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Darfur peace is dangerous - Minawi

Tuesday 6 June 2006.

June 6, 2006 (FATA BORNO CAMP, Darfur) — Signing a peace deal to end three years of fighting that some have called genocide would normally propel a rebel leader into the ranks of national hero.

Minni Minnawi signs Darfur Peace Agreement, Abuja May 5, 2006.

But in Sudan’s violent Darfur region, the man who made peace with the government in Nigeria on May 5 is restricted in his movement because of security concerns and reviled as a traitor by many in teeming refugee camps.

 

Last week, on Minni Arcua Minnawi’s first return to Darfur since signing the Abuja peace deal, he wanted to visit Abou Shouk camp near the main town of el-Fasher. But the African Union said he was unable to out of fears for his safety following daily protests against the agreement.

At nearby Fata Borno Camp residents warned him to stay away from their camp as well.

"If Minni comes here we will slaughter him," said Abdallah Adam Ibrahim, who fled his home to the camp in north Darfur three years ago.

"He has sold our souls and our tears — he is a traitor," he said, running his finger across his throat to mime slitting the throat of the young SLA leader.

Minnawi, head of the main faction of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA), signed the agreement with the Sudanese government to end the fighting that has killed tens of thousands of people and driven more than 2.5 million from their homes to miserable camps in the vast desert region.

The United States says the campaign of rape, killing and looting carried out by Arab militia known locally as Janjaweed and originally armed by the government is genocide, a charge the government denies. The International Criminal Court is investigating alleged war crimes in the region.

Despite intense international pressure and the threat of sanctions, rival SLA leader Abdel Wahed Mohammed al-Nur and the rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) refused to sign the Abuja deal.

They said they wanted more compensation for war victims, more political posts and a role in disarming the Janjaweed.

Though neither group has as much firepower on the ground as Minnawi, Nur is from the region’s main tribe — the Fur — who also make up the majority of those languishing in squalid camps.

"Minni may have the soldiers but all the camps belong to Abdel Wahed," said Ibrahim Ismail Adam, another Darfuri who has taken refuge in the Fata Borno camp.

Nur’s objections to the African Union-mediated peace deal are echoed by thousands of Darfuris demonstrating almost daily in Khartoum and in the camps.

"We have paid a dear price in this war, we have suffered rape, pillage and killing, so we have to have compensation," said Mohamed Abdel Karim, a local Fur leader from the areas around Fata Borno.

The Abuja deal allocates an initial $30 million in compensation from the government for more than 3 million Darfuris the United Nations says were affected by the conflict.

Nur and those in the camps dismissed the $10 per person payout as a joke.

Minnawi says some international partners have promised to add to that amount. But his many critics in the camps aren’t hearing his message.

Minnawi is unable to travel to areas controlled by commanders loyal to Nur and also says he still does not fully trust his government partners in peace.

"If I trust the government 100 percent I would not come to land in the AU camp," he told Reuters in an interview in the AU headquarters in el-Fasher.

This week he refused to allow an AU plane moving him from south Sudan to el-Fasher to stop and refuel in Nyala in South Darfur for security reasons.

The AU peace agreement reached in early May was the result of two years of talks. Analysts say the road ahead on the ground in Darfur will likely be as long and difficult. Despite the setbacks during his first weeks as peacemaker, Minnawi remained optimistic.

"With time ... everyone will recognize that the peace is for them, the peace is for the Darfuri people," he said.

(Reuters)

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Why the UN can’t save Darfur

Saturday 27 May 2006.

By Eric Reeves, The New Republic online

May 27, 2006 — It has been a good few weeks for those who believe that the United Nations can save Darfur—or so it may appear. Eleven days ago, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution demanding that the Sudanese government allow a mission to enter Darfur and assess the needs of an eventual deployment of U.N. troops. That vote came in response to repeated obstruction by Khartoum, which has long balked at allowing a U.N. assessment team to enter Darfur—even after reaching a peace agreement with one faction of the largest Darfuri rebel group earlier this month. But yesterday, three days past the deadline established by the Security Council, Khartoum finally agreed to allow the U.N. team to enter the country. The State Department trumpeted the development as "a positive step," and a headline in yesterday’s Washington Post conveyed optimism that a deployment of U.N. troops to Darfur is on the way: "DEAL ON MISSION IN DARFUR MAY PRESAGE U.N. PRESENCE: MOVE CALLED PRECONDITION TO PEACEKEEPING." Good developments all. Right?

Actually, far from suggesting that the United Nations can save Darfur, the developments of the last few weeks provide an excellent illustration of why the international body will never be able to stop the genocide. Indeed, the most recent Security Council resolution does more to highlight Darfur’s exceedingly grim future than to suggest that security for civilians or humanitarian operations will improve anytime in the near term. We might recall that there have been seven previous U.N. Security Council resolutions on Darfur, none of which has halted the genocide. These previous resolutions, which together constitute a shameful record of impotence, are recounted in the most recent resolution—unwittingly drawing attention to just how useless Turtle Bay’s steady stream of diplomatic activity on Darfur has been. Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe that this time will be any different.

First, it’s worth understanding just how bad the situation on the ground in Darfur has become—despite the recent peace agreement signed in Abuja that many believe could open the way for U.N. troops. This past week there have been widespread Janjaweed attacks on villages near the town of Kutum in North Darfur, where the Janjaweed are reported to be continuing a massive mobilization. The Gereida area in South Darfur continues to be threatened by the Janjaweed, and late last month Khartoum launched a large military offensive in the area. In West Darfur, international aid workers were attacked by "unidentified men in uniform," likely Janjaweed or Khartoum-allied paramilitary forces. Doctors Without Borders reports large numbers of civilians injured in recent military clashes between rebels and Khartoum’s forces near Labado, also in South Darfur. The rebel groups are far from innocent in all this: In North Darfur, the two main factions of the Sudan Liberation Army—only one of which has signed the peace agreement—are locked in extremely fierce fighting.

Meanwhile, the Sudanese government has proven adept at exporting violence across the border to Chad. Jan Egeland, head of U.N. aid efforts, warned last week that all humanitarian operations in eastern Chad—providing assistance to more than 350,000 refugees and displaced persons—may soon have to be withdrawn due to growing insecurity. As Khartoum-backed rebels continue to threaten the Chadian government of Idris Deby, his military response has been to pull armed forces out of vulnerable rural areas to towns and garrisons. This has left many villages in eastern Chad vulnerable to Janjaweed predations and to attacks by Khartoum’s regular forces; refugee camps along the border have also seen a wave of abductions and forced recruitment by the Darfuri rebel groups in recent weeks.

The only international force on the ground right now is the African Union, but AU troops are without the manpower, equipment, transport capacity, logistics, or intelligence abilities required to stop the genocide. And politically the AU shows no sign of finding the courage to demand of Khartoum a mandate to do more than monitor an absurdly irrelevant April 2004 ceasefire. While the new Abuja peace agreement stipulates any number of roles, tasks, and commission-formings for the AU, this amounts to shuffling paper without the means to enforce the merely notional "guarantees" of the agreement. Guarantees in Darfur, as elsewhere in Sudan, are only as meaningful as the guarantors, and the AU has nothing approaching the capacity to serve as a guarantor of the Abuja agreement. A detailed New York Times dispatch from South Darfur last week, while admiring of the courage of some AU personnel, paints a grim picture of futility and helplessness.

It is against this backdrop that Darfuris are now expected to wait patiently for a U.N. force that may or may not be coming, that may or may not deploy quickly, and that may or may not have a mandate to protect them. About the only thing we can say for sure about this force is that it will require the approval of the Khartoum government; and that, unfortunately, tells us all we need to know.

By delaying permission for the U.N. assessment team to enter the country three days past the deadline imposed by the Security Council, Khartoum was sending an emphatic message to the international community: "We control all access to Darfur, and unless you are willing to enter a non-permissive environment, you will be fully guided by our demands and our timetable." Just today, an advisor to Sudan’s president gave a hint as to what those demands would be. "The [U.N.] role has not been decided yet," he said, according to Reuters. "Will it be a humanitarian role, one of monitoring the ceasefire, a role of peacekeeping?" Note that none of these options include a mandate to disarm the Janjaweed, the essential precursor to ending the genocide.

Fortunately for Sudan, its allies on the Security Council are looking out for its interests. True, China and Russia did eventually accept last week’s resolution, but it was a considerably weakened version of what was originally proposed; language that would have allowed some U.N. peacekeepers from the large force already in southern Sudan to move to Darfur was stripped out. These forces, even if relatively few in number, could have established an important precedent for future deployment of U.N. peacekeepers. One assumes that China and Russia were responsible for watering down the resolution, though we don’t know for sure. Meanwhile, neither China nor Russia is likely to accept any resolution authorizing a U.N. operation under Chapter 7 authority. This is a major problem, since only Chapter 7 authority can provide the mandate necessary to separate combatants and confront the Janjaweed. Instead, the most China and Russia will permit is Chapter 6 authority, which allows only peacekeeping—a cruel joke, since there is no peace in Darfur to keep. The Chinese were quite explicit about this. To explain how they made this clear requires an understanding of the role of Chapter 7 in the current debate. Last week’s resolution—which China and Russia grudgingly agreed to—was passed under Chapter 7 of the U.N. charter. But it did not call for the deployment of troops: Chapter 7 was invoked merely to place Sudan in violation of international law if it refused to admit the U.N. assessment team. Following the vote, China’s deputy ambassador to the U.N. declared that this vote "should not be construed as a precedent for the Security Council’s future discussion or adoption of a new resolution against Sudan." In other words, China may have permitted Chapter 7 to be invoked this time; but when it comes to deploying actual troops to Darfur, Chapter 7 authority will not be an option.

