Saturday, August 28, 2004

Sistani's triumph?

(Guest-posted at Harry's Place and Normblog)

Jeff Weintraub, a social & political theorist, political sociologist, and democratic socialist living in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, writes with this analysis of the recent events in Iraq.

Sistani's triumph?


The Ayatollah Sistani may be a frail, elderly, and reclusive cleric. But he clearly has an exquisite sense of political timing, as well as remarkable skill in using his moral and religious authority to achieve precise political effects.

The solution to the crisis in Najaf that Sistani has just brokered may or may not fall apart, and its long-term effects are still uncertain. But what he's just accomplished, as well as the way he accomplished it, are pretty impressive. Some months ago, he outmaneuvered Bremer and the CPA over the question of how to organize the political transition in Iraq. (In the process, he demonstrated that he could get hundreds of thousands of people to march peacefully in the streets and--just as important--could also get them to go peacefully home again.) And now he appears to have outmaneuvered Muqtada al-Sadr (making skillful use of both the Americans and the Allawi government, but without getting directly entangled with either).

At its heart, the recent crisis in the cities of southern Iraq, centering on Najaf and the Shrine of Ali, has been the latest installment in a long-term power struggle within the Iraqi Shiite religious leadership, in which the Americans mostly play a secondary role. From the day that Saddam Hussein's regime lost Najaf, the crucial conflict there has been between Muqtada al-Sadr and the established Shia religious leadership, centered on Sistani. Essentially, Sistani and the Hawza have more authority (though Sadr has some charisma of his own, partly inherited from his father), while Sadr has more gunmen--and a lot more willingness to use them. Generally speaking, Sadr has shied away from directly defying Sistani's authority when Sistani has issued explicit public declarations (though he did try to drive Sistani out of Najaf by force in the confusion right after the fall of Saddam Hussein). Sistani and the Hawza, on the other hand, have generally shied away from directly confronting and condemning Sadr--partly, no doubt, to avoid a Shia civil war in Iraq, and partly, I suspect, because Sistani does not want to risk using his authority unless he feels pretty sure of success.

This is a struggle across Iraq as a whole (with reverberations in the wider Shiite world). But control of the key shrines in the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala has a special strategic importance. As a number of scholars have pointed out, this has to do not only with the symbolic and sacred significance of these places for Shiites, but also with their economic significance. Now that the Iraqi Ba'ath regime has fallen, millions of Shiite pilgrims from all over the world visit these shrines every year, and whoever controls them has control over the income from the shrines--which, in turn, can be put to a range of consequential uses (from funding networks of social services to arming gunmen).

In this connection, Sadr's problem was that, although he has considerable support in the Sadr City section of Baghdad and across southern Iraq, his support in Najaf and Karbala themselves (according to all serious analysts and observers I have read) is close to nil. However, once Sadr's gunment hijacked the Shrine of Ali a few months ago (something Sadr tried to do, unsuccessfully, a year ago), Sadr put his opponents in an apparently no-win situation--especially since Sistani, unlike Sadr, was reluctant to risk damage to the shrines or widespread destruction in the holy cities.

That set the stage for the most recent fighting. (The timing of its outbreak may have been at least partly accidental, but something like it was almost inevitable at some point.) By convenient coincidence, Sistani left Iraq for medical treatment in Britain, probably hoping that by the time he came back the Americans would have made mincemeat of Sadr and his "Mahdi Army," but at all events not wanting to be directly involved in the conflict. Within the past week, Sistani appears to have concluded that the conjunction of three crucial factors made this the ideal moment for him to intervene. First, it looked as though Sadr's fighters were on the ropes in Najaf, while local hostility to them had become intense, so Sadr was looking for a face-saving way out of the situation rather than risk an ignominious collapse. Second, the Americans and the Allawi government didn't want either to leave Sadr in control of the Shrine of Ali or to risk the potentially disastrous political costs of an armed assault on the Shrine. (I trust everyone remembers what happened to Indira Gandhi after she ordered the assault on the Sikh Golden Temple.) And third, the great bulk of Iraqi public opinion was simultaneously hostile to Sadr and to the Americans, wanted an end to the fighting in Najaf, and wanted to avoid an armed attack on the holy places.

So Sistani returned dramatically to Iraq and to Najaf, accompanied by thousands of peaceful marchers, and brokered a solution that gave all the major actors a less-than-catastrophic way out--while, at least on paper, giving Sistani all the crucial things that he wanted, and enhancing his own prestige and authority in the process. Sadr explicitly recognized Sistani's authority, peacefully gave up the Shrine of Ali, and agreed to have his militiamen leave the holy cities (and stay out). Sadr himself got to leave town without getting "martyred" or arrested--but, in fact, the Allawi government, the Americans, and Sistani himself also wanted to avoid this. And Sistani has gotten everyone to agree that ALL armed groups should leave the holy cities, with the significant exception of the Iraqi police. If this works--admittedly a big if--then this mollifies anti-American sentiment to a certain extent (since the US troops will also pull out), but also happens to be the best possible solution from the point of view of the Allawi government, the US, and Sistani himself.

All this strikes me as a good and promising outcome, since overall (given the available alternatives) a win for Sistani is a win for Iraq. The political weight of the Shia clergy in Iraq, combined with the weakness of effective secular non-authoritarian political forces, is not ideal from my point of view. And no one should imagine that Sistani's perspective on the political role of religion resembles that of Thomas Jefferson (or even that his position is as "moderate" as that of the Ayatollah Abdel Majid al-Khoei, who was murdered by Sadr a year ago). But according to all the evidence I know about (and the consensus of all informed analysts I have read), he has consistently rejected the extreme theocratic line of Khomeini, Sadr, and the Iranian regime; he is committed to a peaceful political transition in Iraq, and to some sort of democratic representative regime; and (as he has just demonstrated again) he is a skillful political actor with very substantial clout. Iraq could do a lot worse right now, so let's hope his health holds up (and that no one manages to assassinate him).

At least, those are my immediate (non-expert) impressions.

Posted by Harry at August 28, 2004 02:54 PM | TrackBack

Johann Hari - Atrocity fatigue and moral failure on Darfur (Independent)

As Hari (correctly) points out:

On 30 July, the United Nations gave the government in Sudan a deadline: Stop the genocide in Darfur and let in aid workers within 30 days, or else.
The response? The tyranny in Khartoum is laughing at the UN; the mass murder has not ceased. Arab Janjaweed militias are still systematically slaughtering whole villages.

