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Showing posts with label Darfur. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Darfur. Show all posts
Mar 31, 2010
Feb 23, 2010
Sudan parties sign Darfur ceasefire
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| Al-Bashir, right, arrived in Qatar on Monday to sign the deal, which the Gulf state has brokered [AFP] |
Sudan's largest opposition group has signed a peace deal with the government that could end the conflict in Darfur.
Preliminary documents setting out the terms of the deal, signed in Qatar on Tuesday, appeared to offer government positions for the Justice and Equality Movement (Jem).
The documents were the first concrete sign that Khartoum is prepared to share power with the group.
"There is some form of a political deal being discussed," she said.
But officials warned a March 15 deadline for a final peace deal was overly ambitious.
"It is a framework, it is not the final peace agreement yet."
The US has hailed the ceasefire deal as a "significant move" towards formal negotiations.
Omar al-Bashir, Sudan's president, arrived in Qatar on Monday to formally sign the deal with Jem.
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The peace agreement is being signed in the run-up to Sudan's first multiparty elections in 24 years.
Sudan puts the death toll at 10,000.
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Oct 30, 2009
BBC - Africa backs Darfur crimes court
African leaders have agreed to establish a new court to bring justice to the Sudanese region of Darfur.
The hybrid court would consist of Sudanese and foreign judges appointed by the African Union in consultation with the Khartoum government.
US-based Human Rights Watch told the BBC the new court should not replace the International Criminal Court.
The ICC is seeking to prosecute Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir for committing war crimes in Darfur, which he denies.
A rebel leader is currently on trial in The Hague and the court has also issued arrest warrants for a Sudanese minister and pro-government militia leader.
DARFUR CONFLICT
300,000 died, 2.7 million homeless Black African rebels say they face discrimination Government denies mobilising Arab militias
Violence flared in Darfur in 2003 when black African rebel groups took up arms against the government in Khartoum, complaining of discrimination and neglect.
Pro-government Arab militias then started a campaign of violence, targeting the black African population.
The UN says some 300,000 people have been killed in Darfur's six-year conflict. Khartoum says about 10,000 died.
Speed
The African leaders, meeting in the Nigerian capital Abuja, agreed to the proposals in a report put forward by South Africa's former President Thabo Mbeki.
Thabo Mbeki himself is asked to head a new implementation panel. This will have an enormous remit, not only helping bring into force the former South African president's own proposals, but also helping Sudan's troubled north-south peace process.
Elections are planned for April next year, to be followed by a referendum on independence the year after. The timetable is tight and much needs to be done.
To strengthen Mr Mbeki's hand there are now suggestions that he will in due course take over as the joint African Union-United Nations mediator in Darfur and the north-south process. This would be an enormous task, but Mr Mbeki is a man of keen intelligence and great patience - skills he will need if he is to succeed.
Mr Bashir was invited to the meeting, but after an angry reaction from human rights groups, he stayed away.
The BBC's Africa analyst Martin Plaut says Mr Mbeki's 148-page report is written in diplomatic language, but makes clear that previous attempts to dispense justice in Darfur have made little progress.
Neither the special courts established by the Sudanese government nor the ICC warrant are considered to have contributed to peace.
Human Rights Watch's Georgette Gaignon told the BBC's Network Africa the organisation welcomed the proposal.
"It's part of the whole package of providing justice to victims in Darfur," she said.
"There are many who have suffered in Darfur and there are many alleged criminals.
"These people should be tried in a domestic system that conforms to fair trial standards, but the most serious cases are now before the International Criminal Court and those should be dealt with there."
She added that it was important that the court was set up as quickly and efficiently as possible.
But the response from the Sudanese participants in the Darfur civil war has been less than enthusiastic.
Sudan's Vice-President Ali Osman Taha, who was at the Abuja meeting, said the proposals needed closer scrutiny to see whether they were in line with the constitution.
One rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement, described Mr Mbeki proposals as impractical, but did not reject them outright.
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Oct 20, 2009
North-south conflict to be emphasis of new U.S. policy on Sudan - washingtonpost.com
By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
The Obama administration's new policy toward Sudan, formally announced Monday, turns the spotlight back on where the troubled nation's problems first began: the split between the Islamic north and the largely animist and Christian south.
Although the world's attention has been focused on the tragedy in the Darfur region of western Sudan, administration officials argued Monday that a faltering peace accord that ended Africa's longest-running conflict is under increasing strain and needs to be repaired. If that deal -- brokered by the Bush administration in 2005 -- collapses, officials and analysts say, then hope will be lost for a solution to Darfur. The two-decade conflict between north and south led to the deaths of 2 million people.
Alex de Waal, a Sudan analyst with the Social Science Research Council, said the emphasis on the north-south conflict is significant.
"What this document is saying is, it was a mistake to lose that focus [on the peace agreement]. And we must get our priorities right," he said. "Darfur is part of Sudan, and if the rest of Sudan falls apart, you're never going to solve Darfur."
Still, many analysts think the Darfur conflict spiraled out of control in 2003 because the United States was so focused on resolving the north-south civil war that it ignored signs that the government in Khartoum was secretly behind brutal clashes in Darfur that ultimately led to the deaths of more than 300,000 people. Now the Obama administration hopes to avoid making the same mistake.
A senior administration official, briefing reporters under ground rules of anonymity, said that "for quite some time, policy has been understandably focused on the urgent crisis in Darfur, and [north-south peace agreement] implementation fell behind."
The official added: "We're dealing with a different timeline in this administration. There are a set of fundamentally different dynamics that have to be addressed in a very short period of time."
During last year's presidential campaign, Obama campaigned on the promise of getting tough with the Sudanese government, particularly over Darfur. But activists and lawmakers complained that his administration has offered conflicting signals in recent months. On Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced a policy that will feature rewards and punishments for Sudanese leaders based on whether they meet benchmarks in three areas: Darfur, the north-south agreement and counterterrorism.
