International failure to investigate atrocity
crimes in Darfur and subsequently in South Kordofan sustains a climate of
impunity that increases the likelihood of war---and sends a
dangerous message to tyrants everywhere
Eric Reeves
June 7, 2012
The Face of Impunity
In June of last year massive atrocity crimes
were committed by military, paramilitary, and intelligence forces of the
Khartoum regime in the major town of Kadugli, capital of South Kordofan in
(northern) Sudan. To be sure, such crimes were committed elsewhere,
and continue to this day---in the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan, in Blue
Nile State (where major conflict began on September 1), and in the form of
aerial attacks on refugees in the new Republic of South Sudan. I
have chronicled many of these atrocities over
the past year. But the events in Kadugli were singularly well
reported and utterly appalling. And yet nine months later, despite demands from
the UN, the U.S., the EU, and human rights organizations for an unfettered
international human rights investigation, nothing has been done to confirm the
horrific reports that emerged during this month of widespread, ethnically
targeted violence. Nothing has been done to hold accountable those
responsible, and the self-righteous words from various international actors of
consequence have all proved vacuous. I
predicted precisely as much last August, and was dismissed.
Now, against the present backdrop of desperate
need for humanitarian access to many hundreds of thousands of civilians
throughout South Kordofan and Blue Nile---cut off from all relief aid by
Khartoum, an action that is itself a crime against humanity---it
becomes increasingly unlikely that a human rights investigation will ever move
to the top of the international agenda. Moreover, recent violence along the border between Sudan and South
Sudan---instigated by Khartoum and coming perilously close to
triggering renewed all-out war---has commandeered all available diplomatic
capacity.
What we are likely to see in the end is not a
human rights investigation but rather something much more like what was
reported two days ago (April 5, 2012) by Radio
Dabanga. The focus of the dispatch was the mass gravesites holding
the bodies of Fur men and boys massacred by Khartoum's génocidaires in the Wadi
Saleh area of West Darfur in spring 2004, massacres documented by both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International:
Authorities hire new settlers to destroy evidence of mass graves
[Radio Dabanga:
Wadi Saleh, West Darfur (April 5, 2012)]
"Sudanese
authorities in the Wadi Salih area of West Darfur are reportedly hiring new
settlers to destroy the evidence of mass graves in the area. Eyewitnesses said
that government authorities have hired groups of new settlers to clear the
evidence of mass graves particularly in Mukjar, Bindisi, Arwala, Deleig and
Sundu. The groups were reportedly told to burn all traces of bodies and bones
to destroy all evidence of extra-judicial killing by the government or its
militias. Witnesses said Daif al Summah, Al Sadig Salona and Korin Kwei were
hired by Ali Kushayb to oversee this operation. They noted that this process
began following the international criminal court issuing an arrest warrant for
the Sudanese defence minister Abdel Rahim Mohamed Hussein, wanted for alleged
war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in the Wadi Salih area of West
Darfur. Kushayb is also wanted by the ICC, accused by Luis Ocampo of ordering
killings, rapes and looting of civilians from 2003 - 2004 in Darfur."
Here we have Janjaweed leader Ali Kushayb
reportedly receiving instructions from Defense Minister Abdel Rahim Mohamed
Hussein (who was Minister of the Interior during the years in question)---both
indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.
The connection to South Kordofan and the present
border fighting and humanitarian crises? Ahmed Haroun, now
Khartoum's governor of South Kordofan, has also been indicted by the ICC for
crimes against humanity---and worked directly for Hussein in Darfur, serving as
a key implementing partner in the early stages of the genocide. And
as if to confirm his status as a war criminal, Haroun recently declared in an interview tape-recorded by al-Jazeera his attitude
towards troops of the Sudan People's Liberation Army/North (SPLA/N):
"don't bring them back alive, we have no space for them." A
native Arabic speaker from the north of Sudan has confirmed to me the
impressive precision of the al-Jazeera English translation of Haroun's address
to troops before an assault on an SPLA/N base: "You must hand over their
base clean, swept, rubbed, crushed. Don't bring them back alive, we
have no space for them." Off camera, al-Jazeera reports, Haroun
declared further, "we don't want administrative costs," i.e., the
"costs" entailed in treating prisoners-of-war in accord with the
Geneva Conventions.
