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**Gavur** · 01-22-2006, 12:05 AM

DARFUR-Genocide in Slow Motion By Nicholas D. Kristof

The New York Review of Books

Genocide in Slow Motion | Nicholas D. Kristof

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18674

The same paralysis occurred as Rwandans were being slaughtered in 1994. Officials from Europe to the US to the UN headquarters all responded by

Jan 20 2006

By Nicholas D. Kristof

Darfur: A Short History of a Long War
by Julie Flint and Alex de Waal
London: Zed Books, 176 pp., �12.00 (to be published in the US in
March)

Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide
by G�rard Prunier
Cornell University Press, 212 pp., $24.00

1.
During the Holocaust, the world looked the other way. Allied leaders
turned down repeated pleas to bomb the Nazi extermination camps or
the rail lines leading to them, and the slaughter attracted little
attention. My newspaper, The New York Times, provided meticulous
coverage of World War II, but of 24,000 front-page stories published
in that period only six referred on page one directly to the Nazi
assault on the Jewish population of Europe. Only afterward did many
people mourn the death of Anne Frank, construct Holocaust museums,
and vow: Never Again.

The same paralysis occurred as Rwandans were being slaughtered in
1994. Officials from Europe to the US to the UN headquarters all
responded by temporizing and then, at most, by holding meetings. The
only thing President Clinton did for Rwandan genocide victims was
issue a magnificent apology after they were dead.

Much the same has been true of the Western response to the Armenian
genocide of 1915, the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s, and the
Bosnian massacres of the 1990s. In each case, we have wrung our hands
afterward and offered the lame excuse that it all happened too fast,
or that we didn't fully comprehend the carnage when it was still
under way.

And now the same tragedy is unfolding in Darfur, but this time we
don't even have any sort of excuse. In Darfur genocide is taking
place in slow motion, and there is vast documentary proof of the
atrocities. Some of the evidence can be seen in the photo reproduced
with this essay, which was leaked from an African Union archive
containing thousands of other such photos. And now, the latest proof
comes in the form of two new books that tell the sorry tale of
Darfur: it's appalling that the publishing industry manages to
respond more quickly to genocide than the UN and world leaders do.

In my years as a journalist, I thought I had seen a full kaleidoscope
of horrors, from babies dying of malaria to Chinese troops shooting
students to Indonesian mobs beheading people. But nothing prepared me
for Darfur, where systematic murder, rape, and mutilation are taking
place on a vast scale, based simply on the tribe of the victim. What
I saw reminded me why people say that genocide is the worst evil of
which human beings are capable.

On one of the first of my five visits to Darfur, I came across an
oasis along the Chad border where several tens of thousands of people
were sheltering under trees after being driven from their home
villages by the Arab Janjaweed militia, which has been supported by
the Sudan government in Khartoum. Under the first tree, I found a man
who had been shot in the neck and the jaw; his brother, shot only in
the foot, had carried him for forty-nine days to get to this oasis.
Under the next tree was a widow whose parents had been killed and
stuffed in the village well to poison the local water supply; then
the Janjaweed had tracked down the rest of her family and killed her
husband. Under the third tree was a four-year-old orphan girl
carrying her one-year-old baby sister on her back; their parents had
been killed. Under the fourth tree was a woman whose husband and
children had been killed in front of her, and then she was gang-raped
and left naked and mutilated in the desert.

Those were the people I met under just four adjacent trees. And in
every direction, as far as I could see, were more trees and more
victims~Wall with similar stories.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There is no space in most newspaper articles to explain how this came
to pass, and that is why the recent books under review are
invaluable. The best introduction is Darfur: A Short History of a
Long War, by Julie Flint and Alex de Waal. Both writers are
intimately familiar with Darfur~WMs. Flint reportedly came close to
getting herself killed there when traveling with rebels in 2004~Wand
their accounts are as readable as they are tragic.

