Eric Reeves
December 12, 2003
A range of international diplomats are now speaking of the vast human destruction and displacement in Darfur Province of western Sudan as “ethnic cleansing.” UN officials are also speaking of the crisis in Darfur within the context of allegations of “ethnic cleansing.” Various reports over the last several days (from the UN News Center, the UN Integrated Regional Information Networks [IRIN], the International Crisis Group, Deutsche Presse Agentur [dpa], and the BBC) have put this ominous term squarely at the center of discussion concerning Darfur. The increasingly desperate accounts of a rapidly accelerating human catastrophe in this remote region of Sudan are consequently taking on a more urgent moral character.
Certainly the emphatic findings by the UN, as well as humanitarian and human rights organizations, create a sense of human scale in which moral clarity is imperative. As many as 700,000 people have been displaced over the last nine months; the UN speaks of a war-affected population of as many 1 million people; the humanitarian organization Save the Children has reported (December 10, 2003) on rapidly rising malnutrition rates; Khartoum’s deliberate obstruction of humanitarian access to these desperate populations has also very recently been highlighted by senior UN officials.
We had best be certain that we are using the right terms to describe what is happening.
Here it is critical to realize that all evidence indicates that people who being targeted by Khartoum’s Arab militia proxies (the Janjaweed) are overwhelming the racially African tribal groups of the Fur, Masseleit, and Zaghawa peoples. These sedentary agriculturalists are perceived by Khartoum as the base of support for the two insurgency movements in Darfur, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM). They are being displaced and destroyed accordingly. It no longer matters where the noncombatant populations are located, or whether there really is an insurgency military presence in the areas being attacked. The African peoples of Darfur are being attacked, displaced, and denied humanitarian access, because of who they are—“as such,” we might say. This latter phrase is of course central to the definition of genocide in the 1948 UN “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”:
“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such—”
That the conflict in Darfur is driven in such fundamental fashion by Khartoum’s racial and ethnic animus should put the recurrently euphemizing term “ethnic cleansing” once more under fierce scrutiny. We should first recall that the Nazis referred to ethnic extermination as the “cleansing” (Suberung) of Jews from German society and culture. In turn, the advent of the phrase “ethnic cleansing” during the Balkan conflicts produced a UN definition, one whose history has recently been recounted by Samantha Power in her Pulitzer Prize-winning study, “‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide”:
“In February 1993 the UN commission’s five lawyers presented an interim report to the UN secretary-general in which they defined ‘ethnic cleansing,’ the term that was then being used as a kind of euphemistic halfway house between crimes against humanity and genocide.” (page 483, “‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide”)
Among the elements of this “ethnic cleansing” (i.e., efforts to produce ethnically homogenous regions) were “murder, torture, rape, sexual assault, forcible removal, displacement [ ] of civilians, deliberate military attacks or threats of attacks on civilians and civilian areas, and wanton destruction of property” (page 483, “‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide”).
Significantly, according to Power, the UN commission of lawyers concluded that such actions “might well be considered genocide under the [1948 UN] convention [‘on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crimes of Genocide’]” (page 483, “‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide”).
And these are precisely the actions that are being reported with ever greater insistence and authority from Darfur—actions whose motives are unambiguous in the minds of the African peoples under relentless assault. The UN’s Integrated Regional Information Network (IRIN) reports from Junaynah (Darfur):
“‘I believe this is an elimination of the black race,’ one tribal leader told IRIN (UN IRIN, Junaynah [Darfur], December 11, 2003)
This point was amplified by various local sources in conversation with IRIN in Junaynah:
“The fact is the government is arming some tribes, just Arabs, they go and kill, take the belongings and rape the women,” local sources in Junaynah told IRIN. “The militias have been given access to good arms, they are better than the army’s.” (UN IRIN, Junaynah [Darfur], December 11, 2003)
The International Crisis Group, in a press release and report on Darfur (December 10 and 11, 2003), notes that in response to the insurgency by the SLA and the JEM, Khartoum has stepped up its assaults on the Fur, Zaghawa, and Masseleit peoples:
“the government of Sudan has mobilised and armed Arab militias (Janjaweed), whose salary comes directly from booty captured in raids on villages, to terrorise the populace of Darfur” (International Crisis Group, December 10, 2003)
After noting Khartoum’s signing of a cease-fire agreement with the SLA in September, the International Crisis Group finds in its report that:
“Government-supported militias deliberately target civilians from the Fur, Zaghawa, and Massalit groups, who are viewed as ‘Africans’ in Darfur and form the bulk of the SLA and JEM ethnic base. [ ] The latest attacks [by the government-supported Arab militias] occurred deep inside the Fur tribal domain, against unprotected villages with *no apparent link to the rebels other than their ethnic profile* [emphasis added].” (International Crisis Group, “Sudan: towards an Incomplete Peace,” December 11, 2003; available at http://www.crisisweb.org/home/index.cfm?l=1&id=2416)
And yet another recent report, from Amnesty International, has found that there is “compelling evidence” the Khartoum regime “is largely responsible for the human rights and humanitarian crisis in Darfur in the western Sudan.” Amnesty anticipates recent UN and diplomatic comments by noting ominously that “the situation in Darfur is at risk of rapidly degenerating into a full-scale civil war *where ethnicity is manipulated* [emphasis added]” (Amnesty International, November 27, 2003;full report available at: http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engafr541012003).
