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.

In mid-November, the Security Council held an extraordinary meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, to discuss Sudan. The session won a pledge from Khartoum and the southern rebels to finalize a peace agreement by the end of the year. On Darfur, however, the Security Council managed only to pass another limp resolution voicing "serious concern." Conceivably, Annan's commission could still determine that genocide has occurred in Darfur--giving the Security Council yet another chance to take concrete action. Given recent history, however, such action is unlikely. So far, the immediate consequences of the U.S. genocide determination have been minimal, and despite the historic declarations by Bush, Powell, and the U.S. Congress, the international community has barely budged. Nor has the United States itself done much to stop the violence.

The genocide debate and the Darfur crisis are thus instructive for several reasons. First, they have made it clear that "genocide" is not a magic word that triggers intervention. The term grabs attention, and in this case allowed pundits and advocates to move Sudan to the center of the public and international agendas. The lack of any subsequent action, however, showed that the Genocide Convention does not provide nearly the impetus that many thought it would. The convention was intended to institutionalize the promise of "never again." In the past, governments avoided involvement in a crisis by scrupulously eschewing the word "genocide." Sudan--at least so far--shows that the definitional dance may not have mattered.

Second, the Darfur crisis points to other limitations of using a genocide framework to galvanize international intervention. Genocide is a contested concept: there is much disagreement about what qualifies for the term. The convention itself defines genocide as the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." The document also lists several activities that constitute genocide, ranging from obvious acts such as killing to less obvious ones such as causing "mental harm." One often-cited problem with the convention's definition is how to determine a perpetrator's intent in the midst of a crisis. And how much "partial" group destruction does it take to reach the genocide threshold? In April 2004, an appeals chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia addressed the definitional question, upholding a genocide conviction of the Bosnian Serb commander Radislav Krstic for his role in the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica. In that case, the tribunal concluded that "genocide" meant the destruction of a "substantial part" of a group, which the court defined as 7,000-8,000 Bosnian Muslim men from Srebrenica.

By this standard, the violence in Darfur does appear to be genocide: a substantial number of men from a particular ethnic group in a limited area have been killed. For many observers, however, genocide means something else: a campaign designed to physically eliminate a group under a government's control, as in Rwanda or Nazi Germany. The definitional debate is hard to resolve; both positions are defensible. And the indeterminacy makes genocide a difficult term around which to mobilize an international coalition for intervention.

Assuming that humanitarian intervention remains a common goal in the future, one way forward would be to revisit and strengthen the ambiguous provisions in the convention. The confusion associated with the word "genocide" is not likely to disappear, however, and the term, at least as currently defined, excludes economic, political, and other social groups from protection. A better strategy might therefore be to develop a specific humanitarian threshold for intervention--including, but not limited to, genocide--and to establish institutional mechanisms to move from recognition of a grave humanitarian crisis to international action.

Darfur also shows that a genocide debate can divert attention from the most difficult questions surrounding humanitarian intervention. Any potential international action faces serious logistical and political obstacles. Darfur is vast and would require a substantial deployment of troops to safeguard civilians. The area has poor roads, and although it is open to surveillance from the air, ground transportation of troops would be difficult. International action also would need to address the complicated but enduring problems that have given rise to the violence in the first place. Such a strategy would require pressure on both the Darfur rebels and Khartoum to make peace.

Already heavily committed in Iraq and having lost considerable international credibility over the last two years, the Bush administration is not well positioned to lead such an effort. The hardest question about humanitarian intervention thus remains, Who will initiate and lead it? The problem is not just theoretical: the killing continues in Darfur and is unlikely to end soon. Until a powerful international actor or coalition of actors emerges, many more thousands of civilians are likely to die in western Sudan. If the international community fails to act decisively, the brave language of the Genocide Convention and the UN Charter--not to mention the avowed principles of the U.S. government and other states--will once more ring false.