Genocide pales before the War on Terror.
"What's a little genocide between friends?" asks the New Republic Online, referring to the Bush Administration's embrace of the Sudanese government's help in the War on Terror. These days, there seems to be a single criterion for being one of America's -- at least the Administration's -- "friend": effective cooperation in the fight against al Qeada.
The backstory: the ongoing conflict in the western Darfur region of Sudan has now, according to recent and widely bruited estimates based on data from the Coalition for International Justice data, killed as many as 400,000 civilians over the course of the past 24 months in the western Sudanese province of Danfur. Last September, when Darfur was a bigger deal in the Western press than it is currently, Colin Powell visited the region and, based on interviews conducted with refugees, openly called the conflict a "genocide". At the time, this phrasology was more than the EU or the UN was willing to commit to and caused an international stir. It may have even had an effect: the UN Security Council toughened up its rhetoric (though not to the level of "genocide") and has since passed a resolution (with the US abstaining) to begin legal investigation into the slaughter under the auspices of the International Criminal Court (though the first indictments aren't expected for another two years). In August, the African Union established a force of roughly 2000 peacekeepers in the region to protect the roughly 3 million refugees currently holed up in camps along the Sudan-Chad border and, at a meeting in Ethiopia at the end of last month, agreed to bump the force up to 3,300 immediately, growing to 7,700 by the fall with a mandate to physically prevent janjaweed attacks on the camps. Meanwhile, back in the United States, Senators John Corzine of New Jersey and Sam Brownback of Kansas introduced the Darfur Accountability Act into the Senate in March as part of a supplemental funding bill for the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Act, according to Mark Leon Goldberg in The American Prospect would "appropriate $90 million in U.S. aid for Darfur and establish targeted U.S. sanctions against the Sudanese regime, accelerate assistance to expand the size and mandate of the African Union mission in Darfur, expand the United Nations Mission in Sudan to include the protection of civilians in Darfur, establish a no-fly zone over Darfur, and call for a presidential envoy to Sudan." It easily cleared the Senate in late April.
Then, in the middle of last month, things changed. First, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, on a trip to Khartoum and in the presense of Bashir regime officials, refused to repeat Powell's early characterization of genocide, deferring instead to the UN's conclusion that the conflict represented "crimes against humanity as opposed to genocide." Nine days later, the White House sent a widely leaked letter to the House Republican leadership asking for the Darfur Accountability Act to be scuttled in committee. According to the Center for American Progress' May 5th "Under the Radar" report, the provisions were in fact stripped from the supplemental bill.
Why the turnabout? Last Wednesday, the NYT's ever mild-mannered columnist Nicholas Kristof -- while attacking the Admin's position -- offered three reasons:
First, Bush doesn't see any neat solution, and he's mindful that his father went into Somalia for humanitarian reasons and ended up with a mess.
Second, Bush is very proud - justly - that he helped secure peace in a separate war between northern and southern Sudan. That peace is very fragile, and he is concerned that pressuring Sudan on Darfur might disrupt that peace while doing little more than emboldening the Darfur rebels (some of them cutthroats who aren't negotiating seriously).
Third, Sudan's leaders have increased their cooperation with the CIA. As The Los Angeles Times reported, the CIA recently flew Sudan's intelligence chief to Washington for consultations about the war on terror, and the White House doesn't want to jeopardize that channel.
This last reason was detailed in a April 29th exclusive in the Los Angeles Times. In fact, just four days after Zoellick's appearance in Khartoum, Maj. Gen. Salah Abdallah Gosh, Sudan's intelligence chief, met with American officials in Washington to discuss intelligence matters. Gosh has been widely implicated in Sudan's various domestic atrocities since the Bashir regime came to power in 1989 and few analysts doubt that top officials in the Bashir regime, including Gosh, have more than just condoned the attacks of the janjaweed militias against agricultural civilians in Darfur in order to deter other ethnic groups who might seek independence from Khartoum. Yet after abstaining from a UN vote to lift sanctions in 2001, Washington did not press to re-impose them in 2004 when the Darfur killings began and, by scuttling the Darfur Accountability Act, recently acted to avoid sanctions again. With the Times report, the mystery of United States softpeddling is solved.
So where does that leave us? In the post-911 world (though Bush Admin reciprications to Sudan in fact predated 911, reversing the Clinton Administration policy of rebuffs to the Bashir government), a government -- even one with a long history of terrorist-sheltering -- can do pretty much whatever it likes domestically -- even exacerbating tribal tensions into a full-fledged ethnic cleansing -- and expect minimal response from the United States or the rest of the West, so long as it cooperates with the CIA and turns over an al Qeada operative here and there. Ten years ago, in the wake of the Rwandan tragedy, the West said "never again". I guess this is just another way that 911 "changed everything".
