Eric Reeves on Darfur
Pursuing Peace and Justice in Darfur: The Role of the ICC Those misrepresenting the efforts of the International Criminal Court will inevitably encourage Khartoum; urging expediency over justice upon the international community will similarly embolden the regime’s génocidaires
Eric Reeves
June 29, 2008
Are peace and justice incompatible pursuits in responding to the Darfur crisis? Do efforts by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to prosecute atrocity crimes in Darfur deserve robust international support or exhortations of caution? Is justice fundamental to a resolution of the crisis? or is it a luxury too costly, too threatening to the chances for peace? Would senior officials in the Khartoum regime be more or less likely to engage in meaningful peace talks if they faced forceful and compellingly researched indictments from the ICC? Would international support for the Court and for justice lead Khartoum to retaliate against civilians and humanitarians? Answers to these questions depend upon which of Darfur’s historical realities are accepted, which are denied or ignored.
Many insist the most basic truth of Darfur is that senior members of the National Islamic Front (National Congress Party) are responsible for engineering the genocidal destruction and displacement most violently in evidence in 2003-2004, and that the regime remains deeply complicit---and where necessary actively engaged---in sustaining the human catastrophe in Darfur. Those so convinced, including this writer, will find grossly expedient the efforts to trade out the claims of justice for those of a peace that is nowhere in sight.
I am asking, in other words, “Can there be a meaningful peace that is not a just peace?” Here we should bear in mind the very considerable evidence bearing directly on this question: for the consequential failure of the “Darfur Peace Agreement” (Abuja, Nigeria; May 2006) was due not only to the fundamental failure of its security arrangements, but to the deep inequities that defined the document, particularly on compensation issues. Moreover, no meaningful provisions for regional, national, or international justice were included in the DPA---accountability was simply not an animating issue. The failure of the DPA was sealed from the moment it became apparent that the only rebel signatory would be the brutal and unrepresentative Minni Minawi. There are many reasons for the disastrous fracturing of the rebel movements in the months that followed Abuja, but none more consequential than the failures of the DPA itself.
It is hardly surprising, then, that someone who has tried to claim excessive success for the betrayals that defined the “Darfur Peace Agreement”---Alex de Waal---should have recently co-authored in the Washington Post (with Julie Flint) an op/ed insisting that the present “course of justice” being pursued by the ICC in Darfur is badly misguided, and that the Court’s Prosecutor needs to make a series of expedient considerations in assessing the impact of ICC actions on the thinking in Khartoum:
“A high-level [ICC] indictment [of those in the al-Bashir regime] would probably damage [the objectives of peace and security].”
“[A high-level ICC indictment would] invite retaliation, including against humanitarian agencies.”
“History shows that dictators often learn that power is their only protection and that nothing, and no one, can be allowed to stand in their way.”
“The risks in Sudan are so great right now that the instruments of justice must be handled with great discretion.”
“Many crimes have been committed in Sudan. The systematic eradication of communities today is not one of them. Bringing charges of this nature against the highest echelons of government, at this moment, would be gambling with the future of the entire nation.” (“Justice Off Course In Darfur,” Alex de Waal and Julie Flint, The Washington Post, June 28, 2008; http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2008/06/27/AR2008062702632.html?hpid=opinionsbox1)
The argument is not hard to see in the abstract, but there are two fundamental forms of question raised by such an argument: is it based on reasonable assertions about the recent history of Darfur, current conditions in the region, and statements by the ICC Prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo? and if not, if facts are being distorted, what implications are there for this supremely expedient argument about the relationship of peace and justice in Darfur?
DE WAAL AND FLINT: RECENT ASSERTIONS AND CHARACTERIZATIONS
The co-authored June 28 Washington Post op/ed is one in a series of publications by de Waal and Flint, arguing very much in tandem about the current situation in Darfur and the prospects for peace, justice, and security. Many of their assertions and characterizations are demonstrably false or self-contradictory (particularly their discussions of the UN-authorized security force for Darfur, UNAMID); others are so skewed or distorted as to constitute a shameful disingenuousness.
Neither de Waal nor Flint---nor anyone outside the ICC---has access to the full body of evidence that ICC Prosecutor Moreno Ocampo has accumulated since atrocity crimes in Darfur were referred to the Court by the UN Security Council in March 2005 (Resolution 1593). But in addition to this fundamental ignorance of what “facts” Moreno Ocampo possesses, it is pure tendentiousness for de Waal and Flint to assert that:
“We are worried about two aspects of Ocampo’s approach, as presented to the UN Security Council early this month. One concerns fact: Sudan’s government has committed heinous crimes, but Ocampo’s comparison of it with Nazi Germany is an exaggeration.”
This is not “factual” rebuttal, but rather a distorted rendering of Moreno Ocampo’s remarks, which in this particular instance included parallel references to crimes in Bosnia as well as in Moreno Ocampo’s native Argentina. Moreno Ocampo was not making a broad generalization about genocide in Darfur and the Holocaust; rather he was making very specific points of comparison:
“The Nazi regime invoked its national sovereignty to attack its own population, and then crossed borders to attack people in other countries.” (“Statement by Mr. Luis Moreno Ocampo, Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, to the UN Security Council pursuant to UNSCR 1593 [2005],” 5 June 2008)
However infelicitous the historical formulation of Nazi activities from the late 1930s through 1945, the issue foremost here is clearly the invocation of “national sovereignty,” which has been precisely the response of Khartoum’s génocidaires to international efforts to provide humanitarian assistance, security, and justice to the people of Darfur. And such assertion of national sovereignty by the regime has been relentlessly and all too effectively made for over five years. If we wish to understand why several hundred thousands human beings have died in this time, why 2.7 million human beings have been internally displaced or turned into refugees, or why the UN estimates that the conflict-affected population in Darfur has reached a staggering 4.3 million human beings, then we must look first to the consequences of international acquiescence before Khartoum’s relentless claims of “national sovereignty.”
