The world is responding with too little, too late to genocide in Darfur
Reeves, Eric
THE INSURGENCY in the Darfur region of western Sudan began virtually unnoticed in February 2003; it has over the past year precipitated the first great episode of genocidal destruction in the...
...Partly as a consequence of this failure to understand the nature of the unfolding catastrophe, the UN's World Food Program and World Health Organization failed to preposition food and medical supplies in Darfur before the onset of the rains...
...In contemplating the costs of a humanitarian intervention, it is important to bear in mind that this is not a natural calamity, nor is it even a case of massive war-related "collateral damage...
...Despite the inconsistent performance of the Bush administration, the fate of Darfur almost certainly rests with its decision, likely in POLITICS ABROAD September, on whether or not to support humanitarian intervention...
...The U.S...
...If the international community cannot find the will to intervene in Darfur, if we acquiesce in what is unmistakably genocide by other means, it can only mean that the real lesson of Rwanda is that there is no one ready to learn the lesson...
...Although hundreds of thousands of lives are already doomed, the decision to intervene can still save hundreds of thousands more...
...Khartoum gave signs of responding to the UN resolution (after an initial rejection by various regime officials...
...Many were able to reach the Chad/Darfur border, and a population of more than two hundred thousand has now been settled in camps inside Chad, under conditions ranging from poor to appalling...
...It's absurd to distinguish between the Sudanese government forces and the militias—they are one," said Peter Takirambudde, executive director of Human Rights Watch's Africa Division...
...Water wells and irrigation systems were blown up or poisoned with corpses (extraordinarily destructive acts in the arid environments of Darfur...
...Nongovernmental organizations in the main (with signal exceptions, such as Doctors Without Borders) were also woefully inadequate in their responses...
...These people have long been politically and economically marginalized, and in recent years the National Islamic Front regime in Khartoum has refused to control increasingly violent Arab militias raiding African villages in Darfur...
...The regime promised the same to Kofi Annan and Colin Powell when they traveled to Darfur in early July...
...Alarm bells were sounding, but without sufficient volume or coordination...
...The task of restoring security to rural Darfur is also immensely important and must figure in any longer term response to the conditions that have precipitated the genocidal violence...
...Khartoum—using its Janjaweed allies—has "deliberately inflicted on [them] conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part...
...Rwanda in slow motion" began to move toward real time...
...Perhaps this more than anything shamed many— though far from all—into realizing the ghastly irony that Rwanda was in fact, on this terrible tenth anniversary, repeating itself...
...But the immediately relevant truth is that without massive humanitarian intervention hundreds of thousands will die...
...One striking exception was the camp at Kailek, near Kass in South Darfur...
...Kofi Annan invoked Darfur during the April 7, 2004, UN commemoration of the events in Rwanda, and even suggested the possibility of a militarily supported humanitarian intervention...
...The primary instrument in this new policy was the Janjaweed, a loosely organized Arab militia force of perhaps twenty thousand men, primarily on horse and camel...
...This immense food-dependent population must be sustained for many months—perhaps more than a year...
...Because Janjaweed-bred insecurity was so great during the spring planting season, no planting occurred, and so there will be no fall harvest...
...ERIC REEVES, a professor at Smith College, has written and testified extensively on Sudan...
...This force was dramatically different in character, military strength, and purpose from previous militia raiders...
...Congress declared Darfur a genocide in a unanimous bipartisan, bicameral resolution (July 23, 2004...
...The best of these are now the sites for rapidly growing malnutrition, as well as breeding grounds for water-borne diseases that peak with the height of the rainy season in August...
...Not directly related to the twenty-one-year conflict in southern Sudan, Darfur's insurgency found early and remarkable success against Khartoum's regular military forces...
...but of course for the vast majority, the villages no longer existed...
...no further such investigations have been permitted by the Khartoum regime...
...DISSENT / Fall 2004 n 23...
...The first public comparison between Rwanda and Darfur was made in March 2004 by Mukesh Kapila, then UN humanitarian coordinator for Sudan...
...critical non-food items (medical supplies, waterpurification equipment, shelter) add substantially to these massive transport and logistical requirements...
...Moreover, aid supplies must be transported not only to Darfur, but within and around the vast province...
...so, too, was any corresponding urging of humanitarian intervention...