Meanwhile, the clear sense among diplomats in Sudan’s capital, according to a recent Reuters report, is that resistance is growing to a U.N. mission, not diminishing. Understanding full well the views of their veto-wielding friends on the Security Council, officials of the National Islamic Front are confident that they can play their trump card whenever needed: threatening a non-permissive environment in Darfur. They know this card can be played with full support from China and Russia. Moreover, various accommodating public statements by U.N., European, and U.S. officials encourage Khartoum in its belief that there is no stomach in the world community for deploying any force in a non-permissive environment. For instance, pressed in a recent interview about what the United States would do in the event Khartoum did not accept U.N. peacekeepers, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer said that she was "certain Khartoum would agree." As she went on to explain, "There is no need to do the contingency plan [for military intervention] if you expect the government of Sudan to agree to a U.N. operation." There could hardly be a clearer signal that the United States has no intention of challenging any claim of national sovereignty that Khartoum might make.

Which leaves two possibilities for the United Nations in Darfur. Either Khartoum will delay for months before making explicit its refusal to admit U.N. troops; or the regime’s genocidaires will calculate that by dictating the terms and mandate of a U.N. mission, they can use it in the same way they have used the African Union mission—as a means of forestalling any more robust initiatives from the international community while the work of genocide goes on. Indeed, a "rehatting" of the ineffective AU force with U.N. blue helmets, along with the addition of a small number of Asian troops, may be much to Khartoum’s liking: It will appease the international community while largely preserving the status quo on the ground.

Here, then, is what the people of Darfur are being asked to believe: that a piece of paper signed in Abuja marks a change of heart within a regime of genocidaires that has never abided by any agreement it has ever made with any Sudanese party; that these genocidaires, having been effectively granted veto power over U.N. actions in Darfur, will permit the United Nations to take actions that would end the killing; that Moscow and Beijing, loyal defenders of the National Islamic Front, will soon abandon their old allies in Khartoum and allow U.N. troops to deploy with an appropriate mandate; that, while waiting for a U.N. force that is either not coming or is likely coming without the tools to stop the genocide, an existing African Union mission that has failed to protect Darfuris for two years will suddenly protect them now. In short, they are being asked to accept the genocidal status quo. Never has it been more obvious that only NATO military action can save Darfur. The people of Darfur have been waiting for help for three years. If working through the United Nations is the best the international community has to offer, they will be waiting for a long time to come.

* Eric Reeves is a professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College and has written extensively on Sudan. He can be reached at ereeves@smith.edu, website www.sudanreeves.org.

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Khartoum clamps down hard on news access to Darfur

Saturday 20 May 2006.

Khartoum Clamps Down Hard on News Access to Darfur: What do the regime’s genocidaires wish to obscure from international view?

By Eric Reeves

May 20, 2006 — The May 18, 2006 Reuters dispatch from Khartoum, by the superbly well-informed Opheera McDoom, offers a telling picture of newly imposed and severe restrictions on the ability of journalists to travel to and report from Darfur:

"Sudan has tightened restrictions on foreign press traveling to Darfur and has not issued any travel permits to its violent western region since a peace deal was signed earlier this month. Experts who have watched Darfur since the conflict erupted in early 2003 say this is the most restrictive the government has been on access since the height of the conflict in 2004." (Reuters [dateline: Khartoum], May 18, 2006)

If there were real meaning to the Abuja peace agreement of May 5, 2006---or to the cease-fire that nominally went into effect 72 hours later---Khartoum would be eager to display any changes that have been effected on the ground. In fact, a steady stream of reports from humanitarian officials, from the New York Times correspondent presently in Darfur, and from a series of confidential sources makes clear that violence continues apace, that the vast humanitarian crisis only grows more desperate, and that many hundreds of thousands of lives remain acutely at risk, even as mortality has already spiked sharply upwards.

A partial explanation of the need for journalists to have access to Darfur was highlighted by Jan Egeland, UN aid chief:

"’It is vital for journalists to be given full access to Darfur...to cover the humanitarian work and explain the urgent need for additional international support,’ [Egeland] said."

And yet Khartoum’s deliberate obstruction of access is conspicuous:

"Since early May [ ] when a peace agreement was signed in Abuja, Nigeria, no travel permits have been issued, said an official at the External Affairs Council responsible for foreign press. He did not know why. Some foreign press have travelled to Darfur without permits on high-level delegations or with the African Union, who are monitoring a widely ignored truce in Darfur. But without permits their access is very limited and they risk being arrested. ’I applied for a permit for myself and my photographer on May 3 and still to this day have not received them,’ said Lydia Polgreen of The New York Times, who is traveling in Darfur with the AU."

"Dan Rice of the Guardian newspaper said he had no travel permit despite applying 11 days ago. Permissions for resident journalists, which are usually issued within a day, have not been given after 10 days. Some correspondents have been waiting months for visas to even enter Sudan." (Reuters [dateline: Khartoum], May 18, 2006)

The calculations by Khartoum’s National Islamic Front regime are obvious: many UN and Western political officials, especially within the Bush administration, are visibly eager to declare a "victory" for diplomacy in Abuja; if this eagerness is coupled with growing invisibility of realities on the ground in Darfur and eastern Chad, Khartoum will be that much closer to having succeeded in evading responsibility for the genocide, even as genocidal destruction continues. The "Darfur Peace Agreement," signed under acute duress in Abuja by only one faction of the Sudan Liberation Army, contemplates no meaningful guarantees for the merely paper "guarantees" that abound. And if the history of Sudan over the past seventeen years teaches anything, it is that "guarantees" without guarantors are utterly meaningless. Abuja was no diplomatic victory; it was a contrived ending to diplomacy that never had any chance for real success in the absence of concerted international pressure on Khartoum.

The same disingenuousness about Abuja infuses comments by US and European officials concerning the significance of UN Security Council Resolution 1679 (passed on May 16, 2006). The Resolution does little more than authorize the highly belated deployment of a UN peacekeeping assessment mission to Darfur; this, in turn, was made necessary because for months Khartoum has obdurately denied entry visas to these peacekeeping planners. Even in the wake of the Security Council resolution, there is still no firm commitment by the regime to allow entry.

In plainly calculated fashion, the Khartoum regime has over the past two weeks made a wide range of ambiguous comments about eventual deployment of a more robust UN force to Darfur, one that might supersede the hopelessly inadequate African Union force that grows increasingly impotent amidst rising violence. Perhaps the most revealing comments come from Majzoub el-Khalifa, head of Khartoum’s delegation to the Abuja peace talks, who recently declared:

"’As long as [UN representatives of Kofi Annan and the Security Council] open the window for negotiation, we are going to continue and go through the negotiation. We hope that the result will be a win-win approach, for the sake of the people of Sudan. We are part and parcel of the international community. If something [does] not go beyond our red lines, we are going to accept it shortly. The cardinal point is the dialogue and the discussion and the consultation with the government of Sudan. If it is on the line with the government of Sudan then everything will go smoothly. If it is against the will of Sudan then we are going to react accordingly.’" (Voice of America [dateline: Khartoum], May 18, 2006)

Despite the specious language, the message is blunt: nothing will happen in Darfur unless we say so and our "red lines" (Khartoum’s widely encompassing claims of national sovereignty) will govern all our decisions. The regime is declaring that they will be the ones making all the decisions about any deploying force. Indeed, Khalifa went on to make this explicitly clear:

"Khalifa said Sudan wants input on the size and mandate of the proposed UN mission. He stressed that Sudan wants a ’re-hatting’ of African Union troops already in Darfur, to retain the presence of African soldiers in the region. [A] UN force is the African Force,’ he added. ’They are just going to change the hats from green hats to blue hats. There will be no other forces in Darfur. They are the same forces, with the same mandate, with the same color and with the same guidance. The chief will also be from Africa.’" (Voice of America [dateline: Khartoum], May 18, 2006)

Khalifa and Khartoum are clearly not willing even to contemplate the large, robust UN force, deploying under UN Chapter VII authority, that has been the focal point of all meaningful discussions of how to provide security for civilians and humanitarians in Darfur. Khalifa’s insistence on "the same mandate" ensures that Khartoum will never accept a force deploying with a Chapter VII mandate (peacemaking as opposed simply to peacekeeping); and to date, no international leader has suggested entering Sudan if the regime were to create a "non-permissive environment."

Moreover, China has signaled clearly that it will oppose the Chapter VII authority necessary to deploy an effective peace support operation in Darfur. While voting for Resolution 1679 under Chapter VII authority, Chinese Deputy Ambassador to the UN Zhang Yishan pointedly declared following the vote that "[Chapter VII] should not be construed as a precedent for the Security Council’s future discussion or the adoption of a new resolution against Sudan’" (Deutsche Presse Agentur [dateline: UN/New York], May 16, 2006). The Chinese can clearly count on substantial support from fellow veto-wielding Council member Russia, as well as Arab countries.

In short, Khartoum’s brutal leaders are increasingly confident that they will be able to minimize the number of witnesses to genocide who are free to speak. Humanitarians, as opposed to journalists, may witness genocide in Darfur, but they cannot speak about it without risking a loss of access. It will also become harder and harder to see the cruel realities of arbitrary arrest, torture, and unlawful detention of those who would report on human rights abuse. In recent days, for example, the humanitarian organization Trócaire has been joined by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International in condemning the May 16, 2006 arrest of two human rights lawyers working with the important Amel Center for Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture Victims. Trócaire reports:

"’This latest arrest of human rights workers follows a pattern of obstruction and harassment which Trócaire’s partners in Darfur have suffered’ said a spokesperson for the organisation. ’This includes arrests and difficulties in getting official permission for activities. One organisation funded by Trócaire has twice this year been ordered to close down and hand over its assets to the authorities in West Darfur.’" (Press release, May 18, 2006)

There can be no mistaking the meaning of Khartoum’s crackdown on journalists’ access to Darfur: our own understanding of the crisis on the ground is meant to be curtailed as much as possible. In turn, those in the international community with the power to pressure the regime to allow a full picture of Darfur to emerge are instead taking refuge in the illusions of a peace agreement and the vague future possibility of some UN action. Such cowardice works to give the sense that Darfur is somehow now less urgently in need. Nothing could be more profoundly false, and yet there should be no betting against the machinations of Khartoum’s skilled genocidaires. Our view of the genocide is in eclipse.

