President's Corner: Diplomatic Gyre over Genocide

My frustration over the slow progress to end the killing in Darfur continues to grow, along with the death toll there.

Two years ago the Bush administration accused the government of Sudan of committing genocide in Darfur, where an estimated 400,000 people have died of war related causes and some 2.2 million have been displaced since early 2003. The Genocide Convention, which the U.S. ratified two decades ago, defines genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."

The causes of the violence in Darfur in west Sudan are a complex mix of economics, ethnicity, politics, climate change and livestock migration patterns, but attacks by government forces and government-backed Arab militias against African villages are a core element of the violence. In a typical attack, government planes bomb or strafe a village, which is then attacked by heavily armed Arab militias, who raze the village, kill men and boys, steal animals, burn crops and rape women and girls (Watch RI’s video on genocide in Darfur).

President Bush, the U.S. Congress and former Secretary of State Colin Powell have all called the attacks genocide because hundreds of African villages have been depopulated in an apparent effort to clear the land for Arab tribes.Nicholas Kristof, the columnist for The New York Times, calls Darfur the first genocide of the 21st Century.

The U.S. has taken little effective action to live up to its obligation to "prevent and punish" genocide. It has helped support a small, often timid African Union force in Darfur. The force, now 7,000 soldiers in an area as large as Texas, was sent to monitor a cease fire that never took place. In addition, Washington has been actively involved in diplomacy to end the war.

The latest round of diplomacy took place last week in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where UN Secretary General Kofi Annan had convened the African Union, the Government of Sudan and members of the UN Security Council. The UN wants to send an international force of more than 20,000 to replace the African Union force in Darfur, but Sudan has refused to authorize a UN force. Instead, Khartoum wants the weak AU force to remain, although it would accept a larger force.

UN officials left the Addis meeting saying that Sudan had agreed to a joint, or hybrid, AU-UN force in Darfur. Jan Egeland, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator, said the Addis meeting produced a "solid agreement that will end the crisis in Darfur and lead to a comprehensive peace," according to a press digest from the US Embassy in Khartoum. Yet the same press summary quotes Sudan's President, Omer Al Bashir, as saying that "Sudan rejects combined forces in Darfur." Sadly, such maddening contradictions often characterize diplomatic efforts to bring peace to Darfur.

At a joint presentation today (Nov. 20) in Washington, DC, Andrew Natsios, President Bush's special envoy for Sudan, and Jean-Marie Guehenno, UN Under Secretary General for Peacekeeping, both tried to put a bright face on the Addis meeting, but they conceded that many important details need to be worked out. For example, Khartoum is asserting the right to prescribe the mandate, size, composition and command structure for any new force. If past is prologue, the government of Sudan, which is adept at stalling for time and deflecting international efforts to end the death and displacement in Darfur, could draw out negotiations of each of these points.

But time is running out for the victims in Darfur. Violence has worsened in the last few months, and many humanitarian agencies are contracting their operations or pulling out entirely because working conditions are too unsafe or difficult. Arab militias are now patrolling in some of the huge camps for displaced persons, and fighting and instability are spilling over to Chad and the Central African Republic, thus regionalizing the violence in Darfur.

Despite the commitment of the U.S. and other signatories to the Genocide Convention to "prevent and punish" genocide, the killing continues as diplomats talk. President Bush has already received a million postcards asking him to act more effectively to stop the genocide in Darfur. How many postcards, how many deaths does it take to get his attention?