The final betrayal of Darfur

...Even So, Is it Genocide...

...Hundreds of thousands of people will die among the almost four million human beings the UN now defines as "conflict-affected" and in need of humanitarian assistance...

...A determination of "genocidal intent" does not logically require "documentary evidence...

...for we may infer intent reliably from actions, when those actions are widespread, systematic, and well reported...

...and 2. HRW reports on the basis of interviews with former government soldiers: "Army commanders directly commanded and coordinated attacks in full knowledge that they were attacking civilians...

...I do not want to see any left after the battle.' He added, 'All men, even civilians that you see, should be killed...

...Skepticism about genocidal intent in the face of such massive evidence as Darfur presents betrays only a peculiar fixation on a particular form of documentary evidence...

...and reports from the immensely courageous indigenous human rights organization SOAT (Sudanese Organization Against Torture...

...if the displaced persons who report widespread destruction, killing, rape, abductions, and torture are overwhelmingly from the African tribal populations of Darfur (as indicated by all human rights groups and humanitarian organizations on the ground...

...Humanitarian aid "hangs by a thread" according to Doctors Without Borders...

...If Khartoum, working in concert with its murderous Janjaweed militia allies, has deliberately destroyed as many as 80 percent to 90 percent of the villages of African tribal groups (the overwhelming consensus within the Darfuri diaspora...

...So the Commission of Inquiry was formed by the UN Secretariat with personnel who ensured that there would be no genocide finding...

...According to men who served under him in several attacks on villages in the Kutum area, he gave clear instructions to attack civilians...

...Juan Mendez, UN SecretaryGeneral Kofi Annan's special adviser on the prevention of genocide (incongruously, a part-time job) is among those who have expressed such an opinion...

...At the same time, Annan knew perfectly well that a finding of genocide by the Commission of Inquiry (COI) would destroy the credibility of the Security Council...

...page 106) Musa Hilal, the paramount leader of the Janjaweed in North Darfur, was deliberately recruited for his brutality by Khartoum (he was in prison for murder at the time of his elevation to his role within the Janjaweed) and continues to receive substantial resources from Khartoum and to enjoy great privileges in Sudan's capital...

...Egeland has pleaded relentlessly, if in vain, for an adequate protection force...

...The debates that have occurred, the reports that have been made, have either been in passing or in association with investigations that were obligatory in any event...

...Some governments and international organizations demur, citing insufficient evidence of "genocidal intent"—the finding of a highly politicized, scandalously conducted, and incompetently reasoned UN Commission of Inquiry (January 2005...

...the chronically belated Darfur Humanitarian Profiles from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs...

...This is not to say that the news media have done their job in Darfur...

...In short, Darfur forces upon us an answer to the question often posed hypothetically about previous genocides of the last hundred years: Would we have intervened to halt the ultimate human crime if we had known of its nature in timely and authoritative fashion...

...The Wadi Saleh massacre had been fully reported in April 2004 by both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International on the basis of interviews with two survivors...

...if the livelihoods of the displaced African tribal populations have been deliberately, comprehensively destroyed (again, reported in scores of investigative documents and assessments...

...But never before have we had a long-running genocide, with all the necessary information, that every day poses the same question: Why will the international "community" not intervene to halt what will continue indefinitely without such intervention...

...For China and Russia would have been no less willing to exercise their veto power in protecting Khartoum after such a finding than they were before...

...Here, evidence includes accounts such as that of a resident of Mukjar: "Ahmed Haroun, the state minister of the interior from Khartoum, exhorted the Janjaweed and army in a speech to 'kill the Fur,' according to a resident of Mukjar who heard the speech...

...These were, of course, African "civilians...

...that is, non-Arab or African tribal groups—and that command-and-control, as well as lines of reporting, are strongly hierarchical, leading directly to senior members of Khartoum's National Islamic Front (and thus revealing of their "intent...

...I have never seen an IRIN dispatch carried in an American newspaper or news magazine...

...Some within the UN, even though they are bound by the constraints of the COI report, have attempted to speak the truth...

...Humanitarian access is even more tenuous in this theater of operations...