REALITY IN DARFUR

Yet there are voices that insist on speaking the truth. Here again, to understand what is actually happening on the ground in Darfur, we can do no better than to read carefully Jan Egeland’s most recent report to the Security Council (May 19, 2006). Contemplating Darfur’s future without a meaningful peace agreement, Egeland declared humanitarian operations would collapse, with "catastrophic" consequences:

"With even more violence and attacks, the humanitarian operation could not be sustained, and relief workers would have to withdraw. Malnutrition and mortality rates would multiply, in some areas within weeks, not months."

In the absence of a meaningful peace, which can only be secured by an international force that is nowhere in sight, we will see only more of what Egeland "saw in the Gereida area in South Darfur: massive displacement, constant violence and attacks against civilians, and a few humanitarian organizations struggling to provide relief to more and more people."

"The number of displaced in Gereida has tripled in the last four months, with current estimates ranging between 100,000 and 120,000. Recently arrived Internally Displaced Persons I spoke to gave harrowing accounts of attacks on their villages by Government [of Sudan] forces and militias only 12 days prior to my visit. In fact, armed militia attacked another village southwest of Gereida since then, on 14 May [2006], as confirmed by the African Union Mission in Sudan. Reports of attacks on villages in other areas of Darfur are still reaching us almost every day." [The Abuja agreement cease-fire began May 8, 2006.]

"As more and more people arrive in Gereida with little or nothing to sustain themselves, the humanitarian community is only barely able to meet the rising needs, and is confronted with constant access problems. The main road from Nyala has to be declared ’no go’ for extended periods. And local government authorities have been blocking fuel deliveries for bore holes and water pumps."

Although (under pressure) Khartoum has reversed its extraordinarily destructive decision to expel the distinguished Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) from Kalma camp, where it had served as the lead humanitarian organization, this reversal is terribly belated. Kalma camp in South Darfur, the largest in all of Darfur, has desperate needs to be met before the approaching rainy season. These efforts have been unconscionably delayed by Khartoum, even as they are,

"essential to avoid epidemics, flooding, blocking of access, and the destruction of infrastructure. Every day counts as time is running out. An outbreak of cholera in Kalma would be a nightmare scenario for the 95,000 inhabitants of the camp and the population of Nyala. I hope that NRC will be able to return within a few days to resume its essential work, under the same conditions as before."

Speaking of access restrictions on humanitarians, Egeland highlighted the terribly under-reported situation in eastern Sudan, which remains poised to explode into violence, and where human suffering and malnutrition in many ways rival that in Darfur:

"The Government [of Sudan] should also lift the many other access restrictions listed on the fact sheet we provided to [Security] Council members during my last briefing [April 20, 2006], including those in the East [Sudan]. This includes the application of the agreement between the Government and the UN to allow freedom of movement to all UN staff. The refusal by the Government [of Sudan] to implement the relevant provisions of the agreement is having increasingly dire consequences, particularly in the East where essential relief activities had to be suspended. It would be very timely and important for the upcoming Security Council mission to Sudan to review these humanitarian access issues with the Government."

The blunt truth is that despite recent proclamations of a new openness to humanitarian operations, Khartoum continues to wage a savagely effective war of attrition against humanitarian assistance throughout Sudan---in the East and in southern Sudan, as well as Darfur and eastern Chad. Promises in the current environment are easy; but the history of humanitarian access over the past three years reveals repeatedly resurgent obstructionism, and makes clear that the regime will not surrender this virtually cost-free weapon of genocidal warfare.

Funding also remains a critical issue, and there is "shortfall of $389 million for Darfur alone." Khartoum refuses to give generously from its huge strategic grain shortfall, and the recent decision to release only 20,000 metric tons (perhaps 5% of the total reserve) still represents, as Egeland pointedly notes, "the first pledge by the Government of Sudan to a UN appeal since the beginning of the Darfur crisis." After three years and more than 450,000 deaths, with millions of people in desperate need of food aid---Khartoum only now makes its first, and almost certainly last, contribution.

Egeland also highlights the desperate funding plight of southern Sudan and other regions of Sudan:

"We urgently need additional and very generous contributions from donors, also for the rest of Sudan. The total shortfall under the [Comprehensive Sudan] Work Plan for 2006 amounts to $983 million, and many vital sectors have received less than 20 percent. The gap between Darfur and rest of Sudan is increasing steadily, with requirements for Southern Sudan still only 17 percent funded. I want to appeal especially to those donors that have contributed much less so far than last year, as well as donors in the Gulf region."

Here it should be highlighted that some rich European countries, such as Belgium and Italy, are giving extraordinarily little to Darfur---far less than 1% of the US contribution, and less than 2% of the British contribution.

The security nightmare in which humanitarian organizations must operate is also presented in harrowing detail by Egeland:

"The attacks against relief workers have been relentless, and are threatening our operations in many areas. Our staff, compounds, trucks and vehicles are being targeted literally on a daily basis. In Geneina alone, there were seven armed incidents against NGOs in three weeks. The Government [of Sudan] urgently has to ensure law and order in areas under its control, as I discussed with Vice-President Taha. And all rebel factions and militia groups have to stop hijacking vehicles and attacking relief workers."

But this is mere exhortation without a robust peacemaking force on the ground, such as Egeland himself has pleaded for on numerous occasions. The consequences of insecurity are devastating:

"Large areas across Darfur are inaccessible to us as a result of these direct attacks and continuing fighting, as you will see on the map we distributed. In many parts of West Darfur, we have had no or only very limited access since last December. NGOs are using every available means to distribute food and other supplies, including through food committees and donkey convoys. But nowhere near enough assistance is getting through, and the ’hunger season’ is approaching. The few sources of food and income left to the local population are threatened by militia that are burning crops, stealing livestock, and attacking women as they collect firewood."

The Janjaweed, Khartoum’s genocidal scavengers, remain completely unconstrained, despite the Abuja "peace agreement."

Egeland also gives us, on the basis of his recent assessment mission to eastern Chad, a terrible glimpse of this new killing field:

"During my visit to Abeche and Goz Beida, the threats against relief workers and the civilian population in Eastern Chad are at least as serious as in Darfur, and in some cases worse. A total of 24 vehicles have been hijacked in the past few months alone. Only two weeks ago, a UNICEF colleague was shot and almost killed in Abeche. All of these attacks are being committed with total impunity. As a result of the insecurity, UN agencies and NGOs have been forced to reduce staff and programmes in many areas, at a time when needs are continuing to increase, particularly those of the 50,000 Internally Displaced Persons [IDPs]. Severe funding shortfalls are also a major constraint, with only 25 percent of the required $179 million funded to date."

"Another major concern in Eastern Chad is the targeting of refugees and IDPs, including children, for recruitment by various armed groups. This is undermining the civilian and humanitarian character of the camps, and further increases their vulnerability to attacks. The displaced and the civilian population are also being threatened by militia and rebel attacks, and an almost total lack of law and order in the area. One group of IDPs I spoke with at the Gouroukoun site near Goz Beida had been attacked three times before they decided to flee their villages. And at least 13,000 people have fled from Chad to Darfur in recent weeks to escape the fighting and attacks."

"The humanitarian colleagues I spoke to during my visit expected the situation in Eastern Chad to deteriorate further rather than improve. At the same time, President [Idriss] Deby made it very clear to me that the Government lacked the capacity to ensure the security and protection of the civilian population in Eastern Chad and the humanitarian organizations there to assist them. This means that we are confronted with a very dangerous vacuum that is being filled by rebels, militia and others, leaving civilians, IDPs, refugee camps and relief workers utterly exposed."

"Something has to be done urgently to prevent a scenario where more and more civilians are attacked and displaced, refugee camps become increasingly militarized and potentially embroiled in the conflict, and relief workers have to withdraw. A number of options could be considered, including assistance to the Government of Chad to enable it to meet its security responsibilities. Humanitarian organizations have also been employing more Chadian security staff themselves. But we also have to consider other security arrangements now before the situation become much worse."

Egeland concludes by offering the largest truth, though one that has yet to move the international community to meaningful action:

"In Darfur and Eastern Chad, humanitarian relief constitutes a lifeline for close to four million people. Attacking relief workers or impeding their work means attacking that lifeline. If relief workers have to pull out, hundreds of thousands of lives are put at risk." (all citations from "Briefing by Jan Egeland, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, on his visit to Chad and Darfur," Security Council Consultations, May 19, 2006)

Of these "close to four million people" who are dependent upon a humanitarian lifeline, evidence strongly suggests that insecurity has placed over 700,000 beyond reach of aid workers, and over 1 million people have only tenuous access to aid as we move into the "hunger gap" and rainy season.

THE AFRICAN UNION

Given these ghastly realities, we hear more and more talk of increasing, improving, and expanding the African Union force in Darfur. Given the palpable unwillingness of the international community to mount the required humanitarian intervention, and given the slow-motion response of the UN, such efforts to augment the AU are clearly in order, and emergency funding and equipment must be provided.

But the essential truth is that the AU is not remotely adequate to the crisis in Darfur, and cannot be made so. Notably, the primary reason that AU soldiers have not been paid for two months lies in performance evaluations conducted over the past two years by those who disperse money to the AU from Brussels. The European Union was to have been the primary funder of AU operations, but the EU has concluded that the inefficiencies and radical shortcomings of the force are such that further funding could not be justified. Some in Brussels feel that the AU is operating at less than 50% efficiency. Others note the decline in troop quality as the AU has struggled to reach the force level of 7,700 that was set over a year ago (it remains several hundred personnel short of this figure even now).

Many in the AU mission have performed courageously, even heroically. They have done the best they can lacking adequate military equipment, transport and communications capacity, intelligence, logistics, and administrative support. They have struggled on despite being denied by the AU political leadership a meaningful mandate for civilian or humanitarian protection. (See a recent sympathetic but relentlessly honest dispatch by Lydia Polgreen of the New York Times, May 17, 2006 at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/17/world/africa/17sudan.html?_r=1&oref=slogin)

But the African Union Mission in Sudan simply cannot be made into a force adequate to address the security needs of almost 4 million people. Moreover, this force can do nothing to staunch the flow of genocidal violence into eastern Chad, or to protect the more than 350,000 Darfuri refugees and conflict-affected Chadians. There is no AU presence whatsoever in eastern Chad, even as West Darfur is the region in Darfur that is most completely unprotected.

