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Darfur
I'm going to leave this one rather open-ended, but it's shameful that a political discussion forum focused on world events includes 12 threads about Iran and not a single one about Darfur. Here's the latest from the UN:
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| SUDAN: Darfur attackers "committed war crimes" Photo: Derk Segaar/IRIN African Union peacekeepers in Darfur NAIROBI, 2 October 2007 (IRIN) - The attackers who killed 10 African Union (AU) peacekeepers in the volatile western Sudan region of Darfur committed a war crime and should be investigated to bring them to book, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said. "Deliberately attacking peacekeepers is a war crime," said Peter Takirambudde, HRW�s Africa director. "The Sudanese government and the rebel groups should cooperate fully with an independent investigation into the dreadful attack in Haskanita." According to aid workers, unidentified men attacked an AU base in Haskanita, North Darfur, killing the men on 29 September. Some policemen were also attacked while other troops were kidnapped. Most were from Nigeria. Describing the attack as heinous, the chairman of the AU commission, Alpha Oumar Konar�, said investigations were under way to identify the attackers. Nigerian army spokesman Colonel Solomon Giwa-Amu said the incident could influence Nigerian policy in Darfur. "It is unfortunate and tragic," he said. "We are investigating the incident. It is not totally unconnected with the failure of the mandate giving for the peacekeeping ... If the UN had come out stronger against the Sudanese government, we wouldn�t have lost as many soldiers at a time. We are not there for war." UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned the attack and called for the perpetrators to be held fully accountable for this outrageous act, describing it as "brutal and shocking". This was the worst single attack that the 7,000-strong force had suffered in the region. Since 2004, the force has lost at least 25 men, with dozens of others injured, according to aid workers. A 26,000-member hybrid UN-AU operation was authorised in July and is to be deployed early in 2008. We have a humanitarian problem that will not go away quickly However, aid workers worry that the worsening situation in Darfur is making it increasingly difficult to adequately respond to the needs of the displaced. "We have a humanitarian problem that will not go away quickly," said John Distefano, ACT-Caritas Darfur emergency response operation director. Among the worries are increasing clashes between and among armed groups representing differing tribal, ethnic and political groupings; banditry and ambushes and increased tensions in camps for the displaced. According to the Church World Service, anxiety within the camps is heightened by long-standing fears of attacks and rape by militias; idleness and boredom; issues of civilian "protection" and when it might become safe for the displaced to return to their home villages. More than 240,000 people have been newly displaced or re-displaced in Darfur during 2007, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, with thousands of people fleeing their homes each week. [This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations] |
http://www.tranceaddict.com/forums/...4&forumid=66&s=
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So two unrelated threads dealing with the same continent are not allowed but 14 threads on Iran are?
I overestimated this forum.
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| Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov ... So two unrelated threads dealing with the same continent are not allowed but 14 threads on Iran are? I overestimated this forum. |
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| Originally posted by Q5echo no no no. i inserted that thread to make my point about Darfur. maybe the reference was a little obscure. we need a Darfur thread. |
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Carter Gets Into Shouting Match in Sudan ALFRED de MONTESQUIOU | October 3, 2007 10:24 AM EST | KABKABIYA, Sudan � Former President Carter got in a shouting match Wednesday with Sudanese security services who blocked him from a town in Darfur where he was trying to meet with refugees from the ongoing conflict. The 83-year-old Carter walked into this highly volatile pro-Sudanese government town to meet refugees too frightened to attend a scheduled meeting at a nearby compound. He was able to make it to a school where he met with one tribal representative and was preparing to go further into the town when Sudanese security officers stopped him. "You can't go. It's not on the program!" the local security chief, who only gave his first name as Omar, yelled at Carter, who is in Darfur as part of a delegation of respected international figures known as "The Elders." "We're going to anyway!" an angry Carter retorted as a crowd began to gather. "You don't have the power to stop me." U.N. officials told Carter's entourage the Sudanese state police could bar his way. Carter's traveling companions, billionaire businessman Richard Branson and Graca Machel, the wife of former South African President Nelson Mandela, tried to ease his frustration and his Secret Service detail urged him to get into a car and leave. "I'll tell President Bashir about this," Carter said, referring to Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. Carter later agreed to a compromise by which tribal representatives would be brought to him at another location later Wednesday. But the refugee delegates never showed up. The Darfur conflict began when ethnic African rebels took up arms against the Arab-dominated Sudanese government, accusing it of decades of neglect. Sudan's government is accused of retaliating by unleashing a militia of Arab nomads known as the janjaweed _ a charge it denies. More than 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million displaced in four years of violence. Most refugees appeared too frightened to speak in Kabkabiya, a North Darfur town that has long been a stronghold of the pro-government janjaweed militia. Branson said some refugees had slipped notes in his pockets. "We (are) still suffering from the war as our girls are being raped on a daily basis," read one of the notes, translated from Arabic, that Branson handed to The Associated Press. The note said that on Sept. 26, a group of girls had been raped, and a refugee had also been shot two days ago. Branson said it had been handed over by an ethnic African man. The visit by "The Elders," which is headed by Nobel Peace laureates Carter and Desmond Tutu, is largely a symbolic move by a host of respected figures to push all sides to make peace. Tutu visited a refugee camp in south Darfur, but the U.N. Mission in Sudan deemed it too dangerous for Carter to make a similar visit. Carter instead flew to a World Food Program compound in Kabkabiya, where he was supposed to meet with refugees, many of whom were chased from their homes by pro-government janjaweed and Sudanese government forces. But as the meeting was set to get under way, none of the nongovernment refugee representatives arrived, and Carter decided to walk out into the town to try to talk with them. "We are in the security field. We're not that flexible," said the security chief, Omar, after the confrontation ended. He said Carter already breached security once by walking to the school and would not be allowed to breach security again. "This illustrates the challenges that communities and humanitarian workers face in Darfur," said Orla Clinton, spokeswoman for the U.N. Mission in Sudan who witnessed the incident. Carter later returned to the North Darfur capital of El Fasher and where he was planning to meet with community representatives later Wednesday. "The Elders" delegation is trying to use their influence at a crucial time _ with peace talks due to start in Libya and the deployment of a 26,000-strong hybrid African Union-U.N. peacekeeping force to begin later this month. Tensions are running high after rebels overran an AU peacekeeping base in northern Darfur over the weekend, killing 10 in the deadliest attack on the beleaguered force since it arrived in the region three years ago. Carter said he felt the trip was proving effective. He said al-Bashir told him this week that Sudan has committed $100 million to a fund for Darfur's reconstruction and another $200 million has been pledged by Chinese diplomatic allies. Carter said the main goal of the three-day visit to Sudan was to seek guarantees for free and fair elections throughout the country in 2009. Observes fear the elections could be postponed and warn this would imperil the fragile peace in southern Sudan and worsen the conflict in Darfur. The 2009 vote would be the first democratic election in Sudan since al-Bashir came to power in a military and Islamist coup in 1989. Carter said al-Bashir vowed to allow the election to take place during a private meeting between the two in Khartoum. "If the CPA fails to fulfill its commitment to free and fair elections and democracy in this country, all other efforts will be futile," Carter said, referring to the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended 21 years of civil war between the government and Christian and animist rebels in the south. |
Angry ex-president (Carter) is prevented from visiting part of Darfur refugee camp
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| KABKABIYA, Sudan - Former President Carter got in a shouting match Wednesday with Sudanese security services who blocked him from a town in Darfur where he was trying to meet with refugees from the ongoing conflict. The 83-year-old Carter walked into this highly volatile pro-Sudanese government town to meet refugees too frightened to attend a scheduled meeting at a nearby compound. He was able to make it to a school where he met with one tribal representative and was preparing to go further into the town when Sudanese security officers stopped him. �You can�t go. It�s not on the program!� the local security chief, who only gave his first name as Omar, yelled at Carter, who is in Darfur as part of a delegation of respected international figures known as �The Elders.� �We�re going to anyway!� an angry Carter retorted as a crowd began to gather. �You don�t have the power to stop me.� Security guards try to ease tension U.N. officials told Carter�s entourage the Sudanese state police could bar his way. Carter�s traveling companions, billionaire businessman Richard Branson and Graca Machel, the wife of former South African President Nelson Mandela, tried to ease his frustration and his Secret Service detail urged him to get into a car and leave. �I�ll tell President Bashir about this,� Carter said, referring to Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. Carter later agreed to a compromise by which tribal representatives would be brought to him at another location later Wednesday. But the refugee delegates never showed up. The Darfur conflict began when ethnic African rebels took up arms against the Arab-dominated Sudanese government, accusing it of decades of neglect. Sudan�s government is accused of retaliating by unleashing a militia of Arab nomads known as the janjaweed�a charge it denies. More than 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million displaced in four years of violence. �Our girls are being raped ...� Most refugees appeared too frightened to speak in Kabkabiya, a North Darfur town that has long been a stronghold of the pro-government janjaweed militia. Branson said some refugees had slipped notes in his pockets. �We (are) still suffering from the war as our girls are being raped on a daily basis,� read one of the notes, translated from Arabic, that Branson handed to The Associated Press. The note said that on Sept. 26, a group of girls had been raped, and a refugee had also been shot two days ago. Branson said it had been handed over by an ethnic African man. The visit by �The Elders,� which is headed by Nobel Peace laureates Carter and Desmond Tutu, is largely a symbolic move by a host of respected figures to push all sides to make peace. Tutu visited a refugee camp in south Darfur, but the U.N. Mission in Sudan deemed it too dangerous for Carter to make a similar visit. �This illustrates the challenges� Carter instead flew to a World Food Program compound in Kabkabiya, where he was supposed to meet with refugees, many of whom were chased from their homes by pro-government janjaweed and Sudanese government forces. But as the meeting was set to get under way, none of the nongovernment refugee representatives arrived, and Carter decided to walk out into the town to try to talk with them. �We are in the security field. We�re not that flexible,� said the security chief, Omar, after the confrontation ended. He said Carter already breached security once by walking to the school and would not be allowed to breach security again. �This illustrates the challenges that communities and humanitarian workers face in Darfur,� said Orla Clinton, spokeswoman for the U.N. Mission in Sudan who witnessed the incident. Carter later returned to the North Darfur capital of El Fasher and where he was planning to meet with community representatives later Wednesday. �The Elders� delegation is trying to use their influence at a crucial time�with peace talks due to start in Libya and the deployment of a 26,000-strong hybrid African Union-U.N. peacekeeping force to begin later this month. Will �all other efforts ... be futile�? Tensions are running high after rebels overran an AU peacekeeping base in northern Darfur over the weekend, killing 10 in the deadliest attack on the beleaguered force since it arrived in the region three years ago. Carter said he felt the trip was proving effective. He said al-Bashir told him this week that Sudan has committed $100 million to a fund for Darfur�s reconstruction and another $200 million has been pledged by Chinese diplomatic allies. Carter said the main goal of the three-day visit to Sudan was to seek guarantees for free and fair elections throughout the country in 2009. Observes fear the elections could be postponed and warn this would imperil the fragile peace in southern Sudan and worsen the conflict in Darfur. The 2009 vote would be the first democratic election in Sudan since al-Bashir came to power in a military and Islamist coup in 1989. Carter said al-Bashir vowed to allow the election to take place during a private meeting between the two in Khartoum. �If the CPA fails to fulfill its commitment to free and fair elections and democracy in this country, all other efforts will be futile,� Carter said, referring to the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended 21 years of civil war between the government and Christian and animist rebels in the south. |
The brutalities in Sudan, and especially Darfur are far worse than the media coverage that is almost absent ... its a total shame. everyday violence kills people in Darfur almost daily. Its a genocide ... very reminiscent of the conflict in south Sudan between Christian and Kartoum-backed Muslim forces to seize control of the oil fields in the south ... that was a tragic conflict that recently re-opened after a fiery helicopter crash of a top leader of the Christian south. But noone give a shit.