Moreover, the second part of Moreno Ocampo’s assertion is also of specific relevance to Darfur: Khartoum has deliberately engineered the export of ethnically-targeted violence to Eastern Chad. Here again the comparison as actually made by Moreno Ocampo is entirely apt. Any reasonable survey of the human rights literature confirms that not only has Khartoum conducted a proxy war against N’Djamena by way of its support for Chadian rebel groups, but has deployed its own military forces across the Darfur/Chad border, and loosed its Janjaweed militia allies to conduct ethnically-targeted attacks against civilians in Eastern Chad as well. Before challenging in such bald fashion Moreno Ocampo’s highly specific invocation of Nazi actions, de Waal and Flint would do well to recall the devastating indictments by human rights groups of cross-border violence by Khartoum, including aerial bombardment of civilian targets and the use of deadly helicopter gunships:
“Darfur Bleeds: Recent Cross-Border Violence in Chad,” Human Rights Watch, February 2006, at http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/africa/chad0206/
“Violence Beyond Borders: The Human Rights Crisis in Eastern Chad,” Human Rights Watch, June 2006, at http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/africa/chad0606/
“‘They Came Here to Kill Us’: Militia Attacks and Ethnic Targeting of Civilians in Eastern Chad,” Human Rights Watch, January 2007, at http://hrw.org/reports/2007/chad0107/index.htm
“Chad/Sudan: Sowing the seeds of Darfur: Ethnic targeting in Chad by Janjawid militias from Sudan,” Amnesty International, June 28, 2006, at http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/ENGAFR200062006]
De Waal and Flint further declare that in his Security Council briefing, Moreno Ocampo “described a Darfur we do not recognize,” specifically with his assertion that:
“the entire Sudanese state apparatus has been mobilized ‘to physically and mentally destroy entire communities’…. He outlined a criminal conspiracy within government to destroy the social fabric of Darfur with, as he has said, the first stage being the massacres of 2003-04 and the second the destruction of the refugee camps and the ethnic groups housed there.”
It is the “second phase” that De Waal and Flint claim “not to recognize,” that “defining today’s violations as a ‘systematic’ campaign to destroy ‘entire’ communities goes too far.” But de Waal and Flint have deliberately misrepresented the context in which Moreno Ocampo referred to “entire communities,”
both in his June 5 statement to the Security Council and in his earlier, more substantial “Sixth Report of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to the UN Security Council,” December 5, 2007 (see there especially Paragraph 40):
“In Darfur, the evidence shows an organized campaign by Sudanese officials to attack civilians, in particular the Fur, Massalit and Zaghawa, with the objective to physically and mentally destroy entire communities. Over a period of 5 years, they have been relentlessly attacked throughout Darfur. Attacked in their villages. Attacked in the camps. Their land [usurped].
“The first phase of attacks in 2003-2004 has affected 4 million people. Since 2005, villages are still being attacked. What is the difference between those two phases? A simple one: there are fewer villages left to burn and loot, [fewer] civilians to terrorize and kill.
“But the tactics remain: the Sudanese army in coordination with the air force and Militia Janjaweed attack civilians. In 2008 alone, they have displaced more than 100,000 civilians from the villages of Abu Suruj, Sirba, Seleia, Aro Sharow, Kandare, Kurlongo, Sheged Karo. Schools, markets, water installations have been hit. Homes have been burned.
“Such attacks are sufficient to keep the entire population terrorized. They are sufficient to demonstrate to the displaced their total vulnerability.” (“Statement by Mr. Luis Moreno Ocampo, Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, to the UN Security Council pursuant to UNSCR 1593 [2005],” 5 June 2008)
What is “unrecognizable” here? Which details are inaccurate? Which generalizations unsupportable? De Waal and Flint offer neither an accurate account of Moreno Ocampo’s assertions nor effective or telling criticism, either in the Washington Post op/ed or elsewhere. Nor has the finding of genocide---the clear implication of Moreno Ocampo’s language throughout his most recent report---always seemed so misplaced to de Waal, who wrote in August 2004:
“This [counter-insurgency effort by Khartoum] is not the genocidal campaign of a government at the height of its ideological hubris, as the 1992 jihad against the Nuba Mountains was, or coldly determined to secure natural resources, as when it sought to clear the oilfields of southern Sudan of their troublesome inhabitants. This is the routine cruelty of a security cabal, its humanity withered by years in power: it is genocide by force of habit." (“Counter-insurgency on the Cheap,” London Review of Books).
De Waal’s thinking about the nature of violence in Darfur may have evolved, but certainly the National Islamic Front regime has not: it comprises the very same men responsible for genocidal destruction in the Nuba Mountains, the oil regions of southern Sudan, and Darfur.
Moreover, in their 2005 book on Darfur, de Waal and Flint seem to take seriously an August 2004 directive from the headquarters of Musa Hilal, the most notorious and powerful of the Janjaweed leaders recruited by Khartoum to assist in its genocidal ambitions:
“The ultimate objective in Darfur is spelled out in an August 2004 directive from [Janjaweed paramount leader Musa] Hilal’s headquarters: ‘Change the demography of Darfur and empty it of African tribes.’ Confirming the control of [Khartoum’s] Military Intelligence over the Darfur file, the directive is addressed to no fewer than three intelligence services---the Intelligence and Security Department, Military Intelligence and National Security, and the ultra-secret ‘Constructive Security,’ or Amn al Ijabi." (“Darfur: A Short History of a Long War,” page 39)
Musa Hilal has recently (January 2008) been appointed to a senior position within the NIF regime, charged with regaining the support of the Janjaweed leaders who had tired of being betrayed by Khartoum, or lost interest in a conflict in which there are indeed many fewer civilian targets of opportunity, and much less land to appropriate (see my analysis of the implications of this appointment at http://www.sudanreeves.org/Article202.html). Given Hilal’s views on “changing the demography of Darfur,” one might think his appointment by Khartoum would be an embarrassment to the argument de Waal and Flint make against Moreno Ocampo. They are predictably silent on the issue, although Moreno Ocampo speaks explicitly and ominously about the potential for current land appropriation by Arab groups “creating a new demography” in Darfur.
A much more detailed and important account of the change from “phase one” to “phase two” of the Darfur genocide is offered by Human Rights Watch (which nonetheless remains unable to secure internal consensus on the question of “genocidal intent”). HRW’s conclusions comport much more fully with the assessment of Moreno Ocampo than that of de Waal and Flint:
“The government [of Sudan] continues to stoke the chaos [in Darfur] and, in some areas, exploit intercommunal tensions that escalate into open hostilities, apparently in an effort to ‘divide and rule’ and maintain military and political dominance over the region.” (“Darfur 2007: Chaos by Design,” September 2007 at http://hrw.org/reports/2007/sudan0907/, page 6 ([see especially as well pages 22, 34, 38, 41-43, 45, 51, 53-54]).