[See my detailed two-part analysis, "Ghosts of Rwanda: The Failure of the African Union in Darfur," November 13 & 20, 2005: http://www.sudanreeves.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=535&page=1 and http://www.sudanreeves.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=534&page=1]

The African Union is no doubt the future of peacekeeping in Africa, and should receive robust support both in the near and longer term. But it is unconscionable to hold Darfur hostage to the overwhelming shortcomings of the AU force, and to allow the fledgling AU Peace and Security Council to continue to fail in its first major peacekeeping operation. Such failure will be far from the least important consequence of unchecked genocide in Darfur.

MENDACITY AND CYNICISM ARE INCREASINGLY THE HALLMARKS OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION ON DARFUR

As the desperate urgency in Darfur increases, as insecurity continues to further attenuate the reach of humanitarian operations, and as we enter the grimmest season of death in this land of genocidal destruction, the Bush administration seems willing to continue with mere posturing. We may trace cynicism and mendacity going back well over a year in statements by various senior officials. But perhaps the most despicably mendacious is Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer. It was Frazer who last November flippantly warned against being concerned by the rising levels of violence, which have subsequently increased dramatically, and continue to increase, posing the grave threat that Egeland and others daily detail:

"[Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer] cautioned against dwelling too much on the current level of violence [in Darfur]." (Washington Post, November 4, 2005)

And it was Frazer who attempted to take the lead in walking the Bush administration back from the genocide determination of September 2004, rendered by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell on the basis of thorough review by State Department legal officials and a comprehensive study by the Coalition for International Justice (August/September 2004). (See my February 9, 2006 New Republic Article "State Department Dishonesty on Darfur," http://www.sudantribune.com/article.php3?id_article=14000).

Most recently Frazer counseled complacency in the wake of the Abuja agreement, suggesting that the need for pressuring Khartoum has ended. Reuters reports the results of an astonishing series of queries:

"Asked what the United States would do if Khartoum did not accept UN peacekeepers to help about 7,000 under-equipped African Union forces in Darfur, Frazer said the international community would proceed as planned. Pressed on whether this meant forced military intervention to end what the US has termed genocide, Frazer said she was certain Khartoum would agree and this would not happen. ’There is no need to do the contingency plan if you expect the government of Sudan to agree to a UN operation,’ she said. ’They signed the Darfur peace agreement and they know what is needed to implement it.’" (Reuters [dateline: Washington], May 12, 2006)

It would be difficult to unpack all the disingenuousness, indeed outright mendacity in these statements. But the truth could not be more directly at odds with the claims made, with an unspeakably casual attitude, about the fate of almost 4 million threatened human lives, perhaps half of them children. It is important to note first that even were Khartoum to permit deployment of a UN force, such deployment would not reach significant numbers for many months, even as there is extraordinary present danger to these people. And it is far from clear that Khartoum will permit anything more than a "re-hatting" of AU forces as a UN force, with some marginal augmentation (see above). What guarantees, then, the security of the humanitarian lifeline that Egeland declared in danger of collapsing because of growing insecurity in Darfur and eastern Chad?

And why should Frazer suppose that because Khartoum "signed" the Abuja agreement, and because the regime indeed "knows what is needed to implement" it, that this will lead to actual implementation? The Comprehensive Peace Agreement of January 2005, between Khartoum and the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, is largely in tatters because of a wide range of implementation failures. The National Islamic Front, since it came to power by military coup in June 1989, has never abided by any agreement with any Sudanese party. Its history is one of reneging and bad faith. With such massive human destruction in the balance, it is disgraceful to posture in such glib fashion as Frazer does here.

There is only one chance for Darfur, and that is relentless pressure on Khartoum: pressure to permit truly unfettered and unthreatened humanitarian access; pressure to open the country to journalists so that we do not lose sight of the potential victims of ongoing genocide; pressure to abide by the terms of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement for southern Sudan; pressure to allow humanitarian access to the ravaged east of Sudan; pressure to stop supporting the Chadian rebels who are creating such massive instability and human destruction within the civilian and refugee populations of eastern Chad.

But most of all, Khartoum must be pressured with the credible threat of humanitarian intervention, regardless of whether or not the regime declares a "non-permissive environment." There could be no words more reassuring to the regime’s genocidaires than Frazer’s: "There is no need to do the contingency plan if you expect the government of Sudan to agree to a UN operation." Those willing to wait for a UN operation to deploy when the African Union surrenders its mandate at the end of September must also be willing to accept the vast human destruction that is clearly impending. But those such as Frazer, willing to take Khartoum at its word, must also accept responsibility for the human destruction that will proceed long after next September. The human deaths that will follow from a lack of security in Darfur and eastern Chad cannot be calculated now; but estimates by Egeland, and by Kofi Annan in Le Figaro (May 19, 2006), are in the hundreds of thousands---and have a terrifying plausibility.

We are asked by Frazer and others in the Bush administration to accept that they believe genocide is occurring in Darfur. Though Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick has referred in the past to the murderous, ethnically-targeted violence by Khartoum and its Janjaweed allies as "tribal warfare," and though Frazer briefly attempted to walk the administration away from its unambiguous genocide determination, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice re-asserted the genocide determination in February 2006 testimony before the House International Relations Committee.

But if it is genocide, why are Frazer and others in the Bush administration so willing to trust to the genocidaires the lives of the very people who have been deliberately targeted because of their ethnicity? It is simply impossible to believe that the full implications of a genocide finding have registered.

But what of Europe? Those nations that so often hold the US in contempt have revealed themselves even more indifferent to the agony of Darfur---and just as disingenuous. When the Parliament of the European Union voted 566 to 6 (September 2004) to declare that realities in Darfur are "tantamount to genocide," what was this phrase other than a semantic evasion, a way of avoiding declaring explicitly that genocide was occurring, and that contractual obligations under the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide were in full force? For purposes of "preventing" genocide, there can be no meaningful distinction between the phrase "tantamount to genocide" and the word "genocide"---except for those who have no wish to act.

As restrictions in access to Darfur become more severe for journalists, leaders in both the US and Europe should find it easier to substitute disingenuousness for blunt truths, and to offer expediency in place of meaningful civilian protection.

Their disgrace increases steadily with the human destruction in Darfur.

Eric Reeves
  Smith College
  Northampton, MA 01063
  Email: ereeves@smith.edu
  Tel: 413-585-3326
  Website: www.sudanreeves.org

 

 

Quantifying Genocide in Darfur (Part 2)

Sunday 14 May 2006.

Current data for total mortality from violence, malnutrition, and disease

Eric Reeves

May 13, 2006 — Part 1 of this morality assessment (April 28, 2006), surveying all relevant extant data, concludes that since the outbreak of major conflict in Darfur (February 2003), over 450,000 people have died from violence, disease, and malnutrition (see http://www.sudanreeves.org/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=102). Moreover, despite the "peace agreement" reached in Abuja (Nigeria) last week, there is little reason to believe that the current mortality rate for disease and malnutrition (based on UN data) will decline from a level of almost 7,000 deaths per month (see Part 1). Indeed, this rate will likely soon rise dramatically: such a conclusion seems inevitable in light of a wide range of humanitarian indicators (including rising acute malnutrition rates), insecurity that paralyzes many aid operations, and general debilitation within a conflict-affected population that reaches to almost 4 million in Darfur and eastern Chad. Violent mortality will also explode upwards if no robust international force deploys to Darfur in order to protect civilians and humanitarian operations

Part 2 of this mortality assessment was originally to have provided not only context for understanding the various factors that will determine prospective mortality in Darfur and eastern Chad, but several detailed comments about the data and assumptions that underlie some of the statistical conclusions in Part 1. These more specific commentaries were to have taken form as a series of appendices, including an overview of UN mortality estimates (ranging forward from January 2004, when the figure promulgated was 3,000 total deaths), as well as brief synoptic critiques of other mortality studies. Because of the pressure of current developments in and concerning Darfur, there is only a single appendix, addressing the vexed but statistically critical question of "family size" in the August 2004 assessment of violent mortality by the Coalition for International Justice.

[The materials to have been included in additional appendices may be found at various points in fourteen previous mortality assessments: see especially "Darfur Mortality Update, June 30, 2005," at http://www.sudanreeves.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=515&page=1, as well as articles appearing under: http://www.sudanreeves.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=listarticles&secid=9 and http://www.sudanreeves.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=listarticles&secid=8]

PROSPECTIVE MORTALITY IN DARFUR

In assessing prospective mortality in Darfur, the most important indicators are not purely statistical, though a raft of grim statistical indicators is at hand, auguring immense human destruction in the weeks and months to come. Even more important than the complex calculus of humanitarian supplies, logistics, and funding are the unrelenting genocidal impulses of the Khartoum regime. Here it cannot be stressed often enough that the National Islamic Front, which now fully controls the nominal "Government of National Unity," has for over two and a half years relentlessly and remorselessly obstructed humanitarian relief efforts.

This obstructionism, noted yet again in recent days by UN humanitarian aid chief Jan Egeland, as well as in his April 20 report to the Security Council, has seriously attenuated the delivery and efficiency of humanitarian operations. This in turn has cost thousands of lives, and may soon cost tens of thousands of lives. This is deliberate human destruction; and given the keen understanding by Khartoum that those who perish for lack of humanitarian assistance are overwhelmingly from the non-Arab or African tribal populations of Darfur, this destruction must be seen as intentional---in short, as genocidal.

