STOPPING THE KILLING IN DARFUR IS NOT ON SUDAN’S AGENDA
by Frank Chalk
26 October 2005

The Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur to the United Nations Secretary-General concluded in January 2005 that:

"the Government of the Sudan and the Janjaweed are responsible for serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law amounting to crimes under international law. In particular, the Commission found that Government forces and militias conducted indiscriminate attacks, including killing of civilians, torture, enforced disappearances, destruction of villages, rape and other forms of sexual violence, pillaging and forced displacement, throughout Darfur. These acts were conducted on a widespread and systematic basis, and therefore may amount to crimes against humanity.”

Central to stopping the crimes against humanity already underway and mounting in Darfur are two key sets of factors:

1) the mandate of the African Union forces in Darfur, the capacity of those forces to provide security to refugees and internally displaced persons in the western Sudan, and the willingness of leaders of the African Union to react decisively to prevent the commission of further attacks on civilians in Darfur; and

2) the intentions of the Government of Sudan: is it serious about settling the grievances of the people of Darfur against the government in Khartoum and its local allies in Darfur?

The mandate of the roughly 5,000 troops in the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) is too weak to implement the responsibility to protect civilians in Darfur. They are chiefly mandated to oversee the ceasefire and protect the monitoring force on the ground. Their responsibilities do not include the protection of civilians except for those civilians whom they encounter under imminent threat and in the immediate vicinity of their bases. The mandate of AMIS must be expanded to include the protection of civilians. But even an expanded mandate will be meaningless unless the capacity of AMIS to protect civilians is significantly enlarged.

To patrol an area the size of France with a handful of helicopters and armored personnel carriers is a perfect example of a “mission impossible.” Yet that is what we will be asking the African Union troops to do if they achieve a more robust mandate. The Government of Sudan seems determined to sabotage any enlargement of their capacity to protect civilians. Khartoum is blocking the delivery of the 105 Grizzly armored personnel carriers donated by Canada, according to a recent International Crisis Group (ICG) report. The Government of Sudan also created an artificial shortage of JetA1 airplane fuel in July by closing down the only refinery in Sudan producing it. In one stroke it forced the World Food Program to drastically curtail its airdrops of food to southern Sudan during the famine season and undermined deliveries of food to Darfur where the World Food Program is feeding over 2 million people. Canada has chartered five helicopters to aid the African Union in carrying out its mission, but they will not fly for very long without a reliable supply of fuel.

The evidence that the Government of Sudan is not serious about negotiating an end to the Darfur crisis extends beyond obstructing deliveries of equipment to the African Union forces and creating fuel shortages. Intelligence analysts learned during World War Two that what a government broadcasts to its people in their own language is often a highly accurate predictor of that government’s future behavior. This summer, I studied BBC Monitoring Service’s translations of Arabic broadcasts and press releases originated by the Government of Sudan and its press agencies. I wanted to discover what the Government in Khartoum was doing to prepare its people for an accommodation with the rebels in Darfur.

 A persistent and significant pattern emerged: in its Arabic language broadcasts and press releases issued from mid-July until today, intended for domestic consumption, the Government of Sudan tells the Sudanese that the Darfur rebels are solely responsible for stalling the peace process initiated by the Government, that the rebels are the sole initiators of the violence in Darfur, and that all Western accusations against Sudan are baseless. But they never mention the specific accusations; the charges of crimes against humanity leveled against the Government of Sudan by the U.N.'s International Commission on Darfur are ignored. The Government actually referred indirectly and misleadingly to the International Commission report in September 2004 to discredit Colin Powell’s charge before a committee of the U.S. Senate describing the situation in Darfur as genocide. But it failed once more to mention that the report to the UN alleged crimes against humanity.

As the situation in Darfur continues to deteriorate, the International Crisis Group has declared: "Either the parties must radically change behavior and respect their commitments, or AMIS must be expanded in both size and mandate, and given the support it needs. Given this conflict's history, the latter is the only real option today." Noting the Government of Sudan's refusal to acknowledge to its own people that it stands accused of crimes against humanity, and its failure to change its behavior on the ground in Darfur, we can only agree with this recommendation.

*Frank Chalk is a history professor at Concordia and co-director of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies. The all-day conference which he has organized to explore Canada’s options on Darfur will be keynoted in Montreal by Lt.-Gen. Romeo Dallaire on Tuesday, 1 November at 9:00 a.m. in Concordia’s Hall Building. The conference is free and open to the public. The full program is available at: http://migs.concordia.ca