The outrage is about the Darfur genocide
Reeves, Eric
AS GENOCIDAL DESTRUCTION in the Darfur region of western Sudan enters its fifth year, we must accept not only the overwhelming disgrace of such prolonged human agony but register...
...The exceedingly compressed time frame for the Abuja negotiations—arbitrarily imposed by the United States and its European partners— assured the failure of the peace process...
...Despite its bedrock principle of "non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign nations" (never mind the "responsibility to protect"), China was moved in April 2007 to urge upon Khartoum greater "flexibility" in accepting UN peace support personnel...
...the leadership structure of the AU force on the ground comes in for universal condemnation by military experts...
...Five months later, Khartoum has agreed to nothing, and "Plan B"—still not deployed— stands revealed as little more than a financial squeeze that would oblige Khartoum to convert its dollar-denominated international contracts to euro-denominated contracts—or even yuan-denominated contracts...
...There is a direct connection between AU impotence, as well as its perceived collaboration with the Khartoum regime, and the tragic events of April 2007, when five Senegalese members of the AU mission in Darfur were killed by rebels in a one-sided firefight...
...To be sure, this gesture was undercut by a trip to Darfur in early April by China's assistant foreign minister, Zhai Jun...
...Indeed, so cynical is Khartoum that it has unhesitatingly reneged on promises to the African Union mediators...
...For precisely this reason, Khartoum cleaves to its insistence that any force in Darfur be an AU force, with the UN providing only technical, logistical, and financial support...
...What explains the regime's brazen reneging on the terms of a watered-down version of 1706 that was mooted by the UN and the African Union in Addis Ababa during a mid-November 2006 "High Level Consultation...
...And the chairperson of the African Union Commission, Alpha Oumar Konare, revealed during the April 2007 UN meetings just how weak his organization is...
...Minawi is despised by most of the people he nominally represents...
...Administrative capacity in AU headquarters in Addis Ababa is dismal...
...And in fact, the AU is despised by the vast majority of rebel groups and ordinary Darfuris, particularly those in the camps who see the AU as completely unable to offer meaningful protection...
...The result of this language was to confer upon POLITICS ABROAD Khartoum's genocidaires veto power over deployment of a UN force charged with halting the genocide...
...A National Basketball Association "Dream Team of Conscience" has signed a strong open letter to the Chinese president, Hu Jintao...
...A Failed Peace Agreement Much of the answer lies in the response of Darfuris to the Darfur Peace Agreement...
...The cause is clear: Sudan's "national authorities" continue to perpetrate "genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity" Predations by the brutal Arab militias known as the Janjaweed, now attacking in various paramilitary guises, continue with impunity...
...The argument of the campaign, called "Genocide Olympics," is that no country can legitimately host the premier event in international sports while enabling the ultimate international crime...
...Why does the regime continue its long-term war against humanitarian assistance...
...Khartoum still engages in the indiscriminate bombardment of civilian targets...
...With $25 billion in debt, the Sudanese economy may, on a per capita basis, be the most heavily indebted in the world...
...DISSENT / Summer 2007 n 13...
...special envoy for Sudan, Andrew Natsios threatened deployment of some putatively coercive "Plan B" if Khartoum did not meet a January 1, 2007, deadline for agreeing to UN 12 n DISSENT / Summer 2007 forces...
...China has provided more than $10 billion in commercial and capital investments in Sudan over the past decade as well—a critical economic lifeline to an economy that labors under a staggering burden of external debt...
...Why has the National Islamic Front contemptuously rejected arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court, issued in early May for both a regime official and a member of the brutal Janjaweed militia forces...
...He would be killed by Darfuris were he to return to his homeland without extreme security...
...This "responsibility" was deliberately framed in recent UN documents so as to supersede claims of national sovereignty, such as those relentlessly made by the National Islamic Front (National Congress Party) regime in Khartoum...
...When a bombing is made after I have visited an area, my credibility is involved," Aprezi told The Associated Press by telephone from Khartoum, Sudan's capital...
...Coupled with poor logistics and transport capacity, extremely weak communications and intelligence-gathering, a lack of operating cohesion among AU units, and disastrous morale, it's not hard to see why security is so precarious in Darfur...
...This attack effectively halted AU patrols throughout Darfur for at least a month...