As the UN World Food Program has been forced to cut food rations by 50% (to half what is required to sustain human life), and as acute malnutrition has risen to 15% in South Darfur (a terribly certain harbinger for much of the rest of Darfur), it is important to understand that the food crisis could be averted if Khartoum were to make humane use of the 300,000-500,000 metric tons of grain within its strategic food reserve. Humanitarian logisticians estimate that it requires approximately 17,000 metric tons of food per million people in need per month. There are over 3 million people in need of food in Darfur, and many more just as acutely in need in eastern and southern Sudan. This enormous quantity of grain---which could save many tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Sudanese lives---is sitting idly at various locations in Sudan. Khartoum’s National Islamic Front regime refuses to disperse it, or even to sell it at a reasonable price to the UN’s World Food Program. According to the US Agency for International Development, Khartoum sets a price so high that it is actually cheaper to procure food elsewhere and transport it to Darfur and other places of need.

To deny Sudanese civilians access to Sudanese food at time of critical need offers a powerfully revealing glimpse of what the National Islamic Front represents---and of what, most fundamentally, it means to be "marginalized" in Sudan.

PROSPECTS FOR SECURITY

There is no evidence to date that the signing of the Abuja accord will improve the security situation on the ground in either Darfur or eastern Chad (see my May 10, 2006 analysis in The New Republic, at http://www.sudanreeves.org/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=103). On the contrary, there have been numerous reports of extremely serious violence in connection with the large-scale military offensive launched by Khartoum in the Gereida area (South Darfur) just days before the deadline for the Abuja draft agreement. Reports of violence along the Chad/Darfur border are also increasingly serious, and large numbers of civilians have been moved away from the border area.

Certainly there are no signs that Khartoum intends to end the "climate of impunity" remarked well over a year and a half ago by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour. More recently, Arbour declared that:

"The International Criminal Court must act more decisively to bring to trial those guilty of war crimes in Darfur because Sudanese officials have so far proved incapable of doing so, the top UN human rights official said. [Arbour], just back from a visit to Sudan, said on Thursday [May 11, 2006] that despite government promises no official had been tried and punished for any of the serious human rights violations committed in the vast western region of Africa’s largest state. ’Progress is invisible,’ she told a news conference. ’I believe we must call on the ICC to act more robustly, and visibly discharge the mandate...that the UN Security Council has conferred on it.’" (Reuters, May 11, 2006)

What went unsaid by the glib Ms. Arbour is that Khartoum adamantly refuses to permit entry to any of the ICC investigators, and has made abundantly clear that it will not permit the extradition of either witnesses or suspects. For certainly among the 51 names referred to the ICC are a number of the most senior and powerful members of the National Islamic Front: they will obviously not extradite themselves. Further, as lead ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo reported to the Security Council almost a year ago, he was quite aware that his investigation posed a significant risk to both witnesses in Darfur as well as to humanitarians:

"The information currently available highlights the significant security risks facing civilians, local and international humanitarian personnel in Darfur. These issues will present persistent challenges for the investigation." (ICC Report to UN Security Council, June 2005, page 8)

How does Arbour propose to deal with these "security risks"? How does she propose that the ICC gain access to witnesses of mass executions, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Darfur? Does she imagine that those responsible for these crimes will permit any investigation on Sudanese territory? Yet again, we see a senior UN leader posturing rather than proposing serious responses to ongoing obduracy on the part of Khartoum’s genocidaires.

Importantly, Arbour does highlight Khartoum’s bad faith in undertaking its obligations under the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (January 2005) between the regime and the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Movement:

"’We are somewhat neglecting the need to support the peace deal in southern Sudan,’ [Arbour] said. Despite the accord, there was ’no visible improvement either in the physical security or the economic well-being of the people.’"

This critical truth tells us far too much about the meaning of the accord signed in Abuja a week ago. While Khartoum may, for the sake of appearances, temporarily reduce levels of military activity, there is simply no reason to believe that the various provisions for wealth-sharing and power-sharing, or for security arrangements, will be respected over the longer term. This patient regime of genocidaires will simply wait, knowing that so long as the African Union remains the sole guarantor of the various security "guarantees," there will be no meaningful peace in Darfur, and ethnically-targeted human destruction will continue.

There is unlikely to be a similarly calculated patience on the part of the Janjaweed, as New York Times correspondent Lydia Polgreen courageously reports in a searing dispatch from Menawashie, South Darfur:

"It took three months for Fatouma Moussa to collect enough firewood to justify a trip to sell it in the market town of Shangil Tobayi, half a day’s drive by truck from here. It took just a few moments on Thursday [May 11,2006] for janjaweed militiamen, making a mockery of the new cease-fire, to steal the $40 she had earned on the trip and rape her."

"Speaking barely in a whisper, Ms. Moussa, who is 18, gave a spare account of her ordeal. ’We found janjaweed at Amer Jadid,’ she said, naming a village just a few miles north of her own. ’One woman was killed. I was raped.’"

"Officially, the cease-fire in the Darfur region went into effect last Monday [May 8, 2006]. But the reality was on grim display in this crossroads town, where Ms. Moussa and other villagers were attacked Thursday as they rode home in a bus from Shangil Tobayi. The Arab militiamen who attacked them killed 1 woman, wounded 6 villagers and raped 15 women, witnesses and victims said." (May 12, 2006)

What are the prospects for a robust international force to protect women like Fatouma Moussa? How likely is it that wealthy nations with modern armed forces will provide the troops and military resources that might serve as guarantor of the Abuja accord and bring true peace to Darfur? In fact, the odds for robust humanitarian intervention or even meaningful peacekeeping remain obscenely long.

UN INTERVENTION TO HALT THE KILLING IN DARFUR?

The latest reports from the UN suggest that the US has encountered serious difficulties in passing a Security Council resolution authorizing deployment of a meaningful peacekeeping force to Darfur. The situation will become clearer following Monday’s (May 15, 2006) meeting in Addis Ababa of the African Union Peace and Security Council. But even prior to that meeting---in which the AU may continue to cleave to a shamefully belated September 30, 2006 handover to the UN---there are signs that the Security Council will balk at providing anything remotely adequate to the security needs of civilians and humanitarians. An especially well-informed Associated Press dispatch reports:

"The US has run into strong resistance in its bid for a Security Council resolution that would give the United Nations immediate control over peacekeepers in Darfur, diplomats said Friday [May 12, 2006]. Objections from China, Russia and several African nations have forced the United States to strip out much of the most powerful language of the draft, possibly delaying the deployment of UN peacekeepers in the troubled Sudanese region." (May 12, 2006)

Indeed, a close look at the revised US draft reveals a thoroughly gutted document, one that commits the UN in no meaningful way. This will have the effect of further emboldening Khartoum, which had disingenuously suggested before the conclusion of the Abuja accord that it would admit UN peacekeepers once a peace agreement had been signed. Now, with the "peace agreement" in hand and international murmurs of approval, Khartoum has begun to renege on its commitment to permit UN peacekeepers. Notably, the regime is still denying visas to an assessment team from the UN Department of Peacekeeping operations. Moreover, various senior officials in the National Islamic Front regime insist that no decision has been made on whether to admit UN forces, and that in any event, the decision will be entirely Khartoum’s. This means, at the very least, that the regime will demand it be allowed to dictate the size and mandate of any UN force---another way of ensuring that there is no meaningful UN force.

The AP dispatch also assessed US claims that the new draft resolution was somehow still a significant move forward:

"But several diplomats said objections [to the draft] remained. They portrayed the latest draft more as a US effort to show progress on Darfur than as a text that will move any closer to a UN-led mission there. The diplomats spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the draft publicly."

Such Bush administration posturing on Darfur at the UN smacks of the same politically motivated contrivance that saw President Bush declare there would be "NATO stewardship" for a Darfur mission. On February 17, 2006, Bush asserted that a security force for Darfur will require "NATO stewardship, planning, facilitating, organizing, probably double the number of peacekeepers that are there now, in order to start bringing some sense of security" (New York Times, February 17, 2006).

But as NATO officials in Brussels were quick to insist at the time, "NATO stewardship" actually means deploying a few dozen advisers. More recently NATO officials have again suggested only a minimal presence in Darfur for the alliance:

"’The consensus is that the NATO footprint should be as limited as possible,’ said one observer of the foreign ministers’ talks in the Bulgarian capital Sofia." (Reuters [dateline: Sofia, Bulgaria], April 28, 2006)

And as if US disingenuousness and posturing weren’t enough to compromise the chances for real diplomatic consensus on the central issue in the Darfur crisis, AP concludes its recent dispatch by noting that, "China and Russia, two veto-wielding members of the council, also oppose the draft’s being written under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which could make it legally binding and enforceable by sanctions." Those expecting that the UN will take urgent and robust action, with meaningful authority to stop the genocide in Darfur and end the killing, will wait in vain.

HOW SERIOUS IS THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION ABOUT CONFRONTING KHARTOUM’S GENOCIDAIRES?

A telling story appears in today’s Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/12/AR2006051201977.html), and reports on the US State Department decision to grant an extended personal visa to one of Khartoum’s most vicious genocidaires. If we want to understand why Khartoum remains emboldened in its conduct of genocide in Darfur, why a "climate of impunity" continues to reign in Darfur, why the voice of the US is so compromised, we must see the implications of admitting to this country Ali Ahmed Karti, former head of the notoriously brutal Popular Defense Forces (PDF), paramilitary militias organized and funded by Khartoum, and recently often fighting alongside the better known Janjaweed militia forces. Indeed, many Janjaweed have been recycled into the PDF.

Beyond its depredations in Darfur, the PDF was a key military instrument in the scorched-earth clearances in southern Sudan during the most brutal phase of the north/south conflict in the oil regions of Upper Nile Province, as well as in neighboring Bahr el-Ghazal Province. As the Washington Post reports, Human Rights Watch offered a telling vignette of Karti in 1999:

"PDF coordinating director Ali Ahmad Karti read out the names of the brigades that had been sent to the field, including the ’Protectors of the Oil Brigade,’ and promised that more brigades would be created."

These "brigades" engaged in unspeakable acts of violence and human destruction, including attacks on humanitarian workers. As this writer reported in the International Herald Tribune (January 23, 2001):

"The International Committee of the Red Cross---the very symbol of neutral, international humanitarian aid---was savagely attacked at its medical base in Chelkou, southern Sudan, on January 12, [2001]. The attack was carried out by militia forces allied with the radical National Islamic Front regime that rules from Khartoum. All buildings were destroyed, all expatriate workers withdrawn, villagers have been killed, and the ICRC is deeply concerned about the fate of their Sudanese workers."