Flint and de Waal scoff at the notion that current efforts by the Khartoum regime are “systematic,” and at Moreno Ocampo’s claim that human destruction and displacement in Darfur are the responsibility of “the entire Sudanese state apparatus.” Moreno Ocampo reports, on the basis of comprehensive investigation:
“The evidence shows that the commission of such crimes on such a scale, over a period of five years, and throughout Darfur, has required the sustained mobilization of the entire Sudanese state apparatus:
“The coordination of the military, security and intelligence
services.
The integration of the Militia Janjaweed.
The participation of all Ministries.
The contribution of the diplomatic and public information
bureaucracies.
The control of the judiciary.”
So again, where does Moreno Ocampo err? Which element of the National Islamic Front regime named has not been directly involved in the Darfur genocide? Here also de Waal and Flint (who, peculiarly, refer in their op/ed only to the “documentation” of “relief agencies”) should recall the results of massive human rights investigating in Darfur. A December 2005 report from Human Rights Watch (“Entrenching Impunity: Government Responsibility for International Crimes in Darfur,” December 2005 at
http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2005/12/09/sudan12186.htm) offers an extraordinarily well-researched account of the mechanics of genocide---of just how the NIF has organized the destruction of non-Arab or African tribal populations in Darfur. It also presents substantial evidence for what had long been clear, but in this report is established beyond reasonable doubt: that senior NIF leadership has directly overseen Darfur’s genocidal destruction. This remains true today, with the especially vicious NIF presidential advisor Nafi’e Ali Nafi’e holding the Darfur portfolio.
The Human Rights Watch report made clear that the chains of command for military operations---as well as recruitment, supply, and direction of the Janjaweed militias---led directly to the most senior members of the NIF: President (and Commander-in-Chief) Omar al-Bashir; former First Vice-President and current Second Vice-President Ali Osman Taha (who held the Darfur portfolio from 2003-2005); the head of Khartoum’s ruthlessly efficient security and intelligence services, Major General Saleh Abdallah ‘Gosh’; former Minister of the Interior and current Minister of Defense Abdul Rahim Mohamed Hussein; Major General Bakri Hassan Salih, former Minister of Defense and subsequently Minister for Presidential Affairs; Abbas Arabi, former Chief of Staff of the Sudanese Armed Forces and currently Director General of the National Communications Corporation.
Also of particular importance in sustaining the Darfur genocide is the grotesquely named Humanitarian Aid Commission (HAC). HAC is little more than an extension of Khartoum’s security forces and the Ministry of the Interior, but provides the official means by which the regime continues its immensely debilitating war of attrition against UN and nongovernmental humanitarian organizations in Darfur. It would be difficult to overstate the consequences of this policy of obstructionism, which has evolved steadily and mercilessly, even as the world’s largest humanitarian effort is set to enter its fifth year. And yet despite the enormous consequences for civilians, and the growing potential for large-scale humanitarian withdrawal because of insecurity either abetted or permitted by Khartoum, de Waal and Flint give only a passing nod to operations that sustain some 4.3 million human beings, people who would be terrifyingly vulnerable if those operations were to collapse or continue to be severely curtailed by HAC:
“Yes, there are great obstructions of relief efforts and much violence around the camps (not all of it by the government). Government functionaries and soldiers abuse civilians with impunity. But….”
This is woefully inadequate, even in the brief scope afforded, particularly since HAC’s efforts of obstruction are so “systematic,” and the issue of this paragraph from de Waal and Flint’s op/ed is precisely Moreno Ocampo’s use of the adjective “systematic” to describe Khartoum’s efforts of destruction. It should also be noted here, in response to the parenthetical comment by de Waal and Flint, that Moreno Ocampo, repeatedly---in all his Statements---makes clear that he well understands that not all violence is the responsibility of Khartoum. Any fair rendering of his views and those of the ICC would acknowledge, for example, that the Court is investigating rebel violations of international law, and is likely to indict those responsible for the attack on African Union forces in Haskanita, North Darfur (September 2007).
The dismissive language that de Waal and Flint offer here---“yes, humanitarian aid is being obstructed, but…”---is deeply disingenuous, since both know that such obstruction is enormously consequential, and that the human stakes are rising even as HAC accelerates its efforts to harass, abuse, and impede humanitarians. Notably, HAC has become the means by which Khartoum has callously suppressed, for months, a number of key malnutrition reports by the UN and nongovernmental humanitarian organizations. It is on the basis of such reports that humanitarians must plan and allocate what are already inadequate resources. HAC and Khartoum’s security services have also obstructed the gathering of new and critically relevant data pertaining to malnutrition, actions that could cost tens of thousands of lives during what all now acknowledge will be the most difficult “hunger gap” since large-scale humanitarian access was secured in July 2004. The period between spring planting and fall harvest looks extraordinarily grim, and humanitarian officials predict that August and September will be extremely dangerous months for huge numbers of civilians weakened by more than five years of war and violence.
Many will starve, and yet UN humanitarian organizations in Darfur are reduced to pleading with the regime and HAC to permit them to do their work. In a June 22, 2008 statement revealing of how desperate they are, the operational UN humanitarian organizations in Darfur felt they said as much as they dared by asserting, inter alia:
“In order to monitor, assess and alleviate the impact of these factors [shortages of food, water, and sanitation], it is essential that humanitarian workers have safe access to all communities. Such monitoring can only succeed if aid agencies are able to undertake and release the results of surveys and assessments in a timely manner and without restrictions.”
Some within the UN community objected to such a weak and merely implicit accusation, given the urgency of the current situation; others feared that Khartoum might retaliate if stronger language were used. The statement continued:
“The Government of Sudan must urgently enact its agreement to release the results of technically cleared humanitarian surveys---including nutritional and crop surveys---and minimize delays in publishing future survey findings.” (“UN Statement on the Humanitarian Situation in Darfur,” 22 June 2008) (See my analysis of this statement, http://www.sudanreeves.org/Article217.html)
The language may be timid, but given the millions of civilians dependent upon the international aid effort in Darfur, we must see Khartoum’s continuing obstruction of humanitarian surveys as a “systematic” instrument of destruction, deliberately targeting those made most vulnerable by previous ethnically-targeted violence.
THE ABANDONMENT OF JUSTICE IN THE INTEREST OF PEACE?
It is by ignoring so many of Darfur’s realities that de Waal and Flint make their argument against Moreno Ocampo’s expected indictment of at least one senior member of the National Islamic Front. But despite such a distorted representation of conditions in Darfur, is the logic of their argument still sound?
“The risks in Sudan are so great right now that the instruments of justice must be handled with great discretion.”
