Process (I)
Khartoum’s genocidal ambitions continue unchecked despite Nairobi signing
By Eric Reeves
Jan 14, 2005 — January 9, 2005 is without question a signal moment in the history of
modern Sudan. The opportunity exists for a meaningful peace to be
fashioned if there is sufficient international commitment to what will
be an ongoing process, as well as sufficient honesty about the
difficulties clearly in evidence. The people of Southern Sudan, who
have suffered and died beyond calculation for decades, have seen many of
their goals substantially met, with a self-determination referendum
guaranteed by the final document. But such a referendum must be
guaranteed by much more than paper, as the present Khartoum regime’s
long history of bad faith, reneging, and abrogation of various signed
agreements should make painfully clear to all.
Tragically, there is little evidence of anything approaching a
realistic or sufficiently urgent international assessment of present
challenges. The fragility of this past Sunday’s achievement is glibly
acknowledged, but there is no sign of rapid international response to
the immediate challenges at hand. A peace-support operation—of
appropriate size, mandate, staffed with sufficiently knowledgeable
personnel and provided adequate equipment—remains, inexplicably,
merely notional. The UN Security Council is content to “pledge to
quickly consider sending peacekeepers to Sudan” following the peace
agreement. But given the daunting nature of the operation and the
critical demands it will confront, this language suggests a deeply
inadequate sense of urgency or understanding of specific requirements
(see analysis of these requirements by this writer at
http://www.sudanreeves.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=23&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0).
Moreover, the time-frame for deployment, the makeup of personnel, as
well as the evident primary basing of forces are all deeply troubling.
Radia Achouri, the UN spokeswoman for the UN Advance Mission in Sudan
declared yesterday that the UN is expected to deploy 9,000 to 10,000
“observers by mid-March to oversee the implementation of a peace
agreement in Sudan.” Achouri went on to say that “a Security Council
resolution is expected by mid-February after which troops would be
deployed within a month” (United Press International, January 13, 2005).
Given the prevailing military conditions in Southern Sudan, the rapid
rate of return by displaced persons and refugees that can be expected,
this seems a perversely delayed time-frame. A provisional Security
Council resolution should have been at the ready, with peacekeeping
forces already poised to begin deployment. Moreover, the peace support
operation should entail much more than mere “observers”: there must be a
robust, fully-equipped and -armed rapid response brigade deployed in
strategic locations in Southern Sudan, especially near potential
flash-points in Eastern and Western Upper Nile, the Shilluk Kingdom, and
Abyei and northern Bahr el-Ghazal. This force must have a peacemaking
mandate and the military capability to ensure that no violations of the
permanent cease-fire will be tolerated or allowed to spread.
Equally troubling is a dispatch from Agence France-Presse, reporting
that “by mutual agreement between Sudanese and UN authorities, offices
and barracks [for the peace-support operation] will be built close to
the airport at Kassala, the news reports said.” (Agence France-Presse,
January 13, 2005). Kassala is a major northern town, with a major
airport; but it is also almost 500 miles from Bentiu, epicenter of oil
operations in Western Upper Nile; it is even further from Abyei and
northern Bahr el-Ghazal. Choosing Kassala simply because it is
convenient for Khartoum and for deploying forces shows an extremely poor
appreciation for the requirements of this critical peace-support
operation.
Nor is there evidence of international commitments to provide anything
approaching adequate emergency transitional aid resources, even as it is
clear that many hundreds of thousands of Southern Sudanese are preparing
to return from the north (particularly Khartoum) and from nations of
refuge. Indeed, many tens of thousands have already begun or completed
the return in the past six months. In recent years the National Islamic
Front (NIF) regime has handled the problem of displaced Southern
Sudanese by forcing them further and further from the national capital
city, with increasing callousness and brutality (see the deeply
compelling account [“Sudan’s forgotten victims live life on the edge”]
by Reuters correspondent Opheera McDoom [January 6, 2005] at
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=ourWorldNews&storyID=7254552).
With the signing of a peace agreement, we may on the basis of such past
behavior reasonably assume that NIF Interior Minister Hussein will be
much more aggressive in forcibly pushing Southern Sudanese southward.
Hussein is the man directly responsible for many of the regime’s most
brutal policies of forced expulsions from camps for displaced persons in
Darfur.
