April 25, 2004
An Open Letter to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan,
from Eric Reeves
Kofi Annan, UN Secretary-General
United Nations Headquarters
First Avenue at 46th Street
New York, NY 10017
Dear Secretary-General Annan,
History has already recorded your substantial culpability during the Rwandan genocide ten years ago, and your failure to work effectively as head of UN peacekeeping during this terrible time. Judgment is a good deal more severe than your own recent admission that “you could have done more.” But with your present inadequate response, as UN Secretary-General, to the massive crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and genocide in Darfur, Sudan, you are compounding your failures of 1994.
Without immediate, urgent, and appropriately robust UN action, your failure to lead during this vast crisis will be beyond either forgiveness or redemption. No subsequent apology for inaction, no claim of ignorance, can possibly have meaning. Your legacy will be to have twice acquiesced in the slaughter and destruction of hundreds of thousands of innocent African civilians.
For the evidence of what is now occurring in Darfur is both utterly unambiguous and authoritative beyond possible dispute. Indeed, the report on Darfur very recently produced by a UN human rights investigative team (“Report of the Office of the High Commission for Human Rights mission to Chad, April 5-15, 2004”) concludes by noting “disturbing patterns of massive human rights violations in Darfur, many of which may constitute war crimes and/or crimes against humanity.”
In particular, this UN assessment—suppressed during the recent debate on Sudan and Darfur at the annual convening of the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva—reports a “reign of terror in Darfur,” including:
“[a] Repeated attacks on civilians by Government of Sudan military and its proxy militia forces with a view to their displacement;
“[b] The use of systematic and indiscriminate aerial bombardments and ground attacks on unarmed civilians;
“[c] The use of disproportional force by the Government of Sudan and the Janjaweed forces;
“[d] That the Janjaweed have operated with total impunity and in close coordination with the forces of the Government of Sudan;
“[e] The attacks appear to have been ethnically based with the groups targeted being essentially the following tribes reportedly of African origin: Zaghawas, Masaalit, and Furs. Men and young boys appear to have been particularly targeted in ground attacks; and
“[f] The pattern of attacks on civilians includes killing, rape, pillage, including of livestock, and destruction of property, including water sources.”
(“Report of the Office of the High Commission for Human Rights mission to Chad, April 5-15, 2004”)
You declared on the grim anniversary date of April 7, 2004 that reports on atrocities in Darfur “leave me with a deep sense of foreboding” and, further, that whatever the language we use to describe the atrocities in Darfur, “the international community cannot stand idle.” You concluded with the declaration that, “wherever civilians are deliberately targeted because they belong to a particular community, we are in the presence of potential, if not actual, genocide.”
But this, Secretary-General Annan, is precisely what is occurring in Darfur: civilians are being “deliberately targeted because they belong to a particular community.” As you must know, with full moral certainty, the Fur, Massaleit, Zaghawa, and other African tribal peoples of Darfur are being targeted because of the “communities” they comprise. In the language of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the African peoples of Darfur are being destroyed—both directly through killings and by consequence of deliberate displacement in this harsh land—“as such.”
And yet the UN is essentially “standing idle,” and doing so largely because of clear obstructionism and obduracy on the part of the Government of Sudan. This tyrannical and unrepresentative regime has now twice postponed an urgent UN humanitarian assessment mission to Darfur, even as all evidence and data clearly suggest that the humanitarian crisis in the region is the greatest in the world today, and has been declared such by various UN officials. During the ten-day period (April 5 to April 15, 2004) that the UN human rights investigative mission was on the Chad/Sudan border, Khartoum adamantly refused the team entry into Darfur, forcing its return to Geneva.
Though this team has apparently now secured access to Darfur, there is substantial evidence that the Government of Sudan is working furiously to conceal as much as possible of its role in “crimes against humanity,” “ethnic cleansing,” (the language of Jan Egeland, UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs), and what the language of the Genocide Convention dictates we declare is genocide. As the US State Department can readily confirm on the basis of surveillance and other data, substantial military transport assets are presently being used to move bodies from the areas of the larger known atrocities. It is also clear from reports within Darfur that Khartoum intends to intimidate witnesses at those sites where the regime will allow the UN investigative team to travel, especially the concentration camps where those confined are completely at the mercy of their government and Janjaweed captors.
Your obligations under these circumstances could not be clearer. You must use your leadership within the UN to move urgently for a significantly expanded mission in Darfur, one that faces no time constraints and no possibility of being impeded, in any way, by the Government of Sudan. Such a team will require substantially increased logistical and transport abilities, as well as a full complement of Arabic-speaking translators not associated with the Khartoum government or at risk with the departure of the UN investigative team. If the security of this team is threatened, the UN must be prepared to provide immediately the military protection required.
Given the substantial evidence of efforts by the Government of Sudan to obliterate and obscure its role in countless crimes against humanity, ethic cleansing, and genocide, the mandate of the UN team must also be immediately expanded to include investigations of all such efforts at concealment.
Your leadership is urgently required, Mr. Secretary-General. Though you asked on April 7, 2004 for the “establishment of a mechanism for an early and clear warning about potential genocides,” there is no such mechanism available. But there is an overwhelming body of evidence that makes clear the indisputable “potential” for genocide, indeed the growing reality of genocide. In short, you don’t require a further “mechanism”: it has been supplied to you by the research of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group, and many others. These are examples of the very nongovernmental organizations that, in the ghastly wake of Rwanda, were to have had a much larger voice in UN thinking about the threat of genocide. And yet you are not acting in a fashion that responds in a meaningful way to the highly detailed and authoritative accounts these organizations have offered.
Ongoing failure to provide urgent and appropriate leadership ensures that your role in the history of genocide will not be singular. I believe that you will be hearing from a growing number of those who also feel that the genocidal destruction of the people of Darfur warrants your most serious and immediate attention. What you can be sure of is that the same history that found you so wanting during the genocide in Rwanda continues to watch and judge. You have very little time in which to escape the harshest of judgments.
Sincerely,
Eric Reeves
Smith College
Northampton, MA 01063
Transmitted via US Postal service and electronic mail, April 25, 2004 to:
Kofi Annan, UN Secretary-General
United Nations Headquarters
First Avenue at 46th Street
New York, NY 10017
and
inquiries@un.org
(email address indicated for such communication of the UN website, www.un.org)