Redstate

In Which Jimmy Carter Wishes Away Yet Another Atrocity

By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in Foreign Affairs — Comments (20) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

International public opinion has overwhelmingly concluded that the situation in Darfur is tantamount to genocide.

But don't tell that to Jimmy Carter:

"There is a legal definition of genocide and Darfur does not meet that legal standard. The atrocities were horrible but I don't think it qualifies to be called genocide," [Carter] said. Washington is almost alone in branding the 4 1/2 years of violence in Darfur genocide. Khartoum rejects the term, European governments are reluctant to use it and a U.N.-appointed commission of inquiry found no genocide, but that some individuals may have acted with genocidal intent. Carter, whose charitable foundation, the Carter Center, worked to establish the International Criminal Court (ICC), said: "If you read the law textbooks ... you'll see very clearly that it's not genocide and to call it genocide falsely just to exaggerate a horrible situation I don't think it helps."

As the first link shows, of course, Washington is hardly "alone" in characterizing the situation in Darfur as genocide. But even if it were, how precisely does one argue against the conclusions found here?

The nature of the attacks on African villages in Darfur--as reported by numerous human rights groups--makes clear Khartoum's genocidal intent. Janjaweed assaults, typically conducted in concert with Khartoum's regular military forces (including helicopter gunships and Antonov bombers), have been comprehensively destructive of both human life and livelihood: men and boys killed en masse, women and girls raped or abducted, and all means of agricultural production destroyed. Thriving villages have had buildings burned, water sources poisoned, irrigation systems torn up, food and seed stocks destroyed, and fruit trees cut down. Cattle have been looted on a massive scale, and most of those not looted have died from lack of water and food, as people flee into the inhospitable wastes of this arid region.

According to Article 2 of the 1948 U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide--to which the United States is party--genocide encompasses not only the deliberate killing of members of a "national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such," but also "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part." What we have seen in Darfur is precisely this latter offense.

As a result, agricultural production has largely come to a halt in Darfur, and the United Nations estimates that over 3.8 million people are currently conflict-afected and in need of humanitarian assistance, primarily food (the total population of Darfur was approximately 6-6.5 million at the beginning of the conflict). Moreover, there is no sign that the current planting season will yield a significant fall harvest. Huge civilian populations--well over 2 million people, perhaps over 3 million--will be dependent on food aid for the foreseeable future. Many of these people will die in what has become a genocide by attrition.

To be sure, there have been many unambiguous voices: The U.S. Congress--in a unanimous, bipartisan, bicameral resolution--declared a year ago that ethnically targeted human destruction in Darfur constitutes genocide; so did former Secretary of State Colin Powell in September 2004 Senate testimony (though subsequent reiterations of Powell's finding have come from the Bush administration only with considerable prodding). Senior officials of the German and British governments have declared that genocide is occurring in Darfur, as did the European parliament (by a vote of 566 to 6 in September 2004). And a number of important organizations and institutions have also declared that genocide is taking place: the Committee on Conscience of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (an unprecedented action), Physicians for Human Rights, the U.S. Committee for Refugees, Africa Action, Justice Africa, Africa Confidential (U.K.), Yad Vashem (Israel), Genocide Watch, and numerous genocide scholars.

Human Rights Watch has not used the g-word but has found massive evidence of "ethnic cleansing" in Darfur (no clear articulation of the difference between these two crimes has been forthcoming from HRW). Amnesty International has also not declared genocide in Darfur, though the director of Amnesty in the United States, William Schultz, has been explicit about his own view that what is occurring in Darfur is genocide.

Most consequentially, a U.N. Commission of Inquiry (COI) report on Darfur concluded in January 2005 that there was "insufficient evidence of genocidal intent" on the part of the NIF, though the commissioners' reasoning was embarrassingly flawed and the failure to conduct forensic investigations at all sites of reported mass ethnic murders was inexcusable. In addition, the COI badly confused the issues of motive and intent, deployed evidence in conspicuously contradictory fashion, and misrepresented the consequences of genocidal violence and displacement in Darfur. (See my detailed critique here.)

The COI report called for a referral of all violations of international law in Darfur to the International Criminal Court (ICC), which occurred in a U.N. Security Council resolution on March 31, 2005. But this focuses far too much on the future punishment of the crime of genocide rather than its current prevention, the primary purpose of the Genocide Convention. Despite expedient arguments made by some human rights groups that the threat of an ICC referral would serve as a deterrent to violence in Darfur, this hope has proved thoroughly specious--violence against civilians and humanitarian operations has, in many respects, increased.

Clear enough? Well, if you are the 39th President of the United States, it isn't. And if you are the 39th President of the United States, you may wonder why words do indeed matter.

Read on . . .

Here's why:

None of this would be more than a debate about nomenclature if a finding of genocide did not hold the potential to dictate the need for humanitarian intervention in Darfur--the only response that can provide security for the millions of innocent civilians at acutest risk and for humanitarian operations that are operating at the very limit of tolerable insecurity. At least one major aid organization has withdrawn because of the deaths of several of its workers; many others are on the verge of withdrawing. As Jan Egeland, head of U.N. humanitarian operations, recently declared: "I think it's a matter of weeks or months that we will have a collapse in many of our operations." Genocide should not, of course, be the threshold for humanitarian intervention; but in the world as we find it, in the wake of genocides in the Balkans and Rwanda, the g-word has come increasingly to constitute a ghastly gold standard for international action.

Even with consensus on genocide, however, the simple political truth is that intervention, especially in the shadow of Iraq, will require extraordinary efforts to achieve legitimacy, and there are few signs that anyone is willing to step forward. The evident hope is that a peace agreement in Abuja, Nigeria, will give the appearance of a crisis resolving itself. In fact, no matter what agreement is or is not signed in Abuja, critical protection needs for civilians and humanitarians will be urgently required for the foreseeable future. In the absence of robust humanitarian intervention, we have the façade of peace but the genocide with continue.

Objectively speaking, it is impossible to avoid the fact that Darfur is indeed experiencing genocide. If people like Jimmy Carter can't understand that, they should perhaps leave the field to those who can.