In another extraordinary
interview with al-Jazeera, senior regime adviser Rabi Abdel Atti refused
to criticize Haroun's directive, and indeed at one point in the interview
characterized the policy of taking no prisoners as "absolutely
correct" in the context of rebellion in South Kordofan. Asked
repeatedly about actions that clearly contravene international law, Atti gave
no sign whatsoever of caring about such violations. This is the very face of
impunity and intransigence, but it is hardly surprising, certainly not to
Southern Sudanese and their comrades-in-arms in the Nuba and Blue
Nile. It has long been Khartoum's policy not to take prisoners; but
in the absence of an international outcry and concrete evidence---unavailable
for the most part from the remote fronts of a civil war between a guerrilla
movement and a ruthless national army---Khartoum's regular and militia forces
felt no compunction about killing prisoners.
Unsurprisingly, the regime's sense of impunity
only grew during the years of civil war, and carried over to its conduct of genocidal
counter-insurgency in Darfur. There, despite the presence of the world's
largest peacekeeping force (the UN/AU Mission in Darfur, or UNAMID), vast areas
are of Darfur are still marked by constant violence against civilians,
including rape, brutal extortion by militia and paramilitary forces, and murder---all of which occur without
judicial or other consequences (see a compendium of the very most recent
violent events in Darfur as reported by Radio Dabanga, Appendix 1).
It is the failure to recognize the central
reality of massive insecurity facing non-Arab or African civilians that
apparently led to the deeply misconceived and ill-informed reporting by
the New York Times from
Nyuru, West Darfur (February 26, 2012). Guided by the self-serving
assessments of UNAMID, New York
Times correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman reports a factitious success story,
implying in his dispatch that some 100,000 refugees have returned from eastern
Chad to Darfur, thereby escaping a kind of "serfdom." Not
only does the Chad representative of the UN High Commission for Refugees
(UNHCR) deny any such large-scale repatriation, but so do the Darfuri refugee
leaders at all twelve camps in eastern Chad. A Darfuri recently back
from West Darfur has emphatically declared that there are no significant
returns from Chad (email received April 4, 2012); humanitarians on the ground
also indicate that they have seen no sign of large-scale returns (email received
from Darfur, April 5, 2012). In fact, data from the UNHCR and UN Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs make clear that over since UNAMID
assumed its mandate on January 1, 2008, including more than 100,000 in the last
year (mostly from Shangil Tobaya and Khor Abeche).
What Gettleman has done---according to one
highly informed and deeply knowledgeable Western analyst who has long worked in
the region---is allow himself "to be totally manipulated by the
UN," this in line with an ongoing "propaganda" campaign in
support of Khartoum's "New Strategy for Darfur." The purpose of this
campaign, which Gettleman unwittingly assists, is to suggest (according to my
source) that "people are returning en masse"; this in turn aids
Khartoum in its attempt to shift priorities: "early recovery and
development, not aid, should be prioritized," according to repeated
pronouncements by Khartoum. And with this shift, the raison d'être
for the still large humanitarian presence in Darfur disappears, and witnesses
to further atrocity crimes are eliminated.
Notably, this same highly informed
professional observer of Darfur puts the total number of displaced Darfuris
living in eastern Chad outside the camps at roughly 10,000 - 20,000, mostly
near Birak. He excoriates the slickly produced UNAMID website, which
serves as little more than a mouthpiece for Khartoum's mendacious
"Humanitarian Aid Commission." (Gettleman irresponsibly
credits UNAMID's authority without qualification). Thus even though the UN High
Commission for Refugees insists that its rosters for eastern Chad include
282,000 Darfuris, HAC, via UNAMID, declares the number to
be 100,000. In short, the UN is funding Khartoum's
propaganda efforts instead of protecting the people of Darfur and making
returns possible---and ultimately, the New
York Times has assisted in a propaganda effort that is working to
consolidate ethnically-
Even more dismaying are the suggestions that
the people interviewed by Gettleman were not Darfuris at all, but rather---as
has often been reported by human rights groups and Darfuris---Arab settlers
from other countries in the region (particularly Chad and
Niger). Radio Dabanga reported on March
30, 2012:
"The 12
[refugee] camp leaders [in eastern Chad] said the insistence of the Sudanese
government and the UN/African Union Mission in Darfur to tell the international
media that refugees are beginning voluntary return is to deceive the world into
thinking peace and stability have returned to Darfur. [ ] From the
interviews conducted with camp leaders and UNHCR it appears that the New York Times was misled by
[UNAMID official Dysane] Dorani and the residents in place are in fact new
settlers and not Darfuri villagers."
