Darfur: A Clear Case For External Intervention

Transparency is not enough. People already know all over the world. And the genocide continues unabated. Political mechanisms have to be developed such that if a government anywhere engages in genocide, that automatically triggers counter action by some global body or coalition of governments elsewhere. There has to be a muscular counter strike to prevent the collapse of basic human decency.

Darfur has been going on for too long. We have become numb. It has become background noise.

It was said about the Nazi Holocaust: never again. Then Rwanda happened, and the battle cry was, never again. And now Darfur has been in your face.

Darfur is a major statement on a lack of a global political infrastructure. Apparently people there have not had the option to call 911. The rest of us express concern, dispatch statements of solidarity, but all that we end up saying is that there is not much we can do, that the people at the receiving end are basically consigned to being helpless. The rest of the world does not care, does not know to care, does not have the mechanism to care.

The mechanism is lacking.

What is the best we can hope for?

(1) Expose. The old media and the new media could do a super job of plain exposing. Get all the gory details out. That helps. Human rights organizations should continue doing the good job they have been doing. Perhaps they should get more graphic in how they present themselves. They should seek to reach a wider audience.

(2) Lobby. Citizen activists should pressure their lawmakers and leaders to do something.

(3) Muscle. Military action should be threatened.

(4) Make Peace. The political work of making peace might normalize things, but that would require intense, sustained engagement by a major power, like Bill Clinton in Ireland. Some second rung power could also pull it. Maybe India and China should jump in and boost their global credentials. This is a major case of statelessness. A defensive state has let nonstate actors run amok, sometimes by design, at other times with no actual participation. Amnesty can only be thought of in terms of a comprehensive peace and assured justice for the future, and only as the price to be paid to bring an end to future murders and rapes and lootings. The Janjaweed are posing as a non state actor, kind of like the Al Qaeda on the global scene. But how non-state are they really? How do you politically and militarily counter the Janjaweed?

(5) Engage. Perhaps the nearby regional powers should do a better job of engaging the evil doers in power in Sudan. Maybe they can try and talk some sense into their heads. Maybe carrot and stick approaches will take us somewhere.

(6) Cultivate. Dream up new global mechanisms - legal, political - for situations like this one.

(7) Depose. Is there any way regime change can be brought about? Options should be explored. The Sudanese government is clearly the guilty party. These people have to go.

(8) Provide. While the peacemakers try to make sense out of the situation, the aid agencies must provide food, water, medicine, shelter and safety to the hilt to the displaced. Safe zones have to be created. People in the war zone should know they have the option to get out. That hope has to be there.

(9) Create. Peace making efforts have failed so far because attempts have been made to soothe warring factions. The goal should not be that the factions stop competing for power. The goal should be to transform the competition so it is no longer military, but rather political, electoral. Perhaps peace talks should be held, there should be a ceasefire, and elections to a constituent assembly should be organized. The primary challenge seems to be one of building a state where one does not seem to much exist.

The solution like in Iraq is political. If our primary thrust is to be to seek a political solution, we will also be more likely to navigate the local political contours better.

On The Web

Darfur conflict - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia After fighting worsened in July and August 2006, on August 31, 2006, the United Nations Security Council approved Resolution 1706 which called for a new 17,300-troop UN peacekeeping force to supplant or supplement a poorly funded, ill-equipped 7,000-troop African Union Mission in Sudan peacekeeping force. Sudan strongly objected to the resolution and said that it would see the UN forces in the region as foreign invaders. The next day, the Sudanese military launched a major offensive in the region. ..... The UN estimates that the conflict has left as many as 450,000 dead from violence and disease. ..... As many as 2.5 million are thought to have been displaced as of October 2006. ..... In March 2007 the U.N. mission accused Sudan's government of orchestrating and taking part in "gross violations" in Darfur
Darfur - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Save Darfur
Darfur: A Genocide We can Stop
BBC NEWS | World | Africa | Q&A: Sudan's Darfur conflict More than two million people are living in camps after fleeing almost four years of fighting in the region ...... Sudan's government and the pro-government Arab militias are accused of war crimes against the region's black African population ...... Sudan also rejects moves by the International Criminal Court to name and then try war crimes suspects. ...... There are two main rebel groups, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), although the peace talks were complicated by splits in both groups, some along ethnic lines. .... admits mobilising "self-defence militias" following rebel attacks but denies any links to the Janjaweed, accused of trying to "cleanse" black Africans from large swathes of territory. ...... following air raids by government aircraft, the Janjaweed ride into villages on horses and camels, slaughtering men, raping women and stealing whatever they can find ....... UN-backed attempts to get some 50 key suspects tried at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. ...... The Janjaweed patrol outside the camps and Darfurians say the men are killed and the women raped if they venture too far in search of firewood or water. ...... Some 200,000 have also sought safety in neighbouring Chad, but many of these are camped along a 600km stretch of the border and remain vulnerable to attacks from Sudan. ...... Many aid agencies are working in Darfur but they are unable to get access to vast areas because of the fighting. ...... there has been a dramatic increase in violence and displacement since the deal was signed. ....With the peace deal looking unworkable and amid fears of renewed "all-out war" ...... an area the size of France ...... Sudan has resisted strong western diplomatic pressure for the UN to take control of the peacekeeping mission.
Human Rights Watch: Africa : Crisis in Darfur
Sudan: Darfur Destroyed
Darfur: Blogs, Photos, Videos and more on Technorati

