The UN in Darfur: Who’s calling the shots?

In a statement that perhaps best encapsulates the disparity between U.N. rhetoric and the reality the international organization is allowing to transpire under its very own eyes, Juan Mendez, the U.N. Special Advisor to the Secretary General on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide (whose very title already endows him with the ignominy of failure), recently avowed that “[i]t’s high time the AU, the Security Council, and all of us tell the government of Sudan that consent…has to be given in good faith” and that the international community could “not let[] the government call the shots over the makeup or mandate of the future U.N. mission…[which] would render it as ineffective as the AU operation” (“Darfur peace accord is expected to fail: Sudan’s word, U.N. will to act in doubt,” Tina Susman, Newsday, 31 May 2006). However, any will behind this belated statement of the obvious – that genocidaires should not dictate the terms of a force between them and their victims, or, essentially, that the fox should not be given the keys to the chicken coop – has proven wholly transparent, dissipating in the wake of the U.N.’s persistent failure to engage the Sudanese government and take it to task for any of its supposedly unallowable assertions of its right to have the final say over the form of any eventual U.N. mission in its territory. The U.N. Under-Secretary General for Peacekeeping, Jean-Marie Guehenno, has stated quite succinctly, and with ringing overtones of the U.N.’s inherent weakness – signals assuredly picked up and exploited by the Government of Sudan – that “[t]he United Nations never imposes itself on any country” (“Mission Presses Sudan for U.N. Peacekeeping Troops in Darfur,” Opheera McDoom, Reuters, 11 June 2006). While at face seemingly a simple traditional deference to national sovereignty and an assurance that the U.N. is not an aggressor force, this statement also bluntly admits that the international organization will by default bow to the conditions set by Khartoum so as not to be “impos[ing]” itself on a sovereign (albeit genocidal) government. This amounts to a frightening degree of complicity, for the U.N. is effectively averting its eyes and timidly resigning itself to begging the executioner, even when it is the only possible force between the ax and hundreds of thousands more Darfurian lives.
The U.N.’s cowardice is even more dastardly given the statement of Mr. Mendez, for it taints the organization with downright two-faced duplicity, even though the face asserting that it will “call the shots” of a U.N. mission is merely a faint mockery that pales in comparison to the fervent efforts of U.N. leaders to reassure murderous Sudanese government officials that they intend to do nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that could possibly be twisted into the specter of a “Western invasion.” For this, one need go no further than the statements of British U.N. Ambassador Emyr Jones Parry, leading the recent U.N. Assessment Mission (belatedly and only after much pressure, including form Lakhdar Brahimi, accepted by the GoS). Jones Parry, in an astoundingly depressing report to the degree that it reveals how far behind and out of the loop entirely the U.N. is in dealing with a genocidal campaign begun over three years ago, first opines that after this trip, his view that “the argument is not whether we should be involved in Sudan and Darfur” was “reinforced.” If that is as far as the U.N. has progressed – to cautiously reassert step one, that the U.N. should even be at all interested, should even be passing the Security Council resolutions that Khartoum promptly flouts – then we truly can already announce the U.N. response to the 21st century’s first genocide, even before its slaughter is completed, as an utter failure. Mr. Jones Parry, however, totally ignorant to the degree which his conciliatory stance denounces nearly all subsequent U.N. efforts as sheerly chimerical, presents his deference to the Sudanese government as the necessary efforts to succeed in negotiations before a peacekeeping force can be deployed. He urges that the U.N. “emphasise its respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Sudan” and further descends to the base level of downplaying the significance of the vital conferral of a Chapter 7 mandate, reassuring Khartoum that “Chapter VII was a technical, not a political, issue” (“Report to the Security Council on the Council’s Mission to Sudan, Addis Ababa and Chad,” UK Ambassador Emyr Jones Parry, 15 June 2006). Are the hundreds of thousands of lives likely to be saved by a peacekeeping mission with authorization to engage in lethal force to defend itself and civilians, are they merely beneficiaries of a “technical issue,” Mr. Jones Parry? The British Ambassador, who tellingly has been one of the more “active” voices on Darfur, subtly and likely unknowingly evinces the power of Khartoum propaganda in clasping its fist over powerful international voices that, with more independence and courage, could raise a much-warranted storm over a genocide committed by a sovereign government. In his report we can clearly see that he has swallowed all of the lies promulgated by the GoS and designed to keep the United Nations impotent to effect any real change. He accepts the overly simplistic minimalization of “the situation in Darfur as a traditional conflict between herdsmen and farmers over limited national resources” (Idem.)– one far too closely resembling Khartoum’s (and Bob Zoellick’s) version of “tribal warfare” in the peripheries that has no relationship to the center whatsoever. He additionally voices the crucial flaw of U.N. posturing on Sudan (one unfortunately, and with Sudan’s malicious intent, consistent with the current mandate of the AU mission in Darfur, which acknowledges “the protection of civilians being the responsibility of the Government of Sudan,” (see Communique of the AU Peace and Security Council, October 2004) but in sharp contrast to the obligations of the Responsibility to Protect that the U.N. supposedly adopted (unanimously) in the fall of 2005), abdicating all responsibility for the lives of millions of Darfurians by unacceptably declaring that “it is the obligation of the Government of Sudan to protect its civilians” (Idem.). Finally, the fact that he bothers to reassure Khartoum that the international community has no designs on its “territorial integrity” (itself a patently ridiculous assertion that one would (hopefully) be hard pressed to find outside of Government propaganda) indicates that the U.N. has subtly internalized even the most outlandish of Khartoum’s claims opposing international intervention.