Unless there is a substantial increase in both humanitarian assistance
and emergency transitional aid, many of those returning to Southern
Sudan will live lives of even greater desperation than at present. In a
telling sign, the UN has recently appealed for a substantial increase
simply for food in Southern Sudan:
“The World Food Programme (WFP) challenged donors to support a
southern Sudan peace deal forged on Sunday and appealed for $302 million
to fund emergency food relief for 3.2 million people in the
war-shattered south. ‘Over the next 12 months, some 268,000 metric
tonnes of food will be required for war and drought affected people
primarily in south Sudan,’ said a statement by the UN programme, the
world’s biggest food relief agency.”
“‘Peace brings a whole new set of challenges with it,’ the statement
quoted WFP Sudan Country Director Ramiro Lopes da Silva as saying. ‘Many
of those who fled their homes during the war have already started
returning home, adding pressure to already limited resources available
within these communities.'” (Reuters, January 9, 2005)
In order for these people to resume agriculturally productive lives, to
reach the point where the Southern Sudanese portion of oil revenues can
begin to create a self-sustaining agricultural economy, they must have a
great deal of emergency transitional assistance. But despite vaguely
generous promises by Colin Powell, there is no Bush administration
appropriation, or supplemental appropriation request, for transitional
aid. This fact makes a mockery of the promise of a “large peace
dividend” for Southern Sudan, and Sudan as a whole, on completion of a
peace agreement (made most conspicuously by then-Assistant Secretary for
African Affairs Walter Kansteiner in Congressional testimony of May
2003).
It is less than a week since the signing of the final Naivasha peace
agreement. But there is already reason to be intensely dismayed by the
lack of urgency, the absence of any clear time-line for deployment of
the necessary peace-support operation, and the absence of a funding
strategy for this moment of critical transitional need in Southern
Sudan. But most of all, we should be dismayed at Khartoum’s evident
conviction that by signing a peace agreement in Nairobi, it is free to
continue its genocide in Darfur. The failure of the international
community to disabuse the regime of this conviction threatens additional
hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths (over 400,000 have already
died; see December 12, 2004 mortality assessment by this writer at
http://www.sudanreeves.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=8&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0).
UN Undersecretary for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland recently warned
that the monthly mortality rate could climb to 100,000 if humanitarian
organizations are forced by growing insecurity to withdraw (interview
reported by the Financial Times, December 15, 2004).
Khartoum’s unrebuked genocidal ambitions in Darfur are ultimately a
direct threat to the viability of the Naivasha peace agreement: there is
no imaginable “national government” that can include a majority National
Islamic Front, with its domestic policy of genocide in Darfur, as well
the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) and representatives of
other political opposition groups. “National governance” simply
cannot—as SPLM leader John Garang has made fully clear—include a
policy of massive, targeted human destruction of the sort endured by the
people of Southern Sudan and the Nuba Mountains for so many years.
DARFUR SECURITY SITUATION CONTINUES TO DETERIORATE
In the past week, Kofi Annan has had the task of not only blessing the
peace agreement signed in Nairobi, but reporting to the UN Security
Council on conditions in Darfur. Annan’s special envoy for Sudan, Jan
Pronk, has also had occasion to report on the current situation in
Darfur. A critical review of their comments should be sobering for
those who now speak vaguely of the Naivasha process serving as a “model”
or “inspiration” or “template” for resolution of the catastrophe in
Darfur. And let us not forget that the so-called “Naivasha process”
began with the Machakos (Kenya) Protocol, signed by Khartoum in July of
2002. Is this an appropriate time-frame in which to contemplate
diplomatic resolution to genocidal destruction in Darfur?
Jan Pronk, who has so often functioned expediently, ineffectively, and
disingenuously, has for once demonstrated some political foresight in
assessing Khartoum’s calculations. The UN’s Integrated Regional
Information Networks reported yesterday on Pronk’s warning to the UN
Security Council that:
“Sudanese government forces might be tempted to think the conclusion of
the north-south peace accord would provide a brief window of immunity
from international criticism on their actions in Darfur, [said Pronk].”
(UN IRIN, January 13, 2005)
Pronk also reported in his monthly briefing that:
“Conflict was spreading outside Darfur. [ ] The violence, he added, was
affecting humanitarian work more frequently and more directly than
bureaucratic restrictions ever did, ‘with fatal and tragic consequences.’
[ ]
‘Large quantities of arms have been carried into Darfur in defiance of
the Security Council decision taken in July,’ Pronk said. ‘December saw
a build-up of arms, attacks of positions, including air attacks, raids
on small towns and villages, increased banditry [and] more looting.'”