The killing in Darfur, a vast region in western Sudan, is not a case
of religious persecution, since the killers as well as the victims of
this genocide are Muslim. But, like the Christian and animist parts
of southern Sudan, Darfur has traditionally been neglected by the
Arabs (and before them, the British) who held power in Khartoum, the
Sudanese capital. Flint and de Waal write that the British colonial
rulers deliberately restricted education in Darfur to the sons of
chiefs, so as not to produce rabble-rousers who might challenge their
authority. As a result, in 1935, all of Darfur had only one
full-fledged elementary school. There was no maternity clinic until
the 1940s, and at independence in 1956 Darfur had fewer hospital beds
than any other part of Sudan. After independence, Sudan's own leaders
nationalized this policy of malign neglect.

One result was the terrible Darfur famine of 1984 and 1985, which de
Waal earlier made the subject of a powerful case study, Famine That
Kills.[1] That book has been reissued with a new preface because of
the interest in Darfur, and it makes the point that, in places like
Sudan, "'to starve' is transitive; it is something people do to each
other." The Darfur famine was the result not just of drought, but
also of reckless mismanagement and indifference in the Sudanese
government. It was transitive starvation.

During the 1980s and 1990s, ethnic antagonisms were also rising in
Darfur. The civil war in neighboring Chad spilled over into Darfur
and led some Arab tribes to adopt a supremacist ideology. Meanwhile,
the spread of the Sahara desert intensified the competition between
Arab and non-Arab tribes for water and forage.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The other book under review, G�rard Prunier's Darfur: The Ambiguous
Genocide, makes the point that the shorthand descriptions from Darfur
of Arabs killing black Africans are oversimplified. He's right~Wthere
has been intermarriage between tribes, and it's hardly accurate to
talk about Arabs killing Africans when they're all Africans. The
racial element is confusing, because to Western eyes, although not to
local people, almost everyone looks black. And of course the very
concept of an Arab is a loose one; with no consistent racial or
ethnic meaning, it normally refers to a person whose mother tongue is
Arabic.

But while shorthand descriptions are simplistic, they're also
essentially right. In Darfur, the cleavages between the Janjaweed and
their victims tend to be threefold. First, the Janjaweed and Sudanese
government leaders are Arabs and their victims in Darfur are members
of several non-Arab African tribes, particularly the Zaghawa, Fur,
and Masalit. Second, the killers are frequently lighter-skinned, and
they routinely use racial epithets about the "blacks" they are
killing and raping. Third, the Janjaweed are often nomadic herdsmen,
and the tribes they attack are usually settled farmers, so the
conflict also reflects the age-old tension between herders and
farmers.

The leader of the Janjaweed, whom the Sudanese government entrusted
with the initial waves of slaughter in Darfur, is usually said to be
Musa Hilal, the chief of an Arab nomadic tribe. His own hostility to
non-Arabs long predates the present genocide. Flint and de Waal quote
a former governor of Darfur as saying that Musa Hilal was recorded
back in 1988 as expressing gratitude for "the necessary weapons and
ammunition to exterminate the African tribes in Darfur." In the
mid-1990s, the early version of the Janjaweed (with the connivance of
Sudan's leaders) was responsible for the slaughter of at least two
thousand members of the Masalit tribe. In 2001 and 2002, there were
brutal attacks on villages belonging to the Fur and Zaghawa tribes.

The upshot was increasing alarm and unrest, particularly among the
three major non-Arab tribes in Darfur. Their militants began to
organize an armed movement against the Sudanese government, and in
June 2002 they attacked a police station. The beginning of their
rebellion is usually dated to early in 2003, when they burned
government garrisons and destroyed military aircraft at an air base.