Political leaders are not benign, even in democracies. They will usually behave altruistically only if we - the public - strongly urge them to. Blair's conscience seems to have gravitated towards Sudan of its own accord, as it did towards Sierra Leone in 1998. But Blair will only overcome the massive obstacles to intervention - including antiquated UN structures that prevent the international body from enforcing its own founding principles - if we make him.
So where is the public pressure to make Blair stop the Sudanese holocaust? There has been only a muffled whine of protest.

Broadly speaking, the same thing is also true in other European countries (except that some governments, instead of simply dithering, are actively running interference for the Khartoum regime). If this continues to be the case, it will probably seal the death warrant of the Darfur refugees.

Cheers (but not cheery),
Jeff Weintraub

P.S. By the way, I'm not sure that the argument summed up in Hari's title--"If the victims of Sudan's genocide were white, we would have acted long ago"--is entirely correct. Bosnians are white, and Bosnia is right in Europe (and not in the relatively inaccessible Sahel), but nothing serious was done to stop mass murder, mass rape, and ethnic cleansing of Bosnian civilians until hundreds of thousands were already dead. On the other hand, when Hari says the reasons for the shamefully inadequate failure of western public opinion (on both left and right) are tied up with "racism," I think he is on to something--though the ways in which this is true are somewhat complex. The mass murder of black Africans does tend to galvanize a weaker response than mass murders elsewhere; and, in general, the degree of sympathy for victims of atrocities depends very much on who the perpetrators are.

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The Independent (London)
August 24, 2004

If the victims of Sudan's genocide were white, we would have acted long ago

If we don't act now, you can toss your tear-stained copy of Schindler's List onto the bonfire along with the people of Western Sudan

By Johann Hari


It's easy to get atrocity fatigue about the genocide ripping through Darfur in western Sudan. When I discuss it with otherwise well-informed people, they often reply, "Yes, but terrible things are always happening somewhere, aren't they?"

This is different. This is not the ordinary low-level persecutions that occur, alas, every day. This is not Thailand or Libya or Haiti. This is a deliberate attempt to wipe out an entire group of people - the black inhabitants of Darfur - from the face of the earth. At least 50,000 people have been slaughtered - and the numbers are rising. This is a holocaust.

On 30 July, the United Nations gave the government in Sudan a deadline: Stop the genocide in Darfur and let in aid workers within 30 days, or else.

The response? The tyranny in Khartoum is laughing at the UN; the mass murder has not ceased. Arab Janjaweed militias are still systematically slaughtering whole villages. As Jack Straw was reminded when he visited refugee camps in Darfur yesterday, the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs confirms that racist Sudanese militias are still launching helicopter gunship attacks against black people and disrupting basic food and medicine supplies.

The UN was founded to prevent all this. In 1948, the United Nations of the world resolved - in the shadow of Auschwitz - that if a genocide was launched, external intervention was not merely advisory, it was mandatory. More than a dozen genocides passed without UN action. By the time 800,000 people were hacked to death in just six weeks in Rwanda in 1994, the UN commitment sounded like a cruel joke.

But then the public and some decent politicians began to conduct a post-mortem into the Rwandan holocaust. General Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian who had led the UN peace-keeping force in Rwanda, explained that if he had been given just 5,000 troops by the world's armies, he could have prevented the violence - just 5,000 troops for 800,000 lives. The UN's own internal investigation accepted these findings - more than a year too late for the people of Rwanda.

The case for this military intervention in Rwanda now, in retrospect, looks unanswerable; Tony Blair promised that if it happened again, "we would have a moral duty to act". It seemed that at last - half a century after it was written - some people were beginning to take the UN's declaration on genocide seriously.

And then the Janjaweed began to butcher their way through Darfur, and the world did not blink. Months after the first reports of this genocide reached the outside world, a puny UN resolution was waved in the direction of Khartoum. The punishment for not obeying the resolution? Well ... sanctions. Maybe.

Several countries are trying to justify inaction with grotesque word-play. Intervention is only legally required if the Darfur murders are technically defined as "genocide". The US Congress, John Kerry and several human rights groups have been using the term for months - but other countries (particularly France, which has oil interests in the region) have resisted it.

Blair's record of responding to genocide is mixed. He was a leading proponent of intervening in Kosovo before Slobodan Milosevic could murder the ethnic Albanian population, and he will be lauded by history for it. But - almost unnoticed in Britain - Blair has also supported Russia's repression in Chechnya. A third of the province's population has been murdered since the early 1990s. At some press conferences with Vladimir Putin, Blair has justified this as a legitimate response to Chechen "terrorism". Certainly, he has never pressured the Russians to stop this mass killing.

Political leaders are not benign, even in democracies. They will usually behave altruistically only if we - the public - strongly urge them to. Blair's conscience seems to have gravitated towards Sudan of its own accord, as it did towards Sierra Leone in 1998. But Blair will only overcome the massive obstacles to intervention - including antiquated UN structures that prevent the international body from enforcing its own founding principles - if we make him.

So where is the public pressure to make Blair stop the Sudanese holocaust? There has been only a muffled whine of protest. The reason on both left and right is racism.

If more than 50,000 white people had been murdered in an even more distant country - say, Zimbabwe - the British right would be disgusted that we were not coming to the aid of our "kith and kin". They have made far more fuss over the small number of white farmers who have been murdered by Robert Mugabe's tyranny than about the full-blown genocide in Darfur.

But racism from the right is not surprising. It's far harder to answer the question: Where are all the left-wing groups? Where are Ken Livingstone and Peter Hain? If black people were being massacred in Kansas with blatant support from the government in Washington DC, there would be a rolling left-wing occupation of Trafalgar Square that lasted for months, and rightly so. But on Darfur? Nothing.

During the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and during the Rwandan holocaust, there were strong left-wing voices calling for intervention. Now, in the aftermath of Iraq, the ability of the left to unite against genocide has collapsed. In its place there is extreme scepticism. Some suggest that Blair's interest in the current crisis is just a ruse to seize Sudan's oilfields.

There is an automatic assumption that everything our leaders say is a vicious lie, and any claim to benevolent intentions is duplicitous. The people of Darfur are paying for our inability to see that there are some forces out there worse than Blair and Bush - like the primal racist Janjaweed mobs.

In the absence of a mass campaign to stop the genocide, international efforts will continue to be pathetic. The best the UN will offer when its deadline runs out next week is, it seems, a sanctions regime against Sudan - details to be formulated sometime after thousands more corpses have piled up.

As the world has learned over the past decade - especially in Iraq - it is hard to impose sanctions without weakening civilians and leaving tyrannies even stronger. Even the "smart sanctions" proposed by some sincere opponents of the Janjaweed will have (at best) a slow and limited impact. Sanctions are a salve for our conscience, not a serious attempt to stop the murders.