The policy appeared less accommodating toward the Sudanese government than the approach suggested by the U.S. envoy, retired Air Force Major Gen. J. Scott Gration, who has pushed for normalizing relations. However, the new strategy adopted his emphasis on the north-south agreement and on engaging, rather than isolating, the government, analysts said. The policy document also emphasized that Gration will play the "leading role in pursuing our Sudan strategy," despite calls from some humanitarian groups for his replacement.
The 2005 peace agreement gave southerners religious and political autonomy and a role in a unity government until 2011, when a referendum is supposed to be held in the south on whether it will secede. The accord also called for national elections next year.
But activists and officials say the Sudanese government, loath to lose the oil-rich south, has dragged its feet on preparations for the votes. Inter-tribal fighting has increased in the south, and some observers say it is abetted by the government.
Among the benchmarks Sudan will be expected to achieve are progress on election preparations, passage of a law to hold the 2011 referendum and finalizing the boundary between north and south, officials said.
Officials did not describe the punishments or rewards in store for Sudan, saying they were in a classified document. But Sudan has been seeking normalization of relations with the U.S. government, an end to economic sanctions and removal from the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Officials said the U.S. government will continue to refuse to deal with Sudan's president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who has been indicted on war crimes charges by the International Criminal Court in the Darfur killings. Instead, it has held talks with one of his senior advisers and other officials in his government.
U.S. officials emphasized that Sudan would not be rewarded if it simply made progress in one area, such as counterterrorism, but would have to show advances across the board.
The policy got a positive reception from many Sudan advocates and members of Congress.
"We now have a Sudan-wide policy . . . instead of shifting back and forth and allowing Khartoum to play the south off against Darfur," said John Prendergast, head of the Enough anti-genocide project at the Center for American Progress.
The emphasis on the north-south agreement "is very important, because the south was beginning to feel abandoned," said Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.), a leading force in Congress on Sudan.
Even the Khartoum government seemed relieved to see a policy in place, although some of its officials criticized the continued emphasis on sanctions.
"We hope that this will end the debate among U.S. officials, and we hope that now they will think with one mind and speak with one tongue," Ghazi Salah Eddin Atabani, a senior adviser to the Sudanese government, told Sudanese television, according to the Associated Press.
Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
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Oct 15, 2009
Darfur Advocates, Rep. Wolf Intensify Pressure on Obama - washingtonpost.com
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Human rights groups and lawmakers are ratcheting up pressure on the Obama administration this week over its approach to ending violence in Sudan, saying the White House and the State Department are treading too cautiously in dealing with the government in Khartoum.
A coalition of U.S.-based advocates focused on the Darfur region -- where they say genocide is still being committed by the Sudanese government -- sent a letter to President Obama on Monday demanding the replacement of retired Air Force Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration as special envoy to Sudan, arguing that his attempt to engage with the country's rulers "is wrong and deadly."
"The good-intentioned yet soft approach of the General towards the Government of Sudan is abused and exploited by a regime that has continued to rule Sudan with fire and blood throughout the last twenty years," read the letter from nine groups, including the Darfur Reconciliation and Development Organization, and several individuals.
White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said in response, "The President is extremely grateful for the work General Gration has done thus far, and for all the work he'll do on this critical issue in the future."
In a separate letter to be released Thursday, Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.), a member of the House Sudan caucus who has long been critical of the Khartoum regime, calls on Obama to personally intervene to ensure that no U.S. lobbying firm is allowed to represent the country. The Washington Post reported last week that Robert B. Crowe, a fundraiser for Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), is attempting to secure U.S. approval for a lobbying contract with Khartoum.
"I urge you to personally engage on the issue of Sudan," Wolf writes to Obama. "You've rightly noted that 'silence, acquiescence and paralysis in the face of genocide is wrong,' and you've advocated for 'real pressures [to] be placed on the Sudanese government.' I wholeheartedly support these sentiments, but sentiments absent action ring hollow."
The sharply worded criticisms come as the Obama administration prepares to release a long-awaited policy on Sudan, which has been torn apart by a two-decade civil war and by government-backed massacres in the western region of Darfur that have killed more than 300,000 people and displaced millions.
Sudan's president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes in Darfur. His government has embarked on an effort this year to persuade the United States to ease sanctions against Sudan, seeking to hire a lobbyist and helping to negotiate a $1.3 million consulting contract between Qatar and former Reagan aide Robert "Bud" McFarlane, records show.
The letters to Obama this week are the latest in a series of demands for a harder U.S. line on Khartoum. Salva Kiir Mayardit, the president of semiautonomous southern Sudan, wrote to Obama last month, saying that Bashir continues to foment violence in the region, according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Post.
"There has not been any transformation or reform at the center," Mayardit wrote, referring to Khartoum. "The status quo prevails. . . . Significant change in policy in relation to Sudan should only come when there is change in the reality of Sudan."
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Aug 28, 2009
U.N. Officials Turn Focus to Sudan’s South - NYTimes.com
UNITED NATIONS — As the fighting in Darfur diminishes after years of conflict, senior United Nations officials say they are focused increasingly on the deteriorating situation in another part of Sudan: the south.
The shift in alarm has been building for months, but was reinforced late Wednesday when Gen. Martin Luther Agwai, the departing commander of the joint United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur, told reporters that the war in Darfur was essentially over.
“As of today, I would not say there is a war going on in Darfur,” Reuters quoted him as saying. “Militarily, there is not much. What you have is security issues more now. Banditry, localized issues, people trying to resolve issues over water and land at a local level. But real war as such, I think we are over that.”
Senior United Nations officials said that while General Agwai was basically correct, they did not want to play down the dire consequences some three million displaced people face in Darfur. Still, they noted, the escalating skirmishes in the south could reignite the civil war there, which in years past proved far more deadly than the conflict in Darfur.
