Eric Reeves
November 23, 2004
The recent unanimous UN Security Council Resolution on Sudan (No. 1574, November 19, 2004) marks an extraordinary triumph for the National Islamic Front regime in Khartoum, and it has been appropriately celebrated in the regime’s state-controlled press. Official commentary, as well as Saturday editorials in Al-Ayam and Al-Rai Al-Aam, were effusive in praising the UN Security Council’s “progressive move toward supporting Sudan” (UN Daily Press Review, November 20 and 21, 2004).
Such a reaction to the UN resolution is hardly surprising. By demoting massive genocidal human destruction in Darfur as the primary agenda item; by settling for yet another paper promise from Khartoum to complete the Naivasha peace process (stalled for half a year by Khartoum’s refusal to negotiate a comprehensive cease-fire and modalities for implementing the protocols signed May 26, 2004); and by moving from a strategy of coercive measures and demands upon Khartoum to cynical offers of various financial inducements, the Security Council has fully convinced the regime that despite the bluster concerning Darfur from various Western nations and UN officials, there will be no meaningful international response to genocide.
In short, Khartoum got precisely what it wanted, indeed demanded. For the regime was prepared to scuttle the highlighted event of the Nairobi Security Council meeting if the Council had proved insufficiently accommodating. The Los Angeles Times is just one of many sources for the following diplomatic threat from Khartoum:
“Khartoum has sought to use its participation in the peace talks with the southern rebels to avoid reproach over Darfur. The government’s main negotiator, Ali Osman Mohammed Taha, even threatened not to come to Nairobi if the Security Council put too much emphasis on the violence and humanitarian crisis in Darfur.” (Los Angeles Times, November 17, 2004)
In the end, Khartoum had no cause for concern. In a conspicuous moment of dishonesty, the new Security Council resolution shamelessly declares that it “recalls” various previous resolutions, including Resolution 1556 (July 30, 2004). Evidently “recollection” is very partial, for there is no sign that the members of the Security Council recall their singular “demand” in Resolution 1556: that Khartoum disarm the Janjaweed and bring the leaders of this brutal militia force to justice. The Security Council is no longer “demanding” what is essential in restoring security to Darfur, even as the Council hypocritically “expresses its serious concern at the growing insecurity and violence in Darfur.”
Instead of identifying the Janjaweed, or declaring the well-established connections between Khartoum and the Janjaweed (including close military coordination, and the common basing of Janjaweed and the regime’s regular military forces), the Council can bring itself only to “condemn all acts of violence and violations of human rights and international humanitarian law by all parties” (Security Council Resolution 1574, November 19, 2004).
The genocidal acts of the Janjaweed and the Khartoum regime have been rendered here, as well as in comments from the office of the Secretary-General, morally equivalent to those of the Darfuri insurgents, whose military actions are a response to decades of political and economic marginalization, as well as the impunity accorded by Khartoum to Arab militia groups that have for years attacked African tribal villages.
As has been the case so many times in the past, the achievement of “moral equivalence” is for Khartoum an extraordinarily important diplomatic victory. Here again, the genocidaires and their victims are rendered indistinguishable. Small wonder that China, Russia, Pakistan, and Algeria found no need to abstain in this resolution, and that Khartoum moved from its strenuous objection to previous resolutions to an enthusiastic welcoming of the most recent.
As US ambassador to the United Nations John Danforth all too aptly characterized the resolution, “‘There is nothing threatening about it,’ Danforth said” (Associated Press, November 18, 2004).
NON-DIPLOMATIC RESPONSES TO UN SECURITY COUNCIL ACQUIESCENCE
Unwilling and thus unable to confront Khartoum any longer over the human catastrophe in Darfur, international diplomacy has now devolved to the point of passing weakly hortatory resolutions, promising money to this obscenely profligate regime, and reiterating support for a slowly deploying African Union force that is fundamentally inadequate to any of the growing security challenges within Darfur (in a telling vignette, a humanitarian organization operational in Darfur recently “passed the hat” to collect money to purchase boots for a particularly ill-equipped group of AU troops). Unsurprisingly, the response of human rights groups and humanitarian groups to the Security Council Resolution has been scathing.