“Many crimes have been committed in Sudan. The systematic eradication of communities today is not one of them. Bringing charges of this nature against the highest echelons of government, at this moment, would be gambling with the future of the entire nation.”
Let us first of all be clear what de Waal and Flint are urging: it doesn’t matter whether Moreno Ocampo has overwhelming evidence of genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity committed by Minister of Defense Abdul Rahim Mohamed Hussein (also former Minister of the Interior during the most violent years of the genocide)---the senior NIF official most likely to be indicted. The ICC Prosecutor should simply sit on this evidence, no matter how compelling, and allow Khartoum to contend only with the April 2007 indictments of junior interior minister Ahmed Haroun and Janjaweed leader Ali Kushayb (the “colonel of colonels”).
But of course Khartoum has long insisted, falsely, that the ICC has no jurisdiction over atrocity crimes in Darfur (see Paragraphs 10-15 of Moreno Ocampo’s December 5, 2007 Statement to the Security Council), and that it will never surrender any Sudanese to the Court, either as witness or indicted person. The regime contemptuously flouts the ICC and has recently gone so far as to declare that Moreno Ocampo is a “terrorist” because of his Darfur investigations. At the same time, a recent, and unanimous, UN Security Council statement is unlikely to change Khartoum’s calculations unless specific consequences are attached to non-compliance; indeed, the statement is all too likely to convince the regime yet again that they face nothing more vigorous than moral exhortation:
"The Council urges the government of Sudan and all other parties to the conflict in Darfur to fully cooperate with the court, consistent with resolution 1593 (from 2005), in order to put an end to impunity for crimes committed in Darfur.” (UN Security Council statement, June 16, 2008)
What we see here---and in the argument de Waal and Flint offer---is not a serious pressuring of Khartoum, but rather forms of accommodation. In the sixth year of unfathomable violence, destruction, and displacement, “urging” Khartoum to “cooperate” seems little more than a cruel sop thrown to the people of Darfur. In the case of de Waal and Flint, such accommodation of Khartoum extends to an expedient abandonment of justice in the interest of rendering Darfur somehow manageable, a situation requiring certain forms of acquiescence---at the very least not the site of ongoing genocidal destruction. In part, they argue disingenuously against Moreno Ocampo’s reports because to acknowledge the fundamental truth of his investigations---the all but declared finding of continuing genocide---would make expediency seem too appalling, even for de Waal and Flint.
REALITIES
What will Khartoum’s response be to an indictment of Minister of Defense Hussein? We can’t know, although there is compelling evidence that behind its public obduracy, the regime’s génocidaires are a good deal more fearful of the ICC than they let on publicly (see an extraordinarily revealing article by Wasil Ali of The Sudan Tribune, which is based on intelligence provided by a “senior Sudanese official,” at http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article27639). But there is certainly no peace process to be compromised; indeed, Khartoum still insists that the “Darfur Peace Agreement” is the only basis for new negotiations, a non-starter for all the rebel groups (this is yet another dimension of failure represented by the DPA). But what about Khartoum’s ability to curtail further the deployment of the UN/African Union “hybrid” force in Darfur (UNAMID)? What about the possibility of retaliation against humanitarians that de Waal and Flint point to?
These are real possibilities, and given the implicit “go-ahead” recently signaled to the ICC by the Security Council---even if in the painfully weak language of “urging” the regime to “cooperate” with the Court---there is no reason to expect Moreno Ocampo to back down.
But to ask only these questions---now---about UNAMID and the safety of humanitarians is implicitly to accept the logic of international inaction of the past five years: “don’t offend Khartoum, don’t threaten---work cooperatively, patiently, deferentially, and allow these men to preserve their dignity.” This approach has been a manifest failure and yet continues in the reflexive attitude of accommodation that is embodied in de Waal and Flint.
Here it is instructive to recall that on July 30, 2004 the UN Security Council declared that it,
“Demands that the Government of Sudan fulfill its commitments to disarm the Janjaweed militias and apprehend and bring to justice Janjaweed leaders and their associates who have incited and carried out human rights and international humanitarian law violations and other atrocities.” (UN Security Council Resolution 1556, Section “Acting under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations,” Paragraph 6)
Four years later, this “demand”---long contemptuously ignored by Khartoum---is more robustly embodied in the impending indictments of ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo. It is highly likely that in addition to Minister of Defense Hussein (who certainly has had considerable “association” with the Janjaweed), Musa Hilal will also be served (in absentia) an arrest warrant for a wide range of atrocity crimes (though let us recall that the notorious Janjaweed leader is also now a senior NIF official). In the four years since Resolution 1556 was passed---under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, conferring enforcement authority---not only have the Janjaweed not been disarmed or brought to justice, there has not been even a show of an attempt by Khartoum.
During this time hundreds of thousands of people have died, many tens of thousands of women and girls have been raped, more than one million people have been violently displaced, millions of lives have been turned into ghastly exercises in day-to-day survival, humanitarians have been killed by the scores---and Khartoum has paid no price for continued deployment of the Janjaweed. The argument that the regime should continue to receive deference, should continue to be accommodated, should continue to rule with impunity, should continue to be insulated from the demands of justice---in Darfur and throughout Sudan---is perverse and fundamentally counter-productive. The argument that we should accept all that has occurred and pretend---“right now,” “at this moment,” as de Waal and Flint would have it with their peculiarly delicate sense of historical timing---that we serve the people of Darfur by continuing as we have, without the disruptions of ICC indictments for genocide or crimes against humanity, ensures only that the past will define the future.
The status quo in Darfur is simply unacceptable; monstrous crimes against humanity are perpetuated amidst a climate of impunity that is acknowledged by all. The question is not whether indictment of a senior National Islamic Front official will provoke retaliation against humanitarians or further obstruction of UNAMID. The real question is what the international community---and in particular specific member states of the UN, and most particularly of the Security Council---will do to forestall not just immediate or short-term retaliatory responses by Khartoum, but to secure long-term security for all Darfuris.
De Waal and Flint read history as showing “that dictators often learn that power is their only protection and that nothing, and no one, can be allowed to stand in the way.” This is certainly Khartoum’s fully justified reading of recent history. But the imperative that emerges here is not to abandon justice because a brutal handful of serial génocidaires think that theirs is the only power; the task is to demonstrate forcefully the power that resides in the international commitment to justice. If such power is non-existent, no force will long protect the acutely vulnerable civilians of Darfur or the humanitarians upon whom they depend in such terrifyingly vast numbers.