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| Originally posted by Magnetonium But noone give a shit. |
No one ever posts in this thread, but just a friendly reminder that there is a genocide going on in the world right now.
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| China and Sudan By Lee Feinstein | bio As the one-year anniversary of the failed Darfur Peace Agreement approaches, a key question is whether China will continue to offer strong support to the government of Sudan, despite its role in the four-year old conflict. Or, will China increase pressure on Khartoum to accept an international peacekeeping force out of concern about damage to its international reputation. A partial answer is that China's policy toward Sudan is driven by more than its growing appetite for oil and natural gas. Beijing also has a stake in positioning itself in Africa and globally as an alternative to western "meddling" on issues of human rights and governance. Beijing is weighing these issues against against concerns about damage to its international position, reputational and otherwise, especially as it prepares to host the Summer Olympics next year, as I outline in the research note, below. China, Sudan, and Darfur The economic, political, and military relationship between China and Sudan is extensive, but not without limits. China is Sudan�s number one consumer of oil and its largest foreign investor. China is an important supplier of arms and equipment to Sudan. China has also been Sudan�s main defender at the United Nations and elsewhere against efforts to apply sanctions against Khartoum for its role in the Darfur conflict. China has also shown that it will apply pressure on Sudan out of concern about damage to its own international standing, particularly as Beijing prepares to host the Summer Olympics in 2008. China�s close relationship with the government of Sudan is part and parcel of Beijing�s overall policy toward Africa, where China has recently emerged as one of the world�s most influential players. China�s involvement in Sudan dates to the early period of its independence in the late 1950s. But China�s fast growing energy needs have since the mid-1990s significantly elevated the importance Beijing attaches to its relations with Khartoum. Africa today supplies more than a quarter of Beijing�s imported oil needs, and Beijing is, along with the United States and France, among Africa�s most important trading partners. The political ties between China and much of Africa have also intensified in recent years, reflecting common interests as developing nations as well as common interest, in certain instances, in opposing interference by the west on human rights and related issues. China explicitly offers diplomatic support, investment, and assistance to Sudan on a principle of �noninterference.� That principle provides a counterweight to international pressure in support of human rights, good governance, and democracy. And, it is the principle on which Beijing bases its relations with Khartoum, despite the Sudanese government�s role in the mass killings and genocide in Darfur. THE ECONOMIC RELATIONSHIP. The basis of China�s interest in Sudan, and Africa more broadly, is principally oil. China became a net importer of oil in 1993, and its consumption has grown exponentially since then. China surpassed Japan as the world�s second largest consumer of oil, after the United States, in 2004. Its oil imports continue to grow. By 2025, it is estimated that China will import as much oil as the United States currently does. Africa holds nine percent of the world�s proven oil reserves, modest compared to reserves in Saudi Arabia and Russia, but important as an alternative source of reserves, nonetheless. Sudan, in particular, provides unique opportunities and advantages for China and others because many western governments and firms have withdrawn from the country for political or security reasons. Sudan is a relatively minor but new and growing source of oil. Sudan now accounts for 0.4 percent of the world�s total oil supply, producing roughly 360,000 barrels per day. It has proven reserves of roughly 560 million barrels. American and Canadian firms withdrew from Sudan in the mid-1990s due to a combination of security and human rights concerns. U.S. regulations, first imposed during the Clinton administration, bar investment in Sudan�s oil sector. China stepped in to fill the vacuum. In 1999, less than 1 percent of Beijing�s total oil imports were from Sudan. Today, China gets 7 percent of its oil imports from Sudan. Roughly two-thirds of Sudan�s oil exports go to China. Oil revenue is a principle source of funding for Sudan�s military operations. As much as 70 percent of Khartoum�s oil revenues goes to military spending, according to a former Sudanese finance minister. Specifically, the state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation is the largest stakeholder in Sudan�s main oil producing consortium, the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company. Since 1996, China has held a forty percent stake in the Nile project, which produces the majority of Sudan�s oil. Malaysia�s Petronas Nasional Berhad and ONGC Videsh Ltd., a unit of India�s Oil & Natural Gas Corporation, are the other major investors. Chinese firms have also participated in numerous other energy related enterprises, including construction of hydropower and electric power. On the strength of its energy investments, Sudan is China�s third largest trading partner in Africa, after Angola and South Africa. It accounts for 13 percent of China�s total trade with Africa. China, in turn, is Sudan's largest trading partner, purchasing roughly two-thirds of Sudan's exports and providing some 20 percent of its imports. China also offers substantial aid and assistance to Sudan. In February 2007, for example, Chinese President Hu Jintao traveled to Sudan to meet with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, as part of a eight-nation trip through Africa. The advance billing for this trip suggested the possibility that the Chinese government would use the visit to press Khartoum strongly to improve the situation in Darfur. The main results, however, appeared to be a new package of economic and other aid. Hu announced new economic agreements, including to write off $80 million of Sudanese debt and to provide an interest-free loan of $13 million for infrastructure projects, including a new presidential palace. China also pledged $5.2 million in humanitarian assistance for Darfur. THE POLITICAL RELATIONSHIP. Although oil and other natural resources are the main attraction for China, Beijing�s political relationship with Sudan is also important. Beijing�s sensitivity about interference in its domestic affairs is well known, and on this point there is some overlapping interest with some African countries. Many African states rallied to Beijing�s defense after western nations criticized and imposed sanctions on China in the wake of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989. More recently, China has been concerned about efforts to redefine the UN Charter�s principle of noninterference into the �domestic jurisdiction� of states. In September 2005, the General Assembly endorsed the �responsibility to protect,� a principle which establishes an international responsibility to take action to prevent or stop �genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.� While China and Sudan joined the General Assembly consensus to endorse this principle, China is concerned about the precedent it sets, and its potential use as a political weapon. Some African states share China�s historical mistrust of western motivations in pursuing a human rights agenda, although the sub-Saharan democracies are strong backers of the responsibility to protect. Beijing sees Sudan and other African states as natural allies in the effort to push back against efforts to condition state sovereignty on the behavior of states. China�s continued support of Sudan also enhances its position in Africa as an alternative source of support for governments that have chafed under western pressure to reform. China is the world�s second largest economy, but is also the world�s largest developing nation. For the purposes of its relations with Africa, China self-identifies as the leader of the developing world, and there is evidence that this resonates with some Africans, who view Beijing as the developing world�s only permanent representative on the UN Security Council. China has also provided much needed economic assistance and peacekeeping support for Africa. At the November 2006 Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, for example, China announced it would cancel the debt of 31 African countries. In recent years, China has abandoned its traditional aversion to participation in UN peacekeeping operations, becoming the largest contributor of troops among the permanent five members of the Security Council. As of today, China has 1,200 troops in three missions in Africa, the world�s thirteenth largest contributor overall. China supported the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in Sudan that ended the 20-year-old civil war between the North and South, and contributes 565 peacekeepers to UNMIS, the UN mission that monitors implementation of the agreement. China pursues its comparative advantage by emphasizing its policy of investment and assistance in Africa with no strings attached, in contrast to the IMF and other international donors, which have conditioned assistance to African governments on economic reforms and transparency. In the extreme cases of Sudan and Zimbabwe, Beijing has been willing not only to deepen economic and diplomatic relations, but also to protect the regimes against international criticism and sanction. THE MILITARY RELATIONSHIP. China maintains a defense relationship with Sudan, despite the UN arms embargo that has been in place for Darfur since 2005. The Security Council imposed an embargo on all nongovernmental forces operating in Darfur in July 2004, and expanded it to include government forces as well in 2005. Sales to Khartoum are still permitted, although a UN panel, which visited Sudan in August 2005 to investigate violations of the embargo, recommended in April 2006 that the Security Council expand the embargo to the entire country. Information about recent Chinese arms sales to Sudan is difficult to discern both because of China�s secrecy and because of the inherent difficulty of tracking the flow of small arms, which are below most international reporting thresholds. The UN Panel of Experts reported spotting Chinese-made military trucks in the Port of Sudan that appeared similar to those used on Sudanese Army bases in Darfur. Non-governmental organizations have reported that small arms used by rebels, janjaweed, and government forces in Darfur are of Chinese origin. There are also reports that Khartoum supplied Chinese-made automatic grenade launchers to the United Front for Democratic Change, a Chadian rebel group that also operates out of bases in Darfur. Russia and France are also suppliers of arms and military equipment to Sudan. In the last six years, Russia reported to the United Nations deliveries of 33 attack helicopters to Khartoum, eight combat aircraft, and 30 armored combat vehicles. (Between 2001 and 2004, France exported over $1 million of mostly small arms, spare parts, and ammunition.) Beijing defends its sales to Khartoum as legal, and says that it requires all of its buyers not to transfer arms to other parties, including guerilla groups, a claim which is difficult to confirm independently. Zhai Jun, China�s Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs, said in March 2007, �With Sudan, we have cooperation in many aspects, including military cooperation. In this, we have nothing to hide.� In early April, China received Sudan�s Joint Chief of Staff. The Chinese Minister of Defense told his Sudanese counterpart that China was �willing to further develop cooperation between the two militaries in every sphere.� CHINA AND DARFUR. China has been the chief impediment to strong Security Council action against the government of Sudan for its role in the mass killings and genocide in Darfur, although it has calibrated its position as international criticism has grown. The Security Council has passed six resolutions on Darfur in the four years since the present conflict began, but has yet to impose economic sanctions or other penalties on the government, although travel and financial sanctions have been imposed on four individuals implicated in war crimes. The Chinese Ambassador to Sudan, Zhang Dong, explained his government�s position in 2007, saying, �China never interferes in Sudan�s internal affairs.