...Zhai returned from his brief trip to three carefully prepared camps in Darfur declaring that humanitarian conditions were generally fine and that security was improving, especially since the signing of the Darfur Peace Agreement...
...Cataclysmic human destruction could ensue, adding to the hundreds of thousands who have already died Why hasn't the UN force deployed...
...The Organization of the Islamic Conference continues its shameful silence over the destruction of hundreds of thousands of Muslim lives in Darfur...
...This is the context in which to understand China's abstention in the Security Council vote on Resolution 1706, as well as its insistence that the language of the resolution "invite the consent" of the "Government of Sudan," that is, the National Islamic Front regime...
...The effect of this mendacity was to signal to Khartoum that despite Beijing's urging of "flexibility" on the matter of a UN force, China would not accede to any assessment of conditions in Darfur that would require robust action by the Security Council...
...The prospects for greater UN deployments to support a crumbling and badly demoralized African Union force appear bleak...
...Time will tell whether China will bend to international advocacy pressure and use its unrivaled leverage with Khartoum to secure access for desperately needed UN support personnel...
...This morally cowardly turn of phrase has freed the Europeans from considering themselves contractually bound by Article 1 of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide...
...Both the UN World Summit "Outcome Document" (September 2005) and UN Security Council Resolution 1674 (unanimously adopted in April 2006) commit UN member states to protect civilians when "national authorities [are] manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity" Nothing could be more "manifest" than Khartoum's "failure to protect" Darfuris, and yet these endangered populations are at great risk...
...While one may sympathize with General Aprezi, he seems not to recognize how fully it serves Khartoum's genocidal interests to have the AU mistrusted by the rebels...
...For nothing could be clearer than the desire by Beijing to take what it believes is its rightful place of leadership on the world stage and to use the Olympics as a postTiananmen Square "coming out party" for "modern China...
...A more perverse state of international affairs can hardly be imagined, and here we come to the heart of the paralysis that defines international response to the Darfur catastrophe...
...The regime has repeatedly bombed sites where rebel commanders have sought to meet to hammer out differences...
...The 10 n DISSENT / Summer 2007 agreement reached was signed only by the Islamist regime in Khartoum and the most ruthless of the rebel leaders, Minni Minawi—a Zaghawa (a tribe that makes up less than 10 percent of Darfur's population), ethnically parochial and savagely brutal in the field and in dealing with anyone he mistrusts...
...In every document that Khartoum agrees to or refers to, "Darfur Peace Agreement" is the most common point of reference...
...By the end of this year's "hunger gap"— the period between spring planting and fall harvest—the total number of conflict-affected will likely reach five million, twice the number that defined the crisis and mortality threat Egeland confronted two and a half years ago...
...ERIC REEVES is a professor at Smith College and has written extensively on Sudan...
...Even so, there are clear signs of stress as pressure mounts in various advocacy quarters...
...No doubt the Chinese were aware that there would be efforts to crash this party—by advocates for a Free Tibet, for an end to gross domestic human rights abuses in China, for environmental responsibility, and for fair labor practices...
...Oxfam and Action contre la Faim have still not returned to what is the world's largest concentration of displaced persons— tenuous "home" to approximately 125,000 acutely vulnerable civilians...
...Acquiescing in Khartoum's refusal to cooperate in creating a meaningful UN security force in Darfur, Konare urged international officials to focus instead on Khartoum's token concessions on UN assistance rather than acknowledging the abysmal failure of the world community to provide meaningful protection on the ground...
...Minawi's legacy in the field is a rebel faction (usually distinguished as "Sudan Liberation Army/Minni Minaw," or SLA/MM) that has fractured internally and whose commanders have either joined Khartoum's forces or other rebel factions or have become warlords and bandits on their own, especially in South Darfur, home to half the population of the province...
...The Parliament of the European Union voted 566 to 6 in September 2004 to declare that events in Darfur were "tantamount to genocide...
...Rwanda, the most militarily capable country participating in the AU mission, has also threatened to withdraw if much greater financial support is not forthcoming...
...What accounts for the ongoing, indeed apparently endless, international acquiescence...
...This was an unambiguous, robust mandate for civilian and humanitarian protection that also spelled out the role of this force in helping to prevent ethnic violence from spilling further into eastern Chad, as well as the Central African Republic...