“‘From New York to Nairobi, a trail of weak resolutions on Darfur has led nowhere,’ said Caroline Nursey, from Oxfam.” (Financial Times, November 19, 2004)
“‘There has been lots of talk over the last year, and commitments from all sides to end abuses, but security in Darfur has not improved. In fact, in the last two months it has started to deteriorate,’ Caroline Nursey, Oxfam’s regional director, said. The charity’s Brendan Cox, who was attending the Security Council meeting, accused the UN of failing the people of Darfur. ‘The atmosphere at the meeting here in Nairobi is very flat. Nobody seems very concerned,’ he said. ‘The only people who will benefit from this meeting are the travel agents and those people who will collect their free air miles. There is no optimism about the outcome of the meeting. We are expecting an even weaker draft resolution than before. It will probably be passed, but it will not make any difference.'” (The Scotsman, November 19, 2004)
Human Rights Watch declared even before passage of the resolution that “security in Darfur is a ‘farce'” (New York Times, November 15, 2004); in a November 19, 2004 response to the Security Council resolution, Human Rights Watch insisted that:
“The UN Security Council has retreated from its previous stance to hold the Sudanese government accountable for the ongoing human rights abuses in Darfur, Human Rights Watch said today. A new resolution was passed today by a unanimous vote of the Security Council’s 15 members. While today’s resolution recalls prior Security Council resolutions passed in July and September, it leaves out the explicit demand in those resolutions for Khartoum to disarm and prosecute the government-backed Janjaweed militias.”
“In addition, the new resolution omits language in the Resolutions 1556 and 1564 that specifically threatened ‘further measures,’ including the possibility of sanctions. Instead, it includes a much milder warning to ‘take appropriate action against any party failing to fulfill its commitments.'”
“‘We fear that the Sudanese government will take this resolution as a blank check to continue its atrocities against the civilian population in Darfur,’ said Jemera Rone, Human Rights Watch’s senior Sudan researcher.” (“Darfur: U.N. Backtracks in Sudan Resolution,” Human Rights Watch [Nairobi], November 19, 2004)
Oxfam International declared yesterday:
“The European Union must immediately take robust action to force the warring parties in Darfur to comply with their commitments to protect civilians in Darfur, urged international agency Oxfam. The call came as EU Foreign Ministers meet to discuss the crisis at the General Affairs Council meeting today. ‘The European Union must step in to the void left by the UN Security Council’s failure, and take action to stop the violence in Darfur,’ said Jo Leadbeater, Head of Oxfam’s EU Advocacy Office.” (Oxfam International Press release, November 22, 2004)
The Scotsman cited a recent letter sent by Doctors Without Borders/ Mdecins Sans Frontires to the UN:
“Six months ago, Mdecins Sans Frontires briefed the Security Council on the massive suffering and death in Darfur which had resulted from militia attacks on villages and the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Despite several resolutions and pledges since then, neither the government of Sudan nor the international community has provided sufficient assistance and security to the people in Darfur. After over 18 months, people’s lives are still under daily threat.” (The Scotsman, November 19, 2004)
THE DYNAMICS OF INSECURITY IN DARFUR
It is not enough for the Security Council and other international actors simply to lament the growing insecurity in Darfur, or to note the obviously dire implications for humanitarian efforts, which continue to fall further and further behind human needs. There must be an understanding of why insecurity has accelerated so rapidly in recent weeks, and what is required to begin to restore security in parts of Darfur. Though there are reasons why the international community is unwilling to accept this basic obligation to assess Darfur honestly, and even more reasons for continued inaction, none will pass any serious moral scrutiny.
Increasingly, the US, the UN, and other international actors have taken to blaming the insurgency groups for the violence that rages in Darfur. Having proved incapable of restraining Khartoum or the Janjaweed, despite the “demand” of UN Security Council Resolution 1556 (July 30, 2004), many have found that the most convenient response is to hold the insurgents responsible for continuing fighting and insecurity. The expedient calculation here is that rather than reveal their impotence—and rather than offer an honest assessment of the dynamics of violence and insecurity—international actors can shirk responsibility for responding to Darfur’s catastrophe simply by shifting the focus of blame. This is disingenuous and misguided on numerous counts.
People like Charles Snyder, the senior State Department official with responsibilities for Sudan, seem to have forgotten that the US government has found that the assaults by Khartoum and the Janjaweed constitute genocide. Secretary of State Colin Powell declared as much unambiguously in his Senate testimony of September 9, 2004 (even if he would go on to say that “nothing new follows from this determination [of genocide]”). President Bush has declared that the massive, ethnically targeted human destruction in Darfur is genocide. So, too, have both houses of Congress—unanimously.