...The International Response On July 30, 2004, the UN Security Council passed a "wait and see" resolution giving the Khartoum regime an additional month in which to control its Janjaweed militia allies in the Darfur region...
...When the UN team arrived in Kailek, it found a scene suggestive of the death camps of Eastern Europe during the Second World War...
...Khartoum had promised in an April 2004 cease-fire agreement to do what the resolution requires...
...Men and boys were killed, often in mass executions...
...Moreover, historically these differences had not led to excessive levels of violence, though feuding over land and water had increased significantly since the famine of 1984-1985...
...In addition to Khartoum's deliberate obstruction of aid (which continued in more subtle forms), by July a nightmare of transport difficulties and lack of coordination ensured a growing and ever more deadly mismatch between humanitarian need and capacity...
...The truth is that we have no idea how many have perished, and may never know...
...These two phenomena typically correlate extremely highly in famine conditions...
...New York Times [dateline: Tine, Chad/Darfur], January 17, 2004) • "`1 believe this is an elimination of the black race,' one tribal leader told IRIN" (UN Integrated Regional Information Networks, alGeneina [Darfur], December 11, 2003) • "A refugee farmer from the village of Kishkish reported to Amnesty International delegates the words used by the militia: 'You are Black and you are opponents...
...Competition between Arab and African tribal groups over the scarce primary resources in Darfur—arable land and water—has been exacerbated in recent decades by advancing desertification throughout the Sahel region...
...But this success had ominous consequences, for the regime switched from a military strategy of direct confrontation to a policy of systematically destroying the African tribal groups perceived as the civilian base of support for the insurgents...
...Indeed, it was as though history, having patiently accepted our failure to halt the vast spasm of genocidal violence that killed perhaps eight hundred thousand people in a little over one hundred days in the spring of 1994, decided precisely ten years later to give us another chance to respond—this time it would be to "Rwanda in slow motion...
...Shortly after the investigation, the population of the Kailek camp was "relocated...
...The value of this African Union force will depend primarily on Khartoum's willingness to allow the force to be substantially augmented and deployed with a true peacekeeping mandate...
...Committee for Refugees, Africa Action, Physicians for Human Rights, Justice Africa, as well as numerous religious groups also declared Darfur to be genocide...
...The UN's untenably low body count of "only" ten thousand (March 2004) also worked against a finding of genocide, even as the larger destructive consequences of Khartoum's conPOLITICS ABROAD duct of war should have been clear to all (the UN figure stood unrevised from March to late July 2004...
...A return to the burned-out remains of villages ensured either starvation or violent death at the hands of the still-marauding Janjaweed...
...Khartoum ensured that the Janjaweed were heavily armed and well supplied...
...The land and weather are consuming countless thousands of invisible corpses...
...Ultimately, a political solution must be forged that involves the insurgency groups, whatever government exists in Khartoum, and the leaders of both African and Arab tribal groups...
...He further declared that Darfur was not simply a conflict but an "organized attempt to do away with an [ethnically defined] group of people...
...They found a "strategy of systematic and deliberate starvation," "imprisonment," a "policy of forced starvation," an unreported "child mortality rate of 8-9 per day"—and the continued forcible obstruction of humanitarian aid for this critically distressed, forcibly 20 n DISSENT / Fall 2004 confined population...
...These documents show that militia activity has not just been condoned, it's been specifically supported by Sudan government officials...
...At a time when the population of Darfur is approaching the end of the so-called "hunger gap" (the months between planting and harvest, when food reserves begin to dwindle), there will be no food to harvest and no prospect for the smaller fall/winter plantings...
...Looking for machetes, too many international actors failed to identify the real weapons of this genocide...
...Early Evidence of Genocide By August 2004, many groups and organizations had come to the conclusion that Khartoum's various policies of human destruction in Darfur amounted to genocide...
...the donkeys critical to the sedentary agricultural economies of most of the African villages were killed, and cattle looted and sold to the east...
...The nature of the civilian destruction that began in late spring of 2003 is defined all too well by a key clause from the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which stipulates inter alia that acts "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part" constitute genocide...
...Often under Janjaweed control, and denied all humanitarian access, these camps have rarely been seen...
...Genocide Now How many people have died...