(UN IRIN, January 13, 2004)
The patent inadequacy of the current African Union monitoring force
grows daily more evident. In mid-January 2005, deployment of the
contemplated force of 3,500-4,000 has stagnated at around 1,000
personnel. Western nations have not done nearly enough to assist the AU
forces, and the AU for its part has been politically and militarily
highly ineffective. Neither the present force nor the larger force that
is supposedly deploying begins to address the rapidly growing security
concerns of humanitarian organizations or the desperate protection needs
of well over 2 million Darfuri civilians.
It remains the case, as this writer has argued for over a year, that
only substantial humanitarian intervention can forestall ongoing,
massive genocidal destruction. For months now it has been all too clear
that the African Union is simply not capable of taking on this task,
though it could serve as a bridgehead for a larger international effort.
It has been equally clear for many months that UN auspices for any
humanitarian intervention will be blocked by China (with abundant
diplomatic assistance from Russia, Pakistan, the Arab League, and the
Organization of the Islamic Conference).
Faced with these deeply constraining realities, those countries with
the military resources to stop the genocide have chosen to pretend that
an adequate response comprises diplomatic engagement with Khartoum,
security from the African Union, and the largely meaningless threat of
sanctions (which China has vowed explicitly to veto at the UN Security
Council). As Human Rights Watch declares in its annual report (January
13, 2005):
“A large UN-authorized military force is needed to protect Darfur
residents and to create conditions of security that might allow them to
return home safely. The United States and other Western governments,
[HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth] contends, are wrong simply to hand
the problem to the African Union, a new institution with few resources
and no experience with military operations of the scale needed. ‘Darfur
is making a mockery of our vows of “never again,”‘ said Roth.” (Human
Rights Watch News, January 13, 2005)
What Roth does not acknowledge is Human Rights Watch’s unexplained
failure to use the term “genocide,” which is of course the crime that is
“never again” to be allowed to occur. Instead, HRW continues to content
itself with the much vaguer term “ethnic cleansing,” a euphemistic
half-way house between genocide and crimes against humanity,” as
Samantha Power argues in “‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of
Genocide.” Georgette Gagnon of HRW’s Africa Division declared in an
early December interview with Radio/TV Jamaica that the discussion of a
genocide determination “continues within HRW”—though the evidence is
overwhelming and unchanging in character. Significantly, Roth, the
executive director of HRW, is reliably reported to be convinced that
genocide is the appropriate term.
But terminological dithering continues, even as the issue of a genocide
determination is disingenuously characterized by HRW: the Financial
Times (UK) reports that the organization says “debating the definition
of atrocities in Darfur has detracted from a key issue: action by the
international community to help end the violence and ensure those
response are brought to justice” (Financial Times, January 5, 2005).
There is of course not a shred of evidence that “debating the definition
of atrocities in Darfur” has had any effect on decisions, either of
action or inaction, on the part of the international community—not a
shred. On the contrary, HRW is simply excusing its own lack of moral
and intellectual clarity in characterizing the realities in Darfur.
Roth declares that “a large UN-authorized military force is needed to
protect Darfur residents and to create conditions of security that might
allow them to return home safely.” What he refuses to do is acknowledge
the radical implausibility of such a “UN-authorized military force.”
This refusal mirrors the weakness and lack of resolution that pervades
so much international thinking about Darfur in the wake of the US-led
war in Iraq. Indeed, in an all too revealing irony, the HRW cover
release also report highlights “the Abu Ghraib scandal.” Of course such
a shameful scandal should be fully and vigorously investigated, but this
particular feature of a war conducted without UN auspices should not
translate into a generalized unwillingness to contemplate international
military action without UN auspices—it should certainly not leave
Darfur at the mercy of a Chinese veto in the Security Council.
But Roth at least “names names” of those international actors who have
also failed to respond meaningfully to Darfur:
“Human Rights Watch said that the crisis in Darfur cries out for
involvement by the major military powers, but they have chosen to be
unavailable. The United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia are
bogged down in Iraq, with the United States going so far as to say that
‘no new action is dictated’ by its determination that the killing in
Darfur amounts to genocide. France is committed elsewhere in Africa, and
Canada is cutting back its peacekeeping commitments, despite promoting
the ‘responsibility to protect.’ NATO is preoccupied in Afghanistan; the
European Union is deploying forces in Bosnia. ‘Everyone has something
more important to do than to save the people of Darfur,’ said Roth.”