“Whether it is characterized as a war or not, the reality is that threats against civilians do remain” in Darfur, said Edmond Mulet, the assistant secretary general for peacekeeping. Though the level of fighting has diminished there, he said, an additional 140,000 people have sought refuge in camps since January. “It is still far from peaceful,” he said.
Factors contributing to the diminished fighting include a splintering of opposition groups and reduced outside support, officials said. Most current deaths in Darfur come from criminal activity, United Nations officials said, while hundreds of people have been killed in recent months in clashes in the south.
The peace agreement between Khartoum and southern rebels signed in 2005 ended more than 20 years of fighting that killed some two million people. Since then, fighting has renewed along the possible border between north and south, an area rich in oil, as the 2011 deadline approaches for a referendum on southern independence.
The Obama administration has been publicly divided over how to characterize the Darfur conflict.
Susan Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations, has continued to call the conflict in Darfur genocide, and officials said she upbraided Rodolphe Adada, the departing civilian head of the peacekeeping forces, after he described Darfur as a “low-intensity conflict” this year.
Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman, said in a statement, “While the nature of the violence in Darfur may have changed, the crisis over all remains serious and unresolved.”
Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration, a retired Air Force officer who is President Obama’s special envoy for Sudan, has described the situation in Darfur as the “remnants of genocide.” He issued a statement Thursday saying he was focused on “ensuring that any government-backed militias are disarmed, displaced persons can ultimately return to their homes, and the people of Darfur who have suffered so much can live in peace and security.”
Mr. Adada resigned after sustained criticism that he was too soft on the Khartoum government. General Agwai is rotating out, to be succeeded by another officer. Some United Nations officials and Darfur activists called it self-serving of the departing peacekeeping leaders to describe the conflict as settled.
“It undermines international urgency in resolving these problems if people are led to believe that the war in Darfur is over,” said John Prendergast, a founder of the Enough Project, an anti-genocide campaign.
The United Nations has long been criticized for failing to fulfill its mandate for some 26,000 peacekeepers in Darfur. It currently has 18,462 uniformed troops there, and predicts a 95 percent deployment by the end of the year, said Nick Birnback, the spokesman for peacekeeping operations.![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vhsHzDB9OhABIgyVz47pDatF1dirmZhWUUr7mdnlufAx8QI7QnTVsKw1VnSGFCNyZaq3COqsmvlxjAuGPI1rqbsHgSBZT1VI57RjgFoBMg9omkqzIw0XHkh38i04UpSI8ZiEeKdIAoi_QP8tcuND5h=s0-d)
Aug 6, 2009
Envoy's Advice on Darfur Draws Criticism
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 6, 2009
NEW YORK, Aug. 5 -- The Obama administration's Sudan envoy is facing growing resistance to a suggestion he made recently to civilians displaced from Darfur that they should start planning to go back to their villages. Darfurian civilians and U.N. relief agencies say it is still too dangerous to return to the region where a six-year-long conflict has led to the deaths of more than 300,000 people.
In the latest sign of tension, Sheik al-Tahir, a leader at Kalma, one of Darfur's largest camps for displaced people, said Tuesday that homeless civilians would protest retired Air Force Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration's strategy for resolving the conflict and his assertion in June that genocide in Darfur has ended. Tahir and other camp leaders have accused Gration of taking the side of the Sudanese government, which has been seeking to dismantle the camps.
Gration denied this week that he is seeking to send Darfur's displaced into harm's way, saying he was simply urging Darfurians and the United Nations to begin preparations for return.
"I am not pushing for anybody to go back right now, because I don't think the situation is secure enough," he said in an interview Tuesday. "I don't want to get into a position where people are trying to return because there is peace and some modicum of security, and then we haven't done the planning to ensure they can move back."
The latest round of violence in Darfur began in February 2003, when two rebel movements took up arms against the Islamic government in Khartoum. In response, the government, backed by local Arab militiamen known as Janjaweed, launched a bloody counterinsurgency operation that the Bush and Obama administrations have termed genocidal.
A recent State Department analysis showed that more than 3,300 villages have been severely damaged or destroyed in the violence. Most of the survivors have either fled to neighboring Chad or crammed into a network of camps in Darfur.
Gration's effort to prod the displaced communities into preparing for a return has been complicated by the loyalty many still profess to an exiled rebel leader, Abdul Wahid al-Nur, who lives in Paris and has refused for years to participate in talks with the Khartoum government.
Gration met recently with leaders of the Kalma camp, which houses more than 100,000 displaced Darfurians. He told them that the violence was easing in Darfur and that he was confident he could negotiate a political settlement by the end of the year, according to notes of the encounter by a U.N. relief coordination team in Darfur known as the Inter-Agency Management Group.
Gration also urged camp leaders to select envoys to represent their interests at ongoing U.S.-backed talks in Doha, Qatar, suggesting that Wahid's boycott would deny them a voice in the process. Your "future is in his hands, and his hands are in Paris," Gration said, according to the briefing notes. "You need someone who is working for you."
Some of the camp leaders, according to the account, said they were unhappy with Gration's assertion that genocide was no longer occurring in Darfur, insisting that government forces and allied militias continue to commit atrocities against residents of Kalma. They said that they would never return to their villages unless the Janjaweed were disarmed.
The U.N. interagency group also expressed concern about Gration's assurance that "peace will prevail in Darfur by the end of the year, and returns have to happen," and described the conditions in Darfur as too dangerous to ensure civilians' safe return. It voiced concern that Gration was linking the fate of Darfurian civilians to political goals.
The U.N. group concluded that there are not enough funds or resources to deliver assistance to the villages people had fled or even to oversee the administrative work of ensuring that those who return are doing so voluntarily.