Most ominously, only 50 miles from Gettleman's
dateline of Nyuru lies Deleig, site of one of the worst massacres in the Wadi
Saleh area that was so terribly ravaged in 2003 - 2004. It was here, according
to one member of the investigating team for the UN Commission of Inquiry (COI;
fall 2004 - January 2005), that COI forensic investigators on the team were not
allowed to put a spade in the soil (interview with Sgt. Deborah Bodkin
[Waterloo, Ontario police detective] at Concordia University: November). And in
Deleig, unreported by anyone but Radio Dabanga---with an extraordinary network
of contacts on the ground---efforts have begun to sanitize atrocity crimes
scenes, including not only Deleig but also Mukjar, Bindisi, Arwala, and
Sundu. And whether we look to the east, the west, the north or the
south, a brutal violence continues to stalk African civilians, creating a
pervasive insecurity that prevents the vast majority from leaving camps in
Darfur or eastern Chad except at great risk (risks sometimes taken in
desperation during the planting and harvest seasons, this in an attempt to
obtain food and preserve traditional claims to their lands).
[ For further relevant dispatches from Radio
Dabanga on the New York Times
journalistic debacle, see Appendix 2 ]
Easing the Road to Genocide
What do atrocity crimes in Darfur have to do
with the present crises in the border regions of Sudan/South
Sudan? What is the connection to a vast humanitarian crisis that has
put more than half a million lives at risk in South Kordofan, Blue Nile, and
refugee camps in South Sudan, including more than 100,000 who were forced to flee from
Abyei following Khartoum's military seizure of the region in
May 2011?
We may look at present challenges throughout
greater Sudan from various perspectives; and certainly the threat of mass
starvation in South Kordofan and Blue Nile, engineered by Khartoum's génocidaires, is the most
urgent. But even here the regime has learned well its lessons of
obduracy in Darfur, and we should not be surprised that an agreement on humanitarian access presented by the African
Union, the League of Arab States, and the United Nations more
than two months ago has been repeatedly put off by Khartoum, even as it was
signed on February 9 by the northern rebel group known as the Sudan People's
Liberation Movement/Army-North (SPLM/A-N). As a means of further
delay, Khartoum has conducted its own humanitarian assessment and found that the food situation is "normal" in
the affected regions, even as journalists and refugees present a
picture of starvation already underway, and famine looming perilously
close. And with the normal start of the rainy season less than a
month away, there is precious little time to pre-position food and critical
non-food items (shelter, mosquito netting, soap, water drilling and
purification resources, medical supplies). Human mortality is likely
to be appalling---as it has been in Darfur, largely because of Khartoum's
obstruction, harassment, and intimidation of humanitarian relief efforts in the
region.
But neither the humanitarian crisis nor the
military threats diminish in the slightest the atrocity crimes in Kadugli
reported by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP), and
countless escaping eyewitnesses, often speaking to journalists as they fled or
hid. These are crimes that demand to be investigated, particularly
those that occasioned the digging of the many mass
gravesites. Certainly this was the conclusion of the report
by observer son the ground in Kadugli throughout the terrible month of
June 2011. They recommended,
"That the UN
Security Council mandate the establishment of a commission of inquiry or other
appropriate investigative authority, including the Prosecutor of the
International Criminal Court, to conduct a comprehensive investigation into the
violence in Southern Kordofan and violations of human rights and humanitarian
laws and to identify the perpetrators or those who bear the greatest
responsibility, with the view to bringing them to justice."