The only country to send troops so far has been Rwanda; they know a genocide when they see one. Will a Coalition of the Willing send troops to join the Rwandans in Darfur when the UN deadline expires at the end of this week?

If not you can toss your tear-stained copies of Schindler's List on to a bonfire along with the people of western Sudan. All those times we muttered "never again" will be exposed yet again as a lie.

Thursday, August 26, 2004

Stop the Genocide - Rally for Darfur (Norman Geras)

Norman Geras
August 26, 2004

Stop the genocide - rally for Darfur

From an editorial in the Washington Post on Tuesday:

Twenty-four days have elapsed since the U.N. Security Council gave the government of Sudan a month to stop a campaign of ethnic cleansing by militias and its own troops in the region of Darfur - and still the killing goes on. Monitors of the African Union and envoys of the United Nations report no substantial improvement.
From the Guardian:
"Maybe God knows why this happened," said Maryam Ayacoub Solomon, the mother of the murdered boys. "I don't know. I don't know what to say - I have no words left."

Every few days, more refugees from Darfur cross the border into eastern Chad. They all tell the same story; in recent days and weeks, there have been fresh attacks on black African villages involving Janjaweed fighters backed up by Sudanese government troops.

Despite a UN security council resolution demanding that Sudan disarms the Janjaweed, Khartoum's war against its own people goes on.

Jose Ramos Horta in the Melbourne Age:
Those who oppose the use of force under any circumstances have not been able to articulate a better strategy to deal with situations of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Patient diplomacy lasts as long as it lasts; it might bear fruits, and it might not. But genocide goes on, as in the case of Sudan right now where tens of thousands of our fellow human beings are dying.
Like the Washington Post editorial above, Ramos Horta (whose article is worth reading in full) urges support for an effective African Union intervention force.

Stop genocide in Sudan.

Noah Trugman for The American Anti-Slavery Group (email):

The American Anti-Slavery Group and other human rights groups are organizing a rally to protest the UN's inaction in Darfur and to stop the genocide in Sudan. The rally will be held outside the U.N. in New York City at 2:00 p.m. on Sunday, September 12, which is just prior to the reconvening of the UN's General Assembly.

We are issuing a special call to action to the blogging community to publicize this rally on their sites. We hope to bring together a grassroots movement to hold world leaders accountable and force the UN at last to take strong action on genocide. [Emphasis added.]

The website for the rally is here:
Black people across Sudan are under threat of annihilation. The mass murder of Blacks in Darfur is the first genocide of the 21st century: 50,000 have been slaughtered, 2 million forced into the desert as refugees, and thousands raped and enslaved.
Stop genocide in Sudan.

José Ramos Horta, "Silence in the Face of Genocide (Melbourne Age)

Melbourne Age
August 26, 2004

Silence in the face of genocide


Many who denounced the invasion of Iraq are mute about the slaughter in Sudan, says Jose Ramos Horta.


Dr Jose Ramos Horta, East Timor's Minister for Foreign Affairs, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996. This is an edited extract from his address at the Melbourne Writers Festival.


The invasion of Iran by Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the 1980s resulted in the deaths of more than a million people. Chemical and biological weapons were unleashed on civilians and combatants. The West turned a blind eye when Kurds and Iranians were gassed to death by the thousands by the butcher of Baghdad. There were no peace marchers in the West or even in the Muslim world as two Muslim nations, mostly sharing the same brand of Islam, slaughtered each other. The war lasted eight years.

Soon after the end of the Iran-Iraq war, the same regime in Baghdad unleashed yet another invasion, this time against Kuwait. Only then did a coalition of countries intervene and Kuwait was freed, but not without wanton destruction carried out by the retreating forces that set on fire hundreds of oil wells.

Now, in the Darfur region of Sudan, ethnic cleansing has been happening for several months, and yet it has elicited little reaction from the rest of the world. Muslim and Arab masses and fellow pacifists who routinely display their anger at the US-led liberation of Iraq or at Israeli actions in Gaza are on mute mode on the killings of innocent Sudanese civilians by ethnic Arab militias sponsored by the military regime of Sudan.

Much has been written and said, always in the language of frustration and regret, about the world we live in today being a unipolar one based on the unchallenged American economic and military power. But I dare to say, is this so bad?

The alternative, the past bipolar world built on two rival ideological systems, gave us a fragmented world with many wars that resulted in tens of millions of dead and the ever-present nuclear nightmare. The counter-force to the US was the USSR with its Stalinist brutality and expansionist doctrine; it was not a rival benign superpower democracy. Hence there was jubilation and celebration by tens of millions when the rotten Soviet totalitarian system imploded.

The US was the winner, but so was Europe and so was all humanity. However, while Europe remained divided along individual national interests without a real political unity and a strong economy and defence, the US harvested the fruits of the collapse of the Soviet empire.

There is no equal or rival to the US today. Whether we like it or not, the US is the world's unchallenged sole superpower and will remain so for many more years, perhaps as many as 30 years or more, until the emergence maybe of a superpower China or India.

Those who regret the present unipolar world seem to blame the US for its status. The fact is that the US is the sole surviving superpower because of its highly educated people, its ingenuity and creativity, the ability of its industries and commerce to engage in a continuing process of reform and adaptation, its diversity and intellectual and political dynamism, and its investment in research, science and technology. Its universities produce far more Nobel laureates in sciences, medicine and economics than Europe, Japan and Russia combined. It is a superpower partly by default, by the failures of others, and partly by design because it wants and plans to be a superpower.

Many resent the Americans and accuse them of arrogance and insensitivity. But millions of Americans gave their lives for others. They fought with unique bravery and died in Europe and North Africa, throughout Asia, and saved the world from Hitlerian domination.

One wonders, if the US had not entered World War II and had not stayed after the war, what languages the Europeans would be speaking today, and what language Asians would be forced to learn and use. There would be no European Union and no peaceful and democratic Japan.

For 50 years, the US provided the only credible deterrence in Europe against Soviet expansion. It continues to be the only credible security balance, and has thus averted catastrophic wars in the Indian subcontinent, Middle East, Korean Peninsula, China Strait, etc.

An American retreat from Asia would precipitate an uncontrollable arms race between, or among, rival neighbours which would almost inevitably result in open warfare and set back the impressive economic and human development of the past 20 years.

This does not in any way suggest that the US has been a benign power, a sort of a giant Mother Teresa. Its history is also one of conquest, greed and sometimes of barbarism. The Americans are a testimony to US imperial arrogance. Vietnam and Cambodia were carpet-bombed back to the Stone Age. The US cultivated and propped up despotic regimes all over the world. It still does.