...Luke Aprezi had met on Wednesday [December 27, 2006] with rebels, an AU statement said...
...In honoring its dead on April 12, 2007, Senegal warned that it would withdraw its remaining soldiers—among the best within this hopelessly inadequate force unless the African Union were given UN backing in a matter of weeks...
...It tells us much about the UN, the doctrine of a "responsibility to protect," and international political will that the answer lies not in the actions of nations with significant bilateral relations with Beijing but rather in the moral passion of an outraged civil society that refuses to countenance a fifth year of genocide in Darfur...
...These are people the United Nations has assessed as in need of humanitarian assistance because of the conflict...
...Khartoum also cynically insists that the Darfur Peace Agreement be the basis for any talks with nonsignatory rebel groups, knowing full well that this is a diplomatic nonstarter...
...China has decided that it will provide unstinting diplomatic support to Khartoum and has sent signals to assure the regime that there will be no effective UN action...
...Why are there only two hundred UN personnel in Darfur...
...Violence is more chaotic, more unpredictable, and more deeply threatening to humanitarian operations...
...China has for more than a decade been Khartoum's chief supplier of weapons and weapons technology...
...But the Darfur campaign, based in the United States but rapidly internationalizing, has taken China by surprise, and there is considerable evidence of intense official dismay...
...many of these arms have been used against the people of Darfur, as they were used previously against the indigenous populations of the oil regions in southern Sudan...
...In February 2006, George W. Bush spoke of "NATO stewardship" for a security force in Darfur...
...An especially telling but far from unique example was provided by the Associated Press in late POLITICS ABROAD December 2006: Sudanese forces bombed two rebel locations in Darfur just days after the head of the African Union's peacekeeping force visited the area to urge the rebels to join a cease-fire agreement, the AU said yesterday [December 30, 2006...
...The Bush administration, for its part, has postured shamelessly for many months...
...And humanitarian organizations make clear in confidential conversations that because of insecurity they remain poised to withdraw or substantially decrease their operations, leaving millions of human beings without necessary resources...
...Burdened by the debacle in Iraq, the United States has yet to make a commitment of any military resources should a UN mission ever deploy...
...It was a handful of Minawi's most vicious followers who mounted an extremely serious assault on humanitarian workers in the vast Gereida displaced persons camp in a remote region of South Darfur...
...With domestic consumption growing at an annual rate of more than 10 percent, China needs offshore oil production to insulate its economy from petroleum "price shock...
...To be sure, the rebel movements have split along other lines, and there seems little hope that they will present a common negotiating front in any new peace negotiations...
...It is hardly surprising that in the camps for displaced persons and in the Darfuri diaspora, the rejection of the DPA has been virtually unanimous...
...The attack was so brutal (including mock executions of aid personnel) that all humanitarian workers except those of the International Committee of the Red Cross withdrew...
...Bureaucratic obstacles abound, international workers are threatened and abused, while humanitarian supplies are constantly delayed...
...The same is true of the United Kingdom, which has been similarly fulsome in its hand-wringing and empty threats over Darfur...
...IT HAS NOT BEEN lost on Darfur advocacy groups and human rights organizations that China's complicity in the Darfur genocide must be highlighted and that Beijing's hosting of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games provides an extraordinary opportunity for doing so...
...As I write in early May, eight months after passage of Resolution 1706, only about two hundred UN technical personnel have been deployed to Darfur...
...But it is also true that the African Union has highly limited abilities to absorb critical resources efficiently...
...It is certainly true that the UN, Western democracies, as well as the Arab League, Japan, and other powerful Asian countries have been scandalously laggard in funding the AU...
...there is a strong disinclination to accept the help of Western military advisers...
...But nothing was so consequential as the DPA's failure to provide meaningful international guarantors for the exceedingly complex security arrangements—arrangements that Khartoum has consistently and comprehensively flouted from the moment the document was signed...
...At the same time, the threats to humanitarian workers have never been greater, and all the aid organizations—both UN and nongovernmental— are on the verge of withdrawal...
...This was utterly vacuous rhetoric, immediately disowned not only by NATO officials in Brussels but by the Pentagon...