"In addition," the briefing note states, "it is important to keep in mind that a large part of the IDPS [internally displaced people] might opt for staying in their new settlements over a return to their place of origin."
Jul 31, 2009
U.S. Diplomat Urges Revised Sudan Policy
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 31, 2009
President Obama's top Sudan envoy said Thursday that there was no basis for keeping Sudan on the U.S. list of states that sponsor terrorism and that it was only a matter of time before the United States would have to "unwind" economic sanctions against the Khartoum government.
Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Scott Gration's remarks before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee represented the most forceful critique yet by a U.S. official of the long-standing American effort to put economic and political pressure on Sudan's Islamic government. Sudan, which has harbored members of al-Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden, was designated a terrorism sponsor in 1993.
Gration's comments Thursday raised concerns among activists and Sudan's critics in Congress that the administration is offering to reward Sudan without securing assurances that the government will take steps to end conflict in the Darfur region and in the south.
The president's national security advisers have been locked in dispute over the right mix of rewards and penalties to persuade the Khartoum government to pursue peace in those regions. Susan E. Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has been pressing for a tougher approach, citing Khartoum's history of violating agreements.
The interagency feud became public last month, when Gration told reporters that Sudan's government was no longer engaging in a "coordinated" campaign of mass murder against Darfurian civilians. Two days earlier, Rice had said that Sudan was engaged in a campaign of genocide in Darfur.
"There is a significant difference between what happened in 2003, which we characterized as genocide, and what is happening today," Gration said Thursday.
Gration came under fire from human rights activists, who accused him of saying too little to the committee about the brutality of the Sudanese government, whose leader, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, stands accused of war crimes in Darfur.
Also Thursday, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, in partnership with Google Earth, released a State Department analysis of U.S. satellite imagery showing that more than 3,300 Darfurian villages were damaged or destroyed between 2003 and 2005, more than twice previous estimates. The images also showed that most of the destruction in Darfur occurred before 2006, with only a small number of villages apparently destroyed since then.
Gration told the Senate committee that the administration would "roll out" a new, comprehensive strategy on Darfur in the next few weeks that would include "both incentives and pressure" for Khartoum. The administration's priorities, he said, include negotiating a durable political solution in Darfur and averting a collapse of a U.S.-brokered 2005 peace accord ending a war between Khartoum and southern-backed rebels.
But Gration hinted at the tensions over strategy, noting that the State Department had rejected a proposal to fund more U.S. diplomats or private contractors to help support American mediation efforts in Sudan. He said he would raise the issue at a higher level.
Gration said U.S. economic sanctions had undermined American efforts to help implement the 2005 accord, barring the delivery of heavy equipment needed for road and rail projects in southern Sudan. He said the provision of such assistance would be vital in ensuring that southerners can establish a viable government if, as expected, they vote to secede from Sudan in a 2011 referendum.
"We're going to have to unwind some of these sanctions so that we can do the very things we need to do to ensure a peaceful transition to a state that is viable in the south, if they choose to do that," he said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/30/AR2009073004123.html
Jun 30, 2009
International Court Under Unusual Fire
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
UNITED NATIONS -- When Luis Moreno-Ocampo charged Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir with war crimes last year, the International Criminal Court prosecutor was hailed by human rights advocates as the man who could help bring justice to Darfur.
Today, Moreno-Ocampo appears to be the one on trial, with even some of his early supporters questioning his prosecutorial strategy, his use of facts and his personal conduct. Bashir and others have used the controversy to rally opposition to the world's first permanent criminal court, a challenge that may jeopardize efforts to determine who is responsible for massive crimes in Darfur.
At issue is how to strike a balance between the quest for justice in Darfur and the pursuit of a political settlement to end an ongoing civil war in the western region of Sudan. In recent months, African and Arab leaders have said the Argentine lawyer's pursuit of the Sudanese president has undercut those peace prospects.
Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi and Gabon's Jean Ping, the two leaders of the African Union, are mounting a campaign to press African states to withdraw from the treaty body that established the international tribunal. "The attacks against the court by African and Arab governments in the last nine months are the most serious threat to the ICC" since the United States declared its opposition to it in 2002, said William Pace, who heads the Coalition for the International Criminal Court, an alliance of 2500 organizations.
Moreno-Ocampo defended his work in a lengthy interview, saying that his office offers the brightest hope of bringing justice to hundreds of thousands of African victims and halting mass murder in Darfur. "It is normal: When you prosecute people with a lot of power, you have problems," said Moreno-Ocampo, who first gained prominence by prosecuting Argentine generals for ordering mass murder in that country's "dirty war."
The International Criminal Court was established in July 2002 to prosecute perpetrators of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, building on temporary courts in Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone.
Since he was appointed in 2003, the prosecutor has brought war crimes charges against 13 individuals in northern Uganda, Congo, the Central African Republic and Sudan, including a July 2008 charge against Bashir of orchestrating genocide in Darfur. Pretrial judges approved the prosecutors' request for an arrest warrant for Bashir on March 4 on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, but rejected the genocide charge.
The Bush administration initially opposed the court, citing concerns of frivolous investigations of American soldiers engaged in the fight against terrorism. But President Obama -- whose top advisers are divided over whether Sudan continues to commit genocide -- has been far more supportive of the court.
The violence in Darfur began in early 2003 when rebel movements took up arms against the Islamic government, citing discrimination against the region's tribes. The prosecutor has charged that Bashir then orchestrated a campaign of genocide that has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Darfurian civilians from disease and violence, and driven about 2 million more from their homes.
Bashir has openly defied the court, saying that it has only strengthened his standing. "The court has been isolated and the prosecutor stands naked," said Sudan's U.N. ambassador, Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamad.
The prosecutor's case "has polarized Sudanese politics and weakened those who occupy the middle ground of compromise and consensus," said Rodolphe Adada, a former Congolese foreign minister who heads a joint African Union-U.N. mission in Darfur.
