War crimes in Darfur

World must not stand by and let atrocities continue

Editorial, The Newsday

April 7, 2005 — It’s far too late and much too little, but at last the United Nations is taking desperately needed action to address the genocidal ethnic cleansing that has destroyed Sudan’s Darfur region, resulting in the deaths of more than 200,000 people and the displacement of 2 million from burned-out villages.

With the approval of the Security Council, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has given the International Criminal Court at The Hague a sealed list of 51 Sudanese suspected of slaughter, rape and pillaging in Darfur, the first step in the process of a war crimes prosecution.

The council’s approval indicates a tacit and welcome change of heart for President W. Bush, who is no fan of the International Criminal Court and has balked in the past at efforts to legitimize it. Some feared that Bush would order a council veto of the prosecution. But Bush, pressed at first by former Secretary of State Colin Powell and now by Powell’s successor, Condoleezza Rice, has denounced as genocide the horror of Darfur, and refrained from blocking the move.

In Darfur, an impoverished and arid region on the western edge of Sudan, ethnic tensions mounted for years over land ownership and grazing rights between nomadic Arab tribes and black African farmers. The enmity erupted into all-out conflict in 2003, when black rebel groups claiming oppression by the Arab-led government in Khartoum began to clash with Arab militias known as Janjaweed. Though both groups are Islamic, ethnic hatred trumps religion in this conflict. What followed was the systematic destruction of black villages by the Janjaweed militias, which are covertly supported by Khartoum and aided by the Sudanese army.

The international community has done little to stop the massacres and the mass expulsion of black villagers from their homes. The African Union has dispatched a pathetically small contingent of ineffectual peacekeepers to Darfur. And China, eager to exploit oil resources in Sudan with the cooperation of the Arab government, has blocked use of a UN oil embargo that could put pressure on Khartoum. Meanwhile, Doctors Without Borders reports that the Sudanese government is imprisoning black girls and women made pregnant in mass rapes by Sudanese soldiers and prosecuting them for adultery if they are unmarried or their husbands have been killed. The world must not stand by any longer and allow these atrocities to go on.