Irish Echo Editorial: The Darfur crisis

In the last 16 months, at least 10,000 — and maybe, according to some reports, tens of thousands — of black, non-Arab Muslims have been killed by militias supported by the country’s Arab-dominated government. In what can only be described as a scorched-earth policy, 300 villages have been destroyed and more than 1 million people driven from their homes into remote refugee camps. The U.S. Agency for International Development estimates that 350,000 people may die in the next few months of famine, cholera and other maladies. Human Rights Watch likens the Darfur situation to the early days of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, when 800,000 people died in the first 90 days while the Clinton administration shamefully looked away. Carol Bellamy, head of the United Nations Children’s Fund, warns that the developed world is in a “race against time” to provide food, clean water and medicine to camps that may be as much as a three-week drive from Sudan’s main port.
That such enormous human suffering can go all but unnoticed by the world until recently can be placed squarely at the doorstep of the UN. The Security Council is divided between supporters and detractors of the Sudanese government. International aid organizations, among them Ireland’s Concern Worldwide, have been on the scene from the start, but there’s only so much they can do without the level of pressure that only the world body and the U.S. can apply. Meanwhile, the clock ticks away. If the militias, known as the Janjaweed, are not disbanded soon, the refugees will be unable to return to their homes before the start of the rainy season. With the refugees therefore unable to plant their crops, the crisis would continue, and likely worsen, into 2005.
Last week’s visit to Sudan by Secretary of State Colin Powell and UN Secretary General Koffi Annan at long last set the world’s focus on Sudan. It was a necessary first step. But more needs to be done — and quickly. The Bush administration is circulating a petition in the Security Council calling for an arms embargo on the Janjaweed. And though that too is an important step, it is far from sufficient. Rather, pressure must be applied directly to the Khartoum government, which continues to deny there is a crisis at all. An effective move would be to impose immediate economic sanctions. Powell and Annan should also push for a peace-keeping contingent from the African Union to ensure the delivery of essential supplies and to protect refugees and aid workers from attack.
Many aid groups have gone as far as to call the Darfur tragedy a genocide, and indeed the crisis, which has both security and humanitarian elements, would seem to meet the legal definition of the term as set forth in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. But whether it is in reality a genocide or its hardly less reprehensible cousin, ethnic cleansing, the world should have by now learned the lessons offered by the Balkans and Africa in the 1990s. The only greater crime, considering the current tragic circumstances, would be to do nothing.