That's when the Sudanese government, led by President Omar el-Bashir,
decided to launch a scorched-earth counterinsurgency campaign,
involving the slaughter of large numbers of people in Darfur. It was
difficult to use the army for this, though, partly because many
soldiers in the regular army were members of African tribes from
Darfur~Wand so it wasn't clear that they would be willing to wipe out
civilians from their own tribes. The Sudanese leadership therefore
decided to adopt the same strategy it had successfully employed
elsewhere in Sudan, using irregular militias to slaughter tribes that
had shown signs of resistance.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This wasn't a surprise decision. As Prunier writes: "The whole of GoS
[Government of Sudan] policy and political philosophy since it came
to power in 1989 has kept verging on genocide in its general
treatment of the national question in Sudan." Flint and de Waal call
this "counterinsurgency on the cheap" and note:

In Bahr el Ghazal in 1986~V88, in the Nuba Mountains in 1992~V95, in
Upper Nile in 1998~V2003, and elsewhere on just a slightly smaller
scale, militias supported by military intelligence and aerial
bombardment attacked with unremitting brutality. Scorched earth,
massacre, pillage and rape were the norm.
In other words, when Sudan's leaders were faced with unrest in
Darfur, their instinctive response was to start massacring civilians.
It had worked before, and it had aroused relatively little
international reaction. Among the few who vociferously protested the
brutal Sudanese policies in southern Sudan in the 1990s were American
evangelical Christians, partly because many of the victims then were
Christians; some American evangelicals have complained to me that the
American press and television are now calling attention to Muslim
victims in Sudan after years of ignoring similar massacres of
Christians in southern Sudan in the past. The comparison they make
does not seem to me entirely convincing, but they have a point. It's
probably true that if there had been more reaction to Sudanese
brutality in the southern part of the country during the 1990s, the
government might not have been so quick to launch genocidal attacks
in Darfur.

After it had decided to crush the incipient rebellion in Darfur,
Sudan's government released Arab criminals from prison and turned
them over to the custody of Musa Hilal so that they could join the
Janjaweed. The government set up training camps for the Janjaweed,
gave them assault rifles, truck-mounted machine guns, and artillery.
Recruits received $79 a month if they were on foot, or $117 if they
had a horse or camel. They also received Sudanese army uniforms with
a special badge depicting an armed horseman. Prunier quotes a
survivor from one of the attacks that quickly followed:

The Janjaweed were accompanied by soldiers. They attacked the people,
saying: "You are opponents to the regime, we must crush you. As you
are Black, you are like slaves. Then the entire Darfur region will be
in the hands of the Arabs. The government is on our side. The
government plane is on our side, it gives us food and ammunition."
Flint and de Waal quote a young man who hid under a dead mule and was
the only survivor in his family:

[The attackers] took a knife and cut my mother's throat and threw her
into the well. Then they took my oldest sister and began to rape her,
one by one. My father was kneeling, crying and begging them for
mercy. After that they killed my brother and finally my father. They
threw all the bodies in the well.
2.
Initially, the Sudanese government didn't even try hard to hide what
was happening. President Omar el-Bashir went on television after a
massacre in which 225 peasants were killed to declare: "We will use
all available means, the Army, the police, the mujahideen, the
horsemen, to get rid of the rebellion." Later, Sudan would pretend
that the killings were the result of tribal conflicts and banditry,
and deny that it had any control over the Janjaweed. That is false.
Today, the Janjaweed and the Sudanese army work hand in hand as they
have in the past.

**Gavur** · 01-22-2006, 12:06 AM

Cont....

On my last visit to Darfur, in November, while I was driving back
from a massacre site where thirty-seven villagers had been
slaughtered, I saw a convoy of Janjaweed. This was on a main road
with soldiers staffing checkpoints, and in fact I had in my car a
soldier who had demanded a ride. None of the soldiers paid any
attention to the Janjaweed.

Maybe the authorities had no time to stop the Janjaweed because they
were so busy trying to prevent journalists and aid workers from
seeing what was happening. At one checkpoint, the secret police tried
to arrest my local interpreter. They told me to drive on and leave
him behind; I refused, fearing that that might be the end of him. So
they detained me as well (they eventually summoned a higher commander
who freed us both). It's clear that if the Sudanese government simply
applied the current restrictions on foreign journalists to the
Janjaweed, the genocide would quickly come to an end.

