After 300,000 deaths, a modicum of justice

Apr 1st 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

Human-rights groups have hailed as “historic” the UN Security Council’s resolution to refer 51 people suspected of war crimes in Sudan’s Darfur region to the International Criminal Court. But without a larger and more robust foreign intervention in Darfur, the murders and other abuses are unlikely to end soon

IT WAS an “historic first for international law”, according to Citizens for Global Solutions. Other leading human-rights bodies concurred that the United Nations Security Council’s vote, on Thursday March 31st, to refer 51 suspected war criminals in Sudan’s Darfur region to the International Criminal Court (ICC) was an historic step. It was indeed the first time the UN had used its powers to send suspects to the ICC since its establishment as the first permanent world criminal court in 2002. The day before, the Security Council had tightened somewhat its mild arms embargo on the Sudanese government and imposed sanctions on as-yet unnamed individuals impeding the peace process in Darfur. But though the chances that the worst culprits may eventually be brought to justice have improved, there are few signs as yet that the state-sponsored campaign of murder, rape and torture in the troubled region is coming to an end.

For a year and a half now, Sudan’s Arab-dominated government has been ethnically cleansing Darfur by arming and giving air support to mostly Arab militias called the janjaweed, who kill, rape and rob black Africans. The government admits to arming militias but insists that this is only in order to crush a rebellion that began in February 2003. The government has in recent years has been forced by outside pressure to make concessions to a different group of rebels, in the south of the country, in order to end a separate and much older civil war there. So it is in no mood to tolerate further threats to its authority. Hence its brutal response to the uprising in Darfur.

A British parliamentary report this week put the death toll so far in Darfur at up to 300,000, a figure the Sudanese government furiously disputes. Jan Egeland, the UN’s emergency relief co-ordinator, has put the number of those who have died from hunger and disease over the past 18 months at 180,000, not including those killed in the violence. The UN this week greatly increased its estimate of the number of people left homeless after fleeing the conflict, to 2.4m, and said large numbers were continuing to stream into refugee camps. America has called the attacks on black Darfuris “genocide”, though a UN report in January stopped short of describing it thus.

The list of 51 accused of war crimes includes Sudanese government and military officials, janjaweed leaders and some rebel leaders and foreign military commanders. But the list has remained sealed while the Security Council’s members argued over whether to send the suspects to the ICC or, as America at first argued, to set up an ad-hoc tribunal similar to the one created for the Balkan conflicts. Though the Clinton administration had signed the 1998 treaty creating the ICC, the Bush administration pulled out of the court on the grounds that it could be used to bring politically motivated cases against American peacekeepers. Thus it had threatened to veto any Security Council motion sending the Darfur suspects to the ICC. However, in what appears to be a significant policy shift, America finally agreed only to abstain, allowing the resolution to pass. In return, it won a guarantee that no citizens of America (or any other non-signatory of the ICC treaty) would be sent to the court in connection with the Darfur conflict.

The Security Council is able to send war-crimes suspects to the ICC if the country where the abuses took place is unwilling or unable to bring them to justice. Anxious that none of its senior members be charged, the Sudanese government announced pre-emptively this week that it had arrested 15 members of its security forces suspected of war crimes and would bring them before local courts. The government is also decrying the UN’s tightening of its sanctions, though these remain weak. The new sanctions resolution merely orders Khartoum to inform the UN before sending any more weapons to Darfur and imposes an assets freeze and travel ban on those judged responsible for abuses in Darfur or violating the region’s often-broken ceasefire.

Despite the UN’s stirring, the abuses in Darfur go on. Some observers think the number of attacks on civilians has declined in the past couple of months; others disagree. Whatever the truth, few of the displaced dare go home and plant their crops. So the need for food aid is likely to increase—the UN predicts that 3m-4m will need feeding by the middle of next year unless the fighting stops. As more aid arrives, however, more gunmen will seek to make a living by stealing it.

More peacekeepers, please

Few observers imagine that peace can be achieved without a much larger and more robust foreign military intervention. On March 24th, the UN decided to send a 10,000-strong peacekeeping force to Sudan, mainly to police the peace settlement in the south of the country, though some of them could be sent to Darfur, in the west. Currently, there are only 2,000 African Union (AU) peacekeepers there, lacking the resources to face down the janjaweed.

After the mass slaughter in Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s, the world said “never again”. Yet the world has stood by while genocide, or something like it, has been perpetrated in Darfur.
America, with its reluctance to back the ICC, is not the only culprit: China has blocked effective sanctions, fearing the consequences for itself if precedents are set for tough UN action against human-rights abuses. But America’s dilemma over Darfur has been especially acute: on the one hand, it has been in the forefront of pressing for tough action against Sudan; on the other hand, the White House’s vehement rejection of what President George Bush calls a “foreign court” with “unaccountable judges” has made it highly reluctant to “legitimise” the ICC by agreeing to send suspects for trial. The compromise reached at the UN this week is an ugly one, with the immunity offered to American citizens creating double standards. But it seems to have been the only way forward.

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