...How many are doomed to die...
...The language of genocide was regarded as sensationalist...
...Indeed, UN organizations moved diffidently and belatedly, and in general failed or refused to see that the enormous humanitarian crisis was being engineered with considerable deliberation and exquisitely destructive calculation...
...With extremely limited access, the UN and other international actors have been unable to conduct appropriate statistical sampling...
...By the late fall of 2003, a great deal of evidence, mainly from refugees pouring across the border into Chad, suggested Khartoum's success in "racializing" the conflict...
...that is, disarm the Janjaweed...
...The task of providing for the more than 2.5 million waraffected persons is daunting...
...The African tribal peoples of Darfur have been brought to this state by genocidal policies of destruction...
...The weakness of the resolution makes clear that there will be no authorization under Chapter VII of the UN Charter for humanitarian intervention...
...Members of the team, all seasoned humanitarian professionals, were profoundly shocked, with Rwanda their only point of reference...
...What has international disregard cost in the way of Darfurian lives...
...The final death toll could be more than twice this...
...Though it is extremely unlikely that American combat troops will be part of such an operation, this is in any case unnecessary...
...The victims are the African tribal groups of Darfur, primarily the Fur, the Massaleit, and the Zaghawa...
...The UN figure jumped, without explanation or context, from ten thousand to thirty thousand or fifty thousand in late July...
...The U.S...
...Food supplies alone for this many people are approximately thirty-five thousand metric tons per month...
...Despite Vraalsen's ominous finding, and though Jan Egeland, UN under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs, spoke of Darfur as "probably the world's worst humaniDISSENT / Fall 2004 n 21 POLITICS ABROAD tarian crisis" in December 2003, this provoked no appropriate response...
...Food production may not begin until the spring of 2005, ensuring a huge fooddependent population for more than a year...
...this was followed shortly by a "genocide emergency" declaration from the U.S...
...If for purposes of mortality calculations, we presume a war-affected population of 2.5 million (the figure stood at 2.2 million in a June 3, 2004, communiqué from the UN, the United States, and the European Union, and has grown steadily), and if we use the scarce data on violent deaths that have come from Doctors Without Borders and the UN special rapporteur for extrajudicial executions, the number of dead surpassed 150,000 in August 2004 and could easily reach more than 300,000 by the end of calendar 2004...
...The U.S...
...it has over the past year precipitated the first great episode of genocidal destruction in the twentyfirst century...
...But Kapila retired from his position, and Annan would remain virtually silent for the next three months...
...A further 150 women and 200 children were abducted...
...A UN DISSENT / Fall 2004 n I 9 POLITICS ABROAD account from February 2004 offers a grim portrait of this ghastly violence: In an attack on 27 February [2004] in the Tawilah area of northern Darfur, 30 villages were burned to the ground, over 200 people killed and over 200 girls and women raped— some by up to 14 assailants and in front of their fathers who were later killed...
...A grimly authoritative epidemiological study from the USAID gives us reliable clues...
...In creating the Janjaweed, Khartoum worked to incite a highly volatile sense of Arab "racial" superiority among those Arab militia groups most susceptible...
...their attacks were coordinated with the regime's regular ground and air forces...
...We have no idea how many such concentration camps exist in Darfur—or how many have finished their brutal task of extermination...
...Holocaust Memorial Museum...
...All that might make possible the resumption of agricultural life was destroyed...
...Khartoum had only to watch the genocide unfold...
...The calendar militates against success, as August and September are months in which seasonal rains make movement difficult in an area without an effective transportation infrastructure...
...Hundreds of interviews conducted by various news and humanitarian agencies confirm the situation as expressed in the excerpts below: • "Tamur Bura Idriss, 31, said he lost his uncle and grandfather...
...As the Janjaweed began systematically destroying hundreds of villages throughout the three states of Darfur province, it became clear that these attacks were genocidal in nature...
...Never, in fifteen years of tyrannical rule, has the National Islamic Front regime abided by a single agreement it has signed—not one, not ever...
...Beginning in July 2004, Khartoum announced a new and intensely destructive policy of forcibly expelling displaced populations from the camps in which they sought refuge...
...But evidence of genocide was readily available long before this, certainly by the end of 2003...
...food- and seedstocks were destroyed, along with agricultural implements and fruit trees...
