Compromising on the fate of Darfur’s civilians
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By Eric Reeves
On June 30th of this month, the current authorization of the
UN/African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) expires; it is not at all
clear that it will be renewed by the Security Council, and if it is,
the Khartoum regime will likely insist upon compromises in the nature
of the force and its mandate. Several well-informed sources indicate
that West Darfur is likely to be a point of compromise, with UNAMID
withdrawing in all meaningful form from the region, leaving only a few
hundred men in uniform. This is not nearly enough to provide security,
escort relief convoys, or even report in a meaningful way on violence
affecting civilians. And if calm relative to Central and North Darfur
now, we only need recall the explosion of militia violence in early
2008 to understand that another such upsurge in military attacks would
be completely beyond UNAMID’s ability to respond.
In short, Darfur seems to have moved from being an international human
rights cause célèbre to an inconvenient, if ghastly reality. How did
this happen?
THAT WAS THEN
There was a time when Darfur, in western Sudan, galvanized an
extraordinary coalition of activists in this country. The National
Islamic Front/National Congress Party regime in Khartoum had begun in
2003 a genocidal counter-insurgency against the region’s African
tribal groups, perceived as the civilian base of support for rebel
groups. So potent was the campaign to halt genocide in Darfur that it
forced its way onto the national agenda. Both houses of Congress—in a
unanimous, bipartisan vote of July 2004—declared that genocide was
occurring in Darfur. Others followed suit, including then-Secretary of
State Colin Powell, testifying to the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee in September 2004. His testimony was based on very
substantial research along the Chad/Darfur border in August 2004.
Human rights groups, genocide scholars, church and synagogue
congregations, and legions of students made this remote and unknown
region, in the very middle of Africa, a cause to be reckoned with.
As a presidential candidate Barack Obama saw the electoral
possibilities of a strong stance on Darfur. He chided the Bus
administration for what he saw as its excessive accommodation of
Khartoum’s ethnically-targeted destruction. He declared fulsomely,
invoking Rwanda and Bosnia, that “the United States has a moral
obligation anytime you see humanitarian catastrophes”:
“When you see a genocide in Rwanda, Bosnia or in Darfur, that is a
stain on all of us, a stain on our souls. We can’t say ‘never again’
and then allow it to happen again, and as a president of the United
States I don’t intend to abandon people or turn a blind eye to
slaughter.” (video clip at |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEd583-fA8M#t=15 )
And early in his presidency Obama again characterized Darfur as the
site of “genocide.” That was then. Seven years later we hear nothing
of consequences from the administration about Darfur.
THIS IS NOW
Largely as a consequence of this loss of focus, today the Darfur
genocide—the first genocide of the 21st century and the longest one in
more than a century—is about to achieve another distinction. It will
be the first genocide in which the victims are abandoned. The UNAMID
force authorized in 2007 is on the verge of being gutted and
ultimately eliminated altogether. In three weeks, unless the UN
Security Council votes to re-authorize the force, it will be obliged
to leave. This fact gives the Khartoum regime what it considers
irresistible leverage in negotiations that are ongoing, with what
still appear to be major disagreements between the UN and African
Union on one side and Khartoum on the other.
The stakes are extraordinarily high. More than 3 million people have
been internally displaced or turned into refugees in eastern Chad;
almost 500,000 were displaced last year alone. Mortality estimates
vary, but we must of necessity speak of several hundred thousands of
deaths—perhaps half a million—from violence and its consequences, and
all indications are that mortality rates are rising along with acute
malnutrition. The victims continue to be overwhelmingly civilians from
the African tribal groups that have been targeted for more than twelve
years.
It seems perverse that génocidaires in Khartoum are being allowed to
decide the fate of their victims in Darfur, but in fact they are
insisting that an "exit strategy"—foolishly agreed to in principle by
the UN Security Council last August—be executed as rapidly as
possible. The force has already been cut by 10,000 and stands at
approximately at 17,000 uniformed personnel. The regime wants another
15,000 gone this year.
Criticism of UNAMID is longstanding; indeed it preceded official
deployment of the civilian-protection mission in January 2008. For the
mission was set up to fail, largely because Khartoum was given
excessive control over the deployment of personnel and equipment. This
led to poor troop quality, with the regime rejecting many highly
qualified peacekeeping contributions (such as a Swedish-Norwegian
engineering battalion). Essential weaponry and aircraft were also
denied. Despite a status-of-forces agreement that was supposed to give
UNAMID unrestricted access, Khartoum has systematically obstructed,
delayed or compromised countless protection and monitoring missions.