(Human Rights Watch News, January 13, 2005)
Evidently we must settle for important, if very partial truths from
Human Rights Watch.
Returning to the reports of Kofi Annan and Jan Pronk over the last
week, there are other extremely ominous findings:
“Pronk said arms were pouring into Darfur and fighting was spreading,
cautioning that the bloodshed could intensify despite a peace accord
between the government and rebels in the south. ‘We may move into a
period of intense violence unless swift action is taken,’ Pronk said.”
(Agence France-Presse, January 11, 2005)
Perhaps Human Rights Watch and others feel the luxury of waiting for
meaningful UN-sponsored action in the midst of such accelerating
violence, and with such horrific rates of ongoing civilian casualties
(now on the order of 35,000 and poised to climb rapidly in light of
growing food deficits throughout Darfur; again, see mortality assessment
by this writer at
http://www.sudanreeves.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=8&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0).
But this is to enter a morally surreal realm, one that we may be sure
the people of Darfur are desperate to see avoided.
Equally surreal is the political calculus that leads to recent
declarations concerning UN sanctions from US ambassador to the UN, the
soon-to-be retired John Danforth:
“Ambassador John Danforth of the United States, which has failed to get
a reluctant Security Council to impose sanctions to end the violence,
said that option was still on the table. ‘It’s important for all
parties in Darfur, the government and the rebels, to understand that
there is a limit to tolerance,’ Danforth told reporters. ‘While it is
clear that sanctions are opposed by some members of the Security
Council, as a matter of principle…it may be possible to fashion
something that would be agreed to,’ he said.” (Agence France-Presse,
January 11, 2005)
Amidst this intellectually flabby rhetoric, Ambassador Danforth seems
conveniently to have forgotten that he was not able to secure agreement
from the UN Security Council even to use the word “sanctions” in
Security Council Resolution 1556 (July 30, 2004). He seems with equal
convenience to have forgotten the very explicit threat from the Chinese
ambassador to the UN following the passage of a second Security Council
resolution (No, 1564, September 18, 2004): China would veto any UN
measure sanctioning Khartoum, China’s partner in vital off-shore oil
production.
Most significantly and distressingly, Danforth simply ignores
Khartoum’s continued impunity in flouting the only “demand” of
Security Council Resolution 1556—viz., that the regime disarm its
brutal Janjaweed militia allies and bring militia leaders to justice.
Half a year after the “demand” was made there has been no progress on
this score. Indeed, even Kofi Annan—who along with Pronk has done
most to ease non-compliance by Khartoum—is forced to report to the
Security Council:
“At the weekend, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the government
had started a massive build-up of forces and logistics in Darfur and
said they were still using the Janjaweed Arab militia in their
operations rather than bringing them to justice.” (BBC, January 11,
2005)
MILITARY REALITIES
There can be little doubt, as Pronk suggests, that Khartoum plans to
use its signature in Nairobi, and an elaborately contrived celebration
of the peace agreement, in order to proceed with its genocidal ambitions
in Darfur. Other reports make clear that Khartoum is moving not only
light and heavy weaponry into Darfur and massively augmenting its
military logistics, but also continues to use aerial military assets in
indiscriminate assaults on civilians and combatants.
Indeed, in some of the most brazen mendacity of the entire genocidal
campaign in Darfur, Khartoum goes so far as to justify these aerial
attacks, even though it formally committed in Abuja (Nigeria) to stop
them. Citing a UN resolution to the effect that Khartoum had primary
responsibility for protecting the citizens of Darfur, Foreign Minister
Mustafa Osman Ismail preposterously told reporters in Cairo that this
entailed using the very military aircraft that have repeatedly and
authoritatively been implicated in attacks on civilians:
“‘If the African forces there cannot protect routes and protect
civilians, then the Sudanese government must undertake that,’ he said,
adding that the government had a right to use planes in an area larger
than France.”
The African Union has of course itself repeatedly confirmed Khartoum’s
use of military aircraft in attacks on civilian targets. There would be
many more such confirmations if Khartoum had not actively disrupted the
monitoring activities of the AU, particularly in denying aviation fuel
for AU helicopters.
