News » August 27, 2004

Deathly Silence

The growing genocide in Darfur testifies to the world’s disgrace

By Eric Reeves

Refugees at the Kounougo camp, in eastern Chad. Sudan's army has vowed to fight any foreign forces sent into its western Darfur region and called a U.N. resolution to resolve the crisis "a declaration of war."

Darfur continues its relentless slide into greater catastrophe, with no adequate humanitarian or diplomatic response on the horizon. More than 100,000 displaced Sudanese have died, and another 2,000-plus die daily. By the year’s end, the death toll could stand at more than 400,000. Conditions in the refugee camps in neighboring Chad range from poor to appalling. Many of the displaced persons—perhaps more than 1 million—have no resources whatsoever and are dying agonizing, invisible deaths.

The National Islamic Front regime in Khartoum, which precipitated the genocide in response to the insurgency that began in February 2003, has continued to impede humanitarian relief. They recently grounded U.N. World Food Program planes, even though many children suffering from Severe Acute Malnutrition may perish because of a single day’s delay in food.

More disturbingly, Khartoum has inaugurated a policy of forcible expulsions from camps for the displaced. The African tribal populations that are the targets of Khartoum’s genocide are being forced, typically violently, to return to “their villages.” But the villages of these mainly Fur, Massaleit and Zaghawa peoples largely have been destroyed. As numerous aid workers have observed, forced return is a death sentence: There is no food and people returning are easy prey for the marauding Arab militia forces, known as the Janjaweed.

Janjaweed predations continue unchecked and have reached new levels of cruelty. Numerous reports, including from the small contingent of African Union ceasefire monitors, offer accounts of children being hurled serially into the flames of burning huts and buildings. One African Union report includes a picture of the charred remains of eight schoolgirls who were chained together. And as a new Amnesty International report makes clear, rape continues to be used as a weapon of war.

Khartoum’s culpability in this disaster is beyond dispute. Any lingering doubts about the responsibility of the regime were incinerated in July by a Human Rights Watch report that revealed internal government documents indicating Khartoum both armed and coordinated the Janjaweed.

Despite these grim reports, the only meaningful action—humanitarian intervention accompanied by necessary military protection—looks unlikely. The reality of genocide has not galvanized U.S. action. A bipartisan congressional resolution unanimously declared the killings in Darfur to be genocide and called on the Bush administration to do so as well. The State Department, however, continues to dither, denying that such a declaration would change anything.

This is not true: Article 1 of the 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention obliges contracting parties (including the United States and all members of the U.N. Security Council) to “prevent” genocide. Yet the burdens and consequences of U.S. military intervention in Iraq make U.S. leadership at this critical moment politically unimaginable. An appropriate response from the United Nations is no more promising. An already weak U.N. Security Council Resolution, proposed by the United States, survived only after the removal of a meaningless threat of sanctions against Khartoum. Both veto-wielding China and Pakistan abstained in the Darfur resolution vote, urging that Khartoum be given more time to disarm the Janjaweed. China is motivated in particular by its huge investments in oil development in Sudan.

The Arab League subsequently weighed in with a similar demand, while the Organization of the Islamic Conference fully sided with Khartoum out of religious and anti-Western solidarity. The reality on the ground is that more time simply makes possible greater incorporation of the Janjaweed into Khartoum’s regular military and police. The genocidaires will control the camps. All this occurs on the 10th anniversary of the world’s shameful failure to respond in Rwanda. Peace talks between Khartoum and the insurgency groups may begin in late August. Their chances of yielding meaningful results are negligible, given the appeasing words from Kofi Annan’s new special representative for Sudan, Jan Pronk, who declared in early August that he found security improving in camps for the displaced and a regime responding in good faith—despite massive evidence to the contrary. This is all the encouragement Khartoum needs to remain intransigent.

Annan apparently is convinced that the Security Council will be embarrassingly divided on Darfur and thus ineffectual in its response. He has consequently settled on a course of expediency and is looking for ways to ensure that the August 30 deadline of the Security Council Resolution doesn’t have the force of a true deadline. The resolution “demands” that Khartoum disarm the Janjaweed; but this clear-cut demand has devolved into a series of vague benchmarks that make any assessment of Khartoum’s responsiveness a matter of judgment on the part of Pronk and Annan.