� For example, China succeeded in watering down Security Council resolution 1556 (July 30, 2004). That resolution imposed an arms embargo on nongovernmental combatants in Darfur, required Khartoum to allow humanitarian assistance into Darfur, and also required the government of Sudan to disarm the janjaweed. The original draft would have established a committee to monitor Khartoum�s compliance; due to the threat of a Chinese veto, however, the final resolution included no enforcement mechanism. Two months later, China succeeded in weakening an effort to credibly threaten sanctions on Sudan�s petroleum sector and delayed by six months imposition of a ban on offensive military flights, which was imposed by UNSCR 1591 (March 29, 2005). China abstained on a resolution (UNSCR 1593, March 31, 2005) that referred indicted war criminals to the International Criminal Court (as did the United States). The following year, China resisted efforts to sanction Sudanese government officials charged with war crimes, whittling down from seventeen to four the list of those individuals subject to Security Council travel bans and financial sanctions (UNSCR 1672, April 25, 2006). China, backed by Russia, publicly threatened to veto an initial draft of that resolution. In August 2006, China insisted that the Security Council�s resolution authorizing a peacekeeping force for Darfur include the condition that it deploy �with the consent� of the government of Sudan. In a compromise between China and the United States and Britain, the final resolution �invites� but does not require the consent of Khartoum. China and Russia abstained rather than veto the resolution. The impact of China�s successful efforts to block strong action have been significant as they are seen by Khartoum and others as an indication of continuing Security Council division on whether and if so how to pressure the Sudanese government to take action to end the conflict. China has calibrated its position as international opposition has grown. Beijing played a helpful role in gaining Sudanese acceptance on November 16, 2006 of a three-phase plan for deployment of a hybrid African Union/UN peacekeeping force of 22,000 troops. Since then, as Sudan has equivocated on the meaning of a �hybrid� force, China has begun to register its displeasure with Khartoum. During his February trip to Sudan, Hu reportedly spoke privately to Bashir about upholding his commitment to accept a peacekeeping force. In a public statement following the meeting, Hu added to China�s list of guiding principles for resolving the conflict the imperative to �improve the situation in Darfur and living conditions of local people.� After the visit, in February, China�s National Development and Reform Commission announced that Sudan no longer had preferred trade country status, removing certain financial incentives provided to Chinese companies that invest in Sudan. China�s ambassador to the United Nation also publicly expressed disappointment with Khartoum following President Bashir�s March 2007 letter to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon rejecting several aspects of the UN�s hybrid force plan. The degree to which China will push Sudan on Darfur remains an open question. There are strong reasons why China may not pressure Khartoum in a meaningful way. For Beijing, a decision to pressure Sudan would have consequences beyond the bilateral relationship, which is important in its own right. China�s quest for control of and access to natural resources is presently predicated on its ability to negotiate arrangements with governments who promise it exclusivity or preferential treatment. China�s comparative advantage is that it is willing to do business with governments that others spurn, and with no strings attached. A decision to pressure Sudan would erode China�s reputation as a genuine alternative, which could have broader economic consequences in Africa. It would also weaken China�s claim to be a standard bearer against unwanted western meddling, including international criticism of its own human rights practices. On the other hand, China�s relationship with Sudan is worrisome to officials in Beijing, especially as Beijing prepares to host the Summer Olympics in 2008. Beijing�s interest in improving its international standing may shift its position towards more strongly pressuring Khartoum. |
Didn't you hear?, energy is the single greatest commodity of conflict today!! Who cares what some arab malitias are doing out in the deserts of a bare Sahara.. 
?
Yeah I don't think those fools got any oil.
First of all, Sudan has about 560 million barrels of proven reserves, and second of all, it's appalling that both of you are so fucking obsessed with oil that you don't think anything else in the world matters. I didn't realize the PDD was filled with self-obsessed adolescents. I don't think I will be posting here anymore.
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| Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov I don't think I will be posting here anymore. |
On a more serious note. The reason the Bush administration hasn't done anything against Sudan is because it is an ally. Osama bin laden stayed in Sudan for a very long time and the regime's leader knows Osama personally. So no it isn't for oil. It is because the regime know's osama and they have been helping the US government out with Osama.
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| Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov First of all, Sudan has about 560 million barrels of proven reserves, and second of all, it's appalling that both of you are so fucking obsessed with oil that you don't think anything else in the world matters. I didn't realize the PDD was filled with self-obsessed adolescents. I don't think I will be posting here anymore. |
) is because oil is the most important catalyst of conflict right now. Iran has far more oil than Sudan and can affect world crude prices many times over. 
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| Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov First of all, Sudan has about 560 million barrels of proven reserves, and second of all, it's appalling that both of you are so fucking obsessed with oil that you don't think anything else in the world matters. I didn't realize the PDD was filled with self-obsessed adolescents. I don't think I will be posting here anymore. |
Two of the leading Darfur advocates got into a huge fight at the Wilson Center in DC a few weeks ago, and it carried over into print. Quite an interesting read, whether you know much about the Darfur conflict or not.
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| Dueling Over Darfur A human rights activist and an Africa scholar disagree�vehemently�on the best way to help Sudan. An exclusive online forum. Newsweek Web Exclusive Updated: 11:51 AM ET Nov 8, 2007 Have advocacy movements like the Save Darfur Coalition helped or hindered the search for a political solution in Sudan's troubled province? Should the killings there really be classified as genocide, or has the meaning of the term been devalued by activists trying to draw public attention to the conflict? After NEWSWEEK raised some of these questions in a report called "Packaging a Tragedy," two leading Darfur experts, Alex de Waal and John Prendergast, discussed these issues in an online forum for NEWSWEEK. De Waal is program director at the Social Science Research Council, a fellow of the Global Equity Initiative, Harvard University, and a director of Justice Africa. He has written and edited several books on Darfur, including "Famine That Kills: Darfur, Sudan, 1984-1985" and, most recently, " War in Darfur and the Search for Peace . " Prendergast is a co-chair with the Enough Project and serves on the board of the Save Darfur Coalition. He served as an adviser to the White House and the State Department during the Clinton administration and later as a senior adviser to the nonpartisan International Crisis Group. He co-authored the book "Not on Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond," with actor Don Cheadle, and has written seven other books on Africa. ALEX DE WAAL: The point of activism is to make a difference. And the Darfur campaigns have made a difference to U.S. policy�certainly in rhetoric, and significantly in substance. For a start, humanitarian agencies working in Darfur have little difficulty in getting the funds they demand from the U.S. government, and no presidential candidate can outline a position on foreign policy that doesn't have some reference to what he or she proposes to do in Darfur. Without the campaigners there would have been no genocide determination and no referral to the International Criminal Court, and it's unlikely that there would have been an effort to change the African Union force to United Nations peacekeepers. It's certainly true that a lot of what has passed for U.S. Darfur policy in the last three years has been hot air�beginning with Colin Powell's Sept. 9, 2004, determination that genocide had been committed in Darfur (and may be continuing), immediately followed by his assertion that U.S. government policy would not change. But hot air can make a difference too, when we are dealing with a government in Khartoum that has been on the receiving end of U.S. cruise missiles and that fears that the U.S. government will take sides against it in a future war for the secession of southern Sudan. When you are dealing with the U.S., you need to pay attention to what its leaders say. Hot air also makes a difference to inexperienced but heady young rebel leaders who think that if they play their cards right they might just get a NATO military intervention, � la Kosovo, which delivers them from the hands of Khartoum into some form of self-government. Thirteen years ago, in the aftermath of the Rwanda genocide and a lopsided relief response that aided the refugees in (what was then called) Zaire, a group that included much of the genocidal interahamwe militia, and neglected the people threatened by genocide itself, humanitarian agencies went through a painful period of soul-searching. Their first response to their critics (of whom I was one) was something like, "We are not politicians, we are only here to help�and how dare you blame the ambulance crew for car crashes!" But relief workers in the field had long been troubled by the way in which their good intentions were subverted by the realities of horrible wars, in which the material resources provided by aid agencies could turn into an asset that actually worsened conflict and abuse. The principle "do no harm" was adopted to guide humanitarian engagement. The same "do no harm" principle applies to advocacy, too, and I think that what is happening in Sudan today will soon turn into soul-searching by activist organizations. How could they have inadvertently done harm (or failed to do good)? And what should they learn from this experience? Let me pose three questions, as possibilities we shouldn't evade: 1) Could the focus on Darfur mean that the challenges of consolidating the North-South peace have been neglected? Could it mean that the threat of major violence in Kordofan, the region that borders Darfur, has been overlooked? 2) Could the Darfur campaign have driven the Bush administration to adopt hardline rhetoric that made Khartoum less cooperative, while at the same time encouraging the rebels to believe that they could win a military intervention if they held out long enough? Could it in fact have impeded the search for a compromise between government and rebels? 