Eric Reeves
Smith College
Northampton, MA 01063
413-585-3326
ereeves@smith.edu
www.sudanreeves.org
Eric Reeves
June 29, 2008
Are peace and justice incompatible pursuits in responding to the Darfur crisis? Do efforts by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to prosecute atrocity crimes in Darfur deserve robust international support or exhortations of caution? Is justice fundamental to a resolution of the crisis? or is it a luxury too costly, too threatening to the chances for peace? Would senior officials in the Khartoum regime be more or less likely to engage in meaningful peace talks if they faced forceful and compellingly researched indictments from the ICC? Would international support for the Court and for justice lead Khartoum to retaliate against civilians and humanitarians? Answers to these questions depend upon which of Darfur’s historical realities are accepted, which are denied or ignored.
Many insist the most basic truth of Darfur is that senior members of the National Islamic Front (National Congress Party) are responsible for engineering the genocidal destruction and displacement most violently in evidence in 2003-2004, and that the regime remains deeply complicit---and where necessary actively engaged---in sustaining the human catastrophe in Darfur. Those so convinced, including this writer, will find grossly expedient the efforts to trade out the claims of justice for those of a peace that is nowhere in sight.
I am asking, in other words, “Can there be a meaningful peace that is not a just peace?” Here we should bear in mind the very considerable evidence bearing directly on this question: for the consequential failure of the “Darfur Peace Agreement” (Abuja, Nigeria; May 2006) was due not only to the fundamental failure of its security arrangements, but to the deep inequities that defined the document, particularly on compensation issues. Moreover, no meaningful provisions for regional, national, or international justice were included in the DPA---accountability was simply not an animating issue. The failure of the DPA was sealed from the moment it became apparent that the only rebel signatory would be the brutal and unrepresentative Minni Minawi. There are many reasons for the disastrous fracturing of the rebel movements in the months that followed Abuja, but none more consequential than the failures of the DPA itself.
It is hardly surprising, then, that someone who has tried to claim excessive success for the betrayals that defined the “Darfur Peace Agreement”---Alex de Waal---should have recently co-authored in the Washington Post (with Julie Flint) an op/ed insisting that the present “course of justice” being pursued by the ICC in Darfur is badly misguided, and that the Court’s Prosecutor needs to make a series of expedient considerations in assessing the impact of ICC actions on the thinking in Khartoum:
“A high-level [ICC] indictment [of those in the al-Bashir regime] would probably damage [the objectives of peace and security].”
“[A high-level ICC indictment would] invite retaliation, including against humanitarian agencies.”
“History shows that dictators often learn that power is their only protection and that nothing, and no one, can be allowed to stand in their way.”
“The risks in Sudan are so great right now that the instruments of justice must be handled with great discretion.”
“Many crimes have been committed in Sudan. The systematic eradication of communities today is not one of them. Bringing charges of this nature against the highest echelons of government, at this moment, would be gambling with the future of the entire nation.” (“Justice Off Course In Darfur,” Alex de Waal and Julie Flint, The Washington Post, June 28, 2008; http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2008/06/27/AR2008062702632.html?hpid=opinionsbox1)
The argument is not hard to see in the abstract, but there are two fundamental forms of question raised by such an argument: is it based on reasonable assertions about the recent history of Darfur, current conditions in the region, and statements by the ICC Prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo? and if not, if facts are being distorted, what implications are there for this supremely expedient argument about the relationship of peace and justice in Darfur?
DE WAAL AND FLINT: RECENT ASSERTIONS AND CHARACTERIZATIONS
The co-authored June 28 Washington Post op/ed is one in a series of publications by de Waal and Flint, arguing very much in tandem about the current situation in Darfur and the prospects for peace, justice, and security. Many of their assertions and characterizations are demonstrably false or self-contradictory (particularly their discussions of the UN-authorized security force for Darfur, UNAMID); others are so skewed or distorted as to constitute a shameful disingenuousness.
Neither de Waal nor Flint---nor anyone outside the ICC---has access to the full body of evidence that ICC Prosecutor Moreno Ocampo has accumulated since atrocity crimes in Darfur were referred to the Court by the UN Security Council in March 2005 (Resolution 1593). But in addition to this fundamental ignorance of what “facts” Moreno Ocampo possesses, it is pure tendentiousness for de Waal and Flint to assert that:
“We are worried about two aspects of Ocampo’s approach, as presented to the UN Security Council early this month. One concerns fact: Sudan’s government has committed heinous crimes, but Ocampo’s comparison of it with Nazi Germany is an exaggeration.”
This is not “factual” rebuttal, but rather a distorted rendering of Moreno Ocampo’s remarks, which in this particular instance included parallel references to crimes in Bosnia as well as in Moreno Ocampo’s native Argentina. Moreno Ocampo was not making a broad generalization about genocide in Darfur and the Holocaust; rather he was making very specific points of comparison:
“The Nazi regime invoked its national sovereignty to attack its own population, and then crossed borders to attack people in other countries.” (“Statement by Mr. Luis Moreno Ocampo, Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, to the UN Security Council pursuant to UNSCR 1593 [2005],” 5 June 2008)
However infelicitous the historical formulation of Nazi activities from the late 1930s through 1945, the issue foremost here is clearly the invocation of “national sovereignty,” which has been precisely the response of Khartoum’s génocidaires to international efforts to provide humanitarian assistance, security, and justice to the people of Darfur. And such assertion of national sovereignty by the regime has been relentlessly and all too effectively made for over five years. If we wish to understand why several hundred thousands human beings have died in this time, why 2.7 million human beings have been internally displaced or turned into refugees, or why the UN estimates that the conflict-affected population in Darfur has reached a staggering 4.3 million human beings, then we must look first to the consequences of international acquiescence before Khartoum’s relentless claims of “national sovereignty.”