What Emyr Jones Parry fails to recognize is that genocide is not an arena for negotiation; it is a scenario where doing something “out of the ordinary” is exactly what is required. When Mr. Guehenno rationalized his effective castration of any U.N. force by explaining that “[a]ll our peacekeeping operations in Africa are deployed with the cooperation of the host country,” he is neglecting to articulate the difference between those countries with U.N. peacekeepers (DR Congo, Liberia, Burundi, Ivory Coast, & Sierra Leone, all of which have a Chapter 7 peacemaking mandate) and those potentially in Darfur, namely that the former governments all have an interest in U.N. troops helping their countries achieve stability; Sudan’s interest, of course, is the exact opposite – to shy away any interference with their strategic campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide. A similar difference is undermining the efforts of the International Criminal Court in Sudan as compared to other countries. Whereas President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda has a strategic interest in the ICC arresting Joseph Kony and other LRA rebels wreaking havoc on the north of the country (and perhaps of a more realpolitik significance, representing a constant threat to his power that Museveni has had to battle against for twenty years), Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Second Vice President Ali Osman Mohamed Taha, head of security forces Salah Abdallah Gosh, and Interior Minister Zubier Bashir Taha, along with many other national and regional government officials responsible for the design and execution of the Darfur genocide, have no interest whatsoever in allowing the ICC to arrest themselves. This problem, which was nominally overcome by the May 2005 Security Council recommendation of the ICC to Sudan (necessary, as per the Rome Treaty creating the Court, in the absence of state consent), has left the ICC floundering in a quandary it has never experienced in its young existence; how to engage in the somewhat aggressive adjudication necessary to fulfill its mission when it is not welcome. The ICC is also handicapped by that other previously unencountered flaw in the Rome Treaty – that it has no jurisdiction where the offending state has undertaken “efforts” to create its own tribunals to rectify the injustice. These tribunals, represented by the laughably named Special Criminal Court on the Events in Darfur (“events” being the lowest of the low propaganda terms that I have seen the Sudanese government ascribe to its bloody genocide), as described in a recent Human Rights Watch report, have quite literally done nothing whatsoever to even attempt to prosecute anyone related to the atrocities committed in Darfur (“No Justice for Darfur in Local Courts,” Fritzroy Sterling, Inter Press Service, 9 June 2006).
Why are the problems facing the ICC in Darfur significant for the prospects of U.N. reluctance to exert any meaningful pressure on Khartoum’s objection to a U.N. peacekeeping force in Darfur? The answer is the same desire that motivates all of the the GoS’ rhetoric and behind-the-scenes calculations when dealing with the international community – maintenance of the status quo. As long as Khartoum is able to fend off any changes to the current state in Darfur (which they have been remarkably astute at accomplishing without much outcry, from their ability to violate the April 2004 N’djamena Ceasefire with impunity, to their flouting of Security Council Resolutions of 2005, their strategic trade-off allowing augmentation of the AU force in numbers but preventing any upgrade to its mandate, as well as their aforementioned obstruction of ICC efforts, to current obstinacy resisting the U.N., as well as many tactics in between, all designed to darken the shroud around Darfur and ease any inhibitions to their genocidal destructiveness), its military and its Janjaweed proxies – who were supposedly never under government control, whose existence the government tries to obscure and deny, and who, particularly now, under the latest obligation (that of the May 5 DPA) of the government to disarm them, are portrayed as chaotic and acting on their own – can with little hindrance and utter impunity continue to terrorize, maim, kill, rape, and displace any and all “non-Arab” villagers and IDPs in western Sudan and eastern Chad. Khartoum is thus again engaging in a bargain that costs them little and that the international community is too naïve and/or overly cautious to contest; the GoS can tolerate an ineffective ICC mission whose own head prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, admits the failings and slow progress of his team, and the obstacles facing it (for example, he has stated that he cannot call witnesses from Darfur, for risk of their safety, another problem that befuddles the inexperienced ICC), as long as no U.N. troops, who the government genocidaires fear might make more possible their own prosecution and punishment, are allowed to enter the country.