There has been some debate over whether what is unfolding is
genocide, and that's the reason G�rard Prunier in his subtitle refers
to it as an "ambiguous genocide." The debate arises principally
because Sudan has not tried to exterminate every last member of the
Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa tribes. Typically, most young men are
killed but many others are allowed to flee.

Some people think that genocide means an attempt to exterminate an
entire ethnic group, but that was not the meaning intended by Rafael
Lemkin, who coined the word; nor is it the definition used in the
1948 Genocide Convention. The convention defines genocide as "acts
committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnic, racial or religious group, as such." The acts can include
killings, or injuries or psychological distress, or simply
restrictions on births; indeed, arguably the Genocide Convention
provides too lax a definition. But in any case there is no doubt that
in rural Darfur there has been a systematic effort to kill people and
wipe out specific tribes and that the killing amounts to genocide by
any accepted definition.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There has also been a growing appreciation in recent decades that
crimes against humanity often include sexual violence, and that has
been a central fact about the terror in Darfur. Indeed, the mass
rapes in Darfur have been among the most effective means for the
government to terrorize tribal populations, break their will, and
drive them away. Rape is feared all the more in Darfur for two
reasons. Most important, a woman who has been raped is ruined; in
some cases, she is evicted by her family and forced to build her own
hut and live there on her own. And not only is the woman shamed for
life, but so is her entire extended family. The second reason is that
the people in the region practice an extreme form of female genital
cutting, called infibulation, in which a girl's vagina is sewn shut
until marriage. Thus when an unmarried girl is raped, the act leads
to additional painful physical injuries; and the risk of HIV
transmission increases.

>>From the government's point of view, rape is a successful method of
control because it sows terror among the victimized population, and
yet it initially attracted relatively little attention from foreign
observers, because women are too ashamed to complain. As a result,
mass rape has been a routine feature of village attacks in every part
of Darfur, and it hasn't yet gotten the attention it deserves.

Moreover, rape and killings are not just a one-time event when the
Janjaweed attack and burn villages. Two million people have fled the
villages, and most have taken refuge in shantytown camps on the edge
of cities. The Janjaweed surround the camps and routinely attack
people when they go outside to gather firewood or plant vegetables.
In order to survive the victims must get firewood; but each time they
do so they risk being raped or killed.

After a day last year of interviewing a series of women and girls who
had been gang-raped outside Kalma camp, near Nyala, I asked the
families why they were sending women to gather firewood, when women
are more vulnerable to rape. The answer was simple. As one person
explained to me: "When the men go out, they're killed. The women are
only raped."

The Sudanese authorities initially denied that rapes were occurring,
and it repeatedly imprisoned women who became pregnant by rape~Wsaying
that they were guilty of adultery. Last year, a student who was
gang-raped sought treatment from a French aid organization in Kalma
camp, but an informer alerted the police, who rushed to the clinic,
burst inside, and arrested the girl. Two aid workers tried heroically
to protect her, but the police forcibly took her away~Wto a police
hospital where she was chained to a cot by one arm and one leg. The
government also made it difficult for aid groups to bring in
post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) kits, which reduce the risk of HIV in
rape victims when administered promptly.

Sexual violence is also sometimes directed at men, with castrations
not uncommon. At one roadblock, a mother named Mariam Ahmad was
forced to watch as the Janjaweed emasculated her three-week-old son,
who then died in her arms. But it is not clear that this is centrally
directed policy.

Since mid-2005, Western pressure has forced the Sudan government to
relent to some degree on sexual violence. It appears to have stopped
arresting rape victims, and it is allowing the use of PEP kits. But
as far as I can tell, rapes are continuing at the same pace as
before.