Inspired by this reaction, Khartoum promptly rejected the African Union proposal to put a significant number of peacekeeping forces on the ground in Darfur—one of the only meaningful steps contemplated so far. Obstructing international humanitarian intervention in any form remains Khartoum’s highest priority. That it has so thoroughly succeeded in this strategy is a measure of the world’s disgrace.

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• Reader Comments

  I am going to be sick…it’s hard to have faith in humanity when This kind of Terror goes unchecked…I hope something can be done soon….

  Posted by Dan on Aug 27, 2004 at 1:53 PM

  The situation reminds me of what I have learned only recently about East Timor. Years of brutally were ignored by the media while the US and the world looked the other way.

  Posted by Nora on Aug 27, 2004 at 6:13 PM

  I try not to be heartless, but from long experience I question when I hear the terms genocide/humanitarian crisis.  I’ve been exposed to these tales of “catastrophe” on a regular basis, i.e. Somalia, Ethiopia, Angola, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Chad yet things remain the same.  We all know the informercials of bloated bellies/fly covered children with a Christian droning in the background for dollars.  Most Americans are unaware that 70 percent of Ethiopia citizens live normal middle class lives, work, raise families.  Most hear Ethiopia and think it’s nothing but death.  I’ve read these tragic Africa stories for 4 decades now and wonder if there’s a template with “insert country name” here and “bad guy group here.”  Somalia, how quickly that “humanitarian” crisis faded after the Blackhawk went down.  How quickly Chad and Angola faded after Reagan left office. 

  What generates these “crisis” for most of the African nations, some folks have figured it out, but for the average American, the scenes of famine/disease/slaughter indicate ignorant, backward,  barbaric tribes.  It reinforces their bigotry and nothing more.  The displaced and undesirable in the US are not slaughtered in mass (maybe Waco).  No refugee camps, but inner cities.  If not for handouts in the US, both welfare and wealthyfare and a myriad of government scams for the middle class,  we’d see similar arming and coordination of groups to have their way and will.  We do already to an extent.  Simply in a more hidden, methodical, less ugly, slower civilized manner. 

  Seems to me every nation has its “crisis.”  Whether it’s healthcare, drugs, poverty, crime, economic, food, energy, none seem to ever resolve.  What would the contractors do w/o governments and NGOs continually declaring a crisis somewhere over something that needs money and/or troops thrown at it.

  Posted by elita rr on Aug 27, 2004 at 10:34 PM

  For me all those numbers say nothing because even US can’t have an approximated of victims of Iraq War.
  If you state your numbers from the Holy Media, then ...
  Talk a little bit more of the relation between China Russia and Sudan, or about oil in Sudan, it seems to me the truth lies in all those.

  Posted by Cold Hand on Aug 27, 2004 at 11:35 PM

  Elitta rr:

  Try not to let our culture of denial
  de-sensitize you to the point where the spectacle of people dying from famine and slaughter in Africa has the impact of a bad infomercial.
  If modern wo/man has no heart it is because s/he is no longer capable of perceiving things beyond their monetary implications.

  Many of us no longer are capable of seeing the world
  you just but that like a lot of us, you have trouble seeing the world beyond the scope of dollars and cents.
  Just be grateful that your government you are not living is If you pretend for one second that North America is less violent Slaughter is what North America was founded upon.
  It is just as much
  You say the displaced and undesireable in the US are not slaughtered en mass and that is because the US military is too busy slaughtering the displaced and undesireable in other countries, where they are also pilaging the earth like mad pirates. This is the failure of modern wo/man:
  An ability to see the world in terms of anything moree than dollars and cents.

  Even To try and see everything in economic terms

  Don’t forget that it was Europeans who displayed brought slaves to America in order to exploit their labour and I can understand why this kind of suffering can be difficult to grasp - Africa as a continent has been completely written out of history. No one talks much about the rape of the African continent by western powers and subsequent enslavement of the people that has been going on for centuries. But think of the industrial revolution in America for example: Did you know that it was fuelled by cotton plantations in the southern states? That’s just a small example of how the basis of our comfort and wealth in North America is the exploitation of people in the third world.

  Posted by FENTON on Sep 2, 2004 at 12:27 AM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 8 posts.

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