Their insistence could not have been more
emphatic, or more futile:
"The attacks
on UNMIS, its staff and assets are so egregious that condemnation is
insufficient. The conduct of [Khartoum's] Sudan Armed Forces, the Popular
Defense Forces, the Central Reserve Police Force, and the Government Police,
singularly and collectively, has frustrated and weakened the capacity of the
UNMIS to implement in Southern Kordofan a mandate given to it by the UN
Security Council. The conduct has also resulted in loss of life and injury of
UN staff. The international community must hold the Government of Sudan
accountable for its conduct and insist that it arrest and bring to justice
those responsible."
What are some of the specifics from the scores
of incidents reported in this UN human rights assessment?
"Instead of
distinguishing between civilians and combatants and accordingly directing their
military operations only against military targets, the SAF and allied
paramilitary forces have targeted members and supporters of the SPLM/A, most of
whom are Nubans and other dark-skinned people."
"On 6 June,
the second day of the conflict, a physician at Kadugli Hospital confirmed that
four civilians were killed in Kadugli and Um Durein Localities---two from Um
Durein and two from Talodi Locality. Medical officers reported that military
roadblocks in Kadugli prevented ambulances from reaching wounded persons in
need of urgent medical assistance."
"On 9 June,
while on route from the UNMIS Protective Perimeter to their home in Hagar Al
Nar district of Kadugli to retrieve food and belongings, a group of nine
relatives were confronted by Central Reserve Police personnel who shot and
killed two of them. One of the survivors informed UNMIS Human Rights that the
fate of his remaining six relatives who fled from the scene remains unknown.
Eyewitnesses confirmed the incident and pleaded for humanitarian agencies to
provide food assistance to IDPs in order to avoid recurrence of similar
incidents."
"UNMIS Human
Rights received information that on 15 June, eight civilians of Nuban descent
were killed while attempting to retrieve some of their belongings from Al
Gardut Locality of Kadugli Town. An eyewitness reported that another four young
males of the Nuban ethnic group were killed near the Kadugli airport after
being arrested at a checkpoint attempting to leave the state. This individual
pleaded with UNMIS to assist in protection of civilians and provide the
transport of church members to safety in Southern Sudan."
"On the evening
of 22 June, SAF surrounded the UNMIS Team site compound in Kadugli with three
heavy artillery gun-mounted vehicles pointed at the compound from three points,
including the front gate. This occurred following the arrest and interrogation
of six UNMIS national staff early in the day by SAF military intelligence at
the Kadugli airport."
"[On 20 June]
UNMIS Human Rights also observed a well known National Security agent wearing a
Sudan Red Crescent reflective vest intimidating IDPs. When approached and questioned
by UNMIS Human Rights the agent identified himself as a NSS agent and said he
had received instructions from state-level authorities to move out IDPs from
the UNMIS Protective Perimeter. IDPs interviewed said that they were informed
by Sudan Red Crescent personnel that they must evacuate the Protective
Perimeter by 16:00 and that they feared the Central Reserve Police would
evacuate them forcibly if they did not leave the premises. UNMIS Human Rights
confirmed that by 17:00, approximately 75 per cent of the 11,000 IDPs in the
vicinity of the Protective Perimeter had vacated the area."
To this day, there has been no accounting for
these missing 8,000 civilians, all of whom had very good reason to seek the
protection of the UN. It is difficult not to conclude that they fill
the larger gravesites.
Reports from civilians speaking with news
organizations and to expatriate groups were just as chilling. Nuba were systematically stopped at checkpoints grimly similar
to those once seen in Rwanda. One aid worker who had recently escaped from
South Kordofan told McClatchy News,
"Those [Nuba] coming in are saying, 'Whenever they see you are a black
person, they kill you.'" Another Nuba aid worker reported that an Arab
militia leader made clear that their orders were simple: to "just
clear."
Yet another Nuba resident of Kadugli told
Agence France-Presse that he had been informed by a member of the
paramilitary Popular Defense Forces that they had been provided plenty of
weapons and ammunition, and a standing order: "He said that they had clear
instructions: just sweep away the rubbish. If you see a Nuba, just clean
it up .… He told me he saw two trucks of people with their hands
tied and blindfolded, driving out to where diggers were making holes for
graves on the edge of town."
Mass gravesites, capable of holding many
thousands of dead bodies, were identified by the Satellite Sentinel Project by
means of grimly unambiguous satellite photography published on July 14 and August 17.