Moreover, the second part of Moreno Ocampo’s assertion is also of specific relevance to Darfur: Khartoum has deliberately engineered the export of ethnically-targeted violence to Eastern Chad. Here again the comparison as actually made by Moreno Ocampo is entirely apt. Any reasonable survey of the human rights literature confirms that not only has Khartoum conducted a proxy war against N’Djamena by way of its support for Chadian rebel groups, but has deployed its own military forces across the Darfur/Chad border, and loosed its Janjaweed militia allies to conduct ethnically-targeted attacks against civilians in Eastern Chad as well. Before challenging in such bald fashion Moreno Ocampo’s highly specific invocation of Nazi actions, de Waal and Flint would do well to recall the devastating indictments by human rights groups of cross-border violence by Khartoum, including aerial bombardment of civilian targets and the use of deadly helicopter gunships:
“Darfur Bleeds: Recent Cross-Border Violence in Chad,” Human Rights Watch, February 2006, at http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/africa/chad0206/
“Violence Beyond Borders: The Human Rights Crisis in Eastern Chad,” Human Rights Watch, June 2006, at http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/africa/chad0606/
“‘They Came Here to Kill Us’: Militia Attacks and Ethnic Targeting of Civilians in Eastern Chad,” Human Rights Watch, January 2007, at http://hrw.org/reports/2007/chad0107/index.htm
“Chad/Sudan: Sowing the seeds of Darfur: Ethnic targeting in Chad by Janjawid militias from Sudan,” Amnesty International, June 28, 2006, at http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/ENGAFR200062006]
De Waal and Flint further declare that in his Security Council briefing, Moreno Ocampo “described a Darfur we do not recognize,” specifically with his assertion that:
“the entire Sudanese state apparatus has been mobilized ‘to physically and mentally destroy entire communities’…. He outlined a criminal conspiracy within government to destroy the social fabric of Darfur with, as he has said, the first stage being the massacres of 2003-04 and the second the destruction of the refugee camps and the ethnic groups housed there.”
It is the “second phase” that De Waal and Flint claim “not to recognize,” that “defining today’s violations as a ‘systematic’ campaign to destroy ‘entire’ communities goes too far.” But de Waal and Flint have deliberately misrepresented the context in which Moreno Ocampo referred to “entire communities,”
both in his June 5 statement to the Security Council and in his earlier, more substantial “Sixth Report of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to the UN Security Council,” December 5, 2007 (see there especially Paragraph 40):
“In Darfur, the evidence shows an organized campaign by Sudanese officials to attack civilians, in particular the Fur, Massalit and Zaghawa, with the objective to physically and mentally destroy entire communities. Over a period of 5 years, they have been relentlessly attacked throughout Darfur. Attacked in their villages. Attacked in the camps. Their land [usurped].
“The first phase of attacks in 2003-2004 has affected 4 million people. Since 2005, villages are still being attacked. What is the difference between those two phases? A simple one: there are fewer villages left to burn and loot, [fewer] civilians to terrorize and kill.
“But the tactics remain: the Sudanese army in coordination with the air force and Militia Janjaweed attack civilians. In 2008 alone, they have displaced more than 100,000 civilians from the villages of Abu Suruj, Sirba, Seleia, Aro Sharow, Kandare, Kurlongo, Sheged Karo. Schools, markets, water installations have been hit. Homes have been burned.
“Such attacks are sufficient to keep the entire population terrorized. They are sufficient to demonstrate to the displaced their total vulnerability.” (“Statement by Mr. Luis Moreno Ocampo, Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, to the UN Security Council pursuant to UNSCR 1593 [2005],” 5 June 2008)
What is “unrecognizable” here? Which details are inaccurate? Which generalizations unsupportable? De Waal and Flint offer neither an accurate account of Moreno Ocampo’s assertions nor effective or telling criticism, either in the Washington Post op/ed or elsewhere. Nor has the finding of genocide---the clear implication of Moreno Ocampo’s language throughout his most recent report---always seemed so misplaced to de Waal, who wrote in August 2004:
“This [counter-insurgency effort by Khartoum] is not the genocidal campaign of a government at the height of its ideological hubris, as the 1992 jihad against the Nuba Mountains was, or coldly determined to secure natural resources, as when it sought to clear the oilfields of southern Sudan of their troublesome inhabitants. This is the routine cruelty of a security cabal, its humanity withered by years in power: it is genocide by force of habit." (“Counter-insurgency on the Cheap,” London Review of Books).
De Waal’s thinking about the nature of violence in Darfur may have evolved, but certainly the National Islamic Front regime has not: it comprises the very same men responsible for genocidal destruction in the Nuba Mountains, the oil regions of southern Sudan, and Darfur.
Moreover, in their 2005 book on Darfur, de Waal and Flint seem to take seriously an August 2004 directive from the headquarters of Musa Hilal, the most notorious and powerful of the Janjaweed leaders recruited by Khartoum to assist in its genocidal ambitions:
“The ultimate objective in Darfur is spelled out in an August 2004 directive from [Janjaweed paramount leader Musa] Hilal’s headquarters: ‘Change the demography of Darfur and empty it of African tribes.’ Confirming the control of [Khartoum’s] Military Intelligence over the Darfur file, the directive is addressed to no fewer than three intelligence services---the Intelligence and Security Department, Military Intelligence and National Security, and the ultra-secret ‘Constructive Security,’ or Amn al Ijabi." (“Darfur: A Short History of a Long War,” page 39)
Musa Hilal has recently (January 2008) been appointed to a senior position within the NIF regime, charged with regaining the support of the Janjaweed leaders who had tired of being betrayed by Khartoum, or lost interest in a conflict in which there are indeed many fewer civilian targets of opportunity, and much less land to appropriate (see my analysis of the implications of this appointment at http://www.sudanreeves.org/Article202.html). Given Hilal’s views on “changing the demography of Darfur,” one might think his appointment by Khartoum would be an embarrassment to the argument de Waal and Flint make against Moreno Ocampo. They are predictably silent on the issue, although Moreno Ocampo speaks explicitly and ominously about the potential for current land appropriation by Arab groups “creating a new demography” in Darfur.
A much more detailed and important account of the change from “phase one” to “phase two” of the Darfur genocide is offered by Human Rights Watch (which nonetheless remains unable to secure internal consensus on the question of “genocidal intent”). HRW’s conclusions comport much more fully with the assessment of Moreno Ocampo than that of de Waal and Flint:
“The government [of Sudan] continues to stoke the chaos [in Darfur] and, in some areas, exploit intercommunal tensions that escalate into open hostilities, apparently in an effort to ‘divide and rule’ and maintain military and political dominance over the region.” (“Darfur 2007: Chaos by Design,” September 2007 at http://hrw.org/reports/2007/sudan0907/, page 6 ([see especially as well pages 22, 34, 38, 41-43, 45, 51, 53-54]).
Flint and de Waal scoff at the notion that current efforts by the Khartoum regime are “systematic,” and at Moreno Ocampo’s claim that human destruction and displacement in Darfur are the responsibility of “the entire Sudanese state apparatus.” Moreno Ocampo reports, on the basis of comprehensive investigation:
“The evidence shows that the commission of such crimes on such a scale, over a period of five years, and throughout Darfur, has required the sustained mobilization of the entire Sudanese state apparatus:
“The coordination of the military, security and intelligence
services.