To be sure, there seems no journalistic or diplomatic will to use the “g-word,” and as was the case in Bosnia, “ethnic cleansing” seems suitably euphemistic. Deutsche Presse Agentur reports that:
“Darfur and other parts of western Sudan in recent months have been the scene of severe unrest. The violence, which diplomats have described as ‘ethnic cleansing,’ has resulted in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.” (dpa, December 10, 2003)
This was echoed yesterday by the BBC:
“Diplomats have described the fighting in Darfur as ‘ethnic cleansing’ with Arab militias, possibly backed by the government, destroying entire villages inhabited by dark-skinned people who speak African languages.” (BBC, December 11, 2003)
Significantly, the United Nations seems finally to have found its voice on Darfur, and if it is very unlikely to feel itself in a position to speak directly of either “ethnic cleansing” or genocide, some comments have clear implications in any assessment of Khartoum’s actions in Darfur. For example, Mukesh Kapila, the UN’s Humanitarian Coordinator in Sudan, stated to IRIN that:
“One must say there is a prima facie case that some of the denials of access may well be related to the discomfort of the parties concerned to allow international witnesses.” (IRIN, December 11, 2003)
The implication here is unmistakable: the denial of humanitarian access is not only being used as a weapon of war—as it has by the Khartoum regime in southern Sudan for many years—but as a means of ensuring that there are no “international witnesses” to genocide. The UN’s IRIN went on to note that “areas held by the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) rebel group have not received medical aid for months and only limited food supplies,” which produced the following response from Kapila: “The reports, allegations of human rights violations are too persistent, too systematic, too repetitive from different sources to not be given credibility” (UN IRIN, December 11, 2003).
The key word here is “systematic,” and it picks up on an assessment offered several days ago by Ambassador Tom Vraalsen (the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Humanitarian Affairs for Sudan):
“Delivery of humanitarian assistance to populations in need is hampered mostly by *systematically denied access* [latter phrase emphasized in text]. While [Khartoum’s] authorities claim unimpeded access, they greatly restrict access to the areas under their control, while imposing blanket denial to all rebel-held areas.”
(Ambassador Tom Vraalsen, Note to the Emergency Relief Coordinator; “Sudan: Humanitarian Crisis in Darfur,” December 8, 2003)
That the conflict in Darfur is driven in such fundamental fashion by Khartoum’s racial and ethnic animus should put the recurrently euphemizing term “ethnic cleansing” once more under fierce scrutiny. We should first recall that the Nazis referred to ethnic extermination as the “cleansing” (Suberung) of Jews from German society and culture. In turn, the advent of the phrase “ethnic cleansing” during the Balkan conflicts produced a UN definition, one whose history has recently been recounted by Samantha Power in her Pulitzer Prize-winning study, “‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide”:
“In February 1993 the UN commission’s five lawyers presented an interim report to the UN secretary-general in which they defined ‘ethnic cleansing,’ the term that was then being used as a kind of euphemistic halfway house between crimes against humanity and genocide.” (page 483, “‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide”)
Among the elements of this “ethnic cleansing” (i.e., efforts to produce ethnically homogenous regions) were “murder, torture, rape, sexual assault, forcible removal, displacement [ ] of civilians, deliberate military attacks or threats of attacks on civilians and civilian areas, and wanton destruction of property” (page 483, “‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide”).
The word “systematic” appears yet again in Ambassador Vraalsen’s unusually frank assessment of Darfur. He declares that while the Khartoum regime has “presented the security situation [in Darfur] as steadily improving,” this account,
“sharply contrasted with first-hand reports that I received from tribal leaders and humanitarian actors on the ground. They reported that [Khartoum-backed Arab] militias were launching *systematic* raids against civilian populations. These attacks included burning and looting of villages, large-scale killings, abductions, and other severe violations of human rights. Humanitarian workers have also been targeted, with staff being abducted and relief trucks looted.”
