|
|
 Genocide ... in Sudan ... Darfur
|
The article was published in "In These Times" magazine as a cover story:
Content
Features > May 6, 2004
Genocide in Sudan
The United Nations suppresses its own report on ‘the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis’
By Eric Reeves
Women and children wait at a refugee camp in the Darfur region of Sudan in mid-April.
On the 10th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, another human catastrophe is rapidly accelerating despite full knowledge of the United Nations and Western dem-oc-racies. In April, a U.N. team investigating human rights abuses in the far western Darfur region of Sudan found “disturbing patterns of massive human rights violations in Darfur, many of which may constitute war crimes and/or crimes against humanity.” Based on interviews with refugees along the Chad-Sudan border, the report of this team (along with similar reports from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch) was available during the annual meeting of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in Geneva that recently adjourned. But scandalously, as the commission debated what to do about Sudan and Darfur, the U.N team’s damning report was suppressed.
The circumstances of this suppression are murky. But the end result was that the commission released an innocuous and meaningless statement that failed to condemn the government of Sudan for its role in orchestrating the vast human destruction in Darfur. This continues a pattern of callous failures that have rendered the U.N. Commission on Human Rights hopelessly irrelevant in fulfilling its nominal mandate. But willful ignorance can do nothing to diminish what U.N. aid officials are now describing as “the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis.”
This crisis was precipitated by the outbreak of civil war in Darfur, hostilities entirely separate from Khartoum’s 21-year assault against the African peoples of southern Sudan. The long-marginalized and abused African peoples in Darfur rose up in a rebellion early in 2003 and militarily caught Khartoum off guard. But this only made the eventual military response more brutal and violent. The government of Sudan, dominated by the National Islamic Front, is relentlessly, deliberately destroying the African tribal peoples of the region. Indeed, all evidence suggests that what U.N. and Western diplomats are diffidently calling “ethnic cleansing” in Darfur, an area the size of France, is actually genocide.
Sudan is aided by a large militia force comprising various Arab tribal peoples called the Janjaweed (“warriors on horseback”). The predations of the Khartoum government and its militia allies defy easy description. “The scale of the violence is indescribable. In every village they’re talking about hundreds of people killed,” said Coralie Lechelle, an emergency coordinator with Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) who in April returned after four months in Darfur.
Jan Egeland, U.N. undersecretary for humanitarian affairs, has spoken of “scorched-earth tactics” in Darfur. The results are all too conspicuous, even with very limited humanitarian presence in the region, most notably that of MSF. “You can drive for 100 kilometers and see nobody, no civilian,” Mercedes Tatay, an MSF physician who recently spent a month in Darfur, told reporters. “You pass through large villages, completely burned or still burning, and you see nobody.”
Khartoum’s Janjaweed militia has become more active in the war and is now responsible for the majority of killings, village burnings, rapes, and massive destruction of foodstocks, seeds, agricultural implements, livestock, and critical wells and irrigation systems. The effect on African tribal groups—primarily the Fur, Massaleit and Zaghawa—is massive displacement. The U.N. recently increased its estimate of the number of internally displaced persons to more than 1 million, and the number of refugees in neighboring Chad, which shares a 500-mile border with Darfur, to well over 100,000. Displacement in the harsh physical environment of Darfur, without food, water, transport donkeys or other resources, often is a death sentence.
While the number of casualties can only be guessed at, research from along the Chad-Sudan border suggests the number may be 50,000 or greater—and the numbers could well be more terrifying in the future. The U.S. Agency for International Development recently projected huge increases in both “global acute malnutrition” and “crude mortality rates” (CMR) for the vulnerable population in Darfur, estimated at 1.2 million and growing. The CMR is projected to rise to 20 people per day per 10,000; MSF considers three deaths per day per 10,000 “catastrophic mortality rate.” In short, mass starvation will begin in October or November this year without urgent and large-scale humanitarian assistance, which the Khartoum regime, according to U.N. officials, is “systematically denying.”
The language of the 1948 U.N. Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide speaks of acts “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Though both U.N. and U.S. officials have explicitly made the comparison between Darfur in 2004 and Rwanda in 1994, this terrible anniversary has found few voices willing to say what the language of the Genocide Convention all too clearly specifies.