Though greeted with perverse and
untenable skepticism by Obama’s special envoy for Sudan, Princeton Lyman,
evidence continued to pour in, both from the ground and further. Indeed,
yet further confirmation of the mass graves came from a July 1 report released by the
International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies:
"the Sudan Red Crescent Society, reportedly acting on instructions from
the Government of South Kordofan, has been actively collecting dead bodies in
Kadugli town, and had at least 415 body bags and 2,000 plastic tarps
recently transferred to it from the IFRC prior to the fighting in June. By the end of
June, the SRCS was publicly saying it needed more body bags" (emphasis added).
To say that the international response to the
UN human rights report has been tepid hardly captures the abject moral failure
of those countries that have nominally accepted the "responsibility to
protect" endangered and unprotected civilians. Asked in late June
about reports that had already emerged from South Kordofan, Lyman would say only: "We
certainly have reports of [atrocity crimes]. Because we don't have a presence
there, we haven't been able to investigate it fully. There are certainly
reports of targeted killings. There are some reports from the other side also.
What we've asked for is a full investigation." And to the follow-up
question ("By whom [should the investigation be conducted]?") Lyman
responded: "Well, by the UN would be the best. The UN presence has not
been sufficient to get out and stop this or to investigate
it." And yet the U.S. has done nothing to push effectively for such a UN investigation.
"...
accountability for human rights violations that have occurred in [South
Kordofan and Blue Nile] is critical to a lasting resolution of the conflict. We
will continue to push for a credible, independent investigation of violations
of human rights that will contribute to efforts to bring those responsible to
account. Unfortunately, to date, there has been insufficient support in the UN
Security Council for such an investigation."
Here again a U.S. "push" for
accountability ended with the mere mouthing of words thought to be politically
obligatory on such an occasion. Certainly Lyman knows full well the
names of those most "responsible," and for reasons of expediency
refuses to name them.
For its part, the most the European Union
could muster was a press release in late August that was guaranteed to gain
no news profile; it cited the little-known
Kristalina Georgieva, EU Commissioner responsible
for International Cooperation, Humanitarian Aid and Crisis
Response: "A recent report from the UN highlights the perpetration of
human rights abuses in South Kordofan since fighting started in June and calls
for an investigation as a follow-up to these findings." Hardly a
statement likely to push forward such an investigation.
Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for
Human Rights, August that "what [the UN report] suggests has been
happening in Southern Kordofan is so serious that it is essential there is an
independent, thorough and objective inquiry with the aim of holding perpetrators
to account."
But Pillay has let this "essential"
matter drop completely, and indeed distinguished herself mainly by expediently
revising the original UN human rights report so as to blunt its findings when
presented to the UN Security Council (she also offered supremely to Ahmed
Haroun's demand of his troops that "they bring no prisoners back":
"Such comments" said Pillay, "are extremely worrying in this
context and could amount to incitement") (emphasis
added). And Valerie Amos, head of UN humanitarian operations, declared on
July 15: "We do not know whether there is any truth to the
grave allegations of extra-judicial killings, mass graves and other grave
violations in South Kordofan." Unless we credit Amos with complete
ignorance of the UN human rights report, leaked publicly two weeks earlier by a
senior Western diplomat, then we must conclude that she is
lying. And we must wonder what Khartoum makes of such factitious
skepticism.
Unsurprisingly---given this diffidence,
expediency, and mendacity---Khartoum steadfastly refused to allow any
investigation, if only because the regime is fully aware of what is contained
in these well-documented mass gravesites. Instead of allowing an
investigation, Khartoum has continued with its savage aerial bombardment of
civilians and civilian targets throughout the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile
(where Khartoum began its military assault on September 1). The
planting and harvesting seasons were deliberately disrupted by such aerial
attacks, ensuring massive food deficits that are now biting deeply, with no
humanitarian response in sight.
There have seen several high-profile trips
into the Nuba Mountains by notable international figures, and all come back
with some version of the account offered by the outspoken Mukesh Kapila, UN
humanitarian chief in Sudan when the Darfur genocide began in earnest in April
2003. In a reprise of comments that would cost him his job in 2004,
Kapila, on returning from his own dangerous trip to the Nuba, declared (March 11, 2012) that on the basis of what he'd
seen: "Sudan hosted the first genocide of the century in Darfur, and the
second one is unfolding in Nuba."