But despite the fact that Khartoum’s genocidal campaign has claimed over 300,000 lives (see November 16, 2004 mortality assessment by this writer; available upon request); that as many as 2.5 million people have been displaced by Khartoum’s orchestrated mayhem (see below); and that 3 million people are now conflict-affected and in need of humanitarian assistance—despite this massive campaign of human destruction and displacement, Snyder, UN political officials, and other Western governments purport to be surprised that the two insurgency groups are not prepared to take at face value Khartoum’s renewed pledge to abide by a cease-fire (the Abuja [Nigeria] accord of November 9, 2004).
For context, let us recall the events that followed within hours of Khartoum’s agreeing in Abuja to “take all steps required to prevent attacks, threats, intimidations and any other form of violence against civilians” (“Protocol on the Improvement of the Humanitarian Situation in Darfur,” Abuja, November 9, 2004): the El Geer camp for displaced persons saw brutal forced movement of civilians, tear-gas used on women and children lining up at a health clinic, men badly beaten, and a rubber bullet fired at a BBC reporter near a UN vehicle.
Let us also recall how widely and systematically Khartoum has violated the April 8, 2004 cease-fire, and with what extraordinary impunity.
Let us also recall that the consensus among Darfuris in exile, with contacts inside Darfur, is that 90% of African villages have now been destroyed, reducing very substantially the need for the kind of organized military violence against civilians that the US, the UN, and the international community have proved so hopelessly inept in halting for well over a year.
Why should the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army or the Justice and Equality Movement believe that now it will be different? that now the international community is determined to halt the violence, and ensure that Khartoum will respect the terms of the April 8, 2004 cease-fire, terms that have proved meaningless enough that Khartoum agreed to reiterate them in the November 9, 2004 Abuja security protocol? In fact, the international community has done nothing meaningful to address the issue of cease-fire violations, ongoing predations by the Janjaweed, extreme insecurity in the camps and camp environs, or to protect the civilians trapped in inaccessible areas.
Nor has international community committed to a meaningful provision of the troops or equipment that might reduce violence. An African Union force of 3,500 troops and monitors—even if it is fully deployed (and it is not at all clear that the task will be completed before February 2005)—will be without the equipment, logistics, transport, or mandate to respond in any effective fashion to current violence. The insurgents know this perfectly well, and they also know that Khartoum has been reassured by the most recent Security Council resolution that no one is serious about disarming the Janjaweed.
In such a context, what possible justice can there be in blaming the insurgents for attacking military targets in Darfur, including police stations? (Police stations are, given the relationship between security and military organs in Darfur, not truly civilian targets.) To be sure, this can never be an excuse for abductions or attacks on civilians, or the threatening of humanitarian workers; nor can there be any excuse for the looting of humanitarian convoys.
But to expect that the Darfuri insurgents will put any stock in international promises or negotiated agreements is either foolish or disingenuous, and quite conceivably both. Moreover, under acute military pressure, and confronting an increasingly desperate supply situation, the insurgents are evidently beginning to splinter, and command-and-control is slipping away. This is entirely predictable if we look at comparable situations historically, and must be measured as one of the costs of deferring full-scale humanitarian intervention for so many months after its need became obvious.
We have long since passed the point at which anything other than a large, robust, and fully credible peace-making force can restore security in Darfur. To pretend otherwise is simply part of the inevitable search for self-exculpation in the face of unchecked genocide. It is difficult to imagine a more disgraceful expenditure of energies in light of current realities.
