In Our View: Sanctions not enough for Sudan

The Daily Herald
Wednesday, September 22, 2004

While most of the country’s attention has been focused on Iraq, a
human-rights crisis has been unfolding in north Africa.

In Darfur, Sudan, more than 50,000 people have been killed and 1.2
million displaced by Arab militias — the Janjaweed — since February
2003. That is when rebel groups in Darfur accused the Arab-led
government in Khartoum of discrimination and neglect.

Many of the displaced are in refugee camps where starvation and
disease run rampant.

The United Nations, at the behest of the United States, is responding
to the crisis but, as usual, not with the forcefulness the situation
demands. The U.N. Security Council voted to impose sanctions on the
country and its oil industry if the government fails to curb the
violence, and the United Nations will appoint a committee to determine
if the killings of Africans by the Arab militias constitute genocide.

Allow us to save the United Nations the time and trouble: It’s
genocide.

When one group sets out to annihilate another because of racial,
ethnic or religious differences, that’s the plain and simple
definition. There is no magic number you have to reach. Just look at
what happened in Hitler’s Germany, Rwanda, Kosovo, Bosnia, Tibet and
Armenia, just to name a few places where man’s inhumanity to man came
to full flower.

Sanctions are a legitimate tool in the diplomatic arsenal for dealing
with misbehaving countries. But it’s not always the right tool for the
job. And it is definitely not the right one to fight genocide.

The main problem is that any sanction takes time to be felt. It is,
after all, an economic version of siege warfare, in which one side
tries to outlast the other. That may work in cases of forcing a
government to drop a weapons program or to stop supporting terrorist
activities. But it does nothing to halt genocide. Before the pinch of
sanctions is felt Sudan, the death toll could easily double or triple.

Sanctions won’t persuade the Janjaweed and its supporters in the
government to mend their ways. Instead, they may accelerate the
killing as the perpetrators blame the people in Darfur for their
latest woe.

The correct response to genocide is military force. The only way for
the killing to stop is to confront the Janjaweed with
force. Interposing an army is the only way to stop the genocide in its
tracks and safeguard the victims of the planned extermination.

Sadly, the United Nations doesn’t have a good track record when using
its own force for this sort of job. U.N. peacekeepers stood by
helplessly, for example, while Serbian troops slaughtered people in
the former Yugoslavia. But the United Nations can at least authorize
African nations to send in their own troops — forces that know the
territory and the enemy they’re up against.

A force composed mostly of Africans would negate any claim that action
was undertaken as a reprise of European colonialism or
imperialism. Rather, it would be seen as Africans helping their own
people. An all-African force would make outside intervention
unnecessary. The United States, for example, is already spread thin
around the world and is not in the best position to do the United
Nations’ heavy lifting in Sudan.

Since World War II, the civilized world has said “Never again” to
genocide. It’s time to put guns behind that sentiment.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A6.