In The News

US diplomat visits Sudan's war-torn Darfur Raw Story, MA
Positive signs in Darfur?Monsters and Critics.com
Africa: Ban Ki-Moon to Hold Darfur Crisis Talks With Head of ... AllAfrica.com
Darfur needs peace, not peacekeepers Los Angeles Times the double-think of balkanized minds branding as disaster in Iraq what they recommend for Darfur's salvation ...... Without a political solution brokered by the international community, there will be no peace to keep and even less to impose. ...... there are up to 15 rebel factions fighting the government — and increasingly, each other. ...... some rebels have begun raping women from their own tribes. ...... Most of the bloodshed in Darfur took place between the end of 2003 and the beginning of 2005. The same international community that is being urged to intervene in western Sudan was, at that time, helping negotiate peace between the government in the north and rebels in the south to put an end to the longest-running civil war in independent Africa — 21 years — that left an estimated 1.5 million dead. ........ our support should be realistic and honest — and not, in the end, helpless posturing. ...... In the absence of a peace agreement to monitor, what right do we have to demand that anyone — be they our children or U.N. blue helmets from the Third World — go and die in Darfur?
Darfur Crisis Comes To Google Earth InformationWeek, NY
Museum, Google Zoom In on Darfur Washington Post
Delusions of Darfur Chicago Tribune government-sponsored genocide in Darfur ...... Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, addressed a Nation of Islam convention in Detroit via satellite in February. The United States is exaggerating the problems in Darfur to justify an Iraq-style occupation, he told the crowd. There's no need for United Nations peacekeepers because the current African Union force is doing "fantastically well." He described the situation in Darfur as "quite calm." ........ "It is not in the Sudanese culture or people of Darfur to rape. It doesn't exist."
Google maps the Darfur crisis- Internet users can now ... ReliefWeb (press release)
China's "turnaround" on Darfur links to Spielberg: report Hindu, India
Has China changed its "see no evil stance" on Darfur? Foreign Policy (subscription)
Darfur Collides With Olympics, and China Yields Sarasota Herald-Tribune
Darfur Collides With Olympics, and China Yields Tuscaloosa News (subscription)
Militia Talks Could Reshape Conflict in Darfur New York Times, NY Adam Shogar, a commander of the Sudan Liberation Army, the non-Arab rebels at the center of the Darfur conflict, stretched a coal-black arm at Yassine Yousef Abdul Rahman, his copper-skinned, brown-eyed counterpart from an Arab insurgent group, studying him carefully with midnight eyes. ....... “The government fear is if the Darfur Arabs unify and move against them, that is a decisive switch in the balance of power” ....... “Should they shift against the government, then the government is in deep trouble.” ....... The struggle in Darfur has often been portrayed as one between Arabs and black Africans, nomads and farmers, with the former bent on slaughtering the latter. But the conflict has never been that simple. ....... Sudan’s central government in Khartoum views them as marginal and expendable ....... Arab tribes have found themselves victims of non-Arab militias armed by Chad’s government ...... and set off a broad conflict in one of the most unstable parts of the world. ...... The main perpetrators of some of the worst atrocities have been government-sponsored Arab militias that have come to be known by a local epithet for bandits, janjaweed. ...... its own military, weakened by a long civil war in the south and made up largely of non-Arab recruits, could not be relied on to crush the rebellion among non-Arab tribes in Darfur. ........ the relationship between the central government, dominated by three small Arab tribes living along the Nile, and Darfur’s Arabs, who claim a heritage going back to the Prophet Muhammad, is often antagonistic ....... Darfur’s Arabs have long been the stalwarts of the main opposition Umma Party, perhaps the largest and most popular political party in northern Sudan. ....... in the 1980s and ’90s, as the government sought to exercise greater control over Darfur. Political and traditional leaders at the state and tribal level were replaced by Arab candidates closer to the government. ....... “For centuries we have had friendship and exchange with the Fur people and other African tribes. Now we are seen as killers.” ....... the reality that the various tribes of Darfur need one other more than they need the government. ....... But even as the relationship between tribes begins to shift, slowly, back toward its traditional balance in Darfur, Chad is descending deeper into interethnic conflict. ....... black Africans living in squalid, makeshift camps. ....... much of the violence is between Arab and non-Arab Chadians. ....... “Are politics going to destroy centuries of friendship?” ....... 140,000 Chadians have been displaced in interethnic fighting in the past year ....... 10 villages of Arab families have been displaced in the latest fighting, fleeing toward Darfur against the advance of Dadjo militias. ....... Arming local militias is seen as an expedient way of dealing with border security problems, but the experiences of Darfur and the civil war in southern Sudan have shown that once militias are unleashed, they are nearly impossible to control ...... one of the most important messages he plans to bring to the Security Council is the complexity of the conflict here. ....... “It is a political problem, and it needs a political solution.”
Lopez, Molina, Etc. Set for Where's Darfur? Benefit, 4/23 Broadway World, NY
Darfur refugees will return home PRESS TV, Iran
Goodlatte: US can play role in Darfur Staunton News Leader, VA
OU students, author discuss Darfur Norman Transcript, OK
UK accused of collaborating with Sudan over Darfur refugees Sudan Tribune, Sudan
Probe Of Sexual Violence, Disappearances In Darfur Scoop.co.nz
Home Office 'collaborating with Sudan over refugees' Independent
Darfur governor expects return of displaced people after ... People's Daily Online, China