For those skeptical about whether Khartoum's
ambitions are genocidal or not, Reuters recently provided a comment made by President Omar al-Bashir on
the occasion of the election of his candidate for governor last May (Ahmed
Haroun, wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity
and war crimes in Darfur): "If the people here refuse to honour the
results of the election [in South Kordofan], then we will force them back into
the mountains and prevent them from having food just as we did
before." Al-Bashir is here referring to the total humanitarian
embargo imposed on the Nuba Mountains in the 1990s as part of a campaign to
annihilate the Nuba people, reflecting ambitions that virtually all observers
of Sudan characterize as genocidal.
Here we might juxtapose the June 28 assessment of Lyman: "I
don't think the North [Khartoum's SAF] is capable of dislodging large numbers
of people on an ethnic basis from the Nuba Mountains. Second, I'm not
sure that's the objective of the government." By December, the UN was
estimating that more than 400,000 people in the Nuba Mountains and Blue
Nile had been displaced by Khartoum's ethnically targeted
violence and destruction of agricultural production; thousands more have
displaced every week since, and only Khartoum's military stranglehold on much
of the perimeter of the Nuba has prevented many additional tens of thousands
from fleeing toward South Sudan.
Patterns and Antecedents
Khartoum's broader ambitions were evident well
before the May 21, 2011 seizure of the contested Abyei region by
Khartoum's Sudan Armed Forces, in contravention of the Abyei
Protocol of the Comprehensive Peace Act (2005) and the determination of Abyei's
boundaries by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (July 2009). But certainly the
lack of any effective response to this military collapsing of diplomatic
efforts sent a disastrous signal to Khartoum; what we are seeing in the
aftermath is in too many ways a function of this initial weak-willed
acquiescence. The military assault on Kadugli and South Kordofan
began only two weeks after the seizure of Abyei, and on Blue Nile two months
subsequently.
These events are not discrete; they are not a
concatenation of unfortunate developments; they derive directly, all of them,
from a refusal to confront Khartoum and recognize the regime for what it is.
Despite Lyman's conviction that Khartoum is neither capable nor committed to
"dislodging large numbers of people on an ethnic basis from the Nuba
Mountains," the evidence suggests just how misguided he has
been. Moreover, massive displacement has already thoroughly
compromised both planting and harvesting in the Nuba and Blue
Nile. Khartoum's ground forces and militia allies have destroyed
large quantities of foodstocks. As a direct consequence, in early
October the UN Food and Agriculture Organization predicted that because of the
violence, harvests in the region would "generally fail." By November
the Famine Early Warning Network (FEWSNet) was warning that near-famine conditions would be seen by
March without humanitarian relief. March has come and
gone, and people are in fact already starving, or dying from the results of
malnutrition. Mortality will soon accelerate dramatically, even as
the international community dithers.
Refugees from Blue Nile and South Kordofan who
have reached Ethiopia and South Sudan now number roughly 150,000, and the
expectation is strong among relief workers that this number will spike sharply
before the rainy season, even as humanitarian conditions are already
grim. More than 100,000 Dinka Ngok, displaced last May by Khartoum's
military seizure of the region, remain in poor conditions in South Sudan, with
no prospect of returns in substantial numbers. And within Blue Nile
and South Kordofan, hundreds of thousands of civilians are denied all
international humanitarian relief. The situation is urgent and
becoming more so by the day; indeed, in contrast to the relatively upbeat,
"things are manageable" assessment offered by the US Agency for
International Development (April 2, 2012), nongovernmental relief
organizations are a great deal more worried. Both Doctors Without
Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and Oxfam International have very recently
sounded increasingly urgent warnings (here Oxfam):
"Oxfam is
urging donors to ramp up support now, warning that it will be three times more
expensive when the rains come and block off roads; shortages could endanger
people's lives. 'This is going to cause a lot of health problems and I'm afraid
that we will lose a lot of people, especially if rains flood this black cotton
soil,' Omale said. 'The international community has not done enough... it has
not focused on this emergency. These people started coming here in November. Up
to now we have not received enough support to help the refugees here in Jamam
[refugee camp, Upper Nile State].'" (UN IRIN [Jamam refugee camp], April
3, 2012)
This is markedly at odds with the tenor of
remarks by USAID and U.S. special envoy Princeton Lyman, who has managed merely
to talk about the humanitarian crisis, with vague hopefulness about
cross-border corridors for the hundreds of thousands of civilians still trapped
inside Blue Nile and South Kordofan and moving ever closer to a catastrophic
food emergency. Again, let us be clear: these people are being
deliberately starved to death by the Khartoum regime, and the dying has begun,
both from malnutrition and from diseases directly related to malnutrition and
the conditions of forced flight from violence.