The US can be a force for change and good. It can be a benign power. It can turn the world into a much safer, better, common home for all of us - as long as it has the humility of the truly great and walks halfway and meets its other half of fellow human beings, acknowledges its own limits and errors, and shares with the rest of us a more compassionate vision and agenda.

The rest of the world was in shock and mourning after September 11. But some did not fully grasp the American determination to fight an enemy that dared to attack them on their very soil.

The first country to experience American anger was Afghanistan and its Stone Age rulers who had been foolish and irresponsible enough to offer their country as a training ground for extremist foreign mercenaries from the Arab world and Pakistan.

Were there options other than military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq? In the case of Afghanistan, I did not believe then, and do not believe now, that diplomacy had any chance of success.

The nature of the regime was known to all. It harboured the al-Qaeda terrorists, offered them sanctuary, training ground and freedom of movement to stage their terrorist attacks around the world. By choice and because of its own belief, the Taliban regime fell hostage to the al-Qaeda network.

In the case of Iraq, were there diplomatic options that would have averted a war? I believed so, then. Before the war in Iraq, I appealed to the US to show patience and give more time to the weapons inspectors, while at the same time allowing the UN Secretary-General to try to persuade Saddam to leave office. I believed then that given time and without diminishing of the pressures and credible threat of war, Saddam could have accepted exile.

For me there was no doubt that the real and only culprit in the Iraq crisis was Saddam. He was a mass murderer, an egomaniac on the scale of Hitler, a master of brinkmanship and deceit, a gambler. He believed he could pull it off once again, that President George Bush would back off at the last minute. Saddam was banking on the growing peace movement and the divisions within NATO and Europe forcing Bush to pull back from the brink.

The US was confronted with a real dilemma. If it backed down under the pressure of the street demonstrations and the increasingly strong appeals from some of its own friends and allies, the most despotic regime on earth would score another win, thus fuelling its arrogance. The peace movement would have scored a major victory, but it would have been a hollow victory - as the real winner would be the dictator and the losers its many hundreds of thousands of victims.

Like the thousands of peace marchers, I am opposed to violence and wars. But sometimes we must ask ourselves some troubling questions. Should we oppose the use of force even in situations of genocide and ethnic cleansing?

In the war of words over Iraq, there are those opposing the war, period. In their view, there can never be justification for war. This is a highly moral and valid sentiment.

There is a second group, the realists, who support the use of force if it is sanctioned by the UN Security Council. But what should we do when the Security Council fails to act as a unified body because of conflicting political interests?

While there might never be an agreement among the pacifists and the realists over the dilemma of war and peace, there has to be an agreement now that the forces of fanaticism and terrorism cannot prevail in Iraq. Any retreat from Iraq today would have serious consequences for the stability of the whole region. Where there is a real chance today for democracy in Iraq, a hasty withdrawal would deliver the Iraqi people and the Kurds to a Taliban-style rule that would destabilise the entire region.

If I were a political leader of any consequence and I was asked a question regarding the options for Iraq, I would say that retreating and conceding victory to the terrorists is not an option - for the consequences are far too high to contemplate.

Those who oppose the use of force under any circumstances have not been able to articulate a better strategy to deal with situations of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Patient diplomacy lasts as long as it lasts; it might bear fruits, and it might not. But genocide goes on, as in the case of Sudan right now where tens of thousands of our fellow human beings are dying.

Was it wrong that NATO, led by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, intervened in Kosovo in 1999, bypassing the Security Council, saving the lives of thousands of Kosovars? This was the first time in NATO's 50-year history that it intervened to save a Muslim community that was being slaughtered in the heart of Christianity.

Maybe Bill Clinton was smarter than George Bush in not even making a faint gesture to secure a Security Council mandate because he knew the Russians would have vetoed any attempt at having a resolution authorising armed intervention in Kosovo.

If there had been a lone world leader with moral courage, let's say Mandela of South Africa, who had ordered his country's armed forces to intervene unilaterally in Rwanda in 1994, would he have been condemned for this unilateral action? Should the Security Council be always, at all times, the only valid source of legitimacy for an armed intervention? If not, then we should deal with the next question: who else - the only existing superpower with enough firepower?

What should the world community be doing about the politically induced humanitarian crisis in Sudan? So far, intensive diplomatic action by the UN Security Council and by the US Secretary of State has produced no tangible results. The Security Council has not even agreed on imposing sanctions.

The virtual paralysis in regard to the tragic situation in Sudan amply illustrates the difficulties and dilemmas faced by leaders when confronted with such complex conflicts.

A humanitarian intervention in Sudan by the West could very well turn into a military fiasco and further exacerbate the political tensions. But by not intervening, the West is accused of ignoring genocide. The best course of action is for the West to provide financial and logistical support towards an enhanced and effective African Union intervention force coupled with punitive actions against the Sudanese leaders.

Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Countdown on Darfur (Washington Post)

Washington Post (Editorial)
August 24, 2004

Countdown on Darfur

Tuesday, August 24, 2004; Page A16

TWENTY-FOUR days have elapsed since the U.N. Security Council gave the government of Sudan a month to stop a campaign of ethnic cleansing by militias and its own troops in the region of Darfur -- and still the killing goes on. Monitors of the African Union and envoys of the United Nations report no substantial improvement. Attacks by the militias on civilians continue, desperate refugees continue to swell under-provided camps in neighboring Chad, and people continue to die by the hundreds each day. The government has offered only cosmetic compliance with the U.N. resolution, and yet it proclaims that it has nothing to fear from a promised review at the end of the month. Its cynicism is understandable, because Western diplomats are suggesting that the council is unlikely to follow through on an implicit threat of sanctions.

Darfur already has become a synonym for dithering by outside powers in the face of genocide. Soon it may also deliver another grim verdict on the ability of the Security Council to back up its own resolutions. Hamstrung by the unwillingness of veto-wielding members, such as China, to intervene, it delayed action for months, then watered down the language it finally adopted on July 30 to omit any direct sanction against the Sudanese regime. Days after that, an agreement between U.N. and Sudanese officials further weakened the pressure on Khartoum: Among other things, it converted a requirement that the government-sponsored Janjaweed militia be disarmed into a Sudanese promise to provide a list of those it admits to controlling.

