Darfur and the Genocide Debate

Scott Straus

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2005

Summary:  As western Sudan continues to suffer, much international attention has focused on whether to call what is happening there ''genocide.'' Yet once the term was invoked, it did not trigger outside intervention. Terminology turns out to matter far less than was expected. And once more, the world has dithered while people die.

Scott Straus is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

In Sudan's western Darfur region, a massive campaign of ethnic violence has claimed the lives of more than 70,000 civilians and uprooted an estimated 1.8 million more since February 2003. The roots of the violence are complex and parts of the picture remain unclear. But several key facts are now well known. The primary perpetrators of the killings and expulsions are government-backed "Arab" militias. The main civilian victims are black "Africans" from three tribes. And the crisis is currently the worst humanitarian disaster on the planet.

The bloodshed in Darfur has by now received a great deal of attention. Much of the public debate in the United States and elsewhere, however, has focused not on how to stop the crisis, but on whether or not it should be called a "genocide" under the terms of the Genocide Convention. Such a designation, it was long thought, would inevitably trigger an international response.

In July 2004, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution labeling Darfur a genocide. Then, in early September, after reviewing the results of an innovative government-sponsored investigation, Secretary of State Colin Powell also used the term and President George W. Bush followed suit in a speech to the United Nations several weeks later--the first times such senior U.S. government officials had ever conclusively applied the term to a current crisis and invoked the convention. Darfur, therefore, provides a good test of whether the 56-year-old Genocide Convention, created in the aftermath of the Holocaust, can make good on its promise to "never again" allow the targeted destruction of a particular ethnic, racial, or religious group.

So far, the convention has proven weak. Having been invoked, it did not--contrary to expectations--electrify international efforts to intervene in Sudan. Instead, the UN Security Council commissioned further studies and vaguely threatened economic sanctions against Sudan's growing oil industry if Khartoum did not stop the violence; one council deadline has already passed without incident. Although some 670 African Union troops have been dispatched to the region with U.S. logistical assistance to monitor a nonexistent ceasefire, and humanitarian aid is pouring in, the death toll continues to rise. The lessons from Darfur, thus, are bleak. Despite a decade of handwringing over the failure to intervene in Rwanda in 1994 and despite Washington's decision to break its own taboo against the use of the word "genocide," the international community has once more proved slow and ineffective in responding to large-scale, state-supported killing. Darfur has shown that the energy spent fighting over whether to call the events there "genocide" was misplaced, overshadowing difficult but more important questions about how to craft an effective response to mass violence against civilians in Sudan. The task ahead is to do precisely that: to find a way to stop the killing, lest tens of thousands more die.

DEATH IN DARFUR

To understand the Darfur story it helps to know something about the conflict itself. The crisis in western Sudan has grown out of several separate but intersecting conflicts. The first is a civil war between the Islamist, Khartoum-based national government and two rebel groups based in Darfur: the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement. The rebels, angered by Darfur's political and economic marginalization by Khartoum, first appeared in February 2003. The government, however, did not launch a major counteroffensive until April 2003, after the rebels pulled off a spectacular attack on a military airfield, destroying several aircraft and kidnapping an air force general in the process. Khartoum responded by arming irregular militia forces and directing them to eradicate the rebellion. The militias set out to do just that, but mass violence against civilians is what followed.

The Darfur crisis is also related to a second conflict. In southern Sudan, civil war has raged for decades between the northern, Arab-dominated government and Christian and animist black southerners; fighting, in one form or another, has a¤icted Sudan for all but 11 years since the country's independence from the United Kingdom in 1956 and has cost an estimated two million lives since 1983 alone. In recent years, the government and the main southern rebel movement have entered into comprehensive peace negotiations named after the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), which mediated the process. After numerous rounds of talks, the two sides appeared close to finalizing an agreement in June 2004, and many international observers hoped that Sudan's long-running war would finally end.

Darfur, however, was never represented in the IGAD discussions, and the Darfur rebels decided to strike partly to avoid being left out of any new political settlement. Many fear that the fighting may now unravel the IGAD agreements: the southern rebels are wary of signing any deal with a government that is massacring their fellow citizens, and hard-liners in Khartoum have seized on the violence to undermine the IGAD talks, which they see as too favorable toward the south.