Ignored genocide

Editorial, By The Daily Illini

Feb 17, 2005 — More than 70,000 people are dead, and more than two million people have fled their homes. Hundreds of thousands have died due to starvation and disease. No, this isn’t referring to the recent tsunami in the Indian Ocean – this is about the genocide in Darfur, Sudan.

In February 2003, two non-Arab rebel groups in southern Sudan – the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement – took up arms for a greater share of resources and power. In response, the Sudanese government sponsored a counterinsurgency campaign in which a mostly Arab militia known as the Janjaweed has committed wide-scale abuses against people it says are allied to the rebels.

While the uprising started two years ago, the north and the south of Sudan have been engaged in a bitter civil war for the last 21 years – a conflict that has been virtually ignored by the Western media.

Other nations have stopped short of terming it as genocide. However, the United States, recognizing the massacre for what it is and trying to avoid another Rwanda, submitted an eight-page resolution to the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday. The resolution proposed a 10,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping force as well as oil sanctions to help enforce a peace accord signed in Darfur on Jan 9.

While there is already a sizeable African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur, the United States believes that “even if the entirety of the African Union force were deployed to Darfur, it wouldn’t be enough” and thus seeks to bolster the AU force with more than 10,000 U.N. troops.

The Bush administration should be applauded for this new proposal. While China and Russia may oppose sanctions, due to hesistancy over qualifying the scale of the conflict, even the U.N. Secretary General, Kofi Annan, has stated that the government has allowed “atrocious crimes on a massive scale” to go unpunished.

Frankly speaking, the British government, which has been trying to link economic and financial rewards to restoring peace in Darfur, has dropped the ball and the United States is absolutely timely in its suggestions for enforcing the peace.

The opposition to the U.S. proposal, however, can be broken down into two reasons. First, the proposal suggests that the United Nations set up an “internationally accepted means” to try the criminals of war crimes in Darfur. Nine out of 15 Security Council members prefer the new International Criminal Court in the Hague. Washington rejects the court because the Bush government feels the use of the court will lead to frivolous cases against American troops abroad – and opposes the trial of any American outside of its own courts.

Second, the proposal could set a precedent that Russia and China, with accusations of human rights violations against them in Chechyna and Tibet respectively, could find particularly dangerous. The proposed sanctions and tribunal could thus turn next to their alleged violations, in a slippery-slope argument, and they are expected to veto the proposal.

This should not, however, stop the United States from coming to an agreement with the rest of the Security Council on the issue of Darfur. The Sudanese genocide has been ignored for long enough, and this shaky peace agreement should be propped up with all the force that is needed. The United Nations Security Council should stop quibbling over words and forge ahead with this resolution – if only to protect those of the Sudanese population that have survived.