3) Has the stress on genocide�which has continued even after the end of large-scale hostilities in early 2005�misrepresented the situation? Has this meant that we have missed more appropriate actions? Does putting Darfur into the same category as the Holocaust and Rwanda mean that we are obliged to do the same for a whole array of ethnic wars and counterinsurgencies across the world? JOHN PRENDERGAST: Well, at least we agree on your first line: the point of activism is to make a difference. However, we diverge in the starkest of terms on most of your other main points. Let me begin with three general counterpoints: First, your criticism of the advocacy community seems bizarrely misplaced, when it is the policymakers in Washington, Brussels, London, and Beijing who have been primarily responsible for the failure to confront the crime of genocide and the inability to craft relevant solutions to the complicated crisis in Darfur. Activists seek to raise the alarm bell and to shape the policy priorities of their government. We were not running the failed peace process you were a part of in 2006 that led to an escalation of violence, for example. We just want to see solutions. And we recognize that the actor that is primarily responsible for the mayhem in Darfur is the Sudanese regime and its brutal counterinsurgency campaign that has ruthlessly targeted civilian populations and attempted to divide and destroy the rebel movements and the communities that support them. Second, hardline rhetoric is problematic only insofar as it hasn't been backed by credible action. That is not the fault of activists. It represents the failure of will on the part of policymakers in Washington particularly who placed other priorities (reserving assets for Iraq, maintaining access to counterterrorism information from the Khartoum regime, and not wanting to upset China, the principal investor in Sudan's oil sector) over undertaking actions necessary to confront genocidal intent. The Khartoum regime figured out the U.S. Government (USG) was willing to bark but not bite, and knew they could literally get away with mass murder, in the face of the empty Washington rhetoric. Third, I don't think you fully recognize how much activists have indeed made a difference, particularly in the last six months. A divestment movement is growing throughout the U.S. that has led 20 states, numerous universities, and some mutual funds to sell their shares of stock in companies doing business in ways that support genocide. Activist campaigns targeting China's hosting of the "Genocide Olympics" in 2008 have led Beijing to become much more constructive behind the scenes of late. Activists have pressed relentlessly for the deployment of a U.N.-led force to protect civilians in Darfur, and we are almost there. The Bush administration finally decided to take its first bite after all the barking, and imposed further sanctions on the regime a few months ago, signaling that confronting genocide has now taken its rightful place as equal to the other policy imperatives governing relations with Sudan. The list goes on. Frankly, if you removed the advocacy movement from the equation, absolutely nothing would have been done on Sudan. So it's not that activists diverted energies from what otherwise would have been a good approach; rather, we created attention and momentum around a set of issues that would have been ignored, at no cost, otherwise. Now I would like to turn to some of the specific points in your submission, which I have reviewed with my ENOUGH Project colleagues Colin Thomas-Jensen and Julia Spiegel. (You see, we need a battery of people to tally up the differences of view we have with you!!) � Your "Hot Air" paragraph has a number of holes. The USG has often been as vocal in its criticism of the rebels as it has of the government (and often disproportionately harsh on the rebels), so it is very suspect to say that U.S. rhetoric emboldened rebel groups to think that a NATO intervention was imminent. Look also at USG sanctions. The USG has imposed sanctions on the rebels as well as NCP [Sudan's ruling National Congress Party] officials. The hot air is blowing in all directions. "Hot air" without follow-through is what actually emboldens rebels and the NCP alike. As has been the case with the Bush administration's rhetorical advocacy of a no-fly zone, for example, harsh rhetoric without any serious military planning to back it up hands the NCP a propaganda victory. The regime has called the U.S. bluff time and time again, and clearly no one plans to do anything about it. And even with the sanctions, the USG didn't target the key guys responsible for ongoing atrocities, and Washington didn't work aggressively to make them multilateral. That again sends a message to the regime that we're all talk and no walk. � It is worth noting that when renegade rebel�turned�government militia commander Minni Minnawi traveled to the U.S. to visit Bush last year, he met with a number of activist groups�including us�who were harshly critical of the abuses committed by his forces. Activist organizations have not portrayed the rebels as freedom fighters, but rather maintained a justified focus on the primary cause of the crisis: the actions of the regime and the impunity it still enjoys. � Activists had little to do with the genocide declaration in 2004. There was not even what you could call "a campaign" at that time. Actually, the USG sent a team of researchers to Chad, interviewed 1,100 refugees, and based on the patterns of violence they discovered made a determination. Then, the disconnect between word and deed�genocide and "doing all we can"�helped to create the movement. � You write: "When you are dealing with the U.S., you need to pay attention to what its leaders say." Perhaps, but I would argue that a regime as experienced and wily as the one in Khartoum pays a lot more attention to what the USG does, not what it says. You should know this� � You write that the Khartoum regime "fears that the U.S. government will take sides against it in a future war for the secession of southern Sudan". Really? If that were the case, then wouldn't the USG be making much more of an effort to pressure the regime to implement the southern Sudan peace agreement? Or pumping arms into the south? Again, the regime is looking at actions, not words. � In the Rwanda/Zaire paragraph, you are comparing activists calling upon their elected leaders to stop crimes against humanity to relief agencies who were knowingly feeding genocidaires in eastern Congo. That is a grotesque oversimplification�provocative and largely meaningless. You're comparing apples and oranges to make a cute rhetorical point, and it doesn't work. The comparison is at best disingenuous: you cannot say giving aid that gets diverted to genocidaires is analogous to pressuring the USG to take more concerted action in Darfur. Perhaps you're alluding to what you see as activists' oversimplification of the crisis and a focus on Darfur, but I think you would be hard-pressed to explain how that makes activists responsible for bad USG policy or demonstrates that they have done "harm." � You are failing to look at your own actions with a critical eye, as a central participant in crafting the fatally flawed Darfur peace deal in 2006 that led to an intensification of conflict in Darfur. Activists were pushing for a comprehensive peace deal that would address root causes in Darfur, not a half-baked agreement between the regime and the most abusive rebel commander in Darfur who has now become a government militia thanks to your "peace deal." � You write: "Could the focus on Darfur mean that the challenges of consolidating the North-South peace have been neglected?" Again, that suggests that the USG policy is solely dictated by activists, surely not something anyone could argue with a straight face about the Bush administration. Activists have certainly deemphasized the North-South deal, but that doesn't excuse the Bush administration from walking away from one of its only foreign policy successes of the past seven years. And would it have been OK to let Khartoum pursue a policy of mass murder in Darfur just to get the North-South deal implemented? Stove-piped USG policy is the problem, not activism. Why do you consistently let the USG off the hook and blame activists for bad policy? The USG should have had a comprehensive policy to deal with both the North-South deal and Darfur, but instead it has been unable to reconcile the two. Had there been no Darfur movement, it's highly likely that both crises would have been ignored. And right now advocacy groups across the country are taking the lead role in making it clear that the problems in Sudan need to be dealt with holistically, since USG policy still hasn't addressed it that way. � You write: "Could the Darfur campaign have driven the Bush administration to adopt hard-line rhetoric that made Khartoum less cooperative, while at the same time encouraging the rebels to believe that they could win a military intervention if they held out long enough? Could it in fact have impeded the search for a compromise between government and rebels?" What compromise? When has the government of Sudan shown any willingness to compromise when they were not under intense international pressure? At the 2006 peace talks you were part of, the USG put more pressure on the rebels than it did on Khartoum, and ended up with a stillborn agreement. Is this the fault of rebel-coddling activists? � You write: "Has the stress on genocide�which has continued even after the end of large-scale hostilities in early 2005�misrepresented the situation? Has this meant that we have missed more appropriate actions? Does putting Darfur into the same category as the Holocaust and Rwanda mean that we are obliged to do the same for a whole array of ethnic wars and counterinsurgencies across the world?" The answer is no, no and no. Genocidal intent was there in 2003-2004 in Sudan and it is still there today. Without activists pushing on the U.S. to back up the genocide rhetoric with some action, the Khartoum regime would have pursued a scorched-earth policy until many more hundreds of thousand�and perhaps millions�were dead. This is not an "ethnic war," and it is remarkable that you would parrot exactly what the government of Sudan is saying. Also, are Rwanda and the Holocaust the litmus test for genocide? I hadn't realized� You should reread the Genocide Convention. The sincere reading of that document by the preponderance of activists, including this one, leads to a conclusion that the regime in Khartoum is pursuing policies calculated to create conditions that would bring about the destruction, in whole or part, of specific groups of people on the basis of their ethnicity. The names of the groups are the Fur, Zaghawa and Masalit. We should know their stories just as we now know the stories of the Tutsis of Rwanda, or the Jews in Germany. And if there will ever be any meaningful response to these crimes, it will be because of activists saying that as voters we will not tolerate our government standing by in the face of genocide. ALEX DE WAAL: Whoa! I wrote my thoughts in anticipating a constructive debate on how activism could learn the lessons of the successes and failures of the last few years. My three clusters of questions were precisely that�questions, to open debate. You took them as charges�in fact, as personal accusations. Not so! I was hoping for a substantive discussion on how activism by citizens and leadership on moral issues by political figures�congresspeople, aspiring presidential candidates, other public intellectuals�helps shape foreign policy, and how this new wave of international public activism on Africa and human rights can be made more effective. John, your ad hominem attacks are shameful. They display wanton ignorance about the peace process in Abuja and the role I played in it. Have you not read my accounts of what went on there? (Published in the London Review of Books and more recently in "War in Darfur and the Search for Peace.") Are you not aware that I strongly advocated for power-sharing provisions that would have provided parity for the movements and the NCP in Darfur rather than the imbalance that was proposed? Are you ignorant of the fact that after the deal was signed on May 5, with Minni Minawi�a man whom I advocated the U.S. should NOT back�I stayed behind on my own initiative to try to get [rebel leader] Abdel Wahid to continue negotiating with the government and came closer to an agreement than all the assembled diplomats and heads of state on May 4-5? I joined the peace process late, as an adviser. The Sudan government objected to me and I was smuggled in as a personal advisor to the chief mediator, Salim Salim. I didn't dictate that process. My advice was sometimes followed, more often not. I declined the invitation to join the last mediation in Sirte [Libya] because the advice I have been giving was not followed at all. I and others involved have scrutinized and criticized every aspect of the process. Knowing how agonizingly close we came to an agreement in Abuja, and looking at the small things that might have made the difference, I search my memory and conscience every day to examine what I might have done differently. You, however, served in government. You were a senior official on African policy in an administration that fired cruise missiles that destroyed a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum and which endorsed regime change by rebels in both Sudan and Zaire. In the latter case, that regime change happened and ushered in the humanitarian disaster that is the Democratic Republic of Congo today. Do you ever ask yourself what you might have done differently to avert that disaster? Most of your response is an exercise in pyromania of straw men. But although careless with both facts and logic, it deserves a response. Let me start with the first sentence of your second paragraph, in which you unhesitatingly use the word 'genocide,' and your final point about the genocide convention. There is almost six decades of scholarly work on the definition of