As badly as UNAMID has performed, however, it is all that allows
international humanitarian organizations to remain in Darfur. If
UNAMID withdraws, or is hopelessly compromised, these organizations
may well be forced to end their work. To date, some 25 to 30 major
international relief organizations have been expelled by Khartoum or
withdrawn because of insecurity. This has occurred against a backdrop
of extreme malnutrition in many locations, a desperate lack of clean
water and sanitation, and a rapidly collapsing system for providing
primary medical care.
THE MOMENT OF TRUTH
At this very moment decisions are being made that will affect the
lives and security of millions of people in Darfur, and yet we hear
nothing of significance from the Obama administration about the
urgency of preserving key elements of the force. Yes, a facile
international chorus has declared "Darfur won’t be abandoned," but
there are reasons to be skeptical. Leading this chorus is the
expedient Hervé Ladsous, head of UN peacekeeping operations, who not
so long ago argued that a drawdown of UNAMID was justified by improved
security conditions, even as violence has escalated for three years.
Moreover, a brute geopolitical fact defines current planning. UNAMID
must be re-authorized before June 30. But Khartoum has veto-wielding
friends on the Security Council in the form of China and Russia; they
are likely to support the regime even in its most unreasonable
demands. Russia is of particular concern, given President Vladimir
Putin’s general hostility to any Western initiative. In a revealing
show of perverse solidarity, Russia sided with Khartoum in rejecting a
recent report by Human Rights Watch that authoritatively documented
the mass rape last fall of more than 220 girls and women by Khartoum’s
army troops in the town of Tabit. The evidence in the report is so
overwhelming that the Russian denial of its findings suggests an
unwillingness to look at Darfur’s realities except through Khartoum’s
eyes.
Depending on the character of the newly authorized force—assuming one
is authorized at all—humanitarian organizations may be forced to
withdraw from what is already a terribly insecure environment, or at
least parts of Darfur. The epidemic of sexual violence will continue
to accelerate, with the Arab militias most responsible continuing to
operate with total impunity. More than half Darfur’s pre-war
population of 6 million people are in need of assistance, and yet
humanitarian capacity is shrinking. UN agencies such as the World Food
Program cannot function without implementing partners, precisely the
function that has been fulfilled by the organizations contemplating
withdrawal. If they leave, the death toll could be catastrophic.
We need to hear President Obama’s voice now; we need to hear the same
moral passion on which he so effectively traded while campaigning in
2008—seven years ago. This will require foregoing the unseemly,
finally disgraceful trade-off his administration has engaged in with
the Khartoum regime: the U.S. offers the possibility of rapprochement,
including lifting longstanding economic sanctions, in exchange for
receiving putatively valuable counter-terrorism intelligence, and a
possible listening post in Khartoum. The new embassy, costing hundreds
of millions of dollars, has already been built but does not yet house
the listening and intercept equipment that will make it so valuable,
in addition to providing an actual presence in the middle of the
region that seems destined to become the major battleground against
radical Islam. The Obama administration intelligence community lusts
for full access to the embassy.
The value of the counter-terrorism intelligence to date is dubious,
and was challenged vigorously by former Senator Russ Feingold while he
was chairman of the Africa subcommittee of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee and a member of the Senate’s Select Committee on
Intelligence. Perhaps more telling are the leaked minutes of a meeting
of senior military and security officials last August 31st: Defense
Minister Abdel Rahim Mohamed Hussein is recorded as scoffing at what
the U.S. actually gets in the way of intelligence, and the
significance of what is deliberately being withheld about radical
Islamist, terrorists, and the international Islamic movement.
This deal should never have been made (as candidate Obama declared
when chiding the Bush administration) and must surely give way before
moral importance of avoiding a deepening “stain on our souls,” the
inevitable consequence of leaving the people of Darfur completely at
the mercy of Khartoum’s regular and brutal militia forces.
The United States must take the lead and, with Britain and France,
muscle-up politically in the Security Council; otherwise the fate of
Darfur will be dictated by the very men who began the genocide 12
years ago. This would be unprecedented in the grim history of
genocide.
[Eric Reeves is a professor at Smith College and the author of author
of Compromising with Evil: An Archival History of Greater Sudan,
2007-2012.
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