The United Nations took another step in its long road to
irrelevancy on January 31 with a report announcing that the
Sudanese government was not conducting a genocidal campaign in the
Darfur region. It agreed that there were indeed mass killings of
civilians, torture, rape, pillaging, possible war crimes and
perhaps crimes against humanity, but there was no evidence of
genocide.
“Some of these violations are very likely to amount to war
crimes and given the systematic and widespread pattern of many of
the violations, they would also amount to crimes against humanity,”
the report said.
The report hung its conclusion on the belief that there was no
“genocidal intent” by the Sudanese government to kill off a
particular group on the grounds of ethnicity, religion or any other
reason, a rather dubious finding. No such policy was implemented,
the report maintains, by the government, either directly or through
militia groups under its control.
Such an assertion comes as a surprise to anyone with basic
familiarity with Sudan. Although the Sudanese government denies it,
it’s widely believed that it supports an Arab militia known as the
Janjaweed — the group chiefly culpable for causing the region’s
strife — in an effort to put down a rebellion by non-Arab African
groups. Experts believe that the Janjaweed is attempting to
exterminate three tribes so that they can take their land.
Since the campaign began in March 2004, thousands of homes in
several villages have been destroyed in the fighting. At least
70,000 people have died from disease, hunger and fighting, hundreds
of thousands have fled the region to neighboring Chad, and two
million are now affected by the conflict.
Even if one accepts that the Janjaweed aren’t backed by
Khartoum, the idea that the government has had nothing to do with
the killings is laughable. The commission responsible for the
report compiled a list of suspects that includes government
officials and government-backed militias responsible for some of
the worst crimes committed in Darfur. The report also maintained
that most attacks “were deliberately and indiscriminately directed
against civilians.” At some point an official declaration of
genocidal policy merely acknowledges the reality of what’s already
going on.
And yet according to the United Nations, although conditions
that lead to mass killings and the targeting of a particular group
exist, it falls short of being genocide. While the United Nations
can engage in bureaucratic hair-splitting in trying divine whether
genocide is taking place, the rest of us don’t have to. We may not
know how to define it, but we know genocide when we see it.
It’s ironic that we recently celebrated the liberation of
Auschwitz. After the full scale of the Nazi atrocities was revealed
to the world we all joined together to say “Never Again.” Words
have rarely translated into real action, particularly when it comes
to Africa. In January 1994 Kofi Annan and the United Nations
ignored a cable by now retired Canadian Major General Roméo
Dallaire reporting that the Hutu planned to launch a genocidal
campaign against the Tutsis. Three months later a 100-day orgy of
killing began that resulted in the murder of over 800,000
people.
Where eleven years ago one might have argued it was unlikely
that a massacre on the scale of Rwanda could occur, today we are
under no such misconception. The evidence is staring us in the face
in the victims of Darfur. The United Nations can afford to engage
in technicalities in defining genocide and willful blindness to
when it occurs but doesn’t mean that the world has to. We must
either act to end the genocide in Darfur or once again we’ll wonder
how mass murder occurred in front of our eyes and no one did a
thing to stop it. “Never Again” wasn’t meant to be a mantra, it was
meant as a call to arms.