(Ambassador Tom Vraalsen, Note to the Emergency Relief Coordinator; “Sudan: Humanitarian Crisis in Darfur,” December 8, 2003)
Here it is important to emphasize how very closely the definition of “ethnic cleansing” as established during the Balkan conflicts comports with the language Vraalsen is using. For in Darfur, what “system” can there be behind military raids if it is not a “system” based on race and ethnicity, especially when so many of these raids occur well away from any insurgent military opposition forces? and are relentlessly Arab militias attacking non-Arab populations (the Fur, Masseleit, and Zaghawa)? “Systematic” in this context could hardly suggest a more ominous synonym for the linch-pin phrase of the genocide convention: “…as such.”
What are officials of the Khartoum regime saying about all this? The disingenuousness is characteristic, which is to say palpable.
The regime has repeatedly declared that access to Darfur is “unimpeded” or impeded only by “security risks”; but on the basis of a first-hand assessment Ambassador Vraalsen found that whereas in September humanitarian needs were being partially met, at “present humanitarian operations have practically come to a standstill” in Darfur.
(Ambassador Tom Vraalsen, Note to the Emergency Relief Coordinator; “Sudan: Humanitarian Crisis in Darfur,” December 8, 2003)
And citing denials of humanitarian access, United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland declared on December 5, 2003 that “the humanitarian situation in Darfur has quickly become one of the worst in the world” (UN News Center, December 5, 2003).
At the same time, acting governor in Nyala, Adam Idris Al Silaik, “told IRIN it was ‘too difficult’ to send aid to rebel-held areas, [ ] but he added that the situation in southern Darfur was calm and under control'”
(UN IRIN, December 11, 2003).
And in an egregious and shockingly arrogant bit of mendacity, Dr. Sula Feldeen, Khartoum’s national humanitarian aid commissioner, told IRIN that the marauding, nomadic Arab militias (Janjaweed) responsible for so much of the humanitarian crisis were “defending their property” (UN IRIN, December 11, 2003).
Whereas the UN’s IRIN notes “corroborating sources” that have “accused Khartoum of backing the militias,” Dr. Feldeen and his National Islamic Front colleagues simply deny the charges (UN IRIN, December 11, 2003).
But it is the National Islamic Front (NIF) leadership that has, predictably, told the greatest lie about Darfur:
“[NIF President Omer] Beshir declared that] all indications show that the war in the south, *and in all other areas* [emphasis added], has come to an end. What remains is only some final retouches for an agreement on a lasting, just and comprehensive peace.” (Associated Press, December 6, 2003)
But of course as soon as we turn from the gross prevarication of the NIF to the ugly and all too tangible truths on the ground in Darfur, we see just why there is a need for such lies. Humanitarian assessments have consistently, relentlessly, invariably reported a worsening human catastrophe deriving directly from intense war and the attendant insecurity for humanitarian actors, as well as the outright obstruction by Khartoum of relief efforts. The UK humanitarian organization Save the Children two days ago (December 10, 2003) issued a “Sudan Emergency Statement”:
“Parts of western Sudan are experiencing what has been called the worst humanitarian crisis in Sudan since Bahr el-Ghazal in 1998. Current overall malnutrition levels are reported to be alarmingly high with Global Acute Malnutrition rates reaching 25% in some of the affected areas of Darfur, Western Sudan, which are accessible to relief workers. The precarious nutritional situation of children and their families could dramatically deteriorate should a disease break out, or should they be displaced further as a result of the on-going conflict.”
(Save the Children (UK) “Sudan Emergency Statement,” December 10, 2003 at http://www.savethechildren.org.uk)
The grim reality of the overall situation is captured all too well by a local African tribal leader: “Now they [Khartoum, and its proxy Arab militias] are fighting with bullets, but the time will come when starvation will set in” (UN IRIN, December 12, 2003). IRIN further reports, in another extremely ominous development, that in Darfur, “local farmers are unable to leave their homes to harvest or to go to local villages to trade for fear of being shot. Commercial traffic in western Darfur has all but stopped, and food prices have increased dramatically from 1,800 Sudanese dinar to 7,000 for a bag of millet” (UN IRIN, December 12, 2003).