THE REALITIES OF INSECURITY IN DARFUR AT PRESENT
As a result of ongoing fighting and consequent insecurity, humanitarian efforts are beginning to falter badly. From the ground, at least in certain contexts, it will inevitably appear that all combatants are equally responsible, despite the realities suggested above. Thus today’s report from the UN Integrated Regional Information Network:
“The humanitarian agency Save the Children said on Monday that its staff had been forced to flee the town of Tawilla in the troubled Darfur region of western Sudan when fighting broke out between government forces and rebels, despite an existing ceasefire agreement. ‘Both sides have demonstrated utter disregard for the ceasefire,’ Toby Porter, director of emergencies at Save the Children said in statement issued by the agency. ‘Yet again, innocent civilians, particularly women and children, are suffering at the hands of the rebels and their own government, and still the international community fails to protect them.'” (UN Integrated Regional Information Networks, November 23, 2004)
But the IRIN dispatch goes on to note Khartoum’s renewed use of aerial military assaults, despite the regime’s pledge at Abuja to “refrain from conducting hostile military flights in and over the Darfur Region” (“Protocol on the Enhancement of the Security Situation in Darfur,” Abuja, November 9, 2004):
“[The Save the Children] statement said that an aerial attack by the government [of Sudan], including one bomb which landed 50 meters from a Save the Children/UK feeding centre, forced more than 30 of its staff to flee into the desert. African Union helicopters were used to evacuate the Save the Children staff to safety.” (UN Integrated Regional Information Networks, November 23, 2004)
This attack offers a clear glimpse of the savagery and cynicism of the Khartoum regime in continuing genocide in Darfur, and reflects the most callous attitude toward the safety of humanitarian workers and operations. This is what the UN Security Council is unwilling to confront or respond to.
In the same dispatch, IRIN notes:
“In a related development, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has said that reports of violence against women and children in and around IDP camps in Darfur appeared to be on the increase. UNICEF’s Executive Director Carol Bellamy said in New York last week that reports by aid-agency monitors ‘strongly dispute claims [by Khartoum] that the situation is under control.’ She said aid agencies in Darfur have expressed dismay at the increasing number of people arriving in the camps, as well as a surge in violent incidents in and around the camps themselves.”
“A UNICEF statement said armed militias were raping girls and women in Darfur as a tactic to terrorise and humiliate individuals as well as families and communities. UNICEF also lamented that children had, in a series of incidents, been loaded on to lorries and transported to a new camp without their parents, while others had been injured during government attempts to relocate people from camps.” (UN Integrated Regional Information Networks, November 23, 2004)
These unpunished actions—turning camps into sites of violence, rape, humiliation, and forcible displacement of children without their parents—are the actions of Khartoum’s regular military and security forces and the Janjaweed. They are most emphatically not the actions of the insurgents. The failure to accept this as the broader context for understanding ongoing violence in Darfur reveals only willful ignorance.
DISPLACEMENT TOTALS FOR DARFUR AND CHAD
This writer estimated in last week’s Darfur mortality assessment that “well over 2 million people have been internally displaced or made refugees [in Chad]” (November 16, 2004) This and other figures have been greeted in some quarters with considerable skepticism. Significantly, the UN World Food Program has today radically revised upwards its estimate of internally displace persons, indicating a total of 2 million people by December (Agence France-Presse, November 23, 2003):
“World Food Program (WFP) executive director James Morris said that estimate on the region’s torrents of displaced people was a staggering 300,000 people higher than a WFP estimate issued just one week ago.” (Agence France-Presse, November 23, 2004)
This figure of 2 million is for internally displaced persons in Darfur; it does not include the more than 200,000 who have already fled to Chad (with between 100,000 and 200,000 poised to flee to Chad in the coming months, according to officials of the UN High Commission for Refugees), and it does not include the very large population of displaced persons in areas that are presently inaccessible (and unassessed). If we aggregate the new WFP number and reasonable estimates for this last population group, it is clear that an estimate of “well over 2 million people internally displaced or made refugees [in Chad]” is terrifyingly accurate.
The people displaced continue to be overwhelmingly from the African tribal populations of Darfur. And as long as insecurity remains so extreme, as long as the Janjaweed are not militarily neutralized, as long as Khartoum feels unconstrained in using its aerial military assets—even when in dangerously close proximity to known humanitarian operations—displacement will continue within the populations that are in inaccessible rural areas.
As Human Rights Watch emphatically declared on the release of its newest report on Darfur (“‘If We Return We Will Be Killed’: Consolidating Ethnic Cleansing in Darfur,” November 15, 2004; full report available at http://hrw.org/backgrounder/africa/darfur1104/):
“Unless the international community squarely faces the fact that Khartoum is using both militias and its military to target ethnic groups in Darfur as it did in the south [of Sudan], the appalling violence will continue.”
Security Council Resolution 1574 of last week gives no sign whatsoever of squarely facing these basic realities.
WHAT ARE THE DIMENSIONS OF THE CATASTROPHE THE SECURITY COUNCIL HAS CHOSEN TO MAKE A SIDESHOW?