genocide and almost twenty years of debate among Sudanese activists about whether or not to use the term in Sudan (see my recent article in the Spring 2007 Harvard Human Rights Journal). It's not as straightforward as you imply. If we applied the letter of the convention, any attempt to inflict harm on members of a racial, religious or ethnic group, with the intent to destroy them in whole or in part, would be genocide. That would mean that at least half a dozen episodes in the Sudanese civil war would be genocide, as well as episodes in Ethiopia in the 1980s, Uganda in 1983, Somalia in 1988 and 1992-3 and again in the last few months, numerous episodes in the DRC and various others would all be genocide. It would include most ethnic wars and counterinsurgencies (in passing, your attempt to smear me with endorsing Khartoum's explanations for the Darfur war is a cheap shot�I did not write that Darfur's war was an ethnic war and you know it). Many scholars prefer to use a narrower interpretation of the genocide convention to apply to projects of racial or ethnic annihilation�which Darfur is not. Racist insults by militiamen simply aren't proof of genocidal intent. And in your final sentence you cannot resist the temptation of comparing Darfur's victims to the Rwandese Tutsis and European Jews�rather than (for example) the displaced fleeing the fighting in Mogadishu. There's another problem with your argument. The period of intense conflict in Darfur was from about April 2003 to January 2005. The great majority of massacres were committed between July 2003 and April 2004. Mortality from hunger and disease peaked at the end of 2004 and fell away rapidly after that. By this time a major humanitarian operation had been mounted, the AU had dispatched troops, peace negotiations were all under way, and Darfur had been referred to the International Criminal Court. That's not a bad response, from governments, much of it underway before the grass-roots activist campaign got properly into gear. (See your point 3.) Don't claim the credit for everything�governments aren't always as cynical or apathetic as you imply. After that, the nature of the war has changed. There haven't been big government offensives�for one reason, when they try, the rebels usually shoot them up pretty comprehensively. The main reason for ongoing displacement has been generalized insecurity, much of it banditry and extortion rackets, some of it fighting between militias, as the government-armed tribal militias turn on one another. The rebels have launched quite a lot of the offensives themselves. If you are looking for genocidal intent in the period since early 2005, it's pretty hard to find. It looks to most people on the ground like a thoroughly nasty combination of a rather ineffective counterinsurgency and intertribal fighting (the government's description is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy). The government isn't responsible for most of the divisions among the rebels�they have done a pretty good job of that themselves. Darfur is a pretty sorry mess today. No one should be patting themselves on the back for that. The Darfur Peace Agreement failed. The activist campaign hasn't succeeded either. Did you stop any offensives in the last two years? I rather think that the SLA fighters in north Darfur did that. And be careful about proclaiming that protection is on its way. Expectations are sky high for what U.N. troops will do. When they disappoint, I'm sure you will be the first to criticize. But when you get what you call for, your basis for condemnation begins to get thin. The campaign on China has definitely made a difference. I'm not against activism�quite the contrary. I began my human rights activism in Sudan in 1988 and among other things helped start the land-mines campaign, co-wrote the first big report on Rwanda in 1994, opened up the Nuba Mountains to human rights investigation and humanitarian access in 1995, and campaigned for Sudanese civil society organizations to be involved in the peace process from the late 1990s on. (But I would note that China's first serious change in tack happened a year ago, before the Genocide Olympics campaign.) Each time I have tried an honest assessment of what went right and what didn't. It's precisely because activism can make a difference that we need to be honest with ourselves when we assess what has succeeded, what hasn't, and what has had unanticipated side effects. You need to be a lot more careful in describing what activists and their fellow travelers in Congress and among the Washington political aspirants actually said and wrote, and when. During the months when the Abuja peace process was alive and progressing, there was a deafening silence from the activists about it. During those months the overwhelming emphasis was on U.N. troops. I might call it tunnel vision. In the critical days after the signing of Abuja, when I was one of two mediators to stay behind to narrow the gap between Abdel Wahid al Nur and the government, the chorus of condemnation of Abuja was, to say the least, unhelpful. Your point 7 is shockingly misleading and shows a deep ignorance of what happened in Abuja. Afterward, it's true, you and others neatly reversed direction and began to call for a revamped peace process and began to criticize the rebels. Advocacy, like politics, is all about timing. Sorry, John, you were too late. But my serious point here is about how advocacy does influence both rhetoric and policy (and rhetoric can become policy) and how it changes the structure of incentives of peace processes. Making a peace deal involves making compromises with the enemy. The guarantee of faithful implementation is built into the structure of the deal itself�when you do A, we'll do B. Usually the stronger side is asked to act first�e.g., to withdraw its troops or start disarmament�before the weaker one does. A monitoring team or peacekeeping force is there to help keep it on track. This was the structure for the North-South peace deal, for example. Direct security guarantees, in the form of foreign troops who enforce the deal, are pretty rare�Kosovo is the example that comes to mind. The Darfur Peace Agreement was designed with these types of internal security guarantees�staged reciprocal actions by the parties, with the government acting first�built in. They were tough on the government, and when the final text was presented, all the rebel leaders congratulated the mediators on this chapter and accepted it. It was the government that raised objections. But the activist campaign had raised the promise of a military intervention with direct guarantees, and that was the message that got through. In the final session, Abdel Wahid demanded guarantees like Bosnia�he wanted an intervention before he signed. [U.S.] Deputy Secretary Robert Zoellick wouldn't give him that guarantee. I'm not blaming the activists for the failure of the talks. Most of the blame goes to the intransigent miscalculations of Khartoum's chief negotiator, Majzoub al Khalifa, and much of the balance to the rebels and their poor leadership. The mediators made some bad mistakes too. But the question I want to pose, for our own learning and for future activism, is the following: do we run the danger of encouraging rebels to aim too high in their demands, and risk them rejecting workable deals in favor of unrealizable dreams? That's a serious question that demands a serious debate. You completely mistake the point of my comparison with the aid agencies after the Rwanda genocide. The tragedy of that humanitarian response was that one good intention�feeding the hungry�conflicted with another ethical imperative: preventing and punishing genocide. I for one never accused aid agencies of being deliberately complicit in feeding genocidaires. What I did was to point out the unanticipated and often unacknowledged side effects of what they did, and asked that they examine the context of their actions and their outcomes. That is what I am asking you to do now. As any senior policymaker will tell you, much time and energy on issues like Sudan is driven by the clamor of activists. This relates to point 8. There's no doubt that the activist and congressional focus on Darfur drove�and distorted�U.S. policy priorities. Again, pay attention to my argument. I wouldn't blame aid agencies for the Rwanda genocide and I don't blame activists for the failures of U.S. policy on Sudan. But insofar as you make a difference, however small, you must attend to what that difference might be. There's much more I could write�your scattergun approach leaves almost every sentence up for challenge. JOHN PRENDERGAST: Thankfully, in this duel to the rhetorical death we were only given two bullets. I used up most of my nine lives in the last 25 years living and traveling in war zones, so I wouldn't want to spend any more of them on answering these extraordinary claims. Activists need to know there are solutions out there, and that these solutions can be driven by activists. Some of your writings (and no, I haven't read all of them) tend to blame activists for things getting worse on the ground in Darfur, and for the failure of the Darfur Peace Agreemeent of 2006. At least that is what most activists perceive your intentions to be. And I understand that. It is hard to get published these days on Sudan, so an argument like that is very attractive to editors. The fact that it is not true is irrelevant, it appears. Here's the Africa I know from my 25 years' working on the issues there: Afrca is a continent of extraordinary transformation. It is not a place of gloom and doom, of fatalism and hopelessness. Having seen the extraordinary turnarounds in Mozambique, Rwanda, South Africa, southern Sudan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Burundi and elsewhere, I am an unabashed Afro-optimist. I believe Sudan is at one of its low points, just as these other countries were at various times over the last 25 years. And I believe with a little help, particularly driven by activists, Darfur can turn itself around as well. Any social movement here in the U.S. has to go through growing pains and massive learning curves. There is in formation a growing antigenocide movement in the U.S. today, one that understandably contains many people who are just learning about international relations and what is really going on in places like Sudan, half a world away. Most of them, regrettably, have not yet read your London Review of Books article. So they are learning. I stopped writing for academic journals a few years ago to concentrate on building the capacity of these activists, because I learned when I was working for President Clinton that without a permanent constituency supporting actions against genocide and other mass atrocities, even those people in policymaking positions who wanted to do something were hard-pressed to do so. Though in a perfect world politics wouldn't have to drive policy, in the real world we inhabit political will is the holy grail, and the only way to increase it is through building a movement in an inclusive, bipartisan, encouraging way. Your conclusion that activists didn't drive the U.S. position on the deployment of the African Union force or the U.S. stepping aside to allow the referral of the case of Darfur to the International Criminal Court demonstrates a lack of understanding of how policy gets made here in the U.S. by American constituencies. Here most of the major incremental steps that have been taken by the U.S.