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Will President Bush let the word "genocide" cross his lips in regard to the catastrophe in Darfur, Sudan? Human rights activist John Heffernan, writing in the American Prospect, says genocide is what is taking place. And the US, as a signatory to the genocide convention, has a legally binding obligation to act.
There is ample evidence to indicate that an organized campaign on the part of the Sudanese government is under way, targeting several million people from this region of the country either by killing them or forcing them to migrate. Without an immediate and concerted international intervention, a substantial part of the targeted group may be eliminated. Current predictions from governmental and nongovernmental sources suggest that the toll could be between 300,000 and 1 million if a robust intervention does not occur.
But the NY Sun's Eli Lake writes that, despite high profile visits yesterday by Secretary of State Colin Powell and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to a handful of the 173 refugee camps that have sprung up to house some of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have been forced to flee their homes by the Sudanese-government-trained Janjaweed militia, what is being proposed in a UN resolution is just a slap on the wrist to Khartoum.
A copy of the American draft of proposed sanctions obtained by The New York Sun stops short of recommending either military action against Sudan or directly targeting members of the government of President el-Bashir.
It does call upon his government to “disarm and neutralize the Janjaweed militias of the Darfur region of Sudan, protect civilians...cooperate fully with all humanitarian relief organizations and provide them unrestricted and sustained access for the provision of humanitarian relief to the effected populations.”
Talk about appeasement. And don't look for stronger actions from other Security Council members either, human rights activist Eric Reeves tells the Sun.
Mr. Reeves believes that Secretary-General Annan has no interest in sending a U.N. force to western Sudan. Many member states share that view. For example, China, which wields a veto on the Security Council, has been notoriously quiet on the atrocities of the Sudanese government. Its national oil company owns the largest stake in the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company, the Sudanese concern that built a pipeline in the late 1990s, often uprooting the towns and villages in its path.
In a piece published Wednesday, Lake notes the State Department's lawyers are carefully reviewing whether the language of genocide should be used by US government officials regarding Darfur -- and what that would oblige Washington to do.
[US ambassador at large for war crimes Pierre Prosper] also said State Department lawyers were looking at whether the government-backed campaign in Darfur fit the international legal definition of genocide.
The director of Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom, Nina Shea, said such a determination would be one of the first times America proactively labeled a massacre genocide while blood was still being shed.
“This is the first example of the State Department reviewing a situation under the genocide convention while the mass violence is still unfolding,” she said. “I remember Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in response to our request as to whether there was a genocide occurring in southern Sudan in the late 1990s. She turned to her Assistant Secretary for Human Rights Harold Koh, who said if a finding of genocide were made, the U.S. would be compelled to do something.”
Compelled to threaten the Khartoum regime with action they would fear. Check out the New York Times report today to see how frightened the refugees who desperately tried to see Powell on his visit are of the government troops and minders, who threaten them.
Thousands of people swept like water across a sandy plain to meet the convoy of vehicles carrying Mr. Powell and his entourage to a camp of 40,000 displaced people in El Fasher, in north Darfur. They filled the air with applause and trills, although the presence of government minders prompted many camp dwellers to only whisper of their despair.
If you've been in a refugee camp, of people who have fled violence that has killed family members and neighbors, people who feel entirely forgotten by the world, who have what they believe is their one chance to tell a powerful visiting western official like Secretary Powell about their plight, you then realize what it means when these people are too afraid to speak to him in anything but a whisper. It is chilling. Will President Bush give them hope, or no comfort?
Post Script: Cleansing the ethnically cleansed? More evidence of the bad faith of the Sudanese government, which cleared out the el Fasher refugee camp today hours before Kofi Annan arrived. Knight-Ridder reports:
Sudanese government officials emptied a camp of thousands of refugees hours before United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan was to arrive here Thursday, preventing him from meeting some of the hardest-hit victims of the humanitarian crisis in the province of Darfur.
"There may have been 3,000 to 4,000 people here as of 5 p.m. yesterday," a visibly stunned U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said as he gazed at the empty camp of Mashtel. "Now, as you can see, no one is here. I can't imagine they spontaneously moved."
The forced removal came a day after Sudanese officials promised Secretary of State Colin Powell that humanitarian aid workers would have unrestricted access to Darfur and agreed to other U.S. demands to avoid possible U.N. sanctions.
Sudanese officials acknowledged they'd moved the refugees, but said it was for their own good.
If this is how the Sudanese government behaves, when for once the eyes of the entire world are upon it, with the presence of Annan and Powell there this week, how will it behave when most everybody goes home?