...On his astringent reading of the 1948 Genocide Convention, Powell was declaring that the United States had fulfilled its contractual obligation to "prevent genocide" by referring the matter to the UN in an already drafted Security Council resolution—and to a Security Council that the United States well knew was paralyzed on Sudan by virtue of veto threats from China and Russia...

...Massive crimes against humanity war crimes, other violations of international law were all fine, as was the finding of "possible" genocide (conveniently to be determined later)—but not a decisive genocide determination, given the notional UN obligation to "prevent genocide" stipulated in Article 1 of the Genocide Convention...

...But most of what can be known about the character of human suffering and destruction in Darfur—the dynamics within Khartoum's genocidal campaign, the regime's deliberate impeding of humanitarian delivery, the obstruction of African Union forces on the ground, the failure of the Abuja peace agreement, the increasingly large areas inaccessible to all aid assistance, the fracturing of the rebel movements— comes from what must be called "specialist literature...

...That Darfur's genocide has been so conspicuously visible, and has generated so little willingness to undertake international action, makes for its own terrible history lesson—and casts a grim retrospective light on international failures to prevent genocide over the past century...

...Two such examples follow...

...page 27...

...DISSENT / Fall 2006 n 9...

...It is difficult to see any conceptual cleavage between "genocide" and Egeland's periphrasis...

...Our government seems desperate not to be forced to do anything requiring serious diplomatic or political capital, even as it continually (if inconsequentially) utters the word "genocide" whenever the subject of Darfur arises...

...Does the Determination Matter...

...Although these reports frequently generate a brief wire item, they have a limited number of readers...

...Periodically, reports from human rights, humanitarian, and policy organizations bring information to light...

...Most egregiously, the authors badly confused "intent" and "motive" in assessing the issue of "genocidal intent," even as international jurisprudence has consistently found genocide to be a crime of intent, with motives that may vary considerably...

...We can glean partial answers about previous genocides, as Samantha Power has demonstrated in her magisterial study, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide...

...Most of these accounts make brutally clear the ethnic animus in the destruction, as racially charged slurs are vehemently hurled during the assaults...

...For example, as one of the Commission's police interrogation specialists told me in great detail, the forensic specialists who were part 8 n DISSENT / Fall 2006 of the investigating team did no forensic work whatsoever...

...Buried on page 74 of HRW's December 2005 report is the following claim: Whether [National Islamic Front] policy [in Darfur] amounted to genocide remains unclear...

...if all evidence suggests that these actions are systematic, well-planned, and coordinated, then we have overwhelming evidence of the intent to commit acts that "destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such"—the definition provided by the 1948 POLITICS ABROAD UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide...

...THIS IS THE larger political context in which to understand the appointing of a UN Commission of Inquiry in fall 2004...

...Four planting seasons have been missed, and there is no prospect for a fall harvest this year...

...The [UN] International Commission of Inquiry into the crimes in Darfur concluded that there was no government policy of genocide, but that crimes may have been committed by individuals with genocidal intent and that this question should be resolved in a court of law...

...Violence is now so chaotic that Khartoum has only occasionally to mount full-scale military offensives, though it has done so despite the Darfur Peace Agreement negotiated in May in Abuja, Nigeria...

...Because the U.S...

...Nor is Hilal's the only document that speaks directly to the issue of genocidal intent in Darfur...

...if these destructive attacks are very often accompanied by the use of characteristic racial epithets targeting African ethnicity ("Nuba," "zurga," "abid...

...press releases from humanitarian organizations that have endured hijackings, kidnappings, and in far too many cases the killings of workers...

...Its report was the primary basis for Colin Powell's Senate testimony of September 2004, declarDISSENT / Fall 2006 n 7 POLITICS ABROAD ing that "genocide has been committed in Darfur, and that the government of Sudan and the Janjawid bear responsibility" But what might be called the "politics of genocide" were made almost immediately clear by Powell in his astonishing subsequent declaration that, "in fact, no new [U.S.] action is dictated by this determination...

...The evolving features of the National Islamic Front's genocide must be gleaned from fitful UN "sit reps" (situation reports...

