Rwanda is probably the most horrifying genocide in a century distinguished by horrifying genocides. Not because of the number of people killed, but because of the number of people who were directly involved in murdering their neighbours and friends. There were a few brave Hutu who sheltered Tutsis, at grave risk to their own safety, but either by choice or under duress most of the Hutu population took up machetes themselves or watched and encourages family members who did so. Implicating the entire population was deliberate government policy, but there was another group who became complicit through inaction, and that’s the UN and the international community.
Despite pleas from peacekeeper commander Dallaire, the UN would not allow its forces to remove weapons caches before the massacre or intervene while it was going on. President Clinton and the leaders of other governments received daily updates on the progress of the genocide, but were unable to summon the political will to take action. France deliberately impeded progress on an intervention force so that UK and US influence would not be expanded in a francophone part of Africa. When a UN mission of 5500 troops was finally agreed it was delayed because of quibbling by the US over the cost of cost of 50 requested armoured personnel carriers.
All this was a decade ago, and memories have dimmed. The UN promised itself that it would never again allow such a thing to happen, and if it the international community was morally culpable before because it stood by and allowed such a holocaust, then it would surely be doubly culpable if it did not learn from its mistakes.
This is, however, just what is happening right now. To make things worse, the genocide is taking place in slow motion – killing not with machetes but by driving people from their homes and fields and then starving them by keeping aid convoys from reaching the camps. The NIF “government of national unity” in Sudan has a more cunning grasp of international politics than the Rwandan genocidaires. They make offer oil deals to the Chinese to keep support within the security council. They play the colonialist card to the African Union to keep an ineffectual AU peacekeeping force in play. They give close support to militias who do the actual killing, and thereby maintain deniability. They pretend cooperation with the CIA on Al Quaeda to distract the Americans.
None of this changes what is actually happening to the now 3 million internally displaced people in the camps. They are being systematically beaten, raped, murdered, and starved. Their homes have already been destroyed. Jan Egeland, head of UN humanitarian operations, said:
As a result of [deteriorating insecurity] UN relief officials and relief organisations cannot reach more than 300,000 people on the Chad border in western Darfur and the central mountainous region of Jebal Marra because they are too dangerous. [These unreachable areas]will soon get massively increased mortality because there is nothing else but international assistance. Darfur is returning to the abyss of early 2004 when the region was the killing fields of this world. We’re losing ground every day in the humanitarian operation which is the lifeline for more than 3 million people.
Something else that has changed since Rwanda is that the US and other countries do not officially wash their hands of the situation. The international community accepted the AU peacekeeping force, and offered assistance – not all of which was taken up, and not all of which was allowed into the country. But the AU mission was manifestly inadequate to deal with the situation, and had a mandate which was not strong enough to protect the Darfuris. In the last few months any pretence that the genocide would be averted has become transparently false. The AU had committed in principle to a handover to a UN force. The regime in Khartoum stepped up their diplomatic offensive, and at the same time the Janjaweed militias forced more aid agencies to withdraw staff from large areas of Darfur. As a result the UN has agreed to put back the handover from the AU by six months, to September.
This effectively gives the Janjaweed and the NIF the time to carry out their genocide. All the noises the US or anyone else makes about how serious the situation has become are entirely meaningless unless they are backed up by troops on the ground in Darfur while there are still people there to save.
Actions speak louder than the international community’s words about the genocide. Of the $650 million the UN believes will be required to provide aid in 2006 to the people in the camps, only $130 million has so far been committed. The difference is one part in 500 of the cost of the war in Iraq so far.
This article is more of a rant than a reasoned argument, but there’s plenty of reasoned argument around. The two best sources, in my opinion, are Eric Reeves and Ingrid Jones. Kristof is good too, although you may require registration to read some articles.