A number of recent signs and sobering reports give a yet fuller sense of the challenges to humanitarian relief in Darfur. Of particular concern is the threat of drought, reported today in emphatic fashion by Andrew Natsios, Administrator of the US Agency for International Development:
“Sudan’s Darfur region [ ] faces a new threat—a drought that has all but wiped out this year’s harvest, the top US aid official says. Andrew Natsios, head of the US Agency for International Development, said farmers who stayed on their land during the 21-month conflict are now beginning their major harvest, but they’re expected to reap just 10 percent to 15 percent of the normal yield. ‘They have enough production from this crop to last perhaps until March, but certainly not until the end of December’ 2005, when the next harvest will be completed, he said.”
“The dearth of rain is already having an impact because ‘the boreholes, the wells, are drying up from water much earlier,’ [Natsios] said.” (Associated Press, November 23, 2004)
And this account is of those who were able to stay on the their land; as indicated above, far more than 2 million have been displaced and have no means of food production. This comes in the wake of extremely ominous reports on food availability and prospects.
The US Agency for International Development notes in its most recent “fact sheet” that the “World Food Program anticipates that the December caseload of 2 million beneficiaries will rise in 2005 to reach 2.3 million people,” and this does not include the 200,000 refugees in Chad (US AID “Darfur: Humanitarian Emergency” fact sheet, November 19, 2004). (The World Food Program reached only 1.1 million people in October, a decline of 175,000 from September.) US AID also reports “some areas of total crop failure in the normally fertile Jebel Marra region.” The Jebel Marra region is probably the most fertile in all of Darfur; crop failures in this region indicate how badly agricultural production has collapsed.
This is confirmed in the most recent “Food-Needs Assessment: Darfur” from the International Committee of the Red Cross (October 2004). Surveying villages in all three of Darfur’s administrative states, the ICRC found:
“The situation assessed in the survey was found to be alarming as coping mechanisms developed over years of drought and conflict had been nearly exhausted. Most rural communities assessed were found by the survey to be suffering from food shortages, which are expected to become worse in the longer term.” (“Food-Needs Assessment: Darfur” from the International Committee of the Red Cross, October 2004, page 2)
And in a dismayingly familiar conclusion, the ICRC found:
“Rural communities are currently affected by both drought and conflict, but it is the latter that prevents these communities from using their normal drought-time coping strategies.” (page 14)
“Levels of physical insecurity were found to be the main cause of food shortages as people are reluctant to venture outside their villages for fear of attack” (page 2)
We need to be more explicit than the ICRC here: these “fears of attacks” are fears of attacks by the Janjaweed, Khartoum’s most powerful genocidal instrument. It is not enough to say with the ICRC that “insecurity is the root cause of the collapse of agriculture, pastoralism, and trade in Darfur” (page 2). We must also say that this insecurity has identifiable causes, and that—overwhelmingly—these causes are attacks by the Janjaweed and Khartoum’s regular military forces. The vast majority of insecurity in Darfur derives not from conflict between the Darfuri insurgency groups and Khartoum’s opposing military forces: it derives from relentless, deliberate, ethnically targeted attacks on civilian noncombatants from Darfur’s African tribal populations.
The ICRC food assessment also offers us some chilling glimpses of impending food shortages in rural Darfur. Food markets are already seeing severe inflation in food prices of “150% to 300%” (page 9). And in concluding that “food insecurity was an obvious and vast problem among the resident rural population,” and that “coping mechanisms were about to be exhausted,” the ICRC declared bluntly that “Darfur is experiencing a long-term major food crisis” (page 14). In the early months of 2005, there will be large additional displacements in rural areas because there is simply no more food (page 11).
ACQUIESCING IN GENOCIDE
The vast human destruction in Darfur is now being accomplished primarily by virtue of insecurity that directly threatens not only the lives of Darfuri civilians but humanitarian personnel and operations. The attenuation of humanitarian relief, in the context growing shortages of food, will be translated into additional hundreds of thousands of deaths in the coming months and years. This is genocide by attrition.