...And ethnically targeted violence is increasingly spilling into eastern Chad, as the Janjaweed (and Khartoum's regular forces) have accelerated attacks on the non-Arab populations in this desolate region...

...Over 350,000 people in this part of Chad are refugees, internally displaced, or badly affected by the extending conflict...

...He has declared that without adequate protection, humanitarian operations could be suspended at any time, with catastrophic mortality ensuing immediately...

...Thus despite these important reports, perceptions of the Darfur catastrophe remain imprisoned in sloganeering advocacy, an increasingly irrelevant caricature of the nature of violence on the ground, and disingenuous political posturing by the Bush administration...

...So, please, subscribe now, and while you are at it, subscribe for two years: that is an even bigger help...

...For example, Julie Flint and Alex de Waal, in their superb Darfur: A Short History of a Long War (Zed Books [London & New York], 2005), cite a particularly relevant document: a communiqué to the command of the "Western military area" from [chief Janjaweed leader] Musa Hilal's headquarters in Misteriha [North Darfur], [which] said, citing orders from the president of the Republic [Omar el-Bashir]: "You are informed that directives have been issued . . . to change the demography of Darfur and empty it of African tribes 'through burning, looting, and killing' of intellectuals and youths who may join the rebels in fighting...

...A full body of information is readily acDISSENT / Fall 2006 n 5 POLITICS ABROAD cessible to anyone—including journalists— who wishes to understand more fully what is happening in Darfur...

...This is nonsense...

...The upshot is that human security in Darfur will continue to rest with a badly demoralized African Union mission, whose forces have been repeatedly attacked and are now hunkering down, conducting fewer and fewer patrols, and able to enter fewer and fewer of the many scores of camps for internally displaced persons...

...Human Rights Watch 6 n DISSENT / Fall 2006 offers a dismaying example in an otherwise excellent report on Khartoum's political and military command-and-control hierarchy...

...Sudanese government troops based in Kutum were reportedly led by a Sudanese army commander named Gaddal Fadlallah...

...Inevitably, the COI found "insufficient evidence of genocidal intent," and this phrase has become the thoughtless mantra of those who wish the genocide debate would somehow disappear...

...AS THE FOURTH YEAR of genocidal destruction in the Darfur region of Sudan grinds on, with ever greater numbers of civilians affected by increasingly chaotic conflict, one feature in this obscene episode of mass human destruction is clear: never before in history has genocide been so reliably, fully, and consistently reported as it unfolds...

...And in the rural areas and villages, the insurgency movements have badly fractured and are increasingly fighting one another...

...Post Office, in good social democratic fashion, is the cheapest means of distributing magazines, we make money on subscriptions rather than bookstore or newsstand sales...

...Of course there could be no denying the overwhelming evidence of large-scale ethnically targeted murder or that the Fur, Massalit, Zaghawa, and other African tribal groups suffered massive destruction...

...Exceptions must be made for the compelling op-ed work of Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, who has made a number of trips to Darfur and eastern Chad, and the superbly informed editorial writing on Darfur by the Washington Post...

...We have seen all of this—or at least we might have...

...For instance, before an attack on Enciro (where the SLA was based in 2002 and early 2003), he said, 'On your way, every house and village needs to be burned completely...

...But it is not widely read...

...The spectacle of the Security Council remaining paralyzed, even after receiving a formal report that determined genocide was occurring in Darfur, was simply too much for Annan, and this ensured in advance that no such determination would emerge...

...Additionally, the UN's Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) serves as an intelligent and expansive clearinghouse for UN-garnered intelligence about realities on the ground in Darfur, and issues frequent dispatches...

...I spoke with one of these survivors of the massacre, who assured me he could take UN investigators to the precise location of the executions...

...Certainly all the international actors of consequence know what is occurring in Darfur—and have responded weakly and irresolutely...

...government possesses substantial intelligence on Khartoum's movement of corpses from betterknown sites to remote desert dumping grounds...

...But careful scrutiny of this act of nondetermination suggests that there is nothing behind it except an illogically invoked evidentiary standard...

...We have a great many carefully assembled eyewitness accounts of mass executions of African civilians, clearly murdered because of their ethnicity...