It is shocking that none of this has changed
Lyman's assessment of Khartoum; but in a recent interview with Asharq Al-Awsat (the
most important pan-Arabic newspaper publishing in English), he declared:
"Frankly, we
do not want to see the ouster of the [Sudanese] regime, nor regime change. We want to see the regime carrying out reform via constitutional
democratic measures."
But despite this preposterous optimism about a
"reformist" Khartoum regime, this on the part of the chief U.S.
diplomat engaged on Sudan, it is clear that an increasing number of Sudanese in
the north believe that only regime change will create the possibility for a greater
Sudan genuinely that is at peace with itself and its neighbors, and for broadly
shared opportunities for economic development---thus the broad coalition of
rebel groups making up the Sudan Revolutionary Front (SRF). In fact,
the need for regime change has been conspicuous for years.
And if we were in doubt about where the regime
is really headed, we need merely to survey the developments of the past
year. For if there has been a belated and partial acknowledgement of
the growing military ascendancy within the Khartoum regime, there is still too
little acknowledgement of what follows from these new realities, reported
authoritatively by Julie Flint in early August of last year. Flint's
dispatch (August 2, 2011) was based on remarkable
interviews with officials in Khartoum, fearful that a military coup from within
would leave very little room for civilians in the new configuration of power:
"[A]
well-informed source close to the National Congress Party reports that Sudan’s
two most powerful generals went to [Sudanese President Omar al-] Bashir on May
5, five days after 11 soldiers were killed in an SPLA ambush in Abyei, on South
Kordofan’s southwestern border, and demanded powers to act as they sought fit,
without reference to the political leadership."
"'They got
it,' the source says. 'It is the hour of the soldiers---a vengeful, bitter
attitude of defending one's interests no matter what; a punitive and emotional
approach that goes beyond calculation of self-interest. The army was the first
to accept that Sudan would be partitioned. But they also felt it as a
humiliation, primarily because they were withdrawing from territory in which
they had not been defeated. They were ready to go along with the politicians as
long as the politicians were delivering---but they had come to the conclusion
they weren't. Ambushes in Abyei…interminable talks in Doha keeping Darfur as an
open wound…. Lack of agreement on oil revenue…."
"'It has gone
beyond politics,' says one of Bashir's closest aides. 'It is about dignity.'"
It is this reality, this "creeping military coup" in which ruthless
generals seek "dignity," that the world has in the main refused to
see, and nobody more conspicuously than Princeton Lyman. Rather than
clearly assign responsibility for actions that have brought Sudan and South
Sudan to the brink of all-out war, Lyman and others have---when speaking of the
military violence over the past year---consistently indulged in a deeply
disingenuous moral equivalence between Khartoum and
Juba. Dismayingly, this in turn has been reflected in a great deal
of uncritical news reporting.
Kadugli and the "International Community"
International failure to respond to the
atrocity crimes in Kadugli of June 2011 is emblematic of the broad failure of
international diplomacy to confront Khartoum, but most consequentially that of
the Obama administration. This failure is reflected in the decision to "de-couple" Darfur from the key
bilateral negotiating issue between Washington and Khartoum (summer 2010); in
the misguided decision to pressure the Government of South Sudan to
"compromise" (i.e., capitulate) yet further on Abyei
in the face of Khartoum's intransigence (October - November 2010); and in
the feckless response to Khartoum's military seizure of Abyei,
which the Obama administration, including frequent emissary Senator John Kerry,
had fairly invited. Princeton Lyman's skepticism about the commission of
atrocity crimes in Kadugli (June 2011), his refusal to credit satellite
photography of what now all recognize are mass graves---containing perhaps many
thousands of dead Nuba---is finally of a piece with administration helplessness
before Khartoum's adamant refusal to allow international humanitarian relief to
reach hundreds of thousands of desperate civilians.
