24 October 2006
Lagos — Despite the extensive coverage of the humanitarian tragedies in the Darfur region of Sudan and efforts to end the calamities, the place has remained a big sore on the planet. Now, a Minority Rights Group International (MRGI) report has indicted the international community and the United Nations (UN) for not responding to early warnings before the raging catastophe unfolded there in 2003. What else does the world need to prick its conscience and halt the drama of anguish and death ?
MRGI, a United Kingdom- based human rights group, revealed that as far back as 2001, the UN staff in the area had informed the world body about the racial policies of the central government of Sudan, the resultant discontentment amongst the ethnic population of Darfur and the likelihood of hostitlities between the two parties. Curiously, however, rather than taking pre-emptive measures, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), removed Darfur from its watch list two years later. That costly decision was influenced by the fact that the conflict between north and south Sudan, one of the world's most protracted civil wars, was being resolved. The UN clearly did not take into account the worsening tension in the Darfur region which was similar to that which culminated in the infamous Rwanda genocide that claimed close to one million lives in the 1990s.
That non-chalance and the inability of the UN to move promptly to prevent the tragedy are largely responsible for the grave profile of Sudan today. With more than 200,000 people lost to massacre, malnutrition and diseases, and 2.5 million others displaced, the crisis is evidently beyond salvation through internal or even continental intervention. It is sad to note that, so far, Darfur is a case of missed opportunities. The closest it came to peaceful resolution was on May 5 this year in Abuja when the government of Omar Bashir signed an agreement with the Minni Arkou Minnawi-faction of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA). Bashir had agreed to disarm the militias, notably the Janjaweed, widely believed to be empowered by Khartoum to suppress, maim rape and kill the Darfuris. By the pact, the Sudanese government also ought to have set up the machinery to redistribute economic resources, reform land tenure and reconcile the warring parties. But, rather than honouring these clauses, Bashir is obsessed with maintaining the status quo. The result is the worsening of the nightmares of the Darfuris.
In the face of all this, it is unfortunate that the UN is yet pussy-footing. The African Union troops sent to Darfur were soon overwhelmed by the enormity of the task and the only alternative would have been a UN military presence, with a mandate to contain the militias and the rebel organisations that are bent on derailing any march towards tranquility. The UN must, therefore, find a way to crush Bashir's resistance to the vote by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) last August to replace the AU mission with a bigger, stronger UN force.
In addition to that, powerful UN members should take a cue from the United States whose president, George W. Bush, signed the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act a fortnight ago prohibiting transactions with the Sudanese government, including its oil. It is aimed at persuading Sudan to accept the UN peacekeepers and stop the killing of civilians. Such sanctions and even the breaking of diplomatic relations with Khartoum, if it continues along its present path, should be employed to call Bashir's government to order. Any further delay in bringing the sponsors of oppression in that country to their knees would be criminal and unacceptable.
Like Professor Wole Soyinka said at the International Conference of Black Writers and Artists in Paris last month, we ask: "What further dimension of state terrorism does the world need in order to act when a government unleashes its surrogates, armed to the teeth, supported, supplied, and logistically enabled by its own forces and intelligence services, authorised by well documented mandate of ethnic cleansing, its acts witnessed, recorded and reported by the United Nations' own agencies, its results seared on the Sudanese landscape as mass burial grounds, ruins of burnt villages, poisoned wells, slaughtered livestock, in the swelling army of mutilated survivors, victims of gang rape, of diseased and overflowing refugee camps ?"
This absurdity must not be allowed to continue.
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