Until very recently, the genocidal regime’s strategy in discussing any future U.N. role in its country has been one of reticence and coy hints, designed as a perfect dance with the U.N.’s own hesitant posturing. Somehow, somewhere along the line, the press started reporting that the GoS would allow U.N. peacekeepers into Sudan, a reversal of all previous statements of officials, including those of President Bashir, who in February 2006 neatly wove together various strands of Sudanese propaganda in vehemently opposing any international intervention, characterizing it as the work of “some invisible hands that continue to manipulate the question of Darfur for tearing up the unity of Sudan in preparation for controlling and looting its resources” (“Sudan objects to U.N. force in Darfur,” CNN.com, 7 February 2006). After the AU Peace and Security Council snubbed what it considered condescending Western voices by electing at its meeting in March to simply extend its own mandate until 30 September, rather than begin a process of the immediate handoff to the U.N., the assumption again somehow emerged, despite no GoS official on record as voicing anything resembling a warm endorsement of this proposition, that U.N. blue helmets would take over the strapped and ineffective AU forces beginning on 1 October. With the signing of the DPA, this was assumed to be a reality, which can only leave one in bewilderment, were one not seasoned to Khartoum’s history of mendacity and deception, when reading presidential spokesman Majzoub al-Khalifa’s recent statement that “the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) does not include any role for the UN in the region.” (“Sudan reiterates refusal of peacekeeping deployment in Darfur,” CHECK google alerts 6-12). What this indicates more than anything, however, is not an about-face by an ultimately compliant, if a trifle murky on the details, Sudanese regime, but rather the shameful self-deception practiced by the international community to convince itself that with the mere signing of a peace agreement (the sighs of relief were likely uttered not at any real prospects for peace, but more out of a sense of “whew, we are out of this mess now”) it could wash its hands of the confusing bloodshed and embarrassingly stagnant quagmire in Darfur (one that, as all observers of the region have acknowledged, would (have) require(d) an unprecedented confrontation with a sovereign government – confrontation here denoting not violent overthrow or “regime change” as self-styled American anti-imperialists would have it, a prediction they share with Khartoum government propaganda, but rather simply sending in peacekeepers against the government’s will). This, however, neglects to consider all previous statements and prevarications emanating from Khartoum in the past months and years. Thus when First Vice President Salva Kiir recently called into question the acceptability of a U.N. force’s mandate, questioning aloud whether it would be humanitarian (acceptable) or otherwise (unacceptable), President Omar Hassan al-Bashir lashed out at even this timid handling of the issue, stating that he stood on the opposite side of the spectrum as his supposed partner in Khartoum’s executive office. How the international community could convince itself that this placed Bashir anywhere other than staunchly opposed to any U.N. “interference” in Sudan is mystifying. We should thus not be surprised that Bashir has just made his rejection of any U.N. force explicit. The mere face of his outlandish rhetoric, equating a U.N. peacekeeping force with foreign occupation and recolonization (see “Sudan’s Bashir rejects strongly UN peacekeepers,” Sudan Tribune, 21 June 2006) and attributing Darfur activism in the United States to “Jewish organizations” (see “Sudan President Nixes Darfur Peacekeepers,” The Associated Press, 21 June 2006), should belie any seriousness with which the U.N. continues to deal with this genocidal tyrant. Bashir has taught us that, faced with a whimpering and unresolved international response, one too wary to challenge a “sovereign” government, he will not back down, and will in fact only escalate the degree of his rhetoric and the gall that it speaks to. The most painful element of this rhetoric, though, is that, by allowing it to continue, we are ourselves complicit in the death and destruction that lies transparently behind it.