...We have literally hundreds of accounts, authoritatively assembled, of the ethnic targeting and comprehensive destruction of African villages by Khartoum and its Arab militia allies, the Janjaweed...

...It is difficult in midsummer 2006, at the height of the rainy season, to see how this current phase in Darfur's catastrophe will not be the most destructive of human life...

...POLITICS ABROAD BUT NO MEANINGFUL protection is in prospect, as Khartoum adamantly refuses to accept any UN peace support operation, and China and Russia signal that they will veto any UN resolution authorizing deployment without the génocidaires' assent...

...Forensic specialists, deployed to a region replete with mass graves, did no digging, but rather were charged with conducting victim interviews, for which they had no training...

...For its part, the Bush administration commissioned the Coalition for International Justice in July 2004 to conduct an investigation along the Chad/Darfur border...

...You can use your credit card on our Web site (www.dissentmagazine.org ) or on the order form printed in this issue...

...Determining whether there was genocidal intent requires access to government documents and to those in the leadership who planned and coordinated the campaign in Darfur...

...1. The well-established evidence (on the basis of eyewitness reports) of mass executions of hundreds of Fur men and boys in Wadi Saleh, West Darfur (HRW pages 26-33) are a terrible echo of Srebrenica...

...But this is disingenuous...

...There can be no intellectually respectable grounds for agnosticism about whether the human destruction in Darfur is genocide...

...Jan Egeland, head of UN humanitarian operations and the conscience of the UN, has repeatedly declared that human destruction in Darfur is "ethnic cleansing of the worst sort...

...At every stage in the progression of this vast exercise in ethnically targeted human destruction we have had more than enough information available...

...The camps themselves are cauldrons of rage and despair, and increasingly violent, as food, clean water, and primary medical care diminish...

...Indeed, HRW itself provides a great deal of evidence that speaks directly to the issue of genocidal intent...

...The time and energy devoted to debating whether genocide is occurring in Darfur have hardly been incapacitating...

...The conspicuous realities of genocide in Darfur have been discomfiting to those without the political courage to put themselves at odds with the findings of the UN Commission of Inquiry...

...But even this documentary evidence is to be found, despite HRW's tendentious sentences...

...But responsibility for this human carnage was divided, diminished, or concealed by the poorly written and disorganized report and its shabby legal reasoning...

...if more than 90 percent of total casualties, likely in the range of five hundred thousand, are from African tribal populations (strongly suggested by extant data...

...Most outrageously, they did not dig up any of the bodies in the mass graves at Wadi Saleh or elsewhere in Darfur...

...As a direct consequence, what long ago became primarily "genocide by attrition" will continue indefinitely...

...Once a genocide referral had been made by the United States (the first time in history that one sovereign nation had accused another of actively engaging in genocide), an inquiry was obligatory...

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...Moreover, the U.S...

...ERIC REEVES is a professor at Smith College and has written extensively on the Sudan...

...Food reserves have been totally exhausted or destroyed...

...On-the-ground and regional research by the International Crisis Group, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Refugees International, and Physicians for Human Rights has been the basis for critical work going back to February 2003, when major conflict in Darfur broke out and subsequently provoked Khartoum to engage again in its favored domestic security policy: genocidal counter-insurgency warfare (a pattern that goes back to genocide in the Nuba Mountains and southern Sudan's oil regions...

...But in general the response is not to explain grounds for skepticism but rather to dismiss the "genocide debate" as an irrelevant distraction that somehow makes it harder to address the important issues...

...Put DISSENT on Your Credit Card...

...Certainly Egeland understands, as few in the UN appear to, how dangerous it is that the world has responded to genocide in Darfur by deploying essentially unprotected humanitarian workers...

...Indeed, with the exception of a few U.S...

...Here we should recall HRW's own key point that regular army and Janjaweed military attacks were consistently directed "against ethnic groups believed to be linked to the rebels...

...reporters who have dispatched—at times—superb work and the Reuters newswire (in particular the extraordinarily insightful and intrepid Opheera McDoom), coverage has been poor in larger circulation newspapers and worse in news magazines...