It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that Darfur is well on the way to becoming another disaster of Rwandan proportions. The difference in this case is that although in this case everyone is willing to use the ‘G’ word, no one will actually act on it.
The fragile peace between the Sudanese government and some of the Darfur rebels/freedom fighters is breaking down, which is hardly surprising. Significant rebel groups refused to buy into the deal, and it is doubtful if the government in Khartoum ever wanted it to work anyway.
Meanwhile, with the best will in the world but no resources, the African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur is falling apart. The AU will have to pull out the weak mission, in a retreat which will be one step ahead of the Sudanese Army coming to throw them out. This is a disaster for the AU which was trying to develope an effective regional peacekeeping capabilty. Those in the west from whom the AU needed support – financial, logistical and infrastructural – to support the mission, simply did not deliver. It does not take a great leap of cynicism to suggest that there were people in the West who are happy to see non-western regional organisations fail, partly because they don’t want – excuse the phrase – the niggers to get uppity, but also because some of those who control the purse strings are opposed to any strong international organisation. It is also a disaster for the AU because a single, not very strong state, Sudan, has been able to tell the AU to go to hell and get away with it.
One might charitably take the edge of criticism of western failure to support the AU mission by pointing to the current problem of imperial overstretch from which the west is suffering – the US is hard put to find troops for Iraq, Bush cut domestimc spending to fund the GWOT, Britain is tight on troops and it looks like it will be hard to scrape up enough peacekeepers to fill UNIFIL II. This is a real problem, but the AU was supposed to be part of the solution, by providing more manpower to support peace keeping, and even with adequate support, it was cheaper to use the AU than an UN force.
The West knows what is going on in Darfur – people who are predominantly african, and christian are being ethnically cleansed by a muslim majority in Sudan – and the west has not problem describing the displacement of over 2m people and the murder of hundreds of thousands as genocide. In Rwanda, the west worked hard to deny the reality of the genocide, because the US did not want to undertake the response needed to deal with genocide. Now they are willing to call it as it is, but feel no obligation to deal with it – ‘yes, its genocide, but, frankly my dear, we don’t give a damn’
Once the AU force goes, there will be no replacement. Sudan has said they will deploy their army to keep order, but since the Janjaweed milita which has been doing most of the killing is seen by everyone as a thin front for the government, their army is not going to stop the killing. Sudan has rejected the idea of a UN force, saying it would be part of a western conspiracy to undermine their sovereignty.
Now I like that – I think that, like many African states, the Sudan is not a nation anyway, it is three nations, or two and a half nations, drawn together by western mapmakers during the scramble for Africa. The government in Khartoum clearly seeks to retain the terroritoy while removing people who are ethnically different from within their borders. The might well paraphrase the old Cromwellian mantra of ‘Hell or Connaught’ as ‘Hell or Chad’. Someday, the west is going to have to face up to its post-colonial responsibilities in places like Sudan and go in and redraw the map to make the states conform more closely to the cultures, nations and ethnicities of the continent. It would be nice if the rule of law, civic culture and the AU was strong enough to rise about civil war and ethnic genocide, but it ain’t, and it will be many years before it is.
Sudan isn’t really a failed state – it is very successful in its project to create a mono-ethnic and probably theocratic state by killing off those who do not fit in with the majority. Unfortunately, that sort of success is not acceptable on any moral compass, apart from the conveniently spinning one used by the neo-con practictioners of ‘realpolitik’
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