Systematic killing
The human destruction occurring in Darfur has been deliberate. The U.N. news service reported in March:
In an attack on February 27, 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 further 150 women and 200 children were abducted.
With a complete ban on news reporters, and the systematic denial of humanitarian access, Khartoum largely controls the amount of information that can come out of Darfur. But refugees in Chad, frantic and dangerous telephone calls to the outside world from the larger urban areas of Darfur, and reports from sympathetic Arab Darfurians able to leave the region all suggest an invisible but vast holocaust. Concentration camps, often run by the Janjaweed, are increasingly used as a means of controlling the massive numbers of displaced people. Conditions in the camps are appalling—and deteriorating. Food and water are exceedingly scarce, and disease is rapidly taking its toll in extremely cramped quarters without sanitary facilities.
Overwhelming evidence indicates that the human destruction in Darfur is animated by racial and ethnic hatred. Refugees along the Chad-Sudan border offer the same story: “ ‘You are opponents to the regime, we must crush you,’ ” one victim told Amnesty International, quoting the words of his attacker. “ ‘As you are black, you are like slaves. Then the entire Darfur region will be in the hands of the Arabs. The government is on our side. The government plane is on our side, it gives us ammunition and food.’ ”
Though both African and Arab populations are overwhelmingly Muslim, Khartoum has for military purposes stoked the fires of racial and ethnic hatred, the consequences of which will outlive the war.
Tensions between African and Arab tribal groups are not new to Darfur, in part because of cultural differences, in part because of differences in agricultural practices. The African groups tend to be sedentary farmers; the Arab groups nomadic pastoralists. Still, centuries of cohabitation in the difficult land produced a number of relatively effective conflict-resolution and containment mechanisms. Racial and ethnic differences have been salient but never the source of mass killings.
But in the spring 2003, Khartoum’s regular military forces were regularly defeated by Darfur insurgency groups. In response the regime resorted to the classic counter-insurgency strategy of destroying the African civilian base of military resistance in the region. This has produced another casualty of the war: a total breakdown in traditional conflict-resolution measures. The trust required for such mechanisms to work again likely will not be restored.
The shift in military strategy required that Khartoum recruit the Janjaweed, which number more than 20,000, arm them, and give them free reign to take payment in the form of stolen cattle, food, agricultural land, and the use of rape as a weapon of war. The result has been what the U.N. human rights report described as a “reign of terror.”
Military cooperation between the Janjaweed and Khartoum’s regular military and intelligence forces always has been close. In April, Human Rights Watch reported that this coordination has increased, with Khartoum—possessing the only aerial military in the war—relentlessly bombing villages, wells, markets, even fleeing civilians and refugee camps. Though helicopter gunships and MiG jets have been used, the primary weapon is the Antonov bomber: retrofitted Russian cargo planes that are notoriously inaccurate and carry huge loads of shrapnel-packed barrel-bombs. Antonovs are largely useless for real military purposes but are savagely effective against civilian targets. Barrel bombs have been used for many years by Khartoum in its better-known war against the African peoples of southern Sudan.
A typical assault begins in the early morning with an Antonov attack, followed by a ground assault of Janjaweed forces on horse or camel, often accompanied by Khartoum’s regular military. People are forced to flee, though often the disabled and elderly are unable to escape and are slaughtered. Particular efforts are made to kill boys and young men. Wells are dynamited or poisoned with corpses—an extraordinarily destructive act in this arid region—foodstuffs are burned, cattle looted (thus destroying the “food insurance” of these people), and people tortured, raped and abducted.
As both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have found, another weapon in the war is mass extrajudicial executions. A lone survivor, near death from his gunshot wound, was able to provide Human Rights Watch with the following information:
In a joint operation in the Darfur region of Sudan, government troops working with Arab militias detained 136 African men whom the militias massacred hours later. The 136 men, all members of the Fur ethnic group aged between 20 and 60, were rounded up in early March in two separate sweeps in the Garsila and Mugjir areas in Wadi Saleh. They were then taken in army lorries to nearby valleys where they were made to kneel before being killed with a bullet in the back of the neck.