3.
As dispiriting as the genocide itself is the way most other nations
have acquiesced in it. You expect that from time to time, a
government may attack some part of its own people, but you might hope
that by the twenty-first century the world would react. Alas, that
hasn't happened. Indeed, the Armenian genocide of 1915 arguably
provoked greater popular outrage in America at the time than the
Darfur genocide does today.

As the killings began, the Bush administration was in a good position
to take the lead. President Bush had given high priority to ending
the war in southern Sudan (which is entirely separate from the war in
Darfur), and he achieved a tentative peace agreement to resolve the
north~Vsouth war after twenty years and the loss of two million lives.
That is one of Bush's most important foreign policy achievements, and
this means that his administration ~Wand the conservative Christians
in his base~Wwere particularly aware of events in Sudan. They were
among the first to make strong statements about Darfur, and it was
conservatives in Bush's own Agency for International Development who
led the way in trying to stop Darfur's violence when it first
erupted.

Yet as it turned out, the White House couldn't be bothered with
Darfur. The Democrats couldn't either for a long time, until finally
John Kerry made strong statements about the situation there in the
summer of 2004. Then, perhaps worrying about his legacy, Colin Powell
began taking a personal interest in Darfur. Finally, in early 2005,
the Bush administration declared that genocide was unfolding in
Darfur and sent large amounts of aid ~Wbut it refused to do anything
more. In effect, the US had provided abundant band-aids~Wso that when
children were slashed with machetes, we could treat their wounds. But
we did nothing about the attacks themselves.

Prunier captures the situation well:

President Bush tried to be all things to all men on the Sudan/ Darfur
question. Never mind that the result was predictably confused. What
mattered was that attractive promises could be handed around without
any sort of firm commitment being made. Predictably, the interest
level of US diplomacy on the Sudan question dropped sharply as soon
as President Bush was reelected....
In its usual way of treating diplomatic matters, the European Union
presented a spectacle of complete lack of resolve and coordination
over the Sudan problem in general and the Darfur question in
particular. The French only cared about protecting Idris Deby's
regime in Chad from possible destabilization; the British blindly
followed Washington's lead, only finding this somewhat difficult
since Washington was not very clear about which direction it wished
to take; the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands gave large
sums of money and remained silent; Germany made anti-GoS noises which
it never backed up with any sort of action and gave only limited
cash; and the Italians remained bewildered.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The UN has been similarly ineffectual. At one level, UN agencies have
been very effective in providing humanitarian aid; at another, they
have been wholly ineffective in challenging the genocide itself. That
is partly because Sudan is protected on the Security Council by
Russia and especially by China, a major importer of Sudanese oil.
China seems determined to underwrite some of the costs of the Darfur
genocide just as it did the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s. But the
UN's main problem is that it is too insistent on being diplomatic.
One of the heroes of Darfur is Mukesh Kapila, the former UN
humanitarian coordinator for Sudan, who almost two years ago warned:
"The only difference between Rwanda and Darfur now are the numbers
involved." But UN officials were disapproving of Kapila's
outspokenness, which they saw as a breach of etiquette. And Kofi
Annan, while trying to help Darfur, has been trapped in his innate
politeness. He should be using his position to express outrage about
the slaughter, but he seems incapable of the necessary degree of
fury.

News organizations have largely failed Darfur as well~Wparticularly
the television networks. A couple of decades ago, television provided
genuine news about the world; today, it mostly settles for brief and
superficial impressions, or for breathless blondes reporting on
missing blondes.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As a result of this collective failure, the situation in the region
has been getting much worse since about September 2005. The African
Union has lost some of the first troops it stationed there, a growing
portion of Darfur is becoming too dangerous as a place to distribute
food, and the rebels have been collapsing into fratricide. The UN has
estimated that if Darfur collapses completely then the death toll
there will reach 100,000 a month. Just as worrying, the instability
in Darfur has crossed over into neighboring Chad. There is a real
possibility that civil war will again break out there in the next
year or two, and that could be a cataclysm that would dwarf Darfur.