The government also pledged to set up safe areas to which the more than 1 million displaced people in Darfur could go, protected by its security forces. According to reports by human rights groups, it then proceeded to draft members of the Janjaweed into those very forces, while rounding up a few petty criminals whom it parades as captured militants. It eliminated some of the red tape hampering humanitarian groups but has continued to block aid deliveries on security grounds. The strategy is obvious: to foster the illusion of responsiveness, and thereby thwart any agreement by the Security Council on further action, while allowing its campaign against Darfur's non-Arab population to continue.

The only dim light in this gloomy picture is the action of the African Union. Its monitors in Darfur have reported honestly about violations of a cease-fire between the government and rebel groups; it is sponsoring peace talks between the government and rebels. Most significantly, it has dispatched 150 (soon to be 300) troops to the region, nominally as guards for the monitors, and offered to send thousands more to help disarm militias and safeguard civilians. The government has rejected this offer, which represents probably the best chance of preventing hundreds of thousands more civilian deaths in the coming months. That makes the duty of the Security Council obvious: to conclude its 30-day review by mandating the deployment of the African force and insisting on its acceptance by Khartoum. The alternative is more dithering, and more deaths.

Wednesday, August 18, 2004

Howard Dean on Darfur

I was about to write a message that said something along these lines, but Howard Dean beat me to it. Obviously, we have different judgments about the Iraq war. But that makes what he has to say here all the more powerful:

Europeans cannot criticize the United States for waging war in Iraq if they are unwilling to exhibit the moral fiber to stop genocide by acting collectively and with decisiveness. President Bush was wrong to go into Iraq unilaterally when Iraq posed no danger to the United States, but we were right to demand accountability from Saddam. We are also right to demand accountability in Sudan. Every day that goes by without meaningful sanctions and even military intervention in Sudan by African, European and if necessary U.N. forces is a day where hundreds of innocent civilians die and thousands are displaced from their land. Every day that goes by without action to stop the Sudan genocide is a day that the anti-Iraq war position so widely held in the rest of the world appears to be based less on principle and more on politics. And every day that goes by is a day in which George Bush's contempt for the international community, which I have denounced every day for two years, becomes more difficult to criticize.

Now is the time for the world community to act if they are serious about encouraging an enlightened leadership role for the United States. My challenge to the U.N. and Europe is simple: if you don't like American diplomacy under George Bush, then do something to show those of us in opposition here in the U.S. that you can behave in such a way that unilateralism is not necessary.

Yours in struggle,
Jeff Weintraub

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Gov. Howard Dean, M.D., August 16, 2004
The Forgotten Crisis

By Gov. Howard Dean M.D.

As everyone who reads this column knows, I strongly opposed the war in Iraq because I did not believe the president was being truthful with us about the potential dangers Saddam Hussein posed to our safety. I also criticized the president for not using institutions such as the United Nations in a cooperative way to help accomplish a goal most Americans shared, which was to limit the destructive role Saddam played in the region and in his own country.

However, I have also said that the U.N. bears a portion of the blame for the Iraq war. The U.N. did not understand that sometimes action is necessary and talk is not enough. There is often too much dithering in the European Union and at the U.N. when action is needed. The shameful reluctance of the European Union to intervene forcefully in Bosnia in order to stop genocide is one such instance. The ultimate failure of the entire world community, including the United States, to stop the massacres in Rwanda is another example.

The U.N. does not seem to learn very fast.

In Sudan, Africa's largest nation geographically, a terrible ethnic cleansing has been going on for more than a year in the western Darfur region where government sponsored Arabic speaking Sudanese militias have been systematically moving black Muslim Sudanese off their traditional lands. Over one million people have been displaced. Systematic rapes, burning women and children alive, and other forms of murder and intimidation are the preferred methods of the roving gangs called the Janjaweed. These gangs, supported sometimes directly by Sudanese government forces, are burning villages and sending their populations either to mass graves or, for the lucky ones, to foul refugee camps along the border with Chad.

This spring, the U.S. pushed a resolution through the U.N. Security Council threatening sanctions on Sudan for their disgraceful conduct. The already weak resolution was watered down at the request of a number of countries, including the Europeans.

Europeans cannot criticize the United States for waging war in Iraq if they are unwilling to exhibit the moral fiber to stop genocide by acting collectively and with decisiveness. President Bush was wrong to go into Iraq unilaterally when Iraq posed no danger to the United States, but we were right to demand accountability from Saddam. We are also right to demand accountability in Sudan. Every day that goes by without meaningful sanctions and even military intervention in Sudan by African, European and if necessary U.N. forces is a day where hundreds of innocent civilians die and thousands are displaced from their land. Every day that goes by without action to stop the Sudan genocide is a day that the anti-Iraq war position so widely held in the rest of the world appears to be based less on principle and more on politics. And every day that goes by is a day in which George Bush's contempt for the international community, which I have denounced every day for two years, becomes more difficult to criticize.

Now is the time for the world community to act if they are serious about encouraging an enlightened leadership role for the United States. My challenge to the U.N. and Europe is simple: if you don't like American diplomacy under George Bush, then do something to show those of us in opposition here in the U.S. that you can behave in such a way that unilateralism is not necessary.

Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont, is the founder of Democracy for America, a grassroots organization that supports socially progressive and fiscally responsible political candidates. Email Howard Dean at howarddean@democracyforamerica.com Copyright 2004 Howard Dean, All Rights Reserved. Distributed exclusively by Cagle, Cartoons, Inc. www.caglecartoons.com, contact Cari Dawson Bartley 800 696 7561 cari@cagle.com for publishing or posting.

Monday, August 16, 2004

Kristof & Zakaria - getting serious about nuclear proliferation

Nicholas Kristof has lately been doing a good job of forcing people to pay attention to urgent problems that they would rather ignore. In his last few New York Times op-eds, he has moved from Darfur to nuclear proliferation. Nothing he says in the piece below is really news, but that doesn't make it less important.
As I wrote in my last column, there is a general conviction among many experts - though, in fairness, not all - that nuclear terrorism has a better-than-even chance of occurring in the next 10 years. Such an attack could kill 500,000 people.
Yet U.S. politicians have utterly failed to face up to the danger.
"Both Bush administration rhetoric and Kerry rhetoric emphasize keeping W.M.D. out of the hands of terrorists as a No. 1 national security priority," noted Michèlle Flournoy of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "And when you look at what could have been done in the last few years, versus what has been done, there's a real gap."
One of the reasons why military action against Saddam Hussein & his regime was necessary, sooner or later, was the need to prevent him from getting away with several decades of blatantly and persistently violating his obligations under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the 1991 cease-fire agreement ending the first Gulf War, and a series of related UN Security Council resolutions.