In remarks to the U.N. Security Council in April, Adada challenged Moreno-Ocampo's characterization of the situation as genocide and said that only 130 to 150 people were dying each month in Darfur, far fewer than the 5,000 that Moreno-Ocampo says die each month from violence and other causes. "In purely numeric terms it is a low-intensity conflict," Adada said.
African leaders with abysmal human rights records seek to discredit Moreno-Ocampo because "they fear accountability" in their own countries, said Richard Dicker, an expert on the ICC at Human Rights Watch. Dicker concedes that Moreno-Ocampo has made missteps that have played into the hands of the court's enemies.
In September, Human Rights Watch raised concern in a confidential memo to the court about low staff morale and the flight of many experienced investigators. It also cited the prosecutor's 2006 summary dismissal of his spokesman after he filed an internal complaint alleging Moreno-Ocampo had raped a female journalist.
A panel of ICC judges, after interviewing the woman, concluded that the allegations were "manifestly unfounded." Then an internal disciplinary board recommended that Moreno-Ocampo rescind the dismissal, arguing that the prosecutor had a conflict of interest in firing the spokesman.
An administrative tribunal at the International Labor Organization ruled that while the spokesman's allegations were ultimately proved wrong, he had not acted maliciously because he believed his boss had engaged in improper behavior. It required a settlement payment of nearly $250,000 for back pay and damages.
Moreno-Ocampo, in the interview, declined to respond to the criticism of his personal reputation, saying, "I cannot answer unfounded allegations."
The case against Bashir rankles many African leaders, who say it is hypocritical. They note that the Security Council, which authorized the Sudan probe, has three permanent members who never signed the treaty establishing the court: the United States, Russia and China. "The feeling we have is that it is biased," said Congo's U.N. envoy, Atoki Ileka.
Alex de Waal, a British expert on Darfur, and Julie Flint, a writer and human rights activist, maintain that Moreno-Ocampo is the problem. They recently co-wrote an article in the World Affairs Journal citing former staff members and prominent war crimes experts who are critical of the prosecutor for not conducting witness interviews inside Darfur and for pursuing a weak charge of genocide against Bashir.
"It is difficult to cry government-led genocide in one breath and then explain in the next why 2 million Darfuris have sought refuge around the principal army garrisons of their province," Andrew T. Cayley, a British lawyer who headed the prosecutor's Darfur investigation, wrote in the Journal of International Criminal Justice last November.
Christine Chung, a former federal prosecutor and senior trial attorney for the prosecutor until 2007, dismissed the piece as "character assassination" and said the prosecutor's decision to stay out of Darfur was "in the end correct. The Sudanese government indeed detained and tortured persons believed to be cooperating with the ICC."
Moreno-Ocampo said he remains convinced that Bashir is committing genocide. "I have 300 lawyers, all brilliant people, with different opinions, but then I make the decision," he said. "I still think it's genocide, and I will appeal."
Jun 16, 2009
What to Do About Darfur
New York Review of Books, Volume 56, Number 11 · July 2, 2009
By Nicholas D. Kristof
Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror
by Mahmood Mamdani
Pantheon, 398 pp., $26.95
Darfur and the Crime of Genocide
by John Hagan and Wenona Rymond-Richmond
Cambridge University Press, 269 pp., $85.00; $24.99 (paper)
The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur
by Daoud Hari, as told to Dennis Michael Burke and Megan M. McKenna
Random House, 207 pp., $23.00; $13.00 (paper)
Tears of the Desert: A Memoir of Survival in Darfur
by Halima Bashir, with Damien Lewis
One World/Ballantine, 316 pp., $25.00; $16.00 (paper)
The slaughter in Darfur has now lasted more than six years, longer than World War II, yet the "Save Darfur" movement has stalled—even as the plight of many Darfuris may be worsening. Many advocates for Darfur, myself included, had urged the International Criminal Court to prosecute the Sudanese president, Omar al-Bashir. We got what we hoped for—on March 4, the court issued an arrest warrant for Bashir on counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. But the immediate result was that Bashir expelled thirteen foreign aid organizations and closed three domestic ones. Millions of Darfuris have been left largely without assistance, and some are already dying.
Looming in the background is the risk that war will reignite between north and south Sudan, and if that happens Darfur will be remembered simply as a mild prologue to an even bloodier war. The north and south are each accumulating weapons and preparing for a resumption of the civil war, which, between 1983 and 2005, killed two million people. South Sudan is scheduled to hold a referendum in 2011 to determine whether it will remain in Sudan or secede, and everybody knows that the southern Sudanese will vote overwhelmingly for separation if the present regime remains in power in Khartoum. But two thirds of Sudan's oil is in the south, and it is almost inconceivable that the north will accept the loss of this oil without a fight. If you believe that Sudan is so wretched that it can't get worse, just wait.
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were among the leaders in the Senate calling for action on Darfur, yet since they have assumed executive power they have done very little about it. The reason is the same one that has always led American presidents to veer away from taking firm action on genocide—there is no neat, easy solution, major national interests are not at stake, and in the absence of an ideal policy it is always easier on any given day to defer a decision. There are also some signs that the Obama administration—in the form of its Sudan envoy, General Scott Gration, who grew up in East Africa but has no Sudan experience—prefers a softer approach toward Khartoum. As a presidential candidate, Obama sounded as if he were determined to do something about Sudan; since taking office, he has had no visible effect on the situation in Darfur.
Those concerned about Darfur are themselves divided. Some favor more aggressive measures and military tactics, such as a no-fly zone, while aid groups still active in Sudan fret that the result of such a policy would be an end to all relief work in Darfur. There is bickering about whether the ICC indictment of Bashir was a useful step to pressure Sudan, or a feel-good tactic that aggravates the suffering of Darfuris. Most advocates are convinced that the people of Darfur have been subject to genocide, while some, such as Human Rights Watch, prefer to avoid that term.