�either unilaterally or multilaterally�have come because of this growing movement of activists that hail from all kinds of backgrounds. You seem obsessed with the idea that activists have only been pressing for the deployment of force. Some of the [Save Darfur] ads from 2005 and 2006 certainly focused on that issue, but advocacy in the U.S. has been much more comprehensive than you give it credit for, even though we have not fully succeeded in changing U.S. policy. We have focused on what we call the Three P's of Crisis Response: Peace-making, Protection and Punishment. We believe those three elements are part and parcel of every successful external effort to support an end to conflicts or crises in Africa in recent history. We think that a more effective peace process, a rapid deployment of the UN/AU force with a focus on protecting civilians, and clear penalties for obstructing the first two (peace and protection) would do much to helping to bring an end to the crisis in Darfur. And we believe an equal effort must be made to implement the North-South peace deal, as the fates of Darfur and the South are deeply intertwined. Not every activist understands this, but we all can contribute to educating them to make a difference, a real difference. And you are right, activists are not the most even-handed commentators when it comes to responding to Darfur. However, you interpret that as having taken sides with the rebels. Not so. Activists realize that the responsibility for the vast preponderance of atrocities committed since early 2003 lies at the feet of the ruling party in Khartoum, the NCP. Please understand the difference when you are constructing your critiques of the activists and their efforts. Whatever your intent, those activists that have read anything you have written of late are trying to understand why you are saying that activists are more part of the problem than of the solution. Certainly there is room for improvement in our advocacy efforts. For example, you perpetuate the erroneous notion that activists are advocating for military action against Sudan. That just doesn't square with the reality. Many of the key activist groups have gone through a period of reflection and have issued public statements about the potential for negative consequences outweighing positive results in use-of-force scenarios, such as no-fly zones or targeted airstrikes. There is certainly disagreement out there. But it is simply erroneous for you to assert that activists promote the use of force and that hardens rebel positions. The rebels are a lot smarter than you are giving them credit for. They have their own views and agendas and use others to justify those views. Again, blaming activists or even pointing out their ignorance may sell (a few) magazines, but it isn't an accurate reflection of real cause and effect. A final rejoinder on this contentious issue of genocide. Good people can disagree about the use of this term. For example, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and the International Crisis Group (despite my best efforts when I worked there) all were not prepared to call what was happening in Darfur genocide. It comes down for them�and many legal scholars�to the question of intent. The Convention says the perpetrator of genocide must INTEND to destroy, in whole or in part, specific groups of people. I happen to believe that the government of Sudan indeed had the intent to in part destroy the Fur, Zaghawa and Massalit ethnic groups to punish them for supporting the Darfur insurgency, to cut the umbilical cord between rebels and their supporters, and to send a message to all would-be rebels throughout Sudan that this would be your fate if you rebelled. Others disagree, saying it was a by-product of a disproportionate counterinsurgency strategy. On this I believe we agree. Now where you and I diverge is on the last couple years. The war changed, yes, precisely as you say it has. But it changed BECAUSE of the ruling party's genocidal counterinsurgency strategy, which aimed to divide and destroy Darfur, and throw it into the very chaos it suffers from today. You describe it as an "ineffective counterinsurgency strategy." I couldn't disagree more strongly. This has been a textbook counterinsurgency operation, which has turned the Darfur conflict in on itself, leaving the clear lines of regime culpability much more murky, and leaving analysts like you to carry the government's argument that it is anarchy, not genocide. Mission accomplished. Darfur is witnessing the echoes of genocide. I believe one of the best chances we have of reversing the crisis is if well-infomed, united activists in the U.S. and abroad work diligently for governments around the world to step up their efforts to promote peace, protect the people, and punish the perpetrators. In fact, working in partnership with Darfurians, I believe it is the only chance Darfur has. |
One of the largest Fur rebel groups is calling China out on complicity for the genocide:
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| Darfur rebels spurn Chinese force Rebels in Darfur have demanded that peacekeepers from China pull out of the Sudanese region just hours after the arrival of 135 Chinese engineers. The army engineers arrived on Saturday to prepare for a joint UN and African Union peacekeeping force of 26,000. The key Justice and Equality Movement (Jem) rebel group accuses China of being complicit in the Darfur conflict. Last month the group attacked a Chinese-controlled oilfield, kidnapping several workers. The Jem says it wants China to withdraw its support for the Sudanese government. They say that oil sold to the Chinese is being used to fund government operations in Darfur. Rebels would not allow the Chinese into areas controlled by their forces, Jem leader Khalil Ibrahim told the news agency Reuters following the arrival of the engineers. 'Oil for blood' "We oppose them coming because China is not interested in human rights. It is just interested in Sudan's resources," he said. "We are calling on them to quit Sudan, especially the petroleum areas." Mr Ibrahim did not say whether he would target the Chinese engineers. "I am not saying I will attack them. I will not say I will not attack them," he said. "What I am saying is that they are taking our oil for blood." The Chinese engineers are tasked with building roads and bridges and dig wells ahead of the deployment of the joint peacekeeping force planned for January. The rebels have said they would not object to peacekeepers from any country other than China. But on Friday, Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir said his country would only accept non-African troops from Pakistan or China. A month ago the Jem attacked Sudan's Defra oilfield in the Kordofan region, run by a Chinese-controlled consortium, the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company. Jem said at the time that the Chinese company had one week to leave Sudan. An estimated 200,000 people have died during four-and-a-half years of fighting in Darfur, with a further two million people displaced |
A new report released by the International Crisis Group says that there may be a new front opening up in the Darfur conflict. More and more of the fighting is between rival Arab groups, and is no longer explicitly targeted against black African populations (perhaps because there are so few of them left?)
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| The Darfur conflict has changed radically in the past year and not for the better. While there are many fewer deaths than during the high period of fighting in 2003-2004, it has mutated, the parties have splintered, and the confrontations have multiplied. Violence is again increasing, access for humanitarian agencies is decreasing, international peacekeeping is not yet effective and a political settlement remains far off. The strategy the African Union (AU)/UN mediation has been following cannot cope with this new reality and needs to be revised. After a highly publicised opening ceremony in Sirte, Libya, on 27 October 2007, the new peace talks have been put on hold. The mediation should use this opportunity to reformulate the process, broadening participation and addressing all the conflict�s root causes. The May 2006 Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) is a failure, too limited in scope and signatories. Those who signed � the government and a few rebel factions � have hurt the peace process. The ruling party in Khartoum, the National Congress Party (NCP), is pursuing destructive policies in Darfur, while at the same time resisting key provisions in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended the North-South war, thus triggering a crisis in that process. They are meant to ensure its survival in 2009 elections, not end the conflict, and they are jeopardising Sudan�s peacemaking architecture. The NCP wants Darfur in chaos to limit the room for an opposition to emerge, while resettling key allies on cleared land and defying Security Council resolutions by integrating its Janjaweed irregulars into official security structures instead of disarming them. Rebel DPA signatories, particularly the Sudan Liberation Army faction of Minni Minawi (SLA/MM), have been responsible for attacks on civilians, humanitarians, the AU mission (AMIS) and some of the violence in the internally displaced person (IDP) camps. Their leaders have been given government jobs and land and, as ardent supporters of the status quo and without a clearly defined role in the new negotiations, are potential spoilers. Rebel movements that did not sign have further splintered and only just begun tentative steps toward reunifying their ranks. Many have boycotted the talks and increased military action. As they divide along tribal lines, their messages become more fragmented and less representative of constituencies they claim to speak for. The IDP camps are increasingly violent, with residents manipulated by all sides while Khartoum also tries to force them to return to unsafe areas. Inter-Arab dissension has added new volatility to the situation on the ground. Some tribes are trying to solidify land claims before the UN/AU hybrid peacekeeping operation in Darfur (UNAMID) arrives. This has led to fighting with other Arab tribes, which have realised the NCP is not a reliable guarantor of their long-term interests and have started to take protection into their own hands. There is now a high risk of an Arab insurgency, as well as potential for alliances with the predominantly non-Arab rebel groups. A spillover of the conflict into Kordofan has also started. The new realities emphasise the necessity of broadening participation in the peace talks to include the full range of actors and constituencies involved in the conflict, including its primary victims, such as women, but also Arab tribes. Incorporating broader and more representative voices can help remedy the uneven weight the process now gives the NCP and rebel factions. Core issues that drive the conflict, among them land tenure and use, including grazing rights, and the role and reform of local government and administrative structures, were not addressed in the DPA but left to the Darfur-Darfur Dialogue and Consultation process that was supposed to follow the negotiations. They need to be on the agenda of the new negotiations if an eventual agreement is to gain the wide support the DPA has lacked. UNAMID is unlikely to be fully operational until well into 2008, so it is important to complete the delivery of promised aid packages to AMIS quickly so that it can resume more active peacekeeping. When it is on the ground, UNAMID must build upon lessons learned from its predecessor, including to be more pro-active in protecting civilians and responding to ceasefire violations. Its leadership should also engage actively in the peace talks so as to ensure coherence between what is agreed and its capabilities. The international community must give it more support than it did AMIS, including strong responses, with sanctions as necessary, to further non-compliance by any party, as well as to actions that obstruct the peace process or violate international humanitarian law. |
The conflict in Darfur has withdrawn from the public eye somewhat, but it rages on. With the increase in factionalization of the conflict there doesn't seem to be any real hope of a feasible agreement these days. Talks broke down in Libya recently, largely a part of their not incorporating all the sides in the discussion. What began as a conflict between the Justice and Equality Movement for Darfur (JEM) and Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA) allied against the government quickly became muddied by the involvement of Arab tribes on behalf of the government... however, even within the Janjaweed militias there is some fragmentation. There are rumors of a schism on both sides that has brought the Baghara Arabs together with elements of the SLA in opposition to the government - the Baghara is one of the largest groups composing the Janjaweed, and is positioned in closest proximity to the oil fields in south Kordofan. However... they're also notorious slave traders, so it remains unclear what's going on at the moment.
But there has been fighting between the SLA and other black African groups, as well as between Arabs. The government seems to be losing control, but it's unclear what their objectives are anyhow. Chaos could be precisely what they hoped to create.
In addition, reports of Janjaweed militias moving south of Darfur toward the Dinka and Nuer villages of the south are starting to become more frequent as the 2009 deadline for a vote on secession looms. A lot of people are worried that the government will seek to expand the conflict in Darfur to incorporate parts of the South in an effort to undermine the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that was brokered in 2004 and basically promised independence to the South.
In any case, I stumbled upon this article today and thought it was a good read that highlighted the complexity of the situation as opposed to the understanding that most Americans seem to have of it.