The backstory: the ongoing conflict in the western Darfur region of Sudan has now, according to recent and widely bruited estimates based on data from the Coalition for International Justice data, killed as many as 400,000 civilians over the course of the past 24 months in the western Sudanese province of Danfur. Last September, when Darfur was a bigger deal in the Western press than it is currently, Colin Powell visited the region and, based on interviews conducted with refugees, openly called the conflict a "genocide". At the time, this phrasology was more than the EU or the UN was willing to commit to and caused an international stir. It may have even had an effect: the UN Security Council toughened up its rhetoric (though not to the level of "genocide") and has since passed a resolution (with the US abstaining) to begin legal investigation into the slaughter under the auspices of the International Criminal Court (though the first indictments aren't expected for another two years). In August, the African Union established a force of roughly 2000 peacekeepers in the region to protect the roughly 3 million refugees currently holed up in camps along the Sudan-Chad border and, at a meeting in Ethiopia at the end of last month, agreed to bump the force up to 3,300 immediately, growing to 7,700 by the fall with a mandate to physically prevent janjaweed attacks on the camps. Meanwhile, back in the United States, Senators John Corzine of New Jersey and Sam Brownback of Kansas introduced the Darfur Accountability Act into the Senate in March as part of a supplemental funding bill for the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Act, according to Mark Leon Goldberg in The American Prospect would "appropriate $90 million in U.S. aid for Darfur and establish targeted U.S. sanctions against the Sudanese regime, accelerate assistance to expand the size and mandate of the African Union mission in Darfur, expand the United Nations Mission in Sudan to include the protection of civilians in Darfur, establish a no-fly zone over Darfur, and call for a presidential envoy to Sudan." It easily cleared the Senate in late April.
Then, in the middle of last month, things changed. First, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, on a trip to Khartoum and in the presense of Bashir regime officials, refused to repeat Powell's early characterization of genocide, deferring instead to the UN's conclusion that the conflict represented "crimes against humanity as opposed to genocide." Nine days later, the White House sent a widely leaked letter to the House Republican leadership asking for the Darfur Accountability Act to be scuttled in committee. According to the Center for American Progress' May 5th "Under the Radar" report, the provisions were in fact stripped from the supplemental bill.
Why the turnabout? Last Wednesday, the NYT's ever mild-mannered columnist Nicholas Kristof -- while attacking the Admin's position -- offered three reasons:
First, Bush doesn't see any neat solution, and he's mindful that his father went into Somalia for humanitarian reasons and ended up with a mess.
Second, Bush is very proud - justly - that he helped secure peace in a separate war between northern and southern Sudan. That peace is very fragile, and he is concerned that pressuring Sudan on Darfur might disrupt that peace while doing little more than emboldening the Darfur rebels (some of them cutthroats who aren't negotiating seriously).
Third, Sudan's leaders have increased their cooperation with the CIA. As The Los Angeles Times reported, the CIA recently flew Sudan's intelligence chief to Washington for consultations about the war on terror, and the White House doesn't want to jeopardize that channel.
This last reason was detailed in a April 29th exclusive in the Los Angeles Times. In fact, just four days after Zoellick's appearance in Khartoum, Maj. Gen. Salah Abdallah Gosh, Sudan's intelligence chief, met with American officials in Washington to discuss intelligence matters. Gosh has been widely implicated in Sudan's various domestic atrocities since the Bashir regime came to power in 1989 and few analysts doubt that top officials in the Bashir regime, including Gosh, have more than just condoned the attacks of the janjaweed militias against agricultural civilians in Darfur in order to deter other ethnic groups who might seek independence from Khartoum. Yet after abstaining from a UN vote to lift sanctions in 2001, Washington did not press to re-impose them in 2004 when the Darfur killings began and, by scuttling the Darfur Accountability Act, recently acted to avoid sanctions again. With the Times report, the mystery of United States softpeddling is solved.
So where does that leave us? In the post-911 world (though Bush Admin reciprications to Sudan in fact predated 911, reversing the Clinton Administration policy of rebuffs to the Bashir government), a government -- even one with a long history of terrorist-sheltering -- can do pretty much whatever it likes domestically -- even exacerbating tribal tensions into a full-fledged ethnic cleansing -- and expect minimal response from the United States or the rest of the West, so long as it cooperates with the CIA and turns over an al Qeada operative here and there. Ten years ago, in the wake of the Rwandan tragedy, the West said "never again". I guess this is just another way that 911 "changed everything".
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