"This act of barbarism by the Khartoum-backed Popular Defense Forces (PDF) completely destroyed the ICRC medical facilities at an important humanitarian site in the southern province of Bahr el-Ghazal. Reuters newswire, as well as extremely reliable sources from the ground, reported the destruction."

Yet the man ultimately responsible for the actions of these PDF "brigades" has now been officially granted an extended personal visa to visit the US, even as he is almost certainly under indictment by the International Criminal Court in its investigations of crimes in Darfur. The Washington Post reports that Karti was scheduled to meet yesterday with US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer, one of several Bush administration officials to distinguish herself with disingenuousness and foolishness in speaking about Darfur:

"Frazer planned to meet Friday at the State Department with a top Sudanese official linked by human rights groups to the violence in Sudan’s Darfur region that the Bush administration has labeled as genocide. But the official, deputy foreign minister Ali Ahmed Karti, did not show up for the meeting, a State Department spokesman said."

"David Sims, a spokesman for the Africa bureau headed by Frazer, said a meeting had been planned but Karti ’just decided he didn’t want to make it.’ Frazer, who last week was in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, for intensive talks that led to a tentative peace agreement on Darfur, did not have qualms about meeting with Karti, Sims said."

Ms. Frazer had "no qualms" about meeting this brutal genocidaire, and Mr. Karti had "no qualms" about blowing off an appointment with a senior State Department official: this tells us a great deal about Bush administration Darfur policy, and how it is perceived in Khartoum.

Karti’s leisurely visit to the US comes just a year after the CIA flew another of Khartoum’s senior genocidaires to Washington: Major General Saleh Abdalla Gosh, head of Khartoum’s notorious Mukhabarat (the National Security and Intelligence Service [NSIS]). Gosh is one of the primary architects of the Darfur genocide, and his name appears on a recent (January 2006) confidential annex produced by a UN panel of experts commissioned to determine responsibility for ongoing violence and civilian destruction in Darfur. The panel cited Gosh for "failure to take action as Director of NSIS to identify, neutralize, and disarm non-state armed militia groups in Darfur [the Janjaweed]" and for "command responsibility for acts or arbitrary detention, harassment, torture, denial of right to fair trial."

Failure to disarm the Janjaweed, so largely under his control, puts Saleh Gosh directly at odds with the only demand of significance yet made of Khartoum, in the form of UN Security Council Resolution 1556 (July 30, 2004). But why should Gosh fear consequences from the UN---or the US? After all, his central role in the Darfur genocide was not enough to prevent the CIA from flying him to Washington last April (at his request) for a briefing on terrorism intelligence.

Certainly the feeble and exceedingly short list of those sanctioned on April 25, 2006 (per Security Council Resolution 1591, March 2005) does not begin to touch any of the senior NIF genocidaires, including Gosh, Abdel Rahim Mohamed Hussein (current defense minister and former minister of the interior), Elzubeir Bashir Taha (current minister of the interior), and Major General Ismat Zain al-Din (director of military operations of the Sudanese Armed Forces). Here again, the most important consequences of moral and political cowardice take the form of emboldened political calculations in Khartoum. Far from being an action that will change the regime’s thinking, such a painfully weak sanctions resolution signals only that there is no international political ability or diplomatic will to punish those most directly responsible for genocide in Darfur.

HUMANITARIAN MORTALITY INDICATORS

There is no simple way to capture the extraordinary urgency conveyed by increasingly numerous dispatches from UN and nongovernmental humanitarian organizations. But Kofi Annan, who has done more than his share of posturing on Darfur, offers a blunt assessment of the current funding crisis for Darfur and eastern Chad (where only 16% of total funding needs have been met, even as food needs are skyrocketing because of the insecurity deriving mainly from Khartoum-backed violence): "Without massive and immediate support, the humanitarian agencies will be unable to continue their work, which means that hundreds of thousands more will die from hunger, malnutrition, and disease" (UN News Service, May 9, 2006).

"Hundreds of thousands more will die." With a grim irony, given his role at the time, Annan went on to declare that "Darfur was potentially the [UN Security] council’s biggest test since the 1994 genocide in Rwanda" (The Guardian [UK], May 11, 2006). To Annan’s credit, there is very little more that can be said either about prospective mortality in Darfur and eastern Chad---or about the implications of our ongoing failure to respond with a robust humanitarian intervention.

Amidst this overwhelming crisis, it is important to recall again that the Khartoum regime controls a national food stockpile of 300,000 to 500,000 metric tons of grain, according to officials at the US Agency for International Development. Instead of releasing this grain for humanitarian purposes, Khartoum keeps grain prices artificially high, thus making it impossible for the UN’s World Food Program to buy food in-country. This adds enormously to the cost of food, and these increased costs ultimately diminish humanitarian capacity---and thus translate into human death through malnutrition and related diseases.

A wholesale implosion of humanitarian operations also remains a distinct possibility, one highlighted in a recent interview offered by Jan Egeland:

"Everybody now discusses the optimal kind of UN mission---for next year for nine months from now. This whole thing could unravel in nine days or nine weeks because we have no money to continue lifesaving humanitarian work." (Interview with The New Republic [on-line], May 12, 2006)

It was Egeland who also highlighted in an April 20, 2006 report to the Security Council 14 categories of Khartoum’s obstruction, impeding, and harassment of humanitarian workers and operations---obstructionism that severely attenuates humanitarian efficiency and thereby also increases costs (see "Fact Sheet on Access Restrictions in Darfur and Other Parts of Sudan," UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, April 20, 2006). At a time of such desperate financial shortfall, such obstructionism is a tool of genocide.

Jan Egeland’s record is one of singular honesty among UN officials who were in senior positions two years ago, when the genocide in Darfur was so clearly before the eyes of the world. His retrospective glance in a recent Wall Street Journal op/ed gives us all too clear an image of our failure:

"I first spoke to the UN Security Council on Darfur two years ago, calling it ethnic cleansing of the worst kind. Today, I could simply hit the rewind button on much of that earlier briefing. The world’s largest aid effort now hangs in the balance, unsustainable under present conditions. If we are to avoid an imminent, massive loss of life, we need immediate action---from the Government of Sudan, the rebels, UN Security Council members and donor governments." (May 5, 2006)

Such "action" is nowhere in prospect, and we must accept the terrible truth that "imminent, massive loss of life" has already begun. "The worst form of ethnic cleansing"---and here even those who cannot pronounce Darfur and the "g-word" together must find a near synonymous phrase for "genocide"---proceeds apace.

**********************************************************

Appendix 1: "Family size" in Darfur

The primary source of comprehensive, statistically significant data on violent mortality in Darfur remains the September 2004 study by the Coalition for International Justice ("Documenting Atrocities in Darfur," September 2004 at http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/36028.htm). On the basis of 1,136 carefully randomized interviews, conducted among the Darfuri refugee population in Chad at a number of camp locations along the border, the Coalition for International Justice (CIJ) found that "sixty-one percent [of those interviewed] reported witnessing the killing of a family member."

Some have raised legitimate questions about the meaning of "family member"---in particular, whether this refers to nuclear or extended family. Much confusion might have been avoided if this distinction had been made clearly by the CIJ investigators, but they did not. Even so, their data are far too important to ignore, given the scale and comprehensiveness of the study.

This writer has argued that it is statistically reasonable to use "nuclear family" size (for Darfur, five to six) as the basis for calculating violent mortality through August 2004, and as establishing a base rate for subsequent violent mortality. The justifications for this assumption are complex and partially arbitrary (though, I would argue, cautious); but together I believe they suggest that deployment of a figure equivalent in value to "family size" (five to six) works conservatively in governing the calculation of violent mortality.

It is critical to understand first how significant the under-reporting of violent mortality is when the category includes only those interviewees who "reported witnessing the killing of a family member." For excluded from consideration are all families in which mortality (from all causes) was complete, thus leaving no possibility of a reporting presence in Chad. The number of families destroyed in their entirety is not known; but it is certainly a very high number, given the large (and statistically telling) number of surviving families in which only one member reports being alive. This alone could push the violent mortality total much higher.

Also not included in reports of those "witnessing the killing of a family member" are deaths that followed violent attack. This is true, even as the CIJ study reports that 28% of those interviewed "directly witnessed" persons dying from the consequences of violent displacement before reaching Chad. These deaths must be considered the direct consequence of violence, if not violent deaths per se, and would also significantly increase violent mortality totals.

But as significant as these factors are in under-reporting of violent mortality, they don’t speak directly to the question of family size. Here we must look at the nature of the interviews conducted by CIJ, and what they reveal beyond the bare fact that "sixty-one percent [of those interviewed] reported witnessing the killing of [at least one] family member." One detailed assessment by a genocide scholar who was among those conducting the CIJ interviews is especially revealing:

"For me, [asking about the witnessing of family members killed] was the single most painful part of the whole interviewing experience, because the vast majority had indeed witnessed more than one family member being killed, and it obviously pained the respondents to recite the names, relationship, cause of death (shooting, death from the bombing, stabbing, burning, clubbing). I usually stopped writing the information down after the fifth person, both because I ran out of space on the questionnaire form and because I didn’t want to prolong the ordeal for the respondent."

"My clear recollection is that the types of relationship mentioned by our respondents were: son or daughter, husband or wife, mother or father, grandmother or grandfather, aunt or uncle, or cousin. I don’t recall cases of more distant relatives being mentioned. This may be because they started with more immediate family and then I stopped after five. I don’t really know. But my impression is that most of our respondents lost multiple members of their nuclear families as well as grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins. Bottom line: the 61% who said they had witnessed a family member killed is a gross under-indication of the extent of killing." (email communication to this writer by CIJ investigator, May 1, 2006)

This investigator is confident, on the basis of communications with other investigators, that his experience was not anomalous.

