Darfur: Crisis management or genocide prevention?

When the United Nations (UN) Security Council passed a July 30 resolution on Sudan demanding that the Khartoum Government halt killings in Darfur within one month or face economic and diplomatic action, aid agencies slammed the decision as providing more time for killings and rape by militias known as the Janjaweed. Nearly one month later figures indicate that there are currently 2.2 million conflict-affected people in Darfur and Eastern Chad. And as the UN deadline to the Khartoum government rolls to a close on August 30, activity by the Janjaweed is reportedly on the increase in West Darfur.

It now appears unlikely that strong UN action will be taken against Khartoum and that instead support will be given to the African Union’s efforts to solve the crisis. Sudanese government and rebel leaders are currently meeting under AU auspices in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, in an attempt to reach a political settlement and end the violence. The AU already has 80 observers in Darfur, protected by 150 Rwandan troops. However, an AU plan to send nearly 2,000 peacekeepers to monitor the region was rejected on Monday by a senior Sudanese official.

It may be that intervention under the auspices of the AU will be the favoured approach, because broader international action in Darfur through the UN is more complicated than it seems. One reason for this is that although Darfur is a charged topic in the United States ahead of the elections in that country, the most powerful member of the UN Security Council has been stung by its intervention in Iraq. It is unlikely that the US, even driven by the prospects of lucrative oil contracts, would risk an intervention in Sudan while it is embroiled in a disastrous occupation in Iraq. In any case, a “humanitarian intervention” in Sudan led by the US would be farcical while more than 100 000 of their troops are terrorising Iraq.

The US position is further complicated by the contention that the US has only become interested in the Darfur crisis because it threatens a peace deal between the Government of Sudan and the Southern People’s Liberation Army that would have opened up Washington’s access to Sudan’s plentiful oil supplies in the south of the country. Lastly, theories are circulating that the US supports the Darfur rebels against the Khartoum government because it is not sufficiently pro-American. All these factors leave the US hopelessly compromised with regards their credibility in leading an international intervention that is purely aimed at ending the conflict and does not contain insidious connotations related to political and economic ambitions. That this complicates an international response is to say nothing of other factors that might impact on the UN Security Council, such as the largely supportive role that the Arab League has lent Khartoum.

But whatever the UN decision on August 30, criticism remains as to the inadequacy of efforts to date. Part of the reason why it seems like attempts to end the crisis have been half-hearted is that genocide inevitable develops its own myths. The result is that it appears as if a particular situation has spun out of control and is too complicated for immediate action. In this scenario, the various parties are doing all that they can to rescue a seemingly irredeemable situation. But it is important to engage in an unmasking of myths because often they serve to perpetuate genocide.

The first myth to uncover is an obvious one. This is that the increased media attention of the last few months mirrors the timeline of the crisis and that therefore the time for response has been too short to yield results. In fact, the Darfur crisis played itself out throughout last year, so that in October, Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) noted that tens of thousands of people who had fled from Darfur in western Sudan to neighbouring Chad were “invisible” to the humanitarian community, receiving practically no assistance.

The myth that the Darfur conflict is a crisis of the last few months is central to the failure of the international community because it shows that the early warning signs were ignored - or that at the time the conflict did not carry the political relevancy needed for international action. What has been opted for now is a kind of genocide crisis management, with a strong sense that more time is needed and that diplomatic ventures must be allowed to run their course. But both the international community and the Government of Sudan have known about the crisis in Darfur for far longer than it has been in the media spotlight. How much more time exactly would they like? How many more people must die?

This is linked to the idea that genocide somehow ‘just happens’. In reality, genocide has its own social, economic and political aspects. It has been argued that in Africa, the legacy of colonialism, economic problems and inequalities mean that governments or powerful groups can promote differences and conflict as a mechanism of power rather than addressing the root causes of desperation.

Another area that needs to be challenged is that of the “peace process”. There is a sense that once a “peace process” is underway or the perpetrators engaged in diplomacy, then whatever crisis that is underway is about to be solved. But this, as the organisation Genocide Watch points out, often obscures the fact that genocide is not conflict but rather one-sided violence of one group against another. Therefore it is the “genocidal nature of the government in Khartoum” that needs to be confronted. A peace process will not necessary result in a solution. Often, the “peace process” - and this would also apply to other diplomatic efforts - can work to distract attention from genocide or result in the international community being more lenient towards a perpetrating regime.

Often, genocide is characterised as an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dichotomy. In Sudan, it has been argued that what is happening there is a result of a kind of clash of civilisations between ‘Africans’ and ‘Arabs’. But as Alex de Waal has pointed out, this obscures a “complicated reality”. “Darfur's Arabs are black, indigenous, African and Muslim, just like Darfur's non-Arabs, hailing from the Fur, Masalit, Zaghawa and many smaller tribes.”

The ‘African’ versus ‘Arab’ theory may act to obscure the original causes of the conflict such as conflicts over resources, especially water and land. It may also work to obscure the historical causes of conflict, such as the fact that Sudan was a colonial construct arbitrarily created, in which the British entrenched divisions between a wealthy North and the rest of the country. Understanding complicated historical and political factors is important in understanding why the Darfur crisis has developed and is crucial in any solution.

In conclusion, the shameful response of the international community to the Rwandan genocide should have resulted in lessons being learnt on how to deal with similar crisis situations. But not even the obvious reminders presented by the commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the Rwanda genocide in April helped to move the world from genocide crisis management to genocide prevention. That these lessons have not been learnt indicates that those institutions responsible for protecting international human rights standards have not been made accountable for the decisions that they make with regards the lives of those who suffer as a result of inaction, nor have they been able to move towards clear decision-making that is based not on the interests of the powerful but in the interests of ordinary people who suffer most at the hands of violence.

* Patrick Burnett works for Fahamu. Please send comments to

Reference URLs:
http://www.usaid.gov/locations/sub-saharan_africa/sudan/darfur.html

http://www.genocidewatch.org/Never%20Again.htm
http://allafrica.com/stories/200408021131.html
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/comment/0,11538,1285443,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4449674,00.html