(Yes, it does appear that by the late 1990s Saddam Hussein's nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs were mostly a gigantic bluff--contrary to the broad consensus of ALL major intelligence services at the time. But the only way to find that out for sure was to first overthrow his regime, and there is absolutely no question that he was contnuously in "material breach" of his obligations to comply with inspection-&-verification procedures during the entire period from 1991-2003. At all events, once the "containment" of Saddam Hussein's Iraq collapsed--which, by 2002, was almost certainly the real-world alternative to military action--there would have been nothing to prevent him from resuming his NBC weapons programs.)

The way that the war actually happened was far from ideal in this respect, and a lot of credibility was burned up needlessly and damagingly. But from the point of view of trying keep the anti-proliferation system from falling apart, a victory for Saddam Hussein & his foreign backers would have been even worse.

=> All that having been said, however, the fact remains that confronting Saddam Hussein's Iraq was only ONE element in the larger problem of trying to prevent the world-wide proliferation of nuclear weapons, including ones that could get into the hands of terrorists and other non-state actors. Overall, as Kristof (correctly) argues, the Bush administration's response to this problem has been dangerously inadequate, complacent, and/or irresponsible. In some ways, the degree of irresponsibility has been simply inexplicable--for example, the administration's failure to actively pursue the Nunn/Lugar program of securing loose nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union. Like Kristof, I have long found this mind-boggling:
The Nunn-Lugar program to safeguard the material is one of the best schemes we have to protect ourselves, and it's bipartisan, championed above all by Senator Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican. Yet President Bush has, incredibly, at various times even proposed cutting funds for it. He seems bored by this security effort, perhaps because it doesn't involve blowing anything up.
And the Bush administration's intention to develop a new generation of tactical nuclear weapons--when we should be doing everything we can to maintain the taboo against any use of nuclear weapons--is absolutely inexcusable.

=> On the other hand, as the piece by Fareed Zakaria notes, fecklessness and irresponsibility in confronting the problem of nuclear proliferation has not been confined to US administrations. There is a lot of blame to go around. For example, the systematic efforts from 1991-2002 by the governments of France, Russia, and China (among others) to undermine the containment of Saddam Hussein's Iraq--which helped to create a situation in which war was the only realistic alternative to the collapse of the whole sanctions-&-containment system--can only be described as breathtakingly irresponsible.

Then there is Iran. After the 2003 Iraq war, the European governments (belatedly) got their act together and began to make a real effort to slow down Iran's nuclear weapons program. But now the Iranian government has essentially given them the finger, and they seem to be unable and unwilling to come up with an effective response. And there has been a comprehensive failure (not just by the US government, but by all the governments involved) in dealing with the rather terrifying danger posed by North Korea, which could well turn into a nuclear Wal-Mart for terrorist organizations in the not-too-distant future.

=> There is a desperately urgent need for a serious international response to this problem. At the moment, on the contrary, the whole system designed to contain nuclear proliferation is being allowed to erode. This is madness.

Yours in struggle,
Jeff Weintraub

=========================
New York Times
August 14, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Nuclear Shadow
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF


If a 10-kiloton terrorist nuclear weapon explodes beside the New York Stock Exchange or the U.S. Capitol, or in Times Square, as many nuclear experts believe is likely in the next decade, then the next 9/11 commission will write a devastating critique of how we allowed that to happen.
As I wrote in my last column, there is a general conviction among many experts - though, in fairness, not all - that nuclear terrorism has a better-than-even chance of occurring in the next 10 years. Such an attack could kill 500,000 people.
Yet U.S. politicians have utterly failed to face up to the danger.
"Both Bush administration rhetoric and Kerry rhetoric emphasize keeping W.M.D. out of the hands of terrorists as a No. 1 national security priority," noted Michèlle Flournoy of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "And when you look at what could have been done in the last few years, versus what has been done, there's a real gap."
So what should we be doing? First, it's paramount that we secure uranium and plutonium around the world. That's the idea behind the U.S.-Russian joint program to secure 600 metric tons of Russian nuclear materials. But after 12 years, only 135 tons have been given comprehensive upgrades. Some 340 tons haven't even been touched.
The Nunn-Lugar program to safeguard the material is one of the best schemes we have to protect ourselves, and it's bipartisan, championed above all by Senator Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican. Yet President Bush has, incredibly, at various times even proposed cutting funds for it. He seems bored by this security effort, perhaps because it doesn't involve blowing anything up.
Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment sees the effort against nuclear terrorism as having three components. One is the Pentagon's version of counterproliferation, which includes the war in Iraq and the missile defense system; this component is costing $108 billion a year, mostly because of Iraq. Then there's homeland security, costing about $37 billion a year. Finally, there's nonproliferation itself, like the Nunn-Lugar effort - and this struggles along on just $2 billion a year.
A second step we must take is stopping other countries from joining the nuclear club, although, frankly, it may now be too late. North Korea, Iran and (perhaps to a lesser extent) Brazil all seem determined to go ahead with nuclear programs.
Dennis Ross, the former Middle East peace negotiator, notes that if Iran develops nukes, jittery Saudi Arabia will seek to follow, and then Egypt, which prides itself as the leader of the Arab world. Likewise, anxiety about North Korea is already starting to topple one domino - Japan is moving in the direction of a nuclear capability.
The best hope for stopping Iran and North Korea (and it's a bleak one) is to negotiate a grand bargain in which they give up nuclear aspirations for trade benefits. Mr. Bush's current policy - fist-shaking - feels good but accomplishes nothing.
President Clinton's approach to North Korea wasn't a great success, but at least North Korea didn't add to its nuclear arsenal during his watch. In just the last two years, North Korea appears to have gone to eight nuclear weapons from about two.
A third step is to prevent the smuggling of nuclear weapons into the U.S. Mr. Bush has made a nice start on that with his proliferation security initiative.
A useful addition, pushed by Senator Charles Schumer, would be to develop powerful new radiation detectors and put them on the cranes that lift shipping containers onto American soil. But while Congress approved $35 million to begin the development of these detectors, the administration has spent little or none of it.
Finally, Mr. Bush needs to display moral clarity about nuclear weapons, making them a focus of international opprobrium. Unfortunately, Mr. Bush is pursuing a new generation of nuclear bunker-buster bombs. That approach helps make nukes thinkable, and even a coveted status symbol, and makes us more vulnerable.
At other periods when the U.S. has been under threat, we mustered extraordinary resources to protect ourselves. If Mr. Bush focused on nuclear proliferation with the intensity he focuses on Iraq, then we might secure our world for just a bit longer.
Right now, we're only whistling in the dark.


