The Crisis in Darfur

The NYTimes Magazine has a cover article on efforts to build cases, in the International Criminal Court (ICC), against the people responsible for the genocide taking place. While the U.S. is not a supporter of the ICC, President Clinton signed the treaty and sent it to the Senate for ratification, where it languished upon the arrival of the Bush team. I just don't think President Bush and Condi Rice are talking enough about this issue. We can have another Rwanda on our hands:

The current Darfur conflict began raging after rebels ambushed the Sudanese Air Force at one of its bases in North Darfur early in 2003. It was a humiliating defeat for Bashir and his government's security apparatus. The government responded — as it had previously in the Nuba Mountains and the southern oil fields — by recruiting local militias to wage a counterinsurgency campaign, thus pitting tribes against one another. The name janjaweed means bandits or ruffians; it combines "devil" (jinn) with "horse" (jawad) and conjures a dark terror for Darfurians. The janjaweed were plucked from the mostly nomadic camel- or cattle-breeding Arab tribes of Darfur and neighboring Chad. Uneducated, destitute and landless, they are motivated mainly by promises made by Sudanese government officials of land and loot. Today the government uses them as a means of deniability: the militias are uncontrollable, the government says, and are merely carrying on an ancient tribal conflict or a centuries-old fight over resources between seminomadic Arabs and African farmers. Yet when the government wants to control them, it does, and many of the janjaweed have simply been incorporated into what are known as the popular defense forces.

... Sudan's rulers seem to contemplate the murderous violence that sustains their power with complete serenity. One evening in Khartoum I visited the former governor of South Darfur, Lieut. Gen. Adam Hamid Musa. We sat in his garden during Ramadan, accompanied by a professor friend of his. Hamid Musa lived in a residential area cordoned off for favored military officers. He was removed as governor in 2004 and now heads the Darfur Peace and Development Forum, which is financed by Sudan's ruling party. He suggested that talk of rapes and racial cleansing in Darfur was simple propaganda. "Do you think a governor will go to kill his own people?" he asked.

Even before he was made governor in 2003, Musa was part of a group of Arab ideologues who were in Darfur recruiting Arab nomads into the militia now known as the janjaweed. In the garden that night, he noted that the allegations of rape and slaughter all came from the tribes of victims.

"And they all lied?" I asked.

"Yes," he said. "A single case of raping hasn't been proved. The women there don't even know what the word means." He chuckled happily and popped a toffee into his mouth, as did his professor friend.

... At the same time, the Bush administration has stopped calling the crimes in Darfur a genocide. The administration does not want to lose the North-South agreement and the peace it has secured, and this may make it wishy-washy on Darfur. It has also found Sudan to be a useful ally in the war on terror. At least some Sudanese leaders being investigated by the I.C.C. are, according to American officials who asked not to be named, highly valuable, if unreliable, allies in hunting down Islamic terrorists. "In 2004, when the Sudanese decided to conclude the North-South peace, they got an A- on cooperation," a senior American official said. "They rendered people and gave us information on people we didn't even know were there. Since then they've done stuff that saved American lives." The C.I.A. flew Sudan's national-security director, Salah Abdallah Ghosh, to Washington for a debriefing last year. He shared information that his office had on Islamist militants training in Sudan before 9/11. Yet he is one of a handful of top security men orchestrating Khartoum's crimes in Darfur and deploying intelligence units that have carried out targeted killings since 2003. In December, a United Nations panel recommended that Ghosh and 16 other Sudanese officials face international sanctions. "The U.S. has pressed the U.N. not to include Ghosh on the list of people who should be subject to sanctions," John Prendergast, a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group, told me. "Trying to constructively engage with mass murderers in order to gather information is the wrong policy. It reinforces the regime's willingness to perpetrate atrocities."