Darfur Background

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The following write-up is current—Entire villages bombed and destroyed; countless women raped and gang-raped; wells poisoned; humanitarian aid blocked; hundreds of thousands murdered and more than 2.5 million civilians displaced—this is the culture of impunity that continues today in Darfur, a region in Western Sudan. Today the region is the site of an ongoing genocide and the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

The witnesses have horrible stories to tell. This account comes from Amnesty International’s report Darfur: Rape as a Weapon of War: “There was also another rape on a young single girl aged 17: M. was raped by six men in front of her house in front of her mother. M’s brother, S., was then tied up and thrown into [the] fire.”

Since February 2003, Sudan’s dictators and its proxy Janjaweed militias have been committing mass murder, mass rape, and other kinds of systematic violence against Darfur’s civilians. More than 500,000 people have been killed. Millions are now either displaced within their own county or cling to life as refugees. The World Food Program estimates that well over 3.5 million need daily food aid in order to survive.

In July 2004, Congress unanimously declared that the situation in Darfur constituted genocide. The Bush administration followed with its own official genocide determination in September 2004.

For the past four years, in order to consolidate its power, the Sudanese government has been fighting various rebel groups based in Darfur. In May 2006, the Sudanese government and a Darfuri rebel faction agreed to a U.S.-brokered peace plan, but this agreement is now effectively dead. The plan required Sudan’s military to disarm the Janjaweed militias, but nothing like this ever happened.

President Bush, the State Department, and a large majority of Republicans and Democrats in Congress support a multinational protection force to stop the genocide. But words haven’t translated into action. The people of Darfur continue to suffer without the civilian protection they need.

In July 2007, the UN Security Council approved Resolution 1769, which authorizes the deployment of 26,000 peacekeepers to Darfur. While this development offers a glimmer of hope for the people of Darfur, the road ahead is fraught with considerable difficulties, created in part by the inherent limits of this force. For instance, according to Resolution 1769, the planned peacekeeping force cannot disarm the Sudanese government’s proxy militias in Darfur. (Such a condition was insisted upon by Khartoum and its main ally on the Security Council, China.)

Western Sudan is home to the world’s largest humanitarian operation. Forced to work in an incredibly volatile environment, aid agencies in Darfur have repeatedly warned that they are hanging on a thread: if they are forced to leave Sudan because of the genocidal violence, then hundreds of thousands more will die from starvation and disease.

Why Multinational Protection?: A Q&A about Protecting Darfur’s Vulnerable

Q: Why can’t we use diplomatic negotiation to get the Sudanese government to stop what it’s doing?

Ultimately, a peace agreement must be hammered out for the people of Darfur. Table-talk alone, however, cannot get the perpetrators of genocide to stop their violent campaign. Only sanctions and the careful use of force can do this.

Negotiation has been tried for a long time now. More than three years of formal talks between the international community and the government of Sudan have never successfully mitigated the violence in the Darfur region. What’s more, the government has openly broken ceasefire after ceasefire and promise after promise. In May 2006, according to the terms of the Darfur Peace Agreement, the Sudanese government promised to disarm its Janjaweed militias. But instead it drastically increased its military operations in the region, in full view of on-the-ground humanitarian groups, human rights experts, and journalists.

If anything, Sudan’s dictators have used diplomatic agreements as a way to stall—as a way to make time and space for their human rights abuses.

Q: Why call for a multinational protection force? What about having African countries take the lead?

A monitoring presence called the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) is in Darfur right now. The international community originally placed its hope in AMIS, expecting it to protect civilians. But it is clear now that AMIS does not have the resources or numbers to patrol a region the size of Texas: if each of its 7,000 monitors were spread equally throughout Darfur, each monitor would have to patrol a patch of land the size of Manhattan.

AMIS does not have a proper protection mandate: legally, AMIS is forbidden from proactively engaging the genocidaires. It is limited to guarding international monitors in the region. The African Union itself has said that it doesn’t have the resources for a robust peacekeeping mission.

It is also important to note the Sudanese government is an influential member of the African Union. The AU is a decision-by-consensus organization: perversely, the perpetrators have a great deal of control in determining the composition and mandate of the African Union Mission in Sudan.

If planned and executed correctly, a multinational protection force would have the resources, troop numbers, and mandate necessary to stop the Darfur genocide. While the government of Sudan has threatened to attack any NATO or UN force that enters its country, this cannot prevent the international community from acting. The reasons here are ultimately moral. When millions of lives are so near to death in an ongoing genocide—lives exposed to bombing, deliberate starvation, and brutal gang-rape—those in positions of power cannot allow the violence to go unchecked. In no other scenario is intervention a more just cause.

Q: Why the UN? Why NATO?

On August 31st, 2006, the U.S. and Britain helped pass a United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing a Chapter VII UN mission, “Chapter VII” indicating that this force would formally have the mandate to protect civilians and humanitarian groups from genocidal perpetrators. However, the resolution indicated that deployment of this mission would only happen on the basis of the Sudanese government’s unconditional acceptance. This idea—that the international community must ask permission of the perpetrators to stop the perpetrators—reflects an egregious error in moral and political judgment.

The resolution above has now been superseded by a newer one, passed by the Security Council in July 2007, which authorizes a similar force for Darfur. The next big Darfur issue is making sure that all of these peacekeepers hit ground as soon as possible, with the adequate level of resources and training necessary to protect civilians and humanitarian aid workers in Darfur.

While they are not a popular option in today’s political climate, NATO forces would be best equipped to stop the Darfur genocide. NATO can deploy quickly, and it has the prior troop commitments and resources necessary for establishing immediate civilian protection in the region. NATO has also held training exercises in Western Sudan, so it is familiar with the terrain.