Amnesty International reported a similar event in which 168 men and boys were executed. And we may be sure that there are countless such mass executions far beyond possible international scrutiny or discovery.
International inaction
To date the response of the international community has been schizophrenic. U.N. officials and others refer to these realities as “ethnic cleansing,” “crimes against humanity” and a “scorched-earth campaign” that has produced “the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis.” And senior U.N. officials have condemned the “systematic” denial of humanitarian access to the areas in which African tribal peoples live.
But with the U.N. Commission on Human Rights having failed to act, it is no surprise that Khartoum has twice denied a U.N. humanitarian assessment team, led by U.N. Undersecretary for Humanitarian Affairs Egeland, access to Darfur. The regime calculates that with an international community that is apparently unconcerned it will pay no price for their atrocities in Darfur. This belief has only been encouraged by the refusal of the U.N. Security Council to take up Darfur in a serious way. European countries seem content merely to have supported the resolution in Geneva that declared: “The [U.N.] Commission [on Human Rights] expresses its solidarity with the Sudan in overcoming the current situation.”
This is no time for inconsequential “solidarity.” The rainy season begins in May and will quickly render many roads impassable. Pre-positioned food, medicine, well-drilling equipment and shelter supplies are totally inadequate. The rains will not only make transport immensely more difficult, but water-borne diseases like cholera will spread rapidly. The U.N. already has reported an outbreak of meningitis “above the epidemic threshold” in a refugee camp in Chad; outbreaks of measles—a potentially fatal disease in weakened populations—also have been reported.
The political reality of the situation dictates that leadership must come from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. But while floating the notion of humanitarian intervention in Darfur on the anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, Annan has yet to make concrete proposals for either the resources or the mandate that would guide an intervention. The U.N.’s failure to act ensures that hundreds of thousands of Darfurians will die in the coming months, as the projected mortality rates climb beyond the “catastrophic” range in June.
Most of those killed will not die of machete wounds but from the consequences of the racial and ethnic animus that is forcibly displacing a vast African population. All signs indicate that in 10 years we will have another grim anniversary.
|
|
 
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Re: Genocide ... in Sudan ... Darfur (Re: hamid hajer)
|
Date: Fri, 14 May 2004 12:53:49 -04
The world should be ready to intervene in Sudan
International Herald Tribune, May 14, 2004
Gareth Evans (BRUSSELS)
The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, has called it "ethnic cleansing." President George W. Bush has condemned the "atrocities, which are displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians." Others are starting to use the word genocide. Whatever you want to call what is going on today in Darfur, in western Sudan, the time for forceful outside intervention is unmistakably approaching.
Since it came to power, the Khartoum regime has undertaken one scorched earth campaign after another in Sudan. In the past year, it has done so against Muslims of African descent in the west of the country, arming and supporting the Arab militias known as Janjaweed, which inflict collective punishment against the civilian populations in Darfur whom the government accuses of supporting a rebellion there ¯ principally the Fur, Zaghawa and Massalit tribes.
Supported by aerial bombing, Janjaweed attacks have led to wholesale destruction of villages, targeted destruction of water reserves and food stores, indiscriminate killings, #####ng, mass rape and huge population displacement. To date, tens of thousands have been killed, and more than one million displaced, many now living in squalid camps where they are dying from disease and malnutrition. According to the U.S. Agency of International Development, even if the war were to stop immediately, as many as 100,000 people will probably die in Darfur in the coming months because of the desperate humanitarian situation. Another 110,000 have fled across the border to Chad.
At the UN commemoration last month of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Kofi Annan rightly highlighted the current situation in Sudan, demanding improved access to those in need of assistance and protection. If humanitarian workers and human rights experts were not given full access to Darfur, he said, the international community had to be prepared to take appropriate action, "which may include military action." One month after that dramatic and forceful statement, Khartoum is still preventing full access. Aid agencies can now reach some of the internally displaced, but that is far from enough. Meanwhile, the Janjaweed assaults continue, and hundreds of thousands of lives remain at risk.