...In an especially telling example, in spring of 2007 Khartoum denied entry for a substantial period of time to a hundred thousand tons of sorghum—enough to provide grain for one million people for half a DISSENT / Summer 2007 n 1 1 POLITICS ABROAD year—declaring that the sorghum (produced in the United States and a staple food in Darfur) had been "genetically modified...
...On Sudan issues, the Arab League functions as little more than an extension office for the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, which has offered unqualified support to Khartoum...
...Moreover, the DPA offered little in the way of national power-sharing or even clear regional autonomy to Darfuris...
...To that group, I don't have any credibility anymore...
...WHAT ACCOUNTS FOR Khartoum's confident defiance of UN Security Council Resolution 1706...
...accounting is opaque...
...AS GENOCIDAL DESTRUCTION in the Darfur region of western Sudan enters its fifth year, we must accept not only the overwhelming disgrace of such prolonged human agony but register important shifts in the nature of the destruction—the appearance of new and different threats to the existence of both Arab and non-Arab populations in Darfur...
...In December 2006, the U.S...
...A Sudanese government aircraft on Friday [December 29, 2006] bombed Anka and Um Rai in North Darfur province where Gen...
...How has Khartoum been able to paralyze the international community in the first clear test of a "responsibility to protect" civilians threatened with genocide, ethnic cleansDISSENT / Summer 2007 n 9 POLITICS ABROAD ing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity...
...When, in December 2004, the number of conflict-affected persons stood at 2.5 million, then-UN undersecretary for humanitarian affairs, Jan Egeland, warned that in the event of humanitarian collapse, as many as a hundred thousand people could die every month...
...Such commentary has come from international actors grasping for some fig leaf to hide the shameful reality: Khartoum has no intention of allowing into Darfur significant UN peace support personnel...
...director Steven Spielberg has come under increasing pressure to reverse his ill-considered decision to play a Leni Riefenstahl role in the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics...
...There are many answers to these questions...
...Genocide is evolving in Darfur, mutating, and perhaps only now reaching the point of greatest human destruction...
...The DPA provided only a contemptibly small amount of compensation for the millions of people who had lost everything in previous violence and destruction...
...Security on the ground has continued to deteriorate since the signing of the ill-conceived and ill-fated "Darfur Peace Agreement" (Abuja, May 2006...
...As Khartoum well knows, there is no such product as "genetically modified sorghum...
...Although he is now the fourth-ranking member of Sudan's notional "Government of National Unity" he has no power to affect national or even regional policy and has lost the respect of even his own military commanders...
...This has not happened, despite disingenuous commentary about a "heavy UN support package" to the AU...
...The UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, has been widely and justly criticized for foolish temporizing in his dealing with Khartoum...
...Beijing on Guard But the real key to understanding Khartoum's extraordinary obduracy lies in Beijing...
...advocacy groups have devised myriad strategies for highlighting the untenable contradiction at the heart of the "Genocide Olympics," and human rights organizations are pressing hard as well...
...The campaign has taken form not as a boycott, but rather as an effort to create a political platform beyond China's control, one that will serve as a highly visible means of shaming the Chinese as they seek international rehabilitation...
...But Khartoum is clearly determined to forestall such negotiations, even though the Darfur Peace Agreement is a completely dead letter...
...This ensures that there will be no significant change in the grim genocide by attrition...
...Arab tribal groups that had attempted to stay outside the conflict have been drawn into it...
...Almost inconceivably, the number of conflict-affected human beings continues to grow, and now stands at approximately 4.5 million people in Darfur and eastern Chad together...
...The EU has failed to bring any financial or economic sanctions to bear on Khartoum, and many European corporations continue to do business as usual with a regime whose actions are "tantamount to genocide...
...In two extraordinary open letters in January 2007, all fourteen UN organizations and six private organizations made clear that they would be forced to end their work if security deteriorated further...
...The letter from the UN organizations, including the World Food Program, was without precedent, and came more than four months after passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1706, which authorized deployment to Darfur of 22,500 peace support personnel and civilian police under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which confers enforcement authority...
...Most significantly, China has poured huge resources into making itself the dominant player in the two major Sudanese oil exploration and production consortia, and Sudan in turn serves as China's premier source of offshore oil production...
...a terrifyingly large percentage of them are totally dependent on the provision of food, medicine, and resources for clean water...
Vol. 54 • July 2007 • No. 3