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| June 04, 2007 Sudan5 Mahmood Mamdani on Darfur: �The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency� As President Bush orders news sanctions to be placed on the Sudanese government, Columbia Professor Mahmood Mamdani discusses how the media and the Save Darfur Coalition has been misrepresenting the situation in Darfur. [includes rush transcript] Help Printer-friendly version Email to a friend Purchase DVD/CD LISTEN WATCH Real Video Stream Real Audio Stream MP3 Download More� President Bush has ordered new sanctions to be placed on the Sudanese government for its role in the violence in Darfur. Last week�s announcement blocks thirty-one companies tied to the Sudanese government from using the U.S. banking system. The sanctions were seen as a victory for the Save Darfur Coalition, a U.S. group leading a vocal campaign pressuring the White House to take action. But the New York Times reported Saturday some of Save Darfur�s public efforts have angered aid groups working on the ground in Sudan. The aid groups say Save Darfur�s call for imposing a no-flight zone could lead to a halt in aid flights and put their workers at risk. Aid groups have also criticized Save Darfur for not spending its multi-million dollar budget on aid to Darfur�s refugees. * Mahmood Mamdani, one of the world�s most prominent Africa scholars. Earlier this year he wrote a major piece for the London Review of Books titled "The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency." He was born in Uganda, and now splits his time between Uganda and New York, where he teaches at Columbia University. He is the author of many books including, �Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror.� Rush Transcript This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution. Donate - $25, $50, $100, More... AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Darfur. President Bush has ordered new sanctions to be placed on the Sudanese government for its role in the violence in Darfur. Last week�s announcement blocks thirty-one companies tied to the Sudanese government from using the US banking system. The sanctions were seen as a victory for the Save Darfur Coalition, a US group leading a vocal campaign pressuring the White House to take action. But the New York Times reported Saturday some of Save Darfur�s public efforts have angered aid groups working on the ground in Sudan. The aid groups say Save Darfur�s call for imposing a no-flight zone could lead to a halt in aid flights and put their workers at risk. Aid groups have also criticized Save Darfur for not spending its multi-million dollar budget on aid to Darfur�s refugees. Mahmood Mamdani is one of the world�s most prominent Africa scholars. Earlier this year, he wrote a major piece for the London Review of Books called �The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency.� He was born in Uganda and now splits his time between Uganda and New York, where he is a professor at Columbia University. Mahmood Mamdani stopped by our firehouse studio Friday. I began by asking him about the name of his article, �The Politics of Naming.� MAHMOOD MAMDANI: I think the larger question is the names�genocide, in particular�come into being against a background of the twentieth century and mass slaughter of the twentieth century, and particularly the Holocaust. And against that background, Lemkin convinced the international community, and particularly states in the international community, have an obligation to intervene when there is genocide. He�s successful in getting the international community to adopt a resolution on this. Then follows the politics around genocide. And the politics around genocide is, when is the slaughter of civilians a genocide or not? Which particular slaughter is going to be named genocide, and which one is not going to be named genocide? So if you look at the last ten years and take some examples of mass slaughter�for example, the mass slaughter in Iraq, which is�in terms of numbers, at least�no less than what is going on in Sudan; or the mass slaughter in Congo, which, in terms of numbers, is probably ten times what happened, what has been happening in Darfur. But none of these have been named as genocide. Only the slaughter in Darfur has been named as genocide. So there is obviously a politics around this naming, and that�s the politics that I was interested in. AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think this politics is? MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Well, I think that what�s happening is that genocide is being instrumentalized by the biggest power on the earth today, which is the United States. It is being instrumentalized in a way that mass slaughters which implicate its adversaries are being named as genocide and those which implicate its friends or its proxies are not being named as genocide. And that is not what Lemkin had in mind. AMY GOODMAN: The simplifying of the conflict by the US media, you write extensively about this, who the sides are. MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Well, I was struck by the fact�because I live nine months in New York and three months in Kampala, and every morning I open the New York Times, and I read about sort of violence against civilians, atrocities against civilians, and there are two places that I read about�one is Iraq, and the other is Darfur�sort of constantly, day after day, and week after week. And I�m struck by the fact that the largest political movement against mass violence on US campuses is on Darfur and not on Iraq. And it puzzles me, because most of these students, almost all of these students, are American citizens, and I had always thought that they should have greater responsibility, they should feel responsibility, for mass violence which is the result of their own government�s policies. And I ask myself, �Why not?� I ask myself, �How do they discuss mass violence in Iraq and options in Iraq?� And they discuss it by asking�agonizing over what would happen if American troops withdrew from Iraq. Would there be more violence? Less violence? But there is no such agonizing over Darfur, because Darfur is a place without history, Darfur is a place without politics. Darfur is simply a dot on the map. It is simply a place, a site, where perpetrator confronts victim. And the perpetrator�s name is Arab, and the victim�s name is African. And it is easy to demonize. It is easy to hold a moral position which is emptied of its political content. This bothered me, and so I wrote about it. AMY GOODMAN: Columbia University Professor Mahmood Mamdani. We�ll be back with him in a minute. [break] AMY GOODMAN: We return to our conversation with Columbia University Professor Mahmood Mamdani, one of the world�s most prominent Africa scholars, speaking about Darfur in relation to other conflicts around the world. MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Well, let�s begin with the numbers of the dead, OK? The only group in a position to estimate how many people have died in Darfur is UNICEF, because UNICEF is the only one that did a comprehensive survey in 2005 in Darfur. Everybody else only knows the piece of ground on which they work and will then extrapolate from it, like any other NGO, like Oxfam or Medecins Sans Frontieres or World Food Program. The WFP estimate was 200,000. Out of these 200,000, the WPF report tells you that roughly about 20% died of actually being killed, of violence, and 80% died mainly from starvation and from diseases. And normally in our understanding of genocide, we put both those together and look at them as a result of the violence, because the violence prevents the medicine going in, etc., except in the case of Darfur, it�s not a single-cause situation. Darfur is also the place which has been hit hard by global warming. The UN commission which sat on global warming very recently spoke of Darfur as the first major crisis of global warming. In other words, from the late 1970s you have had a significant desertification, and you�ve been having in the north of Darfur basically a situation where people�s simply entire livelihoods are destroyed, and which has been one of the elements, because it has driven the nomadic population in the north down into the south. So how many people are dying from desertification? How many people are dying from the violence that has been unleashed through this civil war in Darfur? Second element in this is that there�s a civil war going on in Darfur. There are two rebel movements, and both rebel movements were born in the aftermath of the peace in the south. And those who were unwilling to accept the peace in the south, who thought the peace in the south should have included a resolution for all of Sudan, particularly for Darfur and not simply for the south, they were the inspiration behind the two movements that developed. One movement, the Sudan Liberation Army, was a movement strongly connected with the SPLA in the south, especially with those sections of the SPLA who were not happy with the partial nature of the settlement in the south. And the other movement� AMY GOODMAN: The SPLA is�? MAHMOOD MAMDANI: The SPLA, sorry, is the Sudan People�s Liberation Army, which had organized and led the guerrilla war in the south for several decades under John Garang. The second movement was the Justice and Equality Movement. The Justice and Equality Movement, unlike the SLA, which is a secular movement, Justice and Equality is an Islamist movement. And it was a break-off from the regime in the Sudan. It was a break-off between two sections of the regime, the military and the civilian section, and particularly the section led by the chief ideologue, Hassan al-Turabi, who split from the military wing and was the inspiration behind the formation of the Justice and Equality Movement. So you have, in a way, a very strong Islamist rebel movement and you have a strong secular rebel movement, and these two began their operations in 2003. The government�s response�and I saw the ambassador�s response there, which was as disingenuous as Bush�s response, in a sense, because he�s claiming that it�s just a civil war inside, the government has nothing to do with it. It�s not true. The government�s response was to pick a proxy and arm it. And the government was, in a way, smart enough to pick those who were the worst victims of the desertification and the drought. It picked the poorest of the nomads from the north whose livelihoods had been entirely destroyed and who had simply no survival strategy at hand and gave them weapons. And these guys went down south, and their object was not to kill the peasants in the south, but to drive them off their land. The government�s response was also to pick a second group, and that second group are the nomads from Chad who have come into Darfur. And to understand that, one has to look at the third dimension of the conflict, which is that over the last twenty-five, thirty years there has been a civil war going on in Chad. Chad, during the Cold War, was a bone of contention, first and foremost between the US and France, and both had their allies in the region. France allied with Libya. The US allied with the military dictatorship in Sudan, with the Numeri dictatorship in Sudan. And every oppositional movement in Chad had a base in Darfur, and they armed themselves, organized themselves in Darfur. So Darfur was awash with weapons for two decades, OK. And those who ran away from the civil war in Chad came into Darfur. So the other wing of those who were armed, whether by the government or whether by this weaponry which was awash, were the Chad refugees in Darfur. So what we call the Janjaweed are two groups. They are the Chad refugees in Darfur, and they are the poorest of the northern camel�the pastoralists divide into two: the camel pastoralists and the cattle pastoralists. And the camel pastoralists, because the camel is the only game which will survive in the worst conditions where even cattle will not survive, they are the poorest of the poor. So these are what are called the Janjaweed. AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to play a clip for you from John Prendergast. He is the senior adviser for the International Crisis Group, leader of the Save Darfur Coalition, has argued that genocide is occurring in Darfur, that the Sudanese government is trying to mask what�s really happening. JOHN PRENDERGAST: This policy of divide and conquer, which has been in place since the early part of this decade, had as its objective the creation of anarchy in Darfur. So when people take a snapshot today and see Darfur and go, �My god, all these groups are fighting against each other. It seems like it�s chaos,� it�s precisely what the government intended. AMY GOODMAN: Your response. MAHMOOD MAMDANI: We need to keep in mind, and John Prendergast needs to keep in mind, that the history of state-sponsored terrorism in that part of Africa begins with the US providing a political umbrella to South Africa to create a state-sponsored terrorist movement in Mozambique: RENAMO. And it is after a full decade of that impunity that others learn the experience, and Charles Taylor begins it in Liberia, and the Sudanese government begins it in the south. But this is the second thing, which builds on this history of political violence. The third thing is that when the rebel movements begin in 2003 in Darfur, the Khartoum government responds in the same way, which is it looks at the scene, and it picks the weakest, the most vulnerable, the ones that they can bring under their wing, it arms them and says, �Go for it,� and they go for the land. AMY GOODMAN: Professor Mamdani, you quote the saying, �Out of Iraq, into Darfur.� What about intervention? MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Well, look, the question in Darfur is really, how do we stop the fighting, because if we want to stop the killing of civilians, we have to stop the fighting. We have�and the only way to stop the fighting is a political resolution. In 2005, African Union troops came into Darfur. I interviewed the Ghanaian general who was deputy to Dallaire in Rwanda and who is the chief of the UN nucleus force in Darfur. And he said to me that the African Union troops were spectacularly successful in 2005. The killing came down dramatically. And then, he said, two things happened. Both happened around the question of finances, because African countries can provide troops but they don�t have finances to provide salaries or logistics. So the first shift was around salaries. The salaries of African troops were being paid by the European Union, which paid them from an emergency fund, and it shifted the payment to quarterly payments, so they would make payment every three months, and they would only make the next three-month payment if the paperwork was done properly, if there was accountability. So, as I speak now, African Union troops have not been paid for four months, because the EU says there hasn�t been proper accountability. Second is about logistics. The troops have to work with planes, and the planes provided are not military planes. They are planes flown by civilian pilots. And civilian pilots have the right to refuse to fly in areas which they consider dangerous. Now, of course, all these areas are dangerous. So you�re operating with logistics that you don�t control. Civilian pilots will not. The Ghanaian general said to me�I asked him, I said, �Why do you think these changes happened?