This bears all the hallmarks of a major famine in the making; perhaps many tens of thousands of people will starve to death, as they did in Bahr el-Ghazal Province (southern Sudan) in 1998. One senior humanitarian aid worker, who recently traveled to Darfur, has told this writer that the similarities between Darfur today and Bahr el-Ghazal in 1998 are indeed all too clear.
These realities must be declared and addressed. Whether or not we choose to use the euphemistic language of “ethnic cleansing,” the nature of Khartoum’s ethnically-, racially-driven war in Darfur, conducted by means of Arab militia proxies, must be fully rendered. And if it does so honestly, the international community will come up against the inescapable need to take full control of humanitarian access to Darfur. Khartoum’s claim of “national sovereignty” cannot again be, as it has so often been in southern Sudan, an impediment to full access for emergency medical and food aid. Whatever cross-border efforts are required must be undertaken if Khartoum continues to obstruct critical humanitarian access. The intolerable alternative is to watch the African peoples of Darfur suffer and die in large numbers in the very near future—this as a result of deliberate policies emanating from Khartoum.
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In terms of the larger Sudanese context, John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group (ICG) has crystallized the issue forcefully:
“The international community has thus far failed to respond appropriately to these developments [in Darfur], in part because the attention of the world remains focused squarely on the IGAD peace process. [ ] The government of Sudan is being feted by the international community for its transition to peacemaker through the IGAD process, while it continues to carry out a bloody campaign by proxy against the people of Darfur. The end of one tragic civil war in Sudan should not be allowed to be a catalyst for a new one.” (International Crisis Group, December 10, 2003)
But the suggestion by the ICG that a peace process for Darfur be “coordinated” with the peace process for southern Sudan (the IGAD/Machakos peace process, now in its final round at Naivasha, Kenya) is belated and impracticable. Moreover, it is critically important that Khartoum not be allowed to drag out the Naivasha talks any further. To be sure, there should be no artificial deadline, nothing that produces a document that is unjust because of haste. But we have seen multiple declared deadlines come and go since last April, and there is still the possibility that if a deal is not consummated in the very near future, with all significant details negotiated, we may see an unraveling of the whole process. Khartoum must face the reality of a completed negotiated agreement, one that stipulates clearly the regime’s obligations per the terms of the final document. The international community must use the occasion of this diplomatic consummation to put in motion, albeit belatedly, the essential peacekeeping efforts and emergency transitional humanitarian relief.
In any event, it is clear that Darfur is not on the agenda at Naivasha, nor will it be. Acting US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Affairs Charles Snyder declared yesterday (December 11, 2003) of the IGAD/Machakos negotiations at Naivasha that an agreement was imminent:
“[Snyder] said some specifics—notably a ‘detail or two’ on a ceasefire and a ‘dollar or two’ in terms of a wealth-sharing deal—might have to be left for experts to conclude in January, but that ‘the essence of the deal could easily be done provided they don’t surprise us with some new agenda item.'” (Agence France-Presse, December 11, 2003)
Of course Darfur would be precisely such a “new agenda item,” and we may be sure that Khartoum would adamantly and uncompromisingly oppose any discussion of Darfur at Naivasha. Indeed, Khartoum has already made fully explicit its desire that there be no “internationalizing” of the Darfur crisis, either in the form of international observers on the ground or in the “peace talks” that are presently being nominally hosted under the extremely weak auspices of the government of Chad and President Idris Deby.
But ICG is certainly right that if peace does not come to Darfur, this will inevitably threaten any peace negotiated between Khartoum and the SPLM/A. Certainly peace for Sudan cannot come if Khartoum is given a “peace agreement” that allows for it to crush an insurgency in the west, one growing out of the long-standing and compelling grievances of the marginalized African peoples of Darfur. And if Khartoum is unwilling to make a just peace with the people of Darfur, we may wonder how great is its commitment to a just peace for the people of southern Sudan. Is the peace agreement now being concluded simply a means of buying time, an attempt by Khartoum to ensure that its military needn’t be stretched to fight on two major fronts at once?
However we answer this question—and Khartoum continues to provide evidence supporting the most pessimistic conclusion—the international community must respond immediately to the unfolding human catastrophe in Darfur. The terrible realities of human suffering and death must be spoken of honestly—and the humanitarian response, in turn, cannot be constrained by Khartoum’s willingness to use the denial of food and medical aid as a weapon of war. The international community is obliged to secure in the very near term, by whatever means are necessary, unimpeded humanitarian access.
Who will say as much? What moral justification is there for saying less?
Eric Reeves
Smith College
Northampton, MA 01063
413-585-3326
ereeves@smith.edu