Khartoum "negotiates" with one hand, attacks with the other

The meaningless of the Khartoum government's supposed support for a peace initiative in Abuja is likely felt most acutely by those innocent civilians in Gereida, Darfur, who very probably face a siege and attacks by the same government that purports to be seeking peace. The civilians in rebel-held Gereida, including an astonishing 90,000 Internally Displaced Persons, are likely experiencing the same feeling of ominous dread experienced by so many innocent Darfurians (and Chadians), a feeling described by Nicholas Kristof, in his report from Koloy, Chad, as being "convinced that they would soon be murdered" (see Kristof, "A Village Waiting for Rape and Murder," NY Times, 12 March 2006). The UN anticipates the attack: the United Nations deputy humanitarian coordinator in Sudan, Gemmo Lodesani, admitted that "[w]e have received unconfirmed, unilateral reports that there might be an attack on Gereida town - meaning that the town could be under fire - if we do not take immediate steps" (see "Government offensive raises fears about attack on Darfur's Gereida," IRIN, 3 May 2006, at http://www.sudantribune.com/article.php3?id_article=15424) (I will spare the rant of the likelihood of the UN, or anyone, taking these vitally necessary "immediate steps"), and acknowledges the death and destruction it will cause to Gereida's civilian population. Lodesani admits that "[i]f an attack occurs, the price to be paid by civilians protected at the moment in Gereida would be very, very high," a fear echoed by Human Rights Watch's Africa director, Peter Takirambudde, who sees that "Civilians there - particularly those who share the ethnicity of the rebel groups - could be in grave danger" (Ibid.). Furthermore, these people in Gereida who will bear the brunt of the government's offensive know themselves that the attack is coming; they hear the stories, they see the wounded and displaced straggle in from nearby villages, and they can only wait and pray. Khartoum's willingness to sign a peace of paper hundreds and hundreds of miles away means nothing to them, so long as the government's policy continues to be one committed to genocide, not peace.
The wonder is not that the Sudanese armed forces, alongside their Janjaweed proxies, will attack a rebel-held village, or a concentration of IDP's and civilians; they have demonstrated their willingness to do so in the past few weeks in the towns neighboring Gereida, as well as in the past three years of the genocide. Rather, the shocking aspect of this is that the international community can nonetheless take the Government of Sudan at face value when it claims to be working to achieve a peace agreement, epitomized most recently by Omar Hassan al-Bashir's lies to President Bush voicing his government's "commitment and determination to reach a peace agreement and achieve stability in Darfur" (see "Sudan's Bashir assures US's Bush he wants Darfur peace deal," Sudan Tribune, 2 May 2006). How can anyone believe with a clear conscience that a government is committed to "achiev[ing] stability" and ending its violent conflict with rebels when just a week earlier, according to UN sources "on 24 April, the Sudanese government used an Antonov plane and two helicopter gunships to attack the rebel-controlled village of Joghana, southeast of Gereida" ("Government offensive...," supra) and is planning a major offensive a rebel territory. Not only does Khartoum hold no intention to peacefully settle the formal conflict with its armed opposition, but it exhibits no sign of restraint in massacring collateral civilian damage as a strategic and systematic policy of war. While the world dithers in Abuja, fretting over provisions and concessions, thousands in Gereida wait to be slaughtered.