...In December 2003 the UN Special Envoy for Humanitarian Affairs in Sudan, Tom Eric Vraalsen, declared in a memo to Kapila that Khartoum was "systematically" impeding humanitarian access to areas in Darfur in which African populations were concentrated, and that operations running relatively effectively in September had come virtually to a halt in December...
...A significant African Union force was deployed in August, and troops from Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand have been promised if they are needed...
...The resolution was sponsored by the United States, though trimmed and weakened under pressure from various Security Council members...
...Insecurity makes global assessments and investigations impossible (clearly by design on Khartoum's part...
...but trusting the regime at this point in the humanitarian crisis is a terrible gamble with many hundreds of thousands of lives at stake...
...Indeed, in July 2004, Human Rights Watch obtained confidential Sudanese government documents that directly implicated high-ranking government officials in a policy of support for the Janjaweed...
...The purported goal was to return them to "their" villages...
...women were raped, often brutally gang-raped, and deliberately scarred to make them undesirable as brides or mothers...
...Every day the decision is deferred brings us closer to catastrophic mortality rates...
...But it was Khartoum's failure to respond to the desperate economic needs of the region, the decayed judiciary, the lack of political representation, and in particular the growing impunity on the part of Arab raiders that finally precipitated armed conflict...
...You are like dust, we will crush you.'" (Amnesty International Report on Darfur ["Too Many People Killed for No Reason"], London, February 3, 2004) 0 NE OF KHARTOUM'S most successful early instruments of genocidal destruction was to impede humanitarian access to and operations within Darfur...
...Many fled from their villages, terrified and bereft of all belongings...
...He heard the gunmen say, 'You blacks, we're going to exterminate you.' He fled deeper into Chad that night...
...Because all the people of Darfur are Muslims, and because generations of intermarriage have removed most of the salient racial differences between the "African" and "Arab" tribal groups, it was initially difficult for outsiders to see the importance of ethnic (and in some respects racial) differences between the tribal antagonists...
...Yet another threat to these acutely vulnerable camp populations is forced expulsion...
...What changed in half a year was not so much the quality or character of evidence, but its sheer volume and a sharp uptick in news reporting and photography...
...Projected Mortality Rates in Darfur, Sudan 2004-2005" has since April 2004 been the best basis for tracking both the crude mortality rate 22 n DISSENT / Fall 2004 (measured in deaths per ten thousand of affected populations) and global acute malnutrition (a standard barometer for the nutritional status of populations facing food deficits...
...Agency for International Development (USAID) put out a figure of eighty thousand at the same time, but this latter figure did not take account of data on violent deaths, only death from disease and malnutrition...
...An even greater number have fled to what can only be called concentration camps...
...Even without machetes, the comparison between Rwanda and Darfur became inevitable as the world moved toward April's grim commemoration of the Rwandan killings...
...an uncountable number died in flight, victims of Darfur's forbidding climate and terrain...
...You are our slaves, the Darfur region is in our hands and you are our herders.' They also reportedly said: 'You are slaves, we will kill you...
...But even camps with humanitarian access offer no real refuge, because need has outstripped humanitarian capacity...
...TO BE EFFECTIVE, humanitarian intervention must have all necessary military support...
...In April 2004 a UN inter-agency investigating team followed up on a series of disturbing reports coming from a former governor of Darfur to this writer, and subsequently to a much larger audience...
...The promises were not kept, and no one can realistically expect that additional time will make a difference...
...There are two key tasks: dramatically augmenting transport and logistical capacity (as well as providing security for transport convoys and humanitarian workers) and providing security to the acutely vulnerable civilian populations concentrated in camps, their general environs, and other vulnerable civilian locations throughout Darfur...
...The worst of the camps are little more than extermination sites...
...Though various UN and aid organizations have protested this policy, it serves as Khartoum's next step in the genocide...
...During the closing days of his tenure, Kapila (who was in Rwanda during the genocide) declared that "the only difference between Rwanda and Darfur now is the numbers" of casualties...
...Many more, perhaps more than half a million, are hiding in the vast and remote rural areas, slowly and invisibly starving (Darfur is roughly the size of France, with a population estimated at between six and seven million...
Vol. 51 • September 2004 • No. 4