For the violence currently escalating
dangerously along the North/South border is neither accidental nor unrelated to
the impunity that has been so amply reaffirmed in the wake of military actions
by the regime---in Darfur, in Abyei, in South Kordofan, in Blue Nile, and
currently in the relentless aerial attacks on the South. Moreover, the
evidence increasingly suggests that the actions reflect neither tactics nor
opportunism, but rather a strategy on the part of Khartoum's military
leaders.
In this light, there is good reason to believe
that one reason the April 3 summit in Juba between President al-Bashir and
President Salva Kiir did not occur is because some of these same military
leaders began offensive military actions that were designed to undermine the
prospect of true rapprochement. The very recent discovery of a secret oil "tie-in,"
whereby Khartoum would be able to siphon off large quantities of Southern crude
into its own infrastructure, may also do much to explain the location and
nature of the military action. Now that the "tie-in" has
been discovered, it will be almost impossible for such subterfuge to succeed
again. In the eyes of Khartoum's most senior military officials,
likely including al-Bashir himself, this means that only seizure of the
Southern oil fields will allow oil to flow north again from these fields.
There are other factors at play, to be sure:
the ongoing aerial military assaults on Southern oil infrastructure are
certainly seen by Khartoum as a way to highlight for Juba the young nation's
vulnerabilities and thus compel concessions. And there can be little
doubt after the successful and cost-free seizure of Abyei that the regime well
understands the importance of creating military "facts on the
ground"; such "facts" will be useful, Khartoum calculates, in
negotiations over border delineation and in holding hostage the demarcation of
borders already delineated. Here we should bear in mind that under present
circumstances, only the regime benefits from ambiguous borders.
Assessing more broadly, we are confronted by
an international failure in Sudan that has been painfully comprehensive: the AU
is powerless and poorly led by Thabo Mbeki; the Arab League was never going to
be of help in dealing with Khartoum; and the UN political bodies---with the
exception of a few individuals---have been disastrously incompetent throughout
Sudan, including Darfur. The European Union has worked too quietly,
largely ineffectually, and with excessive caution. China is being
urged in various quarters to use its enormous leverage with Khartoum to work
for peace, but so far has made only tactical diplomatic moves (for a useful
overview, see the International Crisis Group report of April 4, 2012).
The U.S., however, is still the international actor setting the diplomatic tone
for dealing with Khartoum, and from the beginning the Obama administration has
been disastrously ill-informed and prone to make critical errors in judgment. Guided
initially by the painfully incompetent special envoy Scott Gration and
subsequently by the feckless Lyman, countless opportunities to forestall
greater intransigence on Khartoum's part have been squandered.
And finally the failure of the international
community in Sudan has larger implications; for we must also consider the
signals now being sent to other tyrannies, to other regimes that feel they,
too, will enjoy impunity if they are sufficiently obdurate. Can
anyone doubt that Syria's Assad has taken the measure of the international
community's resolve in responding to his own ongoing atrocity crimes in part by
looking to Sudan? Certainly Assad knows that Khartoum has, with
impunity, relentlessly
and deliberately bombed civilians and humanitarians for decades. Although
Libya is the example most often adduced in discussions of Syria, it is the
impunity enjoyed by Sudan's National Islamic Front/National Congress Party that
gives the Assad regime much of its confidence.
We are left with the dispiriting conclusion
that the widespread failure in Sudan is not only international but also
historic in implication, defining all too authoritatively the demise of any
credible commitment to the "responsibility to
protect." And because of that failure there will be no
investigation of the monstrous violations of international human rights and
humanitarian law in Kadugli and South Kordofan---not in any foreseeable future
defined by current diplomatic priorities and attitudes. It is crucial, if
only for the sake of historical clarity, that we understand how these
priorities emerged and now undermine the possibility for investigating
large-scale and brutal atrocity crimes. For the present over-riding
exigencies---desperately attempting to secure humanitarian access and prevent a
resumption of war---grow directly out of previous failures to confront the
criminals who make up the regime in Khartoum.
Appendices at: http://www.sudanreeves.
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