===============
Newsweek
August 16, 2004
The Stealth Nuclear Threat


Who could have imagined that alliance management would be a hot election issue in America? But it is. John Kerry's repeated pledge to restore relations with America's allies has struck a chord. The trouble is, if he is elected president, Kerry is going to find that promise hard to keep—at least with America's allies in Europe. Most of them would be delighted to see Kerry win, but that doesn't mean they will be more cooperative on policy issues. Terror is understandably on everyone's mind, but there is yet another growing danger over the horizon. Early into a Kerry administration, we could see a familiar sight—a transatlantic crisis—except this time it wouldn't be over Iraq but Iran.
The threat to America from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, if they ever existed, is in the past. Iran, on the other hand, is the problem of the future. Over the last two years, thanks to tips from Iranian opposition groups and investigations by the International Atomic Energy Agency, it has become clear that Iran is seeking to develop nuclear weapons. In the words of the agency, Iran has "a practically complete front end of a nuclear fuel cycle," which leads most experts to believe it is two to three years away from having a nuclear bomb.
European countries were as worried by this development as Washington and, since the United States has no relations with Iran, Europe stepped in last fall and negotiated a deal with Iran. It was an excellent agreement in which Iran pledged to stop developing fissile material (the core ingredient of a nuclear bomb) and to keep its nuclear program transparent. The only problem is, Iran has recently announced that it isn't going to abide by the deal. As the IAEA's investigation got more serious, Tehran got more secretive. One month ago the agency condemned Iran for its failure to cooperate. Tehran responded by announcing that it would resume work in prohibited areas.
That's where things stand now, with the clock ticking fast. If Iran were to go nuclear, it would have dramatic effects. It would place nuclear materials in the hands of a radical regime that has ties to unsavory groups. It would signal to other countries that it's possible to break the nuclear taboo. And it would revolutionize the Middle East. Saudi Arabia and Egypt would feel threatened by Iran's bomb and would start their own search for nuclear technology. (Saudi Arabia probably could not make a bomb but it could certainly buy necessary technology from a country like Pakistan. In fact, we don't really know all of the buyers who patronized Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan's nuclear supermarket. It's quite possible Saudi Arabia already has a few elements of such a program.) And then there is Israel, which has long seen Iran as its greatest threat. It is unlikely to sit passively while Iran develops a nuclear bomb. The powerful Iranian politician Ali Rafsanjani has publicly speculated about a nuclear exchange with Israel. If Iran's program went forward, at some point Israel would almost certainly try to destroy it using airstrikes, as it did Iraq's reactor in Osirik. Such an action would, of course, create a massive political crisis in the region.
In the face of these stark dangers, Europe seems remarkably passive. Having burst into action last fall, it does not seem to know what to do now that Iran has rebuffed its efforts. It is urging negotiations again, which is fine. But what will it tell Iran in these negotiations? What is the threat that it is willing to wield?
Last month the Brookings Institution conducted a scenario with mostly former American and European officials. In it, Iran actually acquires fissile material. Even facing the imminent production of a nuclear bomb, Europeans were unwilling to take any robust measures like the use of force or tough sanctions. James Steinberg, a senior Clinton official who organized this workshop, said that he was "deeply frustrated by European attitudes." Madeleine Albright, who regularly convenes a discussion group of former foreign ministers, said that on this topic, "Europeans say they understand the threat but then act as if the real problem is not Iran but the United States."
American policy toward Iran is hardly blameless. Washington refuses even to consider the possibility of direct talks with Iran, let alone actual relations. Europeans could present Washington with a plan. They would go along with a bigger stick if Washington would throw in a bigger carrot: direct engagement with Tehran. This is something Tehran has long sought, and it could be offered in return for renouncing its nuclear ambitions.
But for any of this to happen, Europe must be willing to play an active, assertive role. It must stop viewing itself merely as a critic of American policy, but rather see itself as a partner, jointly acting to reduce the dangers of nuclear proliferation. And it should do this not as a favor to John Kerry but as a responsibility to its own citizens and those of the world.

Darfur - How a Tragedy Became a Cause (Washington Post)

How and why do some humanitarian catastrophes & mass atrocities get noticed and even provoke a response, while most are neglected or (more or less) ignored? Even a partial answer would have to be very long and complicated. But as a start, this piece offers some topical reflections on the political sociology of humanitarian mobilization (and its limits).

Yours in struggle,
Jeff Weintraub

==============

Washington Post
August 15, 2004

How a Tragedy Became a Cause
Why We Read About Darfur and Not Burundi

By Steven Mufson

Sunday, August 15, 2004; Page B05

Perhaps this is the way political movements begin -- small, devoted and somewhat contrived. But the prospects of galvanizing American public opinion or U.S. policymakers seemed remote when a handful of people showed up to get themselves arrested in front of the Sudanese embassy just over three years ago.

It was a clear day on April 13, 2001, and a couple of dozen people gathered at the embassy to protest the Khartoum regime's war in southern Sudan. Their plan: chain themselves to the door of the embassy and get themselves hauled off to jail to call the media's attention to the issue. The problem was, there didn't appear to be anyone working at the embassy and there weren't any police around.

So one of the protest leaders got on the phone and arranged to have some slightly puzzled cops sent over. Former D.C. congressional delegate Walter E. Fauntroy, local radio talk show host Joe Madison and Hudson Institute senior fellow Michael Horowitz solemnly chained themselves to the embassy door and were subsequently taken away by some obliging D.C. police officers. Charges of unlawful entry were dropped after two months.

More than three years later, Sudan has become one of the world's hot causes -- though not because of the bloody war in the south, where as many as 2 million people died over the two decades before the 2001 protest. Instead, Sudan has burst into the news over the past four months because of attacks by nomadic Arab militias supported by the government against black farmers in the country's sparsely populated western province of Darfur.

In the past month and a half, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has visited the ravaged Darfur region, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has visited refugee camps in neighboring Chad, Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry mentioned the issue in a speech to black journalists, demonstrators have become more regular (and visible) fixtures outside the Sudanese embassy and the U.N. Security Council has taken up the region's plight. Dozens of articles and commentary pieces have appeared in this newspaper and in the New York Times in the past month alone; during the decade prior to 2004, The Post had mentioned Darfur only four times and the Times only twice.

While no action has yet been taken to stop the violence that has displaced nearly a million people, Congress adopted a resolution in July branding the attacks by the Sudanese government-allied militias as "genocide." By deploying the word genocide, with all its historical and political weight, Congress was supplying a rationale for international intervention.

