Redstate

By Charles Bird Posted in War — Comments (6) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

That's what the UN is telling us.  In a February 16 communique:

The Commission of Inquiry, set up last year by Mr. Annan, found these actions constituted war crimes and crimes against humanity and their perpetrators should be referred to the ICC. It concluded that genocide had not occurred as it could not find any specified intent on the part of the Sudanese Government to wipe out an ethnic or racial group.

This despite the fact that Arabs have killed 70,000 black fellow countrymen, that the Janjaweeds have "internally displaced" 1.65 million and forced another 200,000 to Chad.  This despite the fact that the victims in Darfur are fellow Muslims.  This despite Secretary of State Powell's conclusion last September that a genocide is taking place in the region.  This despite the UN's odd interpretation of the UN Genocide Convention.  This despite the obvious tacit permission of wholesale slaughter and relocation by the Wahhabi-style Sudanese government in Khartoum.  This despite smoking gun evidence from Nicholas Kristof:

This archive, including scores of reports by the monitors on the scene, underscores that this slaughter is waged by and with the support of the Sudanese government as it tries to clear the area of non-Arabs. Many of the photos show men in Sudanese Army uniforms pillaging and burning African villages. I hope the African Union will open its archive to demonstrate publicly just what is going on in Darfur.

The archive also includes an extraordinary document seized from a janjaweed official that apparently outlines genocidal policies. Dated last August, the document calls for the "execution of all directives from the president of the republic" and is directed to regional commanders and security officials.

"Change the demography of Darfur and make it void of African tribes," the document urges. It encourages "killing, burning villages and farms, terrorizing people, confiscating property from members of African tribes and forcing them from Darfur."

It's worth being skeptical of any document because forgeries are possible. But the African Union believes this document to be authentic. I also consulted a variety of experts on Sudan and shared it with some of them, and the consensus was that it appears to be real.

Read on

The UN is reshaping the term "never again" to "it's happening again", once more reinforcing the notion that this once highly-principled organization has become a pathetic joke, and an insult to the legacy of Eleanor Roosevelt.  Back last May, Tacitus offered a solution to stop the genocide in its tracks:

The solution to this genocide is pathetically easy. It is a solution tried before, and it is a solution whose elements are already in-place. Moreover, it is a solution that the United States and Chad can execute alone, if need be. There is a tendency, particularly within the humanitarian and self-styled "international" communities, to look at genocide as a sort of natural disaster: causeless and unstoppable, a thing to be alleviated rather than thwarted. The ludicrous extreme expression of this came to fruition in Rwanda, where the United Nations and relief agencies from around the world chose to expend massively more effort assuaging the plight of fleeing Hutu Power genocidaires than that of the scarred survivors of murder, rape, and devastation in Rwanda itself. It is as if the Red Cross set up safe zones for unrepentant Germans in 1945. True justice, and true reconciliation, would of course have come with a ruthless uprooting of those responsible, and a deliverance to judgment of the peoples culpable. Instead, we see that the problem was merely prolonged, rather than resolved -- the Hutu Power mini-state in northeastern Congo still threatens as a cause of war and rebellion. This is the future being slowly charted for Darfur: no return of refugees, no justice for the victims, no punishment for the killers, and no consequence for their leaders. A festering grievance develops, a product of foolish reliance on process and diplomacy (with genocidists, whom one would think would be ipso facto outside the bounds of human discourse), and, yes, cowardice on the part of those who could act but do not.

But as I said, the solution is pathetically simple: the United States and Chad can and should facilitate an invasion of Darfur. Is this madness in the face of ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Hardly. The test cases -- the Afghan campaign of fall 2001, and countless French interventions in the region over the past half-century -- have already been fought and won. This is an altogether simpler case: while the geographic area is truly huge, the terrain is easier, and the determination of combatants -- black Africans versus Arabs -- is as clear-cut as could be. The manpower -- legions of angry, organized, determined Fur -- is present. The infrastructure, in the form of US-Chadian military cooperation, is in place. (As an unrelated aside, the reactions to that cooperation here are instructive.) The allies -- every state, group, and militia ever brutalized or alienated by Khartoum (among whom we can count not just Chad, but Ethiopia, Uganda, Eritrea, and of course the SPLA) -- only lack a unifying force. What remains is, on our part, a comparatively light burden of commitment: supplies and the airlift to get them there; tactical air power we can easily spare; Special Forces teams for communications and coordination; and forcible rhetoric from Washington, DC. It would truly be a war in the service of humanity: politically, just what is needed to demonstrate core American ideals, and a stark differentiation between our willingness to venture abroad in the service of freedom, and the desire of the wider world to ignore the most egregious of horrors. Pragmatically, it is an engagement we could afford and win (especially against the medieval janjaweed throwbacks) in comparatively short order. No need for an occupation of Khartoum, nor even an aggressive push for regime change there: it would be enough to secure the de facto independence of Darfur, and its establishment as a sort of Sahelian Kurdistan.

If we're serious about stopping genocide, we should bypass the process we're undertaking in the UN and start taking real action.  I've said it before and I'll keep saying it.  The UN is part of the problem, and the problem with the UN is incompetent leadership in the form of Kofi Annan, who has no clue and no vision as to what the UN should be, and a suffocating bureaucracy that breeds an atmosphere of corruption and unaccountability.  Claudia Rosett:

So prolific in scandal has the United Nations become that it's getting hard to keep tabs. You can surf the channels, from rape by peacekeepers in the Congo, to theft at the World Meteorological Organization, to a Human Rights Commission crammed with despots; from inadequate auditing to botched management to wasted money to running the biggest heist in the history of humanitarian work--the Oil for Food program in Saddam's Iraq.

Part of the problem also is that segments of the media are bought and paid for by the UN.  Let's get that Democracy Caucus going, and let's not put Darfur on a back burner.