The integration of the Militia Janjaweed.
The participation of all Ministries.
The contribution of the diplomatic and public information
bureaucracies.
The control of the judiciary.”
So again, where does Moreno Ocampo err? Which element of the National Islamic Front regime named has not been directly involved in the Darfur genocide? Here also de Waal and Flint (who, peculiarly, refer in their op/ed only to the “documentation” of “relief agencies”) should recall the results of massive human rights investigating in Darfur. A December 2005 report from Human Rights Watch (“Entrenching Impunity: Government Responsibility for International Crimes in Darfur,” December 2005 at
http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2005/12/09/sudan12186.htm) offers an extraordinarily well-researched account of the mechanics of genocide---of just how the NIF has organized the destruction of non-Arab or African tribal populations in Darfur. It also presents substantial evidence for what had long been clear, but in this report is established beyond reasonable doubt: that senior NIF leadership has directly overseen Darfur’s genocidal destruction. This remains true today, with the especially vicious NIF presidential advisor Nafi’e Ali Nafi’e holding the Darfur portfolio.
The Human Rights Watch report made clear that the chains of command for military operations---as well as recruitment, supply, and direction of the Janjaweed militias---led directly to the most senior members of the NIF: President (and Commander-in-Chief) Omar al-Bashir; former First Vice-President and current Second Vice-President Ali Osman Taha (who held the Darfur portfolio from 2003-2005); the head of Khartoum’s ruthlessly efficient security and intelligence services, Major General Saleh Abdallah ‘Gosh’; former Minister of the Interior and current Minister of Defense Abdul Rahim Mohamed Hussein; Major General Bakri Hassan Salih, former Minister of Defense and subsequently Minister for Presidential Affairs; Abbas Arabi, former Chief of Staff of the Sudanese Armed Forces and currently Director General of the National Communications Corporation.
Also of particular importance in sustaining the Darfur genocide is the grotesquely named Humanitarian Aid Commission (HAC). HAC is little more than an extension of Khartoum’s security forces and the Ministry of the Interior, but provides the official means by which the regime continues its immensely debilitating war of attrition against UN and nongovernmental humanitarian organizations in Darfur. It would be difficult to overstate the consequences of this policy of obstructionism, which has evolved steadily and mercilessly, even as the world’s largest humanitarian effort is set to enter its fifth year. And yet despite the enormous consequences for civilians, and the growing potential for large-scale humanitarian withdrawal because of insecurity either abetted or permitted by Khartoum, de Waal and Flint give only a passing nod to operations that sustain some 4.3 million human beings, people who would be terrifyingly vulnerable if those operations were to collapse or continue to be severely curtailed by HAC:
“Yes, there are great obstructions of relief efforts and much violence around the camps (not all of it by the government). Government functionaries and soldiers abuse civilians with impunity. But….”
This is woefully inadequate, even in the brief scope afforded, particularly since HAC’s efforts of obstruction are so “systematic,” and the issue of this paragraph from de Waal and Flint’s op/ed is precisely Moreno Ocampo’s use of the adjective “systematic” to describe Khartoum’s efforts of destruction. It should also be noted here, in response to the parenthetical comment by de Waal and Flint, that Moreno Ocampo, repeatedly---in all his Statements---makes clear that he well understands that not all violence is the responsibility of Khartoum. Any fair rendering of his views and those of the ICC would acknowledge, for example, that the Court is investigating rebel violations of international law, and is likely to indict those responsible for the attack on African Union forces in Haskanita, North Darfur (September 2007).
The dismissive language that de Waal and Flint offer here---“yes, humanitarian aid is being obstructed, but…”---is deeply disingenuous, since both know that such obstruction is enormously consequential, and that the human stakes are rising even as HAC accelerates its efforts to harass, abuse, and impede humanitarians. Notably, HAC has become the means by which Khartoum has callously suppressed, for months, a number of key malnutrition reports by the UN and nongovernmental humanitarian organizations. It is on the basis of such reports that humanitarians must plan and allocate what are already inadequate resources. HAC and Khartoum’s security services have also obstructed the gathering of new and critically relevant data pertaining to malnutrition, actions that could cost tens of thousands of lives during what all now acknowledge will be the most difficult “hunger gap” since large-scale humanitarian access was secured in July 2004. The period between spring planting and fall harvest looks extraordinarily grim, and humanitarian officials predict that August and September will be extremely dangerous months for huge numbers of civilians weakened by more than five years of war and violence.
Many will starve, and yet UN humanitarian organizations in Darfur are reduced to pleading with the regime and HAC to permit them to do their work. In a June 22, 2008 statement revealing of how desperate they are, the operational UN humanitarian organizations in Darfur felt they said as much as they dared by asserting, inter alia:
“In order to monitor, assess and alleviate the impact of these factors [shortages of food, water, and sanitation], it is essential that humanitarian workers have safe access to all communities. Such monitoring can only succeed if aid agencies are able to undertake and release the results of surveys and assessments in a timely manner and without restrictions.”
Some within the UN community objected to such a weak and merely implicit accusation, given the urgency of the current situation; others feared that Khartoum might retaliate if stronger language were used. The statement continued:
“The Government of Sudan must urgently enact its agreement to release the results of technically cleared humanitarian surveys---including nutritional and crop surveys---and minimize delays in publishing future survey findings.” (“UN Statement on the Humanitarian Situation in Darfur,” 22 June 2008) (See my analysis of this statement, http://www.sudanreeves.org/Article217.html)
The language may be timid, but given the millions of civilians dependent upon the international aid effort in Darfur, we must see Khartoum’s continuing obstruction of humanitarian surveys as a “systematic” instrument of destruction, deliberately targeting those made most vulnerable by previous ethnically-targeted violence.
THE ABANDONMENT OF JUSTICE IN THE INTEREST OF PEACE?
It is by ignoring so many of Darfur’s realities that de Waal and Flint make their argument against Moreno Ocampo’s expected indictment of at least one senior member of the National Islamic Front. But despite such a distorted representation of conditions in Darfur, is the logic of their argument still sound?
“The risks in Sudan are so great right now that the instruments of justice must be handled with great discretion.”
“Many crimes have been committed in Sudan. The systematic eradication of communities today is not one of them. Bringing charges of this nature against the highest echelons of government, at this moment, would be gambling with the future of the entire nation.”