Ismail’s explanation of the use of aircraft flies directly in the face
of numerous investigations conducted by human rights groups, the UN, the
International Crisis Group, and many news reporters:
“‘When we use aircraft, we do not use aerial bombardment. We do not use
planes that drop bombs. This is different from helicopter gunship
aircraft,’ he said.” (Reuters, January 13, 2005)
But let us simply accept that Khartoum is habitually committed to the
most outrageous lies and cleave to the essential truth of Pronk’s
remarks about ominous nature of military developments in Darfur:
“The violence, Pronk added, was affecting humanitarian work more
frequently and more directly than bureaucratic restrictions ever did,
‘with fatal and tragic consequences.'” (UN Integrated Regional
Information Networks, January 13, 2005)
This is precisely the point. From late 2003 through summer 2004,
Khartoum worked most assiduously to halt humanitarian aid by means of
direct obstruction, including blocking humanitarian supplies and
refusing to grant visas and travel permits to international humanitarian
aid works. Following a substantial (but far from complete) “opening of
humanitarian access” in mid-summer 2004, Khartoum simply counted on the
heaviest months of the torrential seasonal rains (July through
September) to obstruct humanitarian aid. Unsurprisingly, the rains did
in fact create what Jan Egeland and others called a “logistical
nightmare,” with many populations cut off from food and other forms of
humanitarian assistance. Now, the regime’s primary means of obstructing
aid is to create intolerable security conditions for humanitarian
workers and convoys.
To be sure, Khartoum is receiving perverse and unconscionable
assistance from the increasingly undisciplined insurgency movements.
But these movements have grown deeply suspicious of the AU for a variety
of reasons; they see that there is no international will to confront
Khartoum for its much more widespread, systematic, and consequential
violations of the merely notional cease-fire negotiated in Abuja
(November 9, 2004). The AU forces are impotent, without a truly
meaningful presence on the ground or a peacekeeping mandate. Moreover,
the Janjaweed are still not a party to any negotiated cease-fire and
their savage predations are thus not officially within the purview of AU
monitoring.
None of this is lost on the insurgents, and their present military
actions are as much a function of this despairing knowledge as of a
desperate need for supplies and weak command-and-control. Further
factionalizing of the insurgency campaign is also in evidence, as is a
spread of fighting to neighboring Kordofan Province (east of Darfur).
Moreover, as Alex de Waal warned in a column in yesterday’s Financial
Times:
“[There is also a] threat of war in eastern Sudan. The Beja people of
the Red Sea Hills took up arms 10 years ago, protesting against
marginalisation. There has been little fighting for five years, but Beja
guerrillas are still in neighbouring Eritrea. Darfurian fighters are
there too, drawn from the more than 1 million Darfurians who migrated to
find work in eastern Sudan. All is quiet now, but the tinder is dry. A
conflagration could be easily triggered by an embittered rebel
commander, perhaps encouraged by Isseyas Afeworki, the capricious
Eritrean president, or by a government clampdown.” (Financial Times,
January 13, 2005)
Precisely in order to forestall a legitimate assertion of rights and
grievances in other marginalized regions of Sudan, Khartoum continues to
make clear that genocide remains a staple tool of domestic security
policy. We have seen this regime commit genocide in the Nuba Mountains,
in the oil regions of Southern Sudan, in Darfur; there is nothing in the
way of international responses to these previous genocidal actions will
prevent similarly targeted human destruction elsewhere in Sudan.
The International Rescue Committee (IRC) has also recently highlighted
the dangers de Waal cites:
“Perhaps most seriously [among the threats to the Naivasha peace
accord], armed conflict and extensive human rights abuses continue in
many parts of Sudan, including Darfur, West Kordofan, and Beja areas of
the northeast, threatening to destabilize the north-south peace.” (The
International Rescue Committee press release, January 11, 2005)
Extraordinarily, in this context of reports from the UN, the IRC, news
reports, and others accounts, retiring US Secretary of State Colin
Powell declared of Darfur on the day of the Nairobi peace signing:
“‘We still see people being pushed out of their homes. We still see the
conflict under way. The conflict has slowed down a bit, but it is not
over by any means.'” (Reuters, January 9, 2005)
It is an obscene distortion of the truth to say that conflict in Darfur
“has slowed down a bit.” On the contrary, as Annan and Pronk make clear
in their reports of the past week, the conflict is clearly accelerating,
and may soon turn into a cauldron of violence so severe that
humanitarian access will be completely compromised.