The sad thing is that much of the suffering of Darfur seems
unnecessary. The conflict there could probably be resolved. The
rebels are not seeking independence but simply greater autonomy and a
larger share of national resources. Neither of the books under review
concentrates on how to bring the disaster to an end, but we have some
good clues based in part on the peace settlement between the Sudan
government and the rebels in the south. The basic lesson from that
long negotiation is that Sudan's leaders will brazenly lie about
their repressive use of power, and you will get nowhere in dealings
with them unless you apply heavy pressure~Wand you have to be
perceptive about what kind of pressure will work.

In the case of Darfur, the solution is not to send American ground
troops; in my judgment, that would make things worse by allowing
Khartoum to rally nationalistic support against the American infidel
crusaders. But greater security is essential, and the African Union
troops that have been sent to Darfur are inadequate to the task of
providing it. The most feasible option is to convert them into a
"blue-hat" UN force and add to them UN and NATO forces. The US could
easily enforce a no-fly zone in Darfur by using the nearby Chadian
air base in Abech�. Then it could make a strong effort to arrange for
tribal conferences~Wthe traditional method of conflict settlement in
Darfur~Wand there is reason to hope that such conferences could work
to achieve peace. The Arab tribes have been hurt by the war as well,
and the tribal elders are much more willing to negotiate than the
Sudan government and the rebel leaders who are the parties to the
current peace negotiations.

Flint and de Waal give a telling account of the chief of the Baggara
Rizeigat Arabs, a seventy-year-old hereditary leader who has kept his
huge tribe out of the war and who is quietly advocating peace~Was well
as protecting non-Arabs in his territory. It would help enormously if
President Bush and Kofi Annan would jointly choose a prominent envoy,
like Colin Powell or James Baker, who would work with chieftains like
the head of the Baggara Rizeigat to achieve peace in Darfur. Such an
initiative is the best hope we have for peace.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The most obvious response to genocide~Wstrong and widely broadcast
expressions of outrage~Wwould also be one of the most effective.
Sudan's leaders are not Taliban-style extremists. They are ruthless
opportunists, and they adopted a strategy of genocide because it
seemed to be the simplest method available. If the US and the UN
raise the cost of genocide, they will adopt an alternative response,
such as negotiating a peace settlement. Indeed, whenever the
international community has mustered some outrage about Darfur, then
the level of killings and rapes subsides.

But outrage at genocide is tragi-cally difficult to sustain. There
are only a few groups that are trying to do so: university students
who have led the anti-genocide campaign and formed groups like the
Genocide Intervention Network; Jewish humanitarian organizations, for
whom the word "genocide" has intense meaning; the Smith College
professor Eric Reeves, who has helped lead the campaign to protest
the genocide; some US churches; and aid workers who daily brave the
dangers of Dar-fur (like the one who chronicles her experiences in
the blog "Sleepless in Sudan"[2] ). Some organizations, like Human
Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group, have also produced a
series of excellent reports on Darfur~Wunderscoring that this time the
nations of the world know exactly what they are turning away from and
cannot claim ignorance.

Sad to say, one of the best books for understanding the lame
international response is Samantha Power's superb "A Problem from
Hell": America and the Age of Genocide[3]~Weven though it was written
too early even to mention Darfur. But when you read Power's account
of international dithering as Armenians, Jews, Bosnians, and others
were being slaughtered, you realize that the pattern today is almost
exactly the same. Once again, the international response has been to
debate whether the word "genocide" is really appropriate, to point
out that the situation is immensely complex, to shrug that it's
horrifying but that there's nothing much we can do. The slogan "Never
Again" is being transformed into "One More Time."

Notes
[1] Oxford University Press, 1989; revised 2005.

[2] See sleeplessinsudan.blogspot.com.

[3] Basic Books, 2002.

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