Having just brokered a fragile political deal in Zimbabwe, South Africa’s president Thabo Mbeki has issued a warning that the International Criminal Court’s decision to prosecute President Omar Bashir for war crimes “will not help to resolve the challenges that we are facing in the Sudan.” Mbeki said the prosecution “could seriously undermine the ongoing efforts aimed at facilitating the early resolution of the conflict in Darfur and the promotion of long-lasting peace and reconciliation in the Sudan.” Mbeki’s diplomacy is noticeably at odds with the UN’s Special Investigator for Sudan, Sima Samar, who recently told the UN Human Rights Council that “A culture of impunity for serious crimes remains prevalent [in Khartoum].” Shortly after she said this, Sudan’s under-secretary for the Ministry of Justice (with the support of Egypt and Pakistan) asked the council not to renew Ms Samar’s mandate to study human rights violations in Darfur, since she had failed to condemn “terrorist attacks” committed by the rebels.
If recent history is anything to go by, there is little evidence that Mbeki’s diplomacy will produce anything more substantial than Samar’s criticism. For in the last few years nobody has done more than President Bashir to frustrate the peace process in Sudan. On many occasions he has even used the cover of diplomacy to extend his genocidal ambitions. As the deputy editor of The New Republic, Richard Just, recently observed in a long and thoughtful review of several books on Darfur, during “seven rounds of peace talks over nearly two years. . . while the NIF [the National Islamic Front, Sudan’s governing party] was burning towns, raping huge numbers of women, and forcing Darfur’s African tribes into camps, it was also sitting at a negotiating table and stalling for time — and being indulged in this farce by international mediators.”
Just points out that “A part of the problem with negotiating an end to genocide is that negotiations depend on the good faith of the participants. The parties cannot be liars, or people for whom a signature on a paper is just a tactical move. But throughout the Darfur conflict, the NIF has demonstrated a contempt for truth that, even by the standards of authoritarian propaganda, must count as brazen. (To this day, the government claims that only 10,000 people have died in Darfur. Estimates by reliable sources differ, but most news organizations put the number between 200,000 and 400,000.)”
Nowhere is this contempt for truth clearer than in the comments of the NIF’s interior minister Ahmed Mohamed Haroun. Earlier this week, dismissing 42 counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes that the ICC has levelled against him, Haroun said the court’s attempt to prosecute Bashir was part of a Western plot to launch a “new colonisation.” Haroun added that the notorious janjaweed militias were nothing more than an invention of the Western media, and that the idea that Khartoum played any role in organising atrocities in Darfur was simply ridiculous: “Some people could have used government weapons to sort out their personal or tribal problems, but not under the direction of the government.”
That last phrase is one key to the future of the debate over Darfur. The growing complexity of the various rebel agendas in Darfur has allowed the NIF to present the conflict as something that is beyond its control and subject to oversimplifications in the ‘West.’ This defence has been extremely effective in delaying international intervention. As Just concludes: “… if the prime causes of the conflict are ancient ethnic disputes among Darfuris, then it probably is a situation so complex that outsiders would have no chance to solve it… But if the Sudanese government is the primary cause of the conflict, that changes things. It does not exactly make the genocide a simple affair, but… [i]t means, for one thing, that there is a single entity we can hold largely responsible for unleashing the violence — and whose behaviour we might change through threats, coercion, or military power.”
The NIF’s appalling record is well known: its willingness during a protracted civil war with the South to use starvation as a weapon, its enthusiastic embrace of Arab supremacism and ‘Islamofascism,’ its careful organisation of the rape and murder of tens of thousands of Darfuris. But President Bashir’s cynical diplomacy has so far drawn the teeth of all serious attempts to intervene in the conflict, and it is likely to succeed for some time unless the international community can agree, at the UN and elsewhere, that the Bashir government – despite documented rebel atrocities – has always been, and remains the prime mover in an ongoing genocide. Until that happens the debate will continue to be a sideshow to the killing, and neither the prospect of ICC prosecutions or yet another round of peace talks will make any difference to the thousands of frightened civilians who live in daily terror of Africa’s latest genocidaires.