Did the Darfur movement lose its way? Does it know what it's doing? And what should be done next?
Mahmood Mamdani, an Africa specialist and professor of government at Columbia University, takes aim at the Darfur advocates in his new book, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror. It is a dyspeptic critique of the humanitarian movement at every level, and has won attention partly because of that view. Mamdani is also deeply critical of my own reporting about Darfur and regards my kind of journalism as a central part of the problem. He would certainly consider me to be the last person to provide a dispassionate examination of these issues or his book.
Mamdani, who grew up in Uganda and is of Indian extraction, has always been something of a provocateur. After September 11, he published a book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, which was more sympathetic to Osama bin Laden than most other books on the subject. He has been accused of serving as apologist for the extremist Hutus behind the Rwandan genocide, and he is also more understanding with respect to Robert Mugabe's brutal rule in Zimbabwe than most writers. His writing is infused with a tendency to indict European colonialism for inflaming tribal tensions and producing other disasters. That perspective also informs his central view of Darfur, as expressed in his final paragraph:
The Save Darfur lobby in the United States has turned the tragedy of the people of Darfur into a knife with which to slice Africa by demonizing one group of Africans, African Arabs.... At stake is also the independence of Africa. The Save Darfur lobby demands, above all else, justice, the right of the international community—really the big powers in the Security Council—to punish "failed" or "rogue" states, even if it be at the cost of more bloodshed and a diminished possibility of reconciliation. More than anything else, "the responsibility to protect" is a right to punish but without being held accountable—a clarion call for the recolonization of "failed" states in Africa. In its present form, the call for justice is really a slogan that masks a big power agenda to recolonize Africa.
There's no way to dress up that conclusion or the failure of Saviors and Survivors to present evidence that any Western power seeks to recolonize Sudan or the failed states in Africa. Ever since the Clinton administration fled Somalia, successive American administrations have studiously pretended not to notice failed states. Somalia has staggered on in chaos, and the US has even refused (wrongly) to have much to do with the tiny well-governed enclave of Somaliland, in the Horn of Africa, which has thrived despite a lack of foreign aid and is desperate for a Western embassy. The Central African Republic, to the southwest of Sudan, is a failed state in the making, but when I visited the country I found a single American diplomat in residence and a tiny UN presence; China is the diplomatic and business heavyweight there. Then there's Congo, the abyss in the heart of Africa and an important pawn in the cold war; in exploring that country's interior, I've met missionaries and diamond- buyers, warlords and UN peacekeepers, but never a US colonist of any kind.
So at a time when Western governments engage in Africa only when badgered by citizens pleading for humanitarian action—and even then do as little as they can get away with—it makes no sense for Mamdani to argue that the Save Darfur movement is some kind of conspiracy by the great powers to recolonize Africa. That is only one weakness in a tendentious book replete with factual mistakes, almost completely dependent on secondary sources, and all papered over with a tone of utter certainty.
To take one example, Mamdani writes that President George W. Bush declared in June 2004 that "the violence in Darfur region is clearly genocide," and then devotes a page in his book to showing that Secretary of State Colin Powell was "somewhat reluctant to fall in line." Mamdani claims that "soon after " Bush's finding, the State Department financed a study of mortality in Darfur, and suggests that all this shows discreditable political motives.
This sequence completely misunderstands what was going on in the United States government. The State Department financed the mortality study, before there was any finding of genocide, because it wanted information. Then Powell, after consultations with State Department legal scholars, was the first official to use the word "genocide"; and Bush was the last to do so. The quotation that Mamdani cites from Bush came in June 2005, not June 2004.
Likewise, he muddles UN Security Council resolution 1769 on Darfur, claiming that it passed a year before it did, and he incorrectly asserts that Darfur was a member of the League of Nations. Again: the most prominent Darfur leader is Abdel Wahid al-Nur, known universally as Abdel Wahid, yet somehow Mamdani mistakes his name by referring to him as Abdel al-Nur. A conversation with anyone familiar with Darfur would have caught such mistakes, but Mamdani doesn't seem to have fact-checked, conducted original research, consulted Arabic-language sources, or, most astonishingly, consulted many Darfuris themselves.
He says he made several trips to Sudan, but visits there are tightly constrained by the Humanitarian Aid Commission, run by Ahmed Haroun, who is under indictment by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. To get around in Darfur and to talk to displaced Darfuris, one needs permits issued by Haroun, or else one goes in illegally. I've paid drivers to sneak me in from Chad, and I've used fake IDs to get through checkpoints. (Well, not exactly fake IDs: after noticing that security officers couldn't read English, I put my frequent flyer membership cards on a lanyard as if they were UN passes, presented them at checkpoints, and was waved through.) It's not clear how Mamdani managed these obstacles in Sudan or whether he simply took propaganda tours, since he never describes his concrete experience there. He apparently did not go to neighboring Chad, the one place where it is possible to interview large numbers of Darfuris without political interference or risking punishment for them.
Mamdani seems to think that the Save Darfur movement was driven by neocons rather than liberals. He writes:
This mass student and evangelical movement does not seek to end the civil war in Darfur; rather, it calls for a military intervention in the civil war without bothering to address the likely consequences of that intervention. "Out of Iraq and into Darfur," says a common Save Darfur slogan. "Boots on the ground," says another. At best, Save Darfur was a romance driven by a feel-good search for instant remedies. At worst, it was a media-savvy political campaign designed to portray "Arabs" as race-intoxicated exterminators of "Africans."
The political dimension of Save Darfur is best understood in the context of the War on Terror. Because the crimes in Darfur are said to have been committed by "Arabs"—who have already been successfully demonized by the War on Terror—it has been easy to demonize these crimes as "genocide."