That Khartoum intends to diminish international humanitarian presence, and thus increase human destruction, is clear beyond doubt—and continues to be demonstrated on an almost daily basis. Two weeks ago it was the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) forced to withdraw staff from Nyala because of Khartoum’s actions:
“UNHCR said today it is temporarily withdrawing some key international staff from strife-torn South Darfur because Sudanese authorities are preventing them from carrying out vital protection work on behalf of thousands of internally displaced people. Jean-Marie Fakhouri, UNHCR’s operations director for the Sudan situation, said UNHCR staff had been restricted to Nyala for nearly three weeks on orders of Sudanese officials following an incident on October 20 when UNHCR and other UN colleagues intervened to stop the involuntary relocation of displaced people.” (UN Integrated Regional Information Networks, November 12, 2004)
Yesterday, in a press release from Save the Children, we learn of “an aerial attack by the Government [of Sudan], including one bomb which landed 50 metres from a Save the Children UK feeding centre, forced over 30 of our staff to flee the town into the desert” (Save the Children press release, November 22, 2004).
Such aerial military attacks represent intolerable security risks to humanitarian personnel and UN operational personnel.
Moreover, life-threatening insecurity in the camps for displaced persons and in rural areas makes physical survival increasingly tenuous. Physical insecurity, directly and indirectly, has been the overwhelming source of human destruction in Darfur, and this insecurity has been overwhelmingly the responsibility of the Khartoum regime. UN Security Council pretense and “diplomatese” cannot change this fundamental fact. US, UN, and other international efforts to create a contrived moral equivalence between the insurgents and Khartoum, a factitiously equal responsibility for violence and insecurity, is disingenuous and expedient. It reflects nothing so much as the international failure to compel Khartoum to disarm the Janjaweed and provide meaningful protection to vulnerable civilians.
As has long been clear, Khartoum has no intention of protecting the African civilian populations; on the contrary, the regime has largely achieved success in Darfur by destroying and displacing these people by genocidal means. The present splintering of the insurgency groups likely portends precisely the military victory that Khartoum’s genocide was designed to achieve. Indeed, this fissuring within the insurgency movements, produced in part by a lack of effective political and military command structure, may intensify dangerously as physical survival becomes as important as military action.
These realities seem not to register with the likes of Charles Snyder of the State Department, John Danforth, the foolishly complacent US ambassador to the United Nations, the ever-expedient Kofi Annan, or his special representative Jan Pronk. Nor are the countries of the European Union or other international actors willing to respond meaningfully to Darfur’s vast crisis. Indeed, though some European governments insistently declare in sanctimonious terms their “deep concern” over Darfur, this has not led them to constrain the commercial, financial, and economic activities of their multinational corporations operating in and supporting the genocidal National Islamic Front regime (see www.divestsudan.org).
Recently the American Catholic Task Force in Africa issued a pleading letter to President Bush, his cabinet members, and leaders in the US Senate: “We call upon you to exert the full influence of the US government to halt…the genocidal killings, rapes and other forms of violence and abuse of fundamental human rights being inflicted upon the people in the Darfur region of Sudan” (Letter of October 19, 2004, American Catholic Task Force).
But this, like so many others, is a call in vain. The US-convened Security Council meeting in Nairobi has made painfully clear that nothing will be done to change the fundamental dynamics of insecurity in Darfur—and thus the genocide will continue remorselessly. 300,000 have already died; as many as 2.5 million have been displaced; and 3 million are conflict-affected and in need of humanitarian assistance. But we know now that this assistance will not be adequate, and thus we may be sure that at least 30,000 human beings will continue to die monthly for the foreseeable future.
We have seen precisely this ghastly indifference and obfuscation in Africa before, and no one speaks more authoritatively of international failure in Rwanda than Romeo Dallaire, the general in charge of the UN peacekeeping force during the 1994 genocide. General Dallaire has recently found a more articulate voice on Darfur, but his first public utterances were among his most powerful:
“‘What should be done is an outright intervention,’ he said. ‘When I compare it to Rwanda, there are so many similarities it makes you sick.’ Khartoum, he said, is ‘getting away with slaughter and genocide,’ while the world reacts, much as it did then, with embargos and restrictions, [Dallaire said].” (The Toronto Star, September 21, 2004)
Disgracefully, a complacent international community can’t bring itself even to impose “embargoes and restrictions.” On the contrary, as UN Security Council Resolution 1574 of November 19, 2004 proves beyond reasonable doubt, there will be no actions of consequence to compel Khartoum to halt genocide in Darfur. We are as far today from humanitarian intervention as we were when the genocide became apparent a year ago.
The dying is only just beginning.
Eric Reeves
Smith College
Northampton, MA 01063
413-585-3326
ereeves@smith.edu