A few days ago, on the fifth Global Day for Darfur British prime minister Gordon Brown said “the eyes of the world are rightly focused on the millions of men, women and children in the region who continue to start each day with the fear of violence, abduction, rape or death.” Brown offered to host a peace summit “as soon as practicable”. Apart from tactful criticism of the limited success which peacekeepers have had so far, Brown refrained from stating the obvious, namely that having survived for so long the intermittent public outrage at its horrific crimes, the government of Sudan will not find peace talks ‘practicable’ anytime soon.
The protests which have followed the journey of the Olympic torch towards Beijing have been very effective in keeping the plight of Tibet in the headlines. But, as too many people in other parts of the world know to their cost, no amount of media attention is useful unless it produces sustained political action. With Iraq’s internal conflicts receiving only sporadic attention from the mainstream press, and with Afghanistan’s deterioration receiving even less, one of the paradoxes of our information age is that many developing nations are as isolated from the immediate notice of the wider world as they were at the end of the Cold War.
Political repression, ethnic cleansing, even genocide can take place within these countries without any real prospect of international intervention, at least not once their governments keep the UN tied up in inconclusive dialogue, and deter the international press from on-the-ground reportage. As a result, the political will needed to resolve major crises will surge periodically, when, for example, there is striking footage to be had (massacres, street protests), but it soon ebbs away in the long months of undramatic negotiation that follow the commencement of ‘dialogue’. This traps the weaker parties in an awful paradox: unless their situation worsens to the point at which it retakes the headlines, they must proceed with very little of the persistent international support that is necessary for the sort of enduring political settlements they are trying to obtain.
Darfur is a case in point.
In the latest edition of the Harvard International Review, professor Eric Reeves writes that “The example of Darfur should prompt considerable reflection on whether the world community feels any “responsibility to protect” civilians endangered because of inaction, or indeed deliberate actions, on the part of their own governments and regimes.” In September 2005 the United Nations said it was ready for “collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council” wherever national authorities failed to “protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.” But little that has happened since has come close to delivering on that promise.
In fact, the international community’s ineffectual response has arguably emboldened Khartoum into believing that it has learned how to out-manoeuvre its harshest critics.
Nowhere is the collective political failure more evident than in the deal which has been reached over peacekeeping. After heated wrangling over the sort of mission it would allow into its territory, Sudan’s ruling National Islamic Front (NIF) managed to restrict intervention largely to an African Union force. As Reeves observes, this has amounted to a tactical victory: “In October 2007, the force had begun deploying without adequate resources, or even land for housing its personnel, and was burdened by a crippling dependence upon African Union personnel. . . Consequently, there is likely to be little significant near-term improvement in the acute security crisis that threatens millions of Darfuri civilians and the vast humanitarian operations on which they depend.” Worse yet, the NIF “appears bent on precipitating renewed north-south conflict … [it has] not only reneged on key terms of the January 2005 peace agreement that ended more than 20 years of unfathomably destructive north-south civil war, but has engaged in a series of provocative actions directed against both the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) and its military forces. . . .
The prospects for renewed war are greater than at any time since January 2005, and the consequences of such a war would be catastrophic. Whatever Darfur cease-fire might be in place, or whatever peace process may be inching forward, would rapidly collapse under the weight of nation-wide civil war.”
So far the human cost in Darfur has been shocking enough: several hundred thousand dead, 2.5 million displaced and about 4.2 million dependent on what Reeves calls “the world’s largest and most endangered humanitarian operation”. Sudan’s two previous civil wars cost almost 3 million lives. This toll gives some idea of what is at stake beyond the politically embarrassing petroleum deals which China, and many western countries, have struck with Khartoum.
But this knowledge does little to clarify the way forward.
China may hold the key to peace in Darfur — and to averting renewed civil war between North and South Sudan — but the countries best placed to bring Beijing around to addressing the plight of the Darfuris are still dithering over symbolic gestures like whether or not they should attend the Olympic opening ceremony. While that would certainly be a powerful gesture, not enough discussion has centred on the likely consequences of shaming China before a global audience.
In the run-up to the US war against Iraq, so-called ‘humanitarian hawks’ who supported the invasion argued that the well-documented crimes of Saddam Hussein justified his overthrow, even if this had to take place under the guise of searching for non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). But as America grew entangled in its disastrous occupation it became clear that while moral imperatives might justify intervention, they are of little help when long-term political solutions have to be arrived at under difficult circumstances. This is similar to the dilemma in Sudan today. The time for political compromise is slipping away, but neither Washington, London, Paris or the UN has been able to lay the groundwork for the sort of hard bargaining that would force China to help the international community prevent the oncoming disaster. Unless and until that changes soon, the crisis in Sudan will continue to degenerate until an international solution can no longer be postponed. By then thousands more lives will have been lost in the ongoing violence, and the moment for constructive peace talks may have been lost for a generation.