I never heard either of these supposedly "common" slogans, and a search of the Save Darfur Web site reveals not a single reference to the first phrase and references to the second only with regard to UN peacekeepers serving in Sudan with government consent. Some people, myself included, favor a no-fly zone that would keep government aircraft from killing people in Darfur, but I don't know of any serious Darfur activist who favors sending American "boots on the ground" into Darfur; that would create a nationalist backlash in Sudan.
As for Darfur being a front in the "war on terror," those active in the Darfur movement were mostly those same liberals who were denouncing abuses in the war on terror. Partly because the movement was worried about seeming judgmental of Arabs, it tended to say little about the fact that the slaughter was conducted by Sudanese Arabs. There have been much more frank acknowledgments of this element of the slaughter in the Arab news media, including al-Jazeera and the pan-Arab newspapers such as al-Sharq al-Awsat. As Lebanon's Daily Star declared:
For the entire Muslim and Arab world to remain silent when thousands of people in Darfur continue to be killed is shameful and hypocritical.
One of Mamdani's objections is that journalists and humanitarians focus so intently on atrocities that they provide no plausible account of the setting in which they occur. He denounces Philip Gourevitch's much-praised book on the Rwandan genocide— We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families —saying that it simplistically brands the Hutus as perpetrators and the Tutsis as victims. Then he issues a broader complaint:
This kind of journalism gives us a simple moral world, where a group of perpetrators faces a group of victims, but where neither history nor motivation is thinkable because the confrontation occurs outside history and context.
This is an objection that is often made about Darfur coverage, and it is true that there are many layers of complexity to Darfur that I am only beginning to uncover after ten visits to the region. For example, some of the Darfur rebel groups, from the "victim" tribes, have also engaged in atrocities; and many of the perpetrators busy killing blacks also look black to an American eye.
Yet every mass slaughter has had its complexities. Turks bitterly protest the designation of the 1915 killings of Armenians as genocide because the killings happened during a war and an uprising by Armenians. In the case of the Cambodian slaughter in the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge targeted people on the basis of education, urban background, or whim, but not for their race, religion, or nationality, so by a strict definition the savagery of Pol Pot is not genocide. In short, complexities always abound, and yet the central truth that resonates through history is that governments have targeted groups of people and slaughtered them.
Is Darfur a case of genocide? Mamdani disputes it, but he makes an elementary mistake in definition on the very first page of his introduction: "It is killing with intent to eliminate an entire group—a race, for example—that is genocide." On the contrary, neither the Genocide Convention of 1948 nor Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide," defined it to mean an attempt to eliminate an entire group. That was what the Nazis attempted to do to Jews, but the Turks were not determined to exterminate every last Armenian or the Serbs every last Bosnian. The Genocide Convention stipulates that it is enough if a group is targeted "in part."
Legal scholars disagree about whether Darfur qualifies as genocide, with most of the dispute turning on the question of the "intent" of the Sudanese government. I believe it is genocide, but whether this is the case, it's only one of several legitimate questions about Darfur. There are many reasonable criticisms one can make of some of the humanitarians and journalists involved. Alex de Waal, a Sudan expert and author with Julie Flint of the excellent book Darfur: A New History of a Long War,[1] has infuriated many Darfur advocates with his opposition to an ICC arrest warrant for President Bashir. But de Waal knows Sudan exceptionally well, and his blog and essays are read with respect as well as disagreement. Anybody who wants to get a well-informed critique of the Save Darfur movement would be better off reading de Waal than reading Mamdani's error-filled polemic.
A far better book than Mamdani's is Darfur and the Crime of Genocide, by John Hagan and Wenona Rymond-Richmond, scholars respectively at Northwestern University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. They make excellent use of an important archive: interviews with more than one thousand Darfuris that were done as part of the study launched by the State Department in 2004. That archive provides a solid empirical basis for research, and the authors use it effectively to argue, for example, that racism against black Africans was more of a factor than many observers believe. They note that surveys found that between one quarter and one half of the tribes attacked heard racial epithets, including "This is the last day for blacks," "Kill all the blacks," "Kill all the slaves."
Hagan and Rymond-Richmond also explore at length the issue of mortality. They estimate that about 400,000 Sudanese have been killed; they have no doubt that it is genocide. They quote Jan Pfundheller, who had previously studied genocide in the former Yugoslavia and then conducted interviews of Darfuris, as saying: "What happened in Kosovo was evil. This is more vast and equally evil." The issue of the death toll is controversial, and Mamdani notes correctly that estimates differ widely. The truth is that we have no accurate idea how many people have died in Darfur, and we won't know until the government allows a careful mortality study—and even then there will be doubts. Rwanda is at peace and available for researchers, but estimates of the genocide there in 1994 still range from 500,000 to one million.
Darfuris are seen as actual people in Darfur and the Crime of Genocide, in a way that they are not in Mamdani's book, but they emerge most clearly in books by Darfuris themselves. Darfur is their story, and they are the ones best equipped to tell it. The first book of this genre is Daoud Hari's powerful The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur, by an extraordinarily courageous (and, somehow, humorous!) young man who interpreted for a number of journalists, including me. The second is Halima Bashir's Tears of the Desert, a luminous tale of growing up in rural Darfur, undergoing training to be a doctor amid a gathering storm of racism directed toward black people such as herself, and then trying to do her medical work even as the killings accelerate. Dr. Bashir's book is a wonderful and moving African memoir that deserves far more attention than it has received.
Dr. Bashir recounts how the Sudanese-sponsored Janjaweed militia—the group believed to be responsible for many of the killings in Darfur—attacked a girls' school in the remote village where she was posted at a rural clinic. She tried desperately to treat the dozens of girls who were raped, even though the only medicine she could offer them was half a pill each of acetaminophen. She writes:
At no stage in my years of study had I been taught how to deal with 8-year-old victims of gang rape in a rural clinic without enough sutures to go around.