In turn, a simple way of conceiving of the statistical significance of such reporting is the following:

If instead of construing the meaning of "sixty-one percent reported witnessing the killing of a family member" as meaning "one and only one family member," we reasonably assume that these data represent an average of two "family" members seen killed, then even if "family" represents "extended family," this "extended family" could be as large as ten to twelve and the calculations by this writer using a "nuclear family" figure (five to six) would hold true. If the average number of "family" members seen killed were as great as three, then the calculations for violent mortality would hold for an "extended family" figure of fifteen to eighteen.

Again, these calculations do not include violent mortality experienced by families that perished in their entirety---or violent mortality represented by the 28% of those interviewed who "directly witnessed" persons dying from the consequences of violent displacement before reaching Chad. Statistically, the effect of any attempt to include these deaths in the figures for "families" reporting "witnessing the killing of a family member" is to increase the size of the statistical range for "extended family," and thus a figure that would continue to yield mortality in the range of 160,000 to 210,000 human beings as of early September 2004 (see statistical derivation in Part 1).

In the absence of additional statistically significant data, we must make assumptions about continuing levels of violent human destruction on the basis of rates from September 2004. Assuming an average 50% decline in violent mortality for the remaining months of 2004, and a 75% decline in violent mortality for 2005 and 2006 to date, this still yields an additional 60,000 violent deaths. This in turn yields a range of 220,000 to 270,000 total violent deaths since the outbreak of major conflict.

Eric Reeves
  Smith College
  Northampton, MA 01063
  Email : ereeves@smith.edu
  Tel: 413-585-3326
  Website: www.sudanreeves.org

---

"In the Wake of Abuja"

"In the Wake of Abuja"

The meaning of the Abuja "peace agreement" between Khartoum's genocidaires and
one of the Darfuri rebel factions requires serious scrutiny.  It is all too
likely that the Bush administration and others will claim diplomatic victory---a
very partial truth---and that the complexities of this deeply flawed agreement
will be obscured by more urgent realities on the ground in Darfur.  But the
agreement does much to reveal both why the Darfur genocide has persisted for
over three years and why it is unlikely to end soon.

The rebel group that signed the agreement, Minni Minnawi's faction of the Sudan
Liberation Movement (SLM), did so under extreme duress.  If the SLM faction that
follows Abdel Wahid al-Nur signs on (and many of his followers have urged him to
do so), it will be under the same conditions.  But Abdel Wahid, a Fur and the
founder of the SLM, has so far refused, and the simmering tensions between
Minnawi's Zaghawa tribe and the other non-Arab or African tribal groups will
only increase.  Khartoum has long proved adept at exploiting ethnic tensions in
its conduct of war, and fighting between the forces of the two SLM factions may
actually increase because of the agreement.

In any event, the rebels do not believe in this agreement, or that it represents
justice; they believe mainly in the consequences of not signing.  There was a
grim authority in the prediction of Alex de Waal, the most informed advisor to
the African Union mediators: in the absence of an agreement, de Waal declared,
"few doubt that Khartoum's Plan B is anything other than a large-scale military
offensive."  In other words, the agreement was secured by means of an implicit
threat that genocidal violence would dramatically accelerate if there were no
agreement.  It is difficult to imagine a less secure foundation for a permanent
and just peace.

In fact the military offensive had begun the week before the eventual agreement
was signed, in the Gereida area of South Darfur. Human Rights Watch reported on
the attack shortly after it began---less than a week before the African Union
deadline of April 30, which had inexplicably become hard and fast.  There was a
terrible familiarity in the account:

"The Sudanese government has launched a new military offensive in South Darfur
that is placing civilians at grave risk. An April 24 attack on a village in
rebel-controlled territory [of South Darfur] used Antonov aircraft and
helicopter gunships indiscriminately in violation of the laws of war, and
displaced thousands of civilians who had sought safety there." [Human Rights
Press release, April 27]

The implications of the attack were clear: if the rebels did not sign, the
military destruction of civilians would intensify---"Plan B."

The African Union accepted far too little international help in negotiating the
agreement, and this prideful self-assertion ensured that the negotiating process
was badly flawed.  The rebels themselves, at least the two SLM factions, had
very poor negotiating skills and almost no diplomatic experience.  They have
behaved badly in many respects, both in Abuja and on the ground in Darfur.  But
a sign of how badly the Abuja process was conducted became apparent in the
absurdly compressed and chaotic end-game.

The rebels received the hastily finalized first version of the agreement, in the
required Arabic, only two days before the deadline.  It was then 86 pages long
and has since grown to over 100 pages, and makes for very confusing reading in
places.  Though some of the terms of wealth- and power-sharing in the agreement
are fair in the abstract, in the end there is no significant devolution of
national political power and no fair allocation of national wealth.  The
preservation of the "three-state" administrative system imposed by Khartoum's
National Islamic Front in 1994 would remain even if Darfuris vote (in a year) to
create a Darfur region.  Two of the state governors will continue to be
hand-picked by regime genocidaires.  The issues of political and economic
marginalization in Darfur that gave rise to the insurgency in 2003 have not been
addressed in effective fashion, and for this reason alone there may be an early
collapse of the agreement.

But the security provisions of the agreement give greatest cause for concern:
there are simply no credible guarantees or guarantors.  The victims of genocide
are being asked to trust that the perpetrators of genocide will disarm and
restrain themselves; even more dismayingly, they are being asked to accept the
African Union monitoring force as the means of ensuring that this occurs.  Given
the dismal record of the AU force in controlling violence in Darfur, which has
escalated steadily since late last summer, this seems dangerous in the extreme.
Indeed, accepting the security terms of the Abuja agreement at face value
amounts to an extraordinary gamble with the lives of more than 3.8 million human
beings now described by the UN as "conflict-affected" in the greater
humanitarian theater of Darfur and eastern Chad (whose vast and growing crisis
receives barely a nod from the Abuja agreement).

The numerous monitoring and verification tasks are to be undertaken by a force
that continues to have no mandate to protect civilians and humanitarians.
Moreover, the AU mission doesn't have the capabilities to take on such a
mandate, even if the organization's political leadership could work up the nerve
to demand it of Khartoum.  No wonder that the Bush administration State
Department and Human Rights Watch oddly find themselves on the same page in
recognizing the urgent need for a robust UN peacekeeping operation.  But such an
operation is nowhere in sight, and Khartoum has yet to agree to its deployment
(which might not be completed until 2007).  To date Khartoum's response to the
idea of a UN force has been to deny visas to an assessment mission from the UN
Department of Peacekeeping Operations---and to threaten that any force deploying
without permission from the regime's chief genocidaires will find Darfur to be
its "graveyard." 

For their part, NATO officials have declared that in Darfur their "footprint
should be as limited as possible."  This signals to Khartoum that there will be
no one willing to challenge its arrogant and self-serving assertions of national
sovereignty---no one willing to ensure that there will be consequences if the
Janjaweed are not in fact disarmed months from now, as Khartoum has again
promised.  Moreover, we're asked by the Abuja agreement to forget how many of
these militia murderers have already been incorporated into the various military
and security services in Darfur. 

For its part, the UN is clearly spooked by the blunt threat Khartoum has issued,
reported in TNR last week by Samantha Power (citing a "senior UN official"): "If
you like Iraq, you'll love Darfur!"  No matter that African Darfuris are
desperate for meaningful international military intervention; Khartoum has
wielded the specter of Iraq, in a ghastly irony, as an efficient instrument
of...terror. 

The first phase of the agreement calls for a month-long assessment of the
combatants.  Only at the end of this does a forty-five-day disengagement period
begin, the success of which won't be evident until well into July and the height
of the rainy season, which coincides with the traditional hunger gap between
spring planting and fall harvest.  If Khartoum reneges on the security
agreement, it will be too late to save those confronting either violence, lack
of food, or the absence of humanitarian assistance that continues to contract
because of insecurity. 

Traveling in the ravaged Gereida area of South Darfur, where Khartoum launched
its recent military offensive, UN humanitarian chief Jan Egeland declared that
2006 has been the worst year yet in the Darfur catastrophe; he highlighted the
immense distance between what is required in the way of humanitarian access and
what Khartoum permits: "In the peace agreement in Abuja, there is unlimited
access granted in all Darfur for all humanitarian organizations, but this is not
the practice."  Indeed, in a recent (April 20) report to the UN Security
Council, Egeland detailed fourteen categories of humanitarian obstructionism on
the part of the National Islamic Front---a strategy working with ruthless
efficiency to deny food and medical assistance to desperate civilians.  As it
did again in Abuja, Khartoum has in the past repeatedly promised to provide
unfettered humanitarian access.  We gamble with an unacceptable number of
innocent lives in assuming it will be different this time.  In the same way, we
put hundreds of thousands of lives at risk by assuming that despite several
previous broken promises to disarm the Janjaweed (the first to Kofi Annan in
July 2004), this time Khartoum can be trusted.

Indeed, the Abuja agreement is little more than another request to trust a
regime that has never abided by any agreement with any Sudanese party---not one,
not ever.  It asks the survivors of genocide to accept the promises of
genocidaires rather than providing the meaningful security they so desperately
need.  The riot that today greeted Jan Egeland in the vast Kalma camp near Nyala
(South Darfur), forcing his evacuation and that of other aid workers, was
apparently sparked by the desperate demand of displaced persons that a
meaningful international military force be deployed to protect them.  They know
all too well that the Abuja agreement will not do so.

The alternative to signing last week's "peace" agreement may indeed have been
Khartoum's following the ghastly "Plan B" described by de Waal, and reported
incipiently by Human Rights Watch.  But "Plan A" may ultimately prove no less
destructive of human lives.  It will be different primarily because the
international community, at the appropriate moment of self-exculpation, will
attempt to point to a meaningless piece of paper signed under genocidal duress
in Abuja.  But this will not be self-exculpation; it will be self-indictment.


Eric Reeves
Smith College
Northampton, MA  01063

Darfur - Ill-prepared agreements never last long

Thursday 4 May 2006.