“In a 16-page report on Friday, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said
conditions in Darfur were deteriorating. He charged the Sudanese
government of doing nothing to disarm and prosecute Arab militias called
the Janjaweed who have committed some of the worst abuses in Darfur. The
instability, analysts say, could undermine Sunday’s accord.” (Knight
Ridder news service [Nairobi], January 9, 2005)
“Six months after the Sudanese government promised to make efforts to
end attacks on the Darfur population by pro-government militias, Annan
said: ‘The armed groups are re-arming and the conflict is spreading
outside Darfur. Large quantities of arms have been carried into Darfur
in defiance of the Security Council decision taken in July. A build-up
of arms and intensification of violence, including air attacks, suggest
the security situation is deteriorating.'” (Agence France-Presse,
January 8, 2005)
These are the elements of the nightmare scenario Jan Egeland warned of
as long ago as July 2004, and what leads him to predict the possibility
of civilian mortality up to 100,000 per month—with no means at hand to
stop the human destruction.
But even the terrifying plausibility of Egeland’s assessment will
evidently not move Powell and the Bush administration away from its
policy of expediency and disingenuousness in responding to Darfur:
“Asked what further action can be taken on Darfur, [Powell] said: ‘The
United Nations still has options before it, including sanctions, and we
cannot take any of those options off the table. And we will have to
examine what further action the international community can take in the
form of actions on the part of the Security Council,’ [Powell] added.”
(Agence France-Presse, January 8, 2005)
Of course the Bush administration’s companions in expediency are
numerous, both in Europe and Canada, as well as at the UN. Jan Pronk
shows his truer colors in his own comments on sanctions against
Khartoum:
“Pronk said sanctions, while still an option, should not be imposed now
as Khartoum had just responded to international wishes by signing the
peace agreement in the south ending Africa’s longest civil war.”
(Reuters [United Nations], January 12, 2005)
Pronk, who declared the obvious—
“Sudanese government forces might be tempted to think the conclusion of
the north-south peace accord would provide a brief window of immunity
from international criticism on their actions in Darfur, [said Pronk].”
(UN IRIN, January 13, 2005)—-
nonetheless feels free to encourage Khartoum in this very thinking by
holding off on recommending sanctions. To be sure, sanctions—even
targeted sanctions—are of very limited value against a regime that
does not believe they will ever be carried out with any effectiveness,
and has thoroughly insulated itself from most of the effects of targeted
sanctions.
But if there is no willingness to push even for UN sanctions, what is
the likelihood that we will see UN debate about Human Rights Watch’s
urging of “a large UN-authorized military force is needed to protect
Darfur residents and to create conditions of security that might allow
them to return home safely”? The likelihood is of course so utterly
remote that to moot such a “force” as a policy option is an exercise in
disingenuousness.
For a voice of honesty, we must once again turn to the comments of Lt.
General Romeo Dallaire, UN force commander in Rwanda during the 1994
genocide:
“In searing remarks after the screening [of “Shake Hands with the
Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire”] at the Canadian Museum of
Civilization on Monday night, Dallaire said there was no excuse for the
failure by Canada’s leaders to lead an international effort to assist in
the Darfur region of Sudan. ‘I applaud the enormous work that we’re
doing and we must do with the catastrophe that is going on in Asia. But
I am guilty and distraught by our ability to totally abandon a whole
other group of humans,’ Dallaire said.”
Dallaire—who has been fully explicit in declaring the realities of
Darfur to be, like those in Rwanda, genocide—went on to say:
“‘As we pour ourselves into the great sense of commitment to humanity
in Asia…we must also have that same courage and determination, and
demand of our politicians the same commitment to areas where the crisis
is not by natural catastrophe but by human catastrophe,’ Dallaire said.
‘And the absence of Canada in the forefront of Darfur, in Sudan is a
travesty.’ [ ]”
“Dallaire urged [ ] audience members to ‘harass our politicians’ until
they address the Darfur crisis. ‘We must…respond even at the risk of
having to spill blood to help. That is where a courage and a
determination and a focus and a vision of a nation comes from. And right
now, we don’t have that,’ Dallaire said.” (The Toronto Star, January 12,
2005)
Tragically, Dallaire refers to a “courage and determination” that are
nowhere in evidence among any of the international actors who can make a
difference.
[End Part I; a relatively briefer Part II (“In the Absence of
Intervention: Current Humanitarian Issues in Darfur”) to follow]
– Eric Reeves
– Smith College
– Northampton, MA 01063
– Tel: 413-585-3326
– Email: [email protected]
– Web site: www.sudanreeves.com