Dr. Bashir disclosed the attack to United Nations investigators, so secret police kidnapped her, beat her, tortured her with knives, and gang-raped her. "Now you know what rape is, you black dog," one of the policemen told her. After reading Mamdani's heavily theoretical apologia, in which Darfuris barely make an appearance, Dr. Bashir's memoir is a useful reminder of what's at stake on the ground.
The attacks on Darfuri villages such as the one Dr. Bashir describes have subsided, partly because there are few black African villages left to attack; the rate of killings in Darfur has dropped. Moreover, France took action last year and led a European military force of 3,700 soldiers that moved into neighboring Chad and the Central African Republic. Sudan had previously dispatched fighters to raid both countries, so that in the past they were the scene of murders and rapes of people because of their race and tribe, just as in Darfur. The European force, which in March passed responsibility to a UN force, has stabilized that crisis and reduced the chance that Chad and the Central African Republic will collapse, so in some respects there is a lull right now. But it won't last. The expulsion of aid workers, if it is not reversed, will lead to the deaths of countless displaced Darfuris from disease and malnutrition, and the war between north and south Sudan may well break out again in the next two years.
What then is to be done? That question has bedeviled and divided Darfur advocates for years, and there is no simple answer. Yet groups like Save Darfur, the Enough Project, and the Genocide Intervention Network have pointed to steps that will help. Here are six that I believe would increase the prospect of a solution:
• Bring together members of Darfuri civil society—doctors, educators, leaders, and businesspeople among them—to form a common negotiating platform, so that there can be constructive peace talks (since the most plausible path to a solution is a negotiated peace agreement). A prominent Sudanese tycoon and philanthropist, Mo Ibrahim, is now pushing this approach in a project called Mandate Darfur. Sudan's government blocked the Mandate Darfur peace talks this spring, with barely a murmur of protest from around the world, and it's crucial that international pressure be focused on Khartoum to allow this initiative to proceed. This may be Sudan's best hope.
• Apply pressure on the Sudanese government to make concessions so that such a negotiated deal is more likely, while also putting pressure on Abdel Wahid and the rebels. One of the basic problems is that the international community hasn't applied credible sticks or carrots to Khartoum. Carrots are difficult politically, but we can do more with sanctions (especially, going after the wealth of the Sudanese leaders in foreign banks), with international pressure from Arab countries (here Qatar has been helpful), and with military measures.
• These military measures can include a no-fly zone. This doesn't mean shooting any planes out of the air. Rather, when a Sudanese military aircraft bombs civilians in defiance of the UN ban on offensive military flights, Western forces can destroy a Sudanese fighter plane or helicopter gunship on the ground a few days later. For this purpose, the US could use aircraft from its military base in Djibouti, and France could use aircraft at its base in Abeché, in Chad. In a classified memo to the White House last year, the special envoy for Sudan, Ambassador Richard Williamson, also outlined other possible military measures, including jamming all telephones, radio signals, and television signals in Khartoum.
• Nudge China into suspending arms deliveries to Sudan. This would terrify the Khartoum regime, at a time when it is arming for renewed war with the south, for China is its main arms supplier and trainer of its military pilots. China won't suspend its oil purchases from Sudan, but it is conceivable that China would suspend military sales (which yield modest sums for China relative to the cost to its image).
• Encourage some elements in the official Sudanese leadership to overthrow President Bashir, by suggesting that if this happens and they take steps to end the violence in Darfur, the US will normalize relations with Sudan. The other leaders will not be indicted by the ICC, so if they remove Bashir they can remove the albatross from Sudan's neck. These other leaders also have blood on their hands, but they are far better than Bashir.
• Give a signal that the US has no objection to its allies selling anti-aircraft missiles to south Sudan (that is easier than providing the missiles ourselves). This would deny Khartoum air control over the south, and thus reduce the chance that the north will attack the south and revive the north–south civil war.
Samantha Power, now a national security official, wrote a superb, Pulitzer Prize–winning history of genocide, noting that time and again the United States refused to intervene in genocides even though it knew more or less what was going on. She titled her book A Problem from Hell,[2] and that's what Darfur is. But there have been other problems from hell, including Kosovo and Bosnia, that have been, if not solved, at least hugely mitigated. The lesson from places like Kosovo is that the most urgent need is less for sophisticated technical solutions than for political will to face the problem squarely. It's too early to know whether President Obama will do this, but at the moment I'm not optimistic.
To some extent, that's a reflection on the Save Darfur movement and on scribblers like myself who took up the Darfuri cause. We have failed to foster the political will to bring about change. For all our efforts, the situation on the ground may soon become worse. A "Darfur fatigue" has set in, and the movement has lost its steam. And of course the movement was always compromised by its own shortcomings, from infighting to naiveté to the ubiquitous penchant of advocacy groups for exaggeration.
Yet another perspective is also possible. As I write, I'm on a plane flying back from Washington State, where I spoke to a university audience about human rights issues, including Darfur. For all the failures, there is something inspiring about how hundreds of thousands of university students around America have marched, fasted, and donated money on behalf of people of a different race and religion who live halfway around the world, in a land they had never heard of five years ago, and who rarely appear on their television screens. Moreover, the movement is far from a complete failure. Those protests and "Save Darfur" lawn signs prompted a vast relief effort that is keeping millions alive in Sudan, Chad, and the Central African Republic. The movement has also projected a spotlight that has restrained the Sudanese government from undertaking even harsher actions it itches for, such as dismantling the vast Kalma camp for displaced Darfuris. For all the failures, hundreds of thousands of people are alive today because of those students, those churches and synagogues, and that's not a shabby legacy.
— June 3, 2009
Notes
[1]Zed Books, 2006; see my review in these pages, February 9, 2006.
[2]Basic Books, 2002; reviewed by Brian Urquhart in these pages, April 25, 2002.
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