By Peter Lokarlo Marsu*

May 3, 2006 — Common sense shows that ill-prepared agreements or dictated treaties never last long. The current quandary in Abuja, Nigeria over the contentious draft peace document which is now on the table should be impartially and honestly re-examined by the mediators and other concerned parties before insisting that the rebel groups immediately give their assent. No one in a right frame of mind would compromise with a covenant that emasculates or enfeebles his destiny.

SLA’s apprehension and consequently reservation on the 85-page document is justifiably understandable. The demands of the Rebel Movement could be fully addressed by restructuring the draft document to accommodate their viewpoints and demands. They have asked for genuine power, security and wealth sharing arrangements. There is no harm done in requesting the position of a Vice president. A Darfuri could become, for instance, a second Vice president in Sudan during the transition or the interim period of rule, without causing detriment to other parties or upsetting the current political leadership symmetry in the government of National Unity.

An equitable blueprint for wealth sharing should be structured and included in the draft peace agreement. The creation of the special fund to cater for the development of Darfur’s three regions as proposed by the government of Sudan in the agreement document is not a workable solution to the regions’ chronic underdevelopment problem. A consistent formula for wealth sharing with the government in Khartoum should be devised. Since the Oil wealth in the Country is split up on a 50% share basis between the North and the South, and as Darfur is territorially part of North Sudan, it should be entitled to share in Khartoum’s 50% portion of the Oil revenue, on a specified percentage and based on the size of the region and taking into account decades of deliberate economic marginalisation and ruined infrastructure.

The limited integration of the rebel soldiers into the government’s security forces as stipulated in the draft agreement is neither an ideal solution nor a tenable proposition. Sudan government must work out a viable and acceptable modus operandi for getting to the bottom of this delicate and sensitive issue of integrating the SLA forces into the national framework of the security system and the disarmament of the janjaweed bandits. Darfur should keep one state instead of the current three, with a government and regional parliament so that they run their own affairs without encroachment and interference on the part of the authorities in Khartoum.

The whole body of the SLA combatants should be absorbed and be part of the National army and security establishment, but must be constitutionally sanctioned to maintain an adequate and credible deterrent force in Darfur for self defence, while the Janjaweed entirely disband, and those who committed various criminal offences be prosecuted and punished according to the law of the country. Such a move would create an atmosphere of reconciliation and appeasement between the victims and their offenders as Sudanese are renowned for the spirit of exoneration and national consensus.

Incorporating the Janjaweed highwaymen into the government’s regular army is tantamount to rewarding those forces of doom for their despicable crimes committed in Darfur with the knowledge and stealthy backing of other parties in Sudan. One would still wonder and be inclined to question the honesty of the government about its assurance of speedy disarmament of the Janjaweed forces after the signing of the document.

If the Authorities in Sudan are now contemplating a hasty disarmament of the Janjaweed at this moment when the draft peace document is on the table ready for endorsement, why had it been impractical and difficult to deactivate the militia in the last three years? Why permitting the mayhem to persist in Darfur? The rebels are justified in being guarded and hesitant at the negotiating table. Elbowing them into a hustled covenant with unpredictable consequences by the mediators is irresponsible and unacceptable. The AU must forge a bona fide and durable solution, and not a face-saving formula. The AU in Darfur has already done much blunder. It has demonstrated political insensitivity and displayed unprecedented weakness by allowing the carnage and rape to continue while standing on the sidelines with folded arms.

AU Chairman Denis Sassou Nguesso, and Commission Head Alpha Oumar Konare alongside Salim Ahmed Salim and other parties should now be preoccupied with revising the draft document with a view to incorporate new proposals, and eliciting compromises especially from the government of Sudan, imploring it to soften its obdurate stance in order to resolve the conflict. Deadlines, timelines or phrases like ‘the parties are given 48 hours’ or ‘one more day’ are inconsistent and alien to the ethics and philosophy of negotiations.

* Peter Lokarlo Marsu is based in Australia. He can be reached at ptr_lok@yahoo.com.au

---

Quantifying Genocide in Darfur (Part 1)

Saturday 29 April 2006.

QUANTIFYING GENOCIDE IN DARFUR: April 28, 2006 (Part 1) Current data for total mortality from violence, malnutrition, and disease

By Eric Reeves

April 28, 2006 — Currently extant data, in aggregate, strongly suggest that total excess mortality in Darfur, over the course of more than three years of deadly conflict, now significantly exceeds 450,000. As Rwanda marks a grim twelfth anniversary, we must accept that while vast human destruction in Darfur has unfolded plainly before us, we have again done little more than watch, offering only unprotected humanitarian assistance while some 450,000 people have perished as a result of violence, as well as consequent malnutrition and disease. Human destruction to date, however, certainly does not mark the conclusion of the world’s moral failure in responding to genocide in Darfur---on the contrary, this massive previous destruction is our best measure of what is impending.

For terrifyingly, all current evidence suggests that hundreds of thousands of human beings will die in the coming months from these same causes. A rapidly accelerating contraction of humanitarian reach and capacity has left three quarters of a million civilians without any assistance whatsoever in Darfur and eastern Chad; many hundreds of thousands of other innocent human beings have only exceedingly tenuous access to aid. Further, the UN World Food Program announced just today that it was halving food rations for Darfur and eastern Sudan:

"Millions of vulnerable people in the western Sudanese region of Darfur and eastern Sudan will receive half-rations of food beginning on Monday, due to a significant shortfall in funding, the United Nations World Food Programme said. [ ] Aid agencies are particularly concerned about the effect of reduced rations in Darfur, where rampant insecurity and continued displacement cause enormous suffering. ’Food must come first. We cannot put families who have lost their homes and loved ones to violence on a 1,000-calorie-a-day diet.’" (UN Integrated Regional Information Networks [IRIN], April 28, 2006)

But such a diet is precisely what will confront the people of Darfur on Monday, this as children under five are already likely dying in large numbers as malnutrition rates are again rising. (UNICEF reported on April 26, 2006 a significant increase in malnutrition rates). Almost 4 million people in the greater humanitarian theater are classified as "conflict-affected" by the UN, and in need of humanitarian assistance, primarily food aid that has now been cut to half what human beings require to live.

And far from being able to pre-position food in anticipation of the coming rainy season, the massive shortfall in April food deliveries to Darfur suggests that there is simply far too little available:

"Between 1 and 24 April [2006], the UN World Food Program transported a total of 10,597 tons of food in the three Darfur states, realizing only 29% of the April [2006] plan due to a serious shortage of food available in Port Sudan and in the hubs of El Obeid and Khartoum." (UN World Food Program Emergency Report, No. 17 of 2006)

The immense human needs in Darfur persist even as international aid capacity is diminishing because of funding shortfalls and dramatically increasing insecurity on the ground. The New York Times reports today from Khartoum:

"’The situation for humanitarian workers and the UN has never been as bad as it is now,’ said one senior aid official here who requested anonymity because aid agencies that have spoken out have been targeted for harassment and expulsion. ’The space for us to work is just getting smaller and smaller.’ [ ] ’You start wondering, "what will it take?"’ the official said. ’How bad does it have to get before the international community acts?’"

"How bad does it have to get before the international community acts?" How many people must die? How much suffering must we witness? The answers already offered by the world community represent a failure beyond shame.

KHARTOUM’S GENOCIDAL LOGIC

Khartoum’s decision to launch a large-scale, coordinated military offensive in South Darfur earlier this week seems designed to assure the failure of the Abuja (Nigeria) peace process. Human Rights Watch reported yesterday:

"The Sudanese government has launched a new military offensive in South Darfur that is placing civilians at grave risk. An April 24 [2006] attack on a village in rebel-controlled territory used Antonov aircraft and helicopter gunships indiscriminately in violation of the laws of war, and displaced thousands of civilians who had sought safety there. [ ] The April 24 attack on Joghana village appears to be part of a broader government offensive in South Darfur [ ]. According to eyewitness reports, government forces and militias began attacking Joghana at 7am on April 24. Civilians who fled the town said that an Antonov plane and two helicopter gunships were used and that the Antonov dropped bombs that killed civilians, although the numbers of dead and injured could not be verified. Thousands of displaced persons were living in Joghana, controlled by the rebel Sudan Liberation Army (SLA), after fleeing earlier attacks on their villages." (press release, April 27, 2006)

In addition, comments today by several leaders of the SLA (much the larger of the two Darfur rebel movements, though badly and bitterly divided)---reported by both Reuters and the UN IRIN in Abuja---suggest strong disapproval of the African Union-proposed "final" draft peace agreement. Nor is there any evidence that Khartoum would abide by any signed agreement, one with very weak guarantees and guarantors. It is critical to remember that the National Islamic Front regime has never abided by a single agreement with any Sudanese party...not one, not ever. Impending failure in Abuja (or in the implementation of an Abuja agreement), along with Khartoum’s highly provocative large-scale military offensive, augurs a resumption of extremely fierce fighting throughout Darfur.

As a direct result, we may very soon see wholesale humanitarian evacuations from even larger areas than are currently inaccessible (many thousands of square kilometers in Darfur, especially West Darfur and the Jebel Marra region). Just today the UN announced that insecurity and attacks on aid workers and operations in North Darfur, primarily by the rebel movements, may force the suspension of humanitarian activities in this area:

"Unless rebel attacks against UN and other relief operations in a northern sector of Sudan’s strife-torn Darfur region stop immediately, the world organization will be forced to suspend all assistance to 450,000 vulnerable people living in the area until safety can be assured, a top UN official warned today." (UN News Centre, April 28, 2006)

Huge areas in eastern Chad are also now inaccessible because of Khartoum’s success in exporting genocidal destruction by means of its regular forces, its Janjaweed militia proxies, and the Chadian rebel groups that enjoy very substantial support from Khartoum’s National Islamic Front.

As a consequence of insecurity, humanitarian contraction and withdrawals, and funding shortfalls, we must expect that the impending rainy season/"hunger gap" (May/June through September) will see human destruction that may exceed all previous mortality. Populations weakened by three years of conflict, utterly without food reserves, and facing a large-scale collapse in humanitarian assistance, have already started dying in large numbers---even greater than those that prompted U