� He said, �I don�t know. But the only thing I can think is that the reason would only be political.� I had the same response when I heard President Bush�s speech. AMY GOODMAN: Meaning to make the African Union troops ineffective. MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Ineffective, exactly, because� AMY GOODMAN: Incapacitate them. MAHMOOD MAMDANI:�the contention has been over who has political control over the troops in Darfur. OK. The African Union troops are under the political control of African Union. And there is a concerted attempt being made to shift the political control of any intervention force inside Darfur from inside Africa to outside Africa. The second thing is that the African Union is convinced that they cannot go in and fight. They can only go in with the agreement of both sides, so they can only intervene consensually. And that is crucial and important, because if they go in with the two sides not agreeing, the fighting will simply increase and the slaughter of civilians will increase. President Bush�s speech yesterday�the response of the UN, the UN Secretary General, was, �Look, we�re just arriving at an agreement. We�ve been working for the last four, five months, and the Sudan government is agreeing.� The South African response was the same. Why sanctions now when we are about to arrive at an agreement? Any sane thinking person would think that, intended or unintended, the consequence of these imposition of sanctions is to torpedo that process on the ground. And that process is the political process which is absolutely vital to stopping the fighting. AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned Congo. What about the comparison of the conflicts and the attention given to each? MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Well, no two comparisons are exactly alike, of course. We know that. But to the extent that numbers are being highlighted, the numbers are huge in Congo. The Congo estimates are four million-plus over several years. The Darfur estimates go from 200,000 to 400,000. So why no concern about Congo? Congo involves, again, multiple causes, like Darfur. It�s a huge place. But in Kivu province, where I have been, the conflict has been very Darfur-like, in the sense that you�ve had proxies being fed from the outside, the Hema and the Lendu. You have the recruitment of child soldiers. You have two states in the region arming these proxies: Uganda and Rwanda. But both states are allies of the US in the region, so there�s nothing said about it. The most recent example is Somalia. We can see that the civilian suffering is going up dramatically in Somalia since the intervention, Ethiopian intervention force. And we know that the Ethiopian intervention force had at least the blessings of the US, if not more than that�I�m not privy to the information. And nothing is being said about it. So one arrives back at the question: what is the politics around it? And I�m struck by the innocence of those who are part of the Save Darfur�of the foot soldiers in the Save Darfur Coalition, not the leadership, simply because this is not discussed. Let me tell you, when I went to Sudan in Khartoum, I had interviews with the UN humanitarian officer, the political officer, etc., and I asked them, I said, �What assistance does the Save Darfur Coalition give?� He said, �Nothing.� I said, �Nothing?� He said, �No.� And I would like to know. The Save Darfur Coalition raises an enormous amount of money in this country. Where does that money go? Does it go to other organizations which are operative in Sudan, or does it go simply to fund the advertising campaign? AMY GOODMAN: To make people aware of what�s going on in Darfur. MAHMOOD MAMDANI: To make people aware of what is going on, but people who then, out of awareness, give money not to fuel a commercial campaign, but expecting that this money will go to do something about the pain and suffering of those who are the victims in Darfur, so how much of that money is going to actually�how much of it translates into food or medicine or shelter? And how much of it is being recycled? AMY GOODMAN: Do you think the UN process, if allowed to carry forward, would be the answer right now? MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Well, the answer has to be a political process. The African Union, if its hands are not tied�if this money was translated into salaries and logistics for the African Union force, it would untie those hands. If the governments who claim to be speaking and acting for the people of Darfur, if they actually directed the money they intend to spend on intervention to paying salaries for the African Union forces, to providing the logistics without these constraints, the problem would be much closer to solving. AMY GOODMAN: Columbia University Professor Mahmood Mamdani. His article, �The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency� appeared in the London Review of Books. He�s the author of many books, including Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror. |
Strange how NATO has not even done to Sudan 1% of what it did to Serbia in the late 1990's.
I'm a little disappointed that while people continue to debate the election cycle there hasn't been a single mention of the ICC indictment handed down last week.
Personally I think it was a very ill-advised move. Though this is what the ICC was created to do, the resources aren't there to enforce the indictment, and as a result the situation on the ground could be adversely affected. Already the UN is withdrawing most personnel from Khartoum following threats of reprisals. Argentina has been put on alert about possible assassination attempts against Luis Moreno-Ocampo.
I feel like nobody else here has any interest in engaging with this issue, as every time it is brought up there are one or two comments about how horrible the situation is and then everyone goes back to calling each other names over hypothetical situations in Iran. But here's an article to read anyhow. I think Lydia Polgreen really hits the crux of the issue in raising the specter of choosing justice vs. peace.
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| The Pursuit of Justice vs. the Pursuit of Peace By LYDIA POLGREEN and MARLISE SIMONS DAKAR, Senegal � When Luis Moreno-Ocampo, prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, reported to the United Nations Security Council last month, he painted a dire tableau of death, rape and dispossession in Darfur, saying the entire state apparatus was involved in a five-year campaign of terror there. His target, it seemed, was Sudan�s president. This week, the prosecutor privately informed Security Council members that he would ask the judges on Monday at the court in The Hague to issue an arrest warrant for Sudan�s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, diplomats said. The prosecution plans to bring charges of crimes against humanity and genocide in Darfur, a region of Sudan, they said. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was also informed out of concern for the security of international peacekeepers in the area, the diplomats said. The indictment of a sitting head of state in a war-torn country would not be unprecedented: Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Charles Taylor of Liberia were both charged by international war crimes courts while in office. But the complexity and fragility of Sudan�s multiple conflicts have led many diplomats, analysts and aid workers to worry that the Sudanese government could lash out at the prosecutor�s move by expelling Western diplomats and relief workers who provide aid to millions of people displaced by the fighting, provoking a vast crisis and shutting the door to vital diplomatic efforts to bring lasting peace. The dueling objectives have exposed a growing tension: between justice and peace, that is, between the prosecution of war criminals and the compromises of diplomacy. Darfur, in many ways, is in freefall. On Tuesday, seven peacekeepers were killed in an ambush, sending shockwaves through the already demoralized international peacekeeping force there. �It is escalating every day,� said a senior United Nations peacekeeping official in Darfur. �The government wants us to fail. We are doing our best, but we are under attack everywhere.� Aid groups are struggling to provide basic assistance, as they face increased banditry and harassment. Last week Sudanese authorities expelled several staff members of the aid group Doctors Without Borders. Hijackings of aid vehicles in Darfur have become an almost daily occurrence, peacekeeping officials say. Beyond that, in southern Sudan, the embers are cooling after a fierce battle in May over the disputed oil-rich town of Abyei that displaced 50,000 people. Tensions remain extraordinarily high between the sides, which fought a 20-year civil war that ended in a fragile peace accord in 2005. A government of national unity is holding, but only just. Many argue that the added strain of war crimes charges against the head of state would push an already precarious nation over the edge. �It is certainly going to close off all sorts of options for diplomacy and leave us very few options other than condemnation and isolation,� said J. Stephen Morrison, director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Other analysts and activists argue that it could increase pressure on the Sudanese government at a critical moment � when peacekeeping forces in Darfur are increasingly under attack, the peace agreement with the south is in danger of collapsing and the aid effort in Darfur hangs by a thread. �I think it is absolutely imperative to go straight to the top,� said John Prendergast, a former Clinton administration official who co-founded Enough, a group that seeks to end genocide. He argued that concerted pressure by the international community had changed Sudan�s behavior at times. Sudanese officials declined to comment, saying they would wait until the prosecutor made his announcement. But in the past, the Sudanese government has rejected the legitimacy of the court, arguing that Sudanese courts are capable of prosecuting any crimes. The international court has already brought criminal charges against two senior government officials, but the government has refused to hand them over. One was even given a promotion. In the short term, a request for Mr. Bashir�s arrest could have a potentially devastating impact on the people of Darfur. Representatives of the Sudanese government have long said that they view the entire aid and security apparatus in Darfur as accomplices of the international court, bent on regime change. Aid organizations say they are under intense scrutiny by Sudan�s intelligence agencies, which monitor their communications and tightly control their visas and permits to work in Darfur. Several foreign aid workers have been expelled at least in part on suspicion of providing information to the International Criminal Court. The government already accuses nongovernmental organizations and the United Nations �of passing information to the I.C.C.,� said one senior aid official in Khartoum, Sudan�s capital, speaking anonymously for fear of retribution. �There is quite strong concern they will expel U.N. staff and possibly entire agencies.� Diplomats are also worried about the impact an indictment might have on efforts to revive peace talks in Darfur, which have been stalled for the better part of a year, and on efforts to prevent the complete dissolution of the strained 2005 peace deal between the north and south. For months, talks have been taking place between the United States and Sudan, with American officials trying to persuade Sudan to improve security in Darfur and strengthen the peace agreement with the south. In exchange, Sudanese officials would get better relations with the United States, something they have sought for years, according to diplomats and analysts. But that process would be much more difficult if Mr. Bashir were formally charged with war crimes, Western diplomats said. Diplomats have predicted dire consequences from arrest warrants before. When Mr. Milosevic, then Yugoslavia�s president, was first indicted in 1999 � during the conflict in Kosovo � German, French and Russian politicians said it would put a fatal obstacle in the way of peace negotiations. When he was transferred to The Hague, diplomats worried it would destabilize the region. Similarly, when the Special Court for Sierra Leone unsealed its arrest warrant for Mr. Taylor, then Liberia�s president, in 2003, in the midst of intense fighting there, diplomats and others involved in peace negotiations privately warned of disastrous consequences. Kofi Annan, then the United Nations secretary general, was furious and reportedly told his aides it was a threat to the peace process. Both leaders ultimately fell from power, and the role the indictments played in either prolonging or shortening conflict has been much debated. More recently, diplomats have complained that arrest warrants hampered a peace deal with the Lord�s Resistance Army, which has ravaged northern Uganda for 20 years. Led by Joseph Kony, the rebel group has kidnapped thousands of children and turned them into soldiers and sex slaves. Mr. Kony agreed to take part in peace talks, but only if the international arrest warrants against him were lifted. The Security Council, which has the power to suspend prosecutions, was reportedly ready to agree if Mr. Kony signed. �But he failed to appear,� said Richard Dicker, director of the international justice program at Human Rights Watch. �It turns out that the rebel group used the talks as a screen to beef up its depleted ranks.� The argument that peace trumps justice might be more compelling in Darfur, human rights workers argue, if there were a peace process achieving results there. But peace efforts are at a virtual standstill. Previous efforts to bring the fractious rebel groups together to negotiate ended in failure. Still, the short-term risks of seeking an indictment are grave, said Alex de Waal, a Sudan expert at the Social Science Research Council in New York. �Bashir is paranoid; he feels the world is out to get him,� Mr. de Waal said. �He is prone to irrational outbursts and could respond in a very aggressive way.� |
Nice thread Leb.
http://www.tranceaddict.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=410300
My point of view has not changed.
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