Let us first of all be clear what de Waal and Flint are urging: it doesn’t matter whether Moreno Ocampo has overwhelming evidence of genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity committed by Minister of Defense Abdul Rahim Mohamed Hussein (also former Minister of the Interior during the most violent years of the genocide)---the senior NIF official most likely to be indicted. The ICC Prosecutor should simply sit on this evidence, no matter how compelling, and allow Khartoum to contend only with the April 2007 indictments of junior interior minister Ahmed Haroun and Janjaweed leader Ali Kushayb (the “colonel of colonels”).
But of course Khartoum has long insisted, falsely, that the ICC has no jurisdiction over atrocity crimes in Darfur (see Paragraphs 10-15 of Moreno Ocampo’s December 5, 2007 Statement to the Security Council), and that it will never surrender any Sudanese to the Court, either as witness or indicted person. The regime contemptuously flouts the ICC and has recently gone so far as to declare that Moreno Ocampo is a “terrorist” because of his Darfur investigations. At the same time, a recent, and unanimous, UN Security Council statement is unlikely to change Khartoum’s calculations unless specific consequences are attached to non-compliance; indeed, the statement is all too likely to convince the regime yet again that they face nothing more vigorous than moral exhortation:
"The Council urges the government of Sudan and all other parties to the conflict in Darfur to fully cooperate with the court, consistent with resolution 1593 (from 2005), in order to put an end to impunity for crimes committed in Darfur.” (UN Security Council statement, June 16, 2008)
What we see here---and in the argument de Waal and Flint offer---is not a serious pressuring of Khartoum, but rather forms of accommodation. In the sixth year of unfathomable violence, destruction, and displacement, “urging” Khartoum to “cooperate” seems little more than a cruel sop thrown to the people of Darfur. In the case of de Waal and Flint, such accommodation of Khartoum extends to an expedient abandonment of justice in the interest of rendering Darfur somehow manageable, a situation requiring certain forms of acquiescence---at the very least not the site of ongoing genocidal destruction. In part, they argue disingenuously against Moreno Ocampo’s reports because to acknowledge the fundamental truth of his investigations---the all but declared finding of continuing genocide---would make expediency seem too appalling, even for de Waal and Flint.
REALITIES
What will Khartoum’s response be to an indictment of Minister of Defense Hussein? We can’t know, although there is compelling evidence that behind its public obduracy, the regime’s génocidaires are a good deal more fearful of the ICC than they let on publicly (see an extraordinarily revealing article by Wasil Ali of The Sudan Tribune, which is based on intelligence provided by a “senior Sudanese official,” at http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article27639). But there is certainly no peace process to be compromised; indeed, Khartoum still insists that the “Darfur Peace Agreement” is the only basis for new negotiations, a non-starter for all the rebel groups (this is yet another dimension of failure represented by the DPA). But what about Khartoum’s ability to curtail further the deployment of the UN/African Union “hybrid” force in Darfur (UNAMID)? What about the possibility of retaliation against humanitarians that de Waal and Flint point to?
These are real possibilities, and given the implicit “go-ahead” recently signaled to the ICC by the Security Council---even if in the painfully weak language of “urging” the regime to “cooperate” with the Court---there is no reason to expect Moreno Ocampo to back down.
But to ask only these questions---now---about UNAMID and the safety of humanitarians is implicitly to accept the logic of international inaction of the past five years: “don’t offend Khartoum, don’t threaten---work cooperatively, patiently, deferentially, and allow these men to preserve their dignity.” This approach has been a manifest failure and yet continues in the reflexive attitude of accommodation that is embodied in de Waal and Flint.
Here it is instructive to recall that on July 30, 2004 the UN Security Council declared that it,
“Demands that the Government of Sudan fulfill its commitments to disarm the Janjaweed militias and apprehend and bring to justice Janjaweed leaders and their associates who have incited and carried out human rights and international humanitarian law violations and other atrocities.” (UN Security Council Resolution 1556, Section “Acting under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations,” Paragraph 6)
Four years later, this “demand”---long contemptuously ignored by Khartoum---is more robustly embodied in the impending indictments of ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo. It is highly likely that in addition to Minister of Defense Hussein (who certainly has had considerable “association” with the Janjaweed), Musa Hilal will also be served (in absentia) an arrest warrant for a wide range of atrocity crimes (though let us recall that the notorious Janjaweed leader is also now a senior NIF official). In the four years since Resolution 1556 was passed---under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, conferring enforcement authority---not only have the Janjaweed not been disarmed or brought to justice, there has not been even a show of an attempt by Khartoum.
During this time hundreds of thousands of people have died, many tens of thousands of women and girls have been raped, more than one million people have been violently displaced, millions of lives have been turned into ghastly exercises in day-to-day survival, humanitarians have been killed by the scores---and Khartoum has paid no price for continued deployment of the Janjaweed. The argument that the regime should continue to receive deference, should continue to be accommodated, should continue to rule with impunity, should continue to be insulated from the demands of justice---in Darfur and throughout Sudan---is perverse and fundamentally counter-productive. The argument that we should accept all that has occurred and pretend---“right now,” “at this moment,” as de Waal and Flint would have it with their peculiarly delicate sense of historical timing---that we serve the people of Darfur by continuing as we have, without the disruptions of ICC indictments for genocide or crimes against humanity, ensures only that the past will define the future.
The status quo in Darfur is simply unacceptable; monstrous crimes against humanity are perpetuated amidst a climate of impunity that is acknowledged by all. The question is not whether indictment of a senior National Islamic Front official will provoke retaliation against humanitarians or further obstruction of UNAMID. The real question is what the international community---and in particular specific member states of the UN, and most particularly of the Security Council---will do to forestall not just immediate or short-term retaliatory responses by Khartoum, but to secure long-term security for all Darfuris.
De Waal and Flint read history as showing “that dictators often learn that power is their only protection and that nothing, and no one, can be allowed to stand in the way.” This is certainly Khartoum’s fully justified reading of recent history. But the imperative that emerges here is not to abandon justice because a brutal handful of serial génocidaires think that theirs is the only power; the task is to demonstrate forcefully the power that resides in the international commitment to justice. If such power is non-existent, no force will long protect the acutely vulnerable civilians of Darfur or the humanitarians upon whom they depend in such terrifyingly vast numbers.
Eric Reeves
Smith College
Northampton, MA 01063
413-585-3326
ereeves@smith.edu
www.sudanreeves.org