The case for military intervention grows with every passing day. Resorting to collective military action, overruling the basic norm of nonintervention that must continue to govern international relations, is never an easy call. But nor is it easy to justify standing by when action is possible in practice and defensible in principle. The primary responsibility for the protection of a state's own people must lie with the state itself. But where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of nonintervention should lead to a larger principle, that of the international responsibility to protect.
These are the basic principles, now quietly gaining international currency, identified in the report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, of which I was co-chairman in 2001 with Kofi Annan's special adviser on Africa, and the current UN Sudan negotiator, Mohamed Sahnoun. Our report, "The Responsibility to Protect." also spelt out some more specific guidelines for military intervention for humanitarian purposes. There must be serious and irreparable harm to human beings in progress or imminent: either large-scale loss of life because of deliberate state action, inaction or inability to act, or large-scale ''ethnic cleansing'' carried out not only by killing, but forced expulsion, acts of terror or rape. Today's Sudan would pass either of these threshold tests.
Acknowledging, however, that coercive military action should always be an exceptional and extraordinary measure, there are some additional precautionary principles that need to be considered. The motivation must be right, aimed purely at halting the human suffering. The intervention must use the minimum force necessary. It must be guided by clear objectives, and likely to do more good than harm. And it must have a clear mandate from the right authority, always most appropriately the UN Security Council.
For today's Sudan these conditions do not present impossible obstacles. Some important members of the Security Council have been dragging their feet, including Britain and France as well as those more reflexively opposed to intervention, but there is growing international indignation at the atrocities in Darfur and increasing will to take action against Sudan's government. All that said, there is one final condition that must be met before military intervention is justified: the use of force has to be a last resort, with every nonmilitary option for the prevention or peaceful resolution of the crisis explored and found wanting.
The record so far of options falling short of force in Darfur has not been good. Demands from the UN secretary general, the United States and the European Union have fallen on deaf ears in Khartoum. The United States and the EU already have general sanctions in place against the regime, and it is not likely that more of them will provide much more leverage, though they should not be excluded. But targeted sanctions freezing the overseas assets and restricting the travel of key Sudanese leaders may change the calculations of some intransigent Khartoum officials, and raising the prospect of international legal accountability for crimes committed may concentrate minds a little more.
The last best hope, if force is to be avoided, is for the Security Council to take hold of the situation, apply whatever further pressures short of force that can be applied, and spell out unmistakably in a resolution that the option of military force is very much on the table if Khartoum's behavior does not rapidly improve. A resolution should include at least these five points.
First, it must condemn what has been happening: the violations of international humanitarian law in Darfur, particularly the indiscriminate targeting of civilians and the obstruction of humanitarian assistance by the government and its continued support of the Janjaweed paramilitary forces. Second, it must demand that the Sudan government stop the slaughter, with Khartoum disarming the Janjaweed and allowing unhindered access to Darfur by humanitarian agencies and international human rights monitors. The resolution should impose an arms embargo on the warring parties, with enforcement mechanisms. All sides must respect the ''humanitarian'' ceasefire signed 8 April in Chad, but there must also be internationally facilitated political negotiations between government and rebels in Darfur.
Thirdly, the resolution must call for the safe return of displaced persons to their villages of origin, reversing the ethnic cleansing in Darfur. Fourthly, it should authorise a high level team to investigate the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Darfur. Finally, it should warn Khartoum unambiguously.
The UN Secretary General should be asked to provide a further report to the Security Council within three weeks, reviewing Sudan's progress. And it should be made unmistakably clear that - in the event this report indicates a continuing humanitarian crisis in Darfur, ongoing indiscriminate targeting of civilians and obstruction of humanitarian assistance by the government - the Security Council will authorise the application of military force on "responsibility to protect" principles.
Khartoum may be betting that the world is too preoccupied with Iraq to care what happens in Darfur. If Sudan ignores a Security Council resolution, the international community must be ready to show that this is not the case by providing the necessary political will and military resources to hold it comprehensively to account.
[Gareth Evans is president of the International Crisis Group, whose latest report on Darfur is at www.crisisweb.org]
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
hamid hajer
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
بنتيريست