And yes, Madison and Faunteroy have been arrested at the embassy again, only this time joined by a few more prominent names like Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's ice cream fame, activist-comedian Dick Gregory, and Reps. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) and Bobby Rush (D-Ill.). "As you say in your medium, it's beginning to get legs," Gregory said on the Travis Smiley radio talk show on July 22. "It's little bitty legs right now . . . but I think it will grow."

Just what does it take for an issue to get some "little bitty legs"? Over the past few months, as many as 50,000 people have died in Darfur, thousands of others have been raped or injured and hundreds of thousands are in danger of perishing from disease or starvation in the refugee camps. It is a tragedy of unimaginable proportions -- except that with hardly a turn of the globe, other calamities easily can seize our imagination. For if there were an international misery index, Darfur would have lots of company.

Roughly 3 million people are believed to have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo over the past five years and perhaps a couple of million have perished in North Korea. Nearly 200,000 Chechens still live in refugee camps. Violence has continued in Burundi, where life expectancy has dropped from age 60 to 40 over a decade; nearly 800,000 of its people have fled to neighboring countries. Hundreds of thousands of others are in danger of starving in Somalia, where there is still no recognized central government. None of these disasters has sparked groundswells of U.S. popular opinion.

These examples come from a list that the relief group Doctors Without Borders publishes every year describing the 10 "most underreported humanitarian stories" of the previous year. The group said that the 10 crises highlighted for 2003 accounted for only 30.2 minutes, or 0.2 percent, of the 14,635 minutes on the television networks' nightly newscasts; seven of the 10 crises received a combined total of 3.2 minutes.

One reason Darfur is breaking through the news equivalent of the sound barrier is that the refugee camps are relatively accessible. Fly to N'Djamena, the capital of Chad, catch a connection to Abeshe, and drive 1 1/2 hours and you reach the first camp. Drive another seven hours and you can reach other big refugee sites in eastern Chad. If you're a busy politician or columnist, it's a relatively quick trip.

Another reason Darfur has been taken up is that there was already a network -- of activists, liberal African Americans and conservative evangelical Christians -- that had been mobilized to try to prod the United States into acting to defend the largely Christian southern Sudanese (with whom they felt some affinity) from attacks from the northern, largely Muslim government. This network reaches into Congress, where it includes some devoted staff members, Congressional Black Caucus members and leading Republican lawmakers. And now some Jewish groups, which weren't that active about Sudan's civil war, have added their voices, prodded by the notion that what's happening in Darfur is genocide.

Darfur also appeals to members of the foreign policy community who favor U.S. intervention abroad for humanitarian reasons. Indeed, Darfur happened on the 10th anniversary of the slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans, while the world stood by and did nothing to stop. At the time the press was distracted by the first multiracial elections in South Africa; for example, four New York Times correspondents and five Post reporters covered the South African elections the last week of April 1994, while each paper had a lone correspondent trying to report about Rwanda that week from Kenya and Tanzania. Many Clinton administration members, including the former president, now regret their decision to block moves at the United Nations to send an international force to Rwanda. They regard it as a low point in Clinton's foreign policy. And many want to act in Darfur to show we've learned some lessons.

Ivo Daalder, who worked at the National Security Council under President Clinton, last week wrote a piece for the Center for American Progress Web site quoting U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's speech on the 10th anniversary of Rwanda. Annan said, "the risks of genocide remain frighteningly real" and that in the face of humanitarian disaster today, "the international community cannot stand idle." Yet, Daalder complained that in the case of Darfur, "the international community has done just that -- even as the killing and dying continued at an ever accelerating pace."

The catastrophic events in Darfur have even managed to grab the attention of the Bush administration, despite the all-consuming focus on the war in Iraq. That's because Darfur threatens to undermine one of the administration's few diplomatic successes. Before his appointment as ambassador to the United Nations, John Danforth, as a special envoy for President Bush, had negotiated an accord that promises to end 20 years of civil war between the Sudanese south and north. It was signed in May. This achievement can hardly be celebrated when the northern government is making mayhem elsewhere in the country. So, to some extent, Powell's visit to Khartoum was an effort to protect the investment in diplomatic time the administration has already sunk into the country.

Finally, this humanitarian tragedy has attracted attention because it is emotionally wrenching, with entire villages burned and women and children victimized. In Britain, where the domestic political dynamic is completely different, the story has been exhaustively covered.

And yet, for all the attention the Darfur story has received, action by foreign nations, including European powers and the African Union, has been negligible. While Nigeria's president opposes military intervention and favors further talks instead, no one has persuaded the Sudanese leaders in the capital city of Khartoum to rein in the militias who have been raping and pillaging, and driving hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. So the suffering continues.

For the United States, Darfur comes at a bad time. More than 135,000 U.S. troops are engaged in Iraq, and more than 9,000 are occupied in Afghanistan. And politically, the consequences of inaction by the Bush administration are slight. With a lackluster U.S. job market and the steady conflict in Iraq, it's not likely that voters will make up their minds based on the candidates' views of Darfur.

Few foreign humanitarian causes do have domestic political impact. One was the anti-apartheid movement during the 1980s. But that movement crested only during the Reagan administration, four decades after apartheid's official imposition in South Africa. The racial dimension struck a chord among Americans and there were recognizable and appealing black South African leaders. Darfur has no Nelson Mandela.

The anti-apartheid movement also had pressure points to use. American corporations had large operations in South Africa and could be pressed to pull out. U.S. banks were asked to cut off loans. U.S. contractors were barred from selling equipment to South Africa's military.

The very poverty of Darfur makes it harder to rally help. U.S. companies don't have a great stake in Sudan, so there's no pressure from that quarter. Often, the humanitarian disasters that need the most attention are the ones that get the least.

And that, too, is part of the tragedy.

Author's e-mail:
mufsons@washpost.com

Steven Mufson, Outlook's deputy editor, covered diplomatic affairs for The Post from 1999 to 2001.

Tuesday, August 10, 2004

"Always Again - Sudan" (Norman Geras)

A very useful roundup of the latest (depressing, appalling, disgusting, and discouraging) news by Norman Geras on his weblog. His sense of exasperation and moral outrage (directed at a range of deserving targets) is, as usual, thoroughly justified and expressed in an understated but powerful way.

Shalom,
Jeff Weintraub

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http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/08/always_again_su.html
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Norman Geras
August 10, 2004

Always again - Sudan

There was an article in Friday's Guardian by Jonathan Steele, preferring the route of diplomacy for Sudan over talk of military intervention. In making the argument Steele refers to...

... the cult of impatience, caused by the new craze for humanitarian intervention and the excessive injection of morality into international disputes.
I've already featured some of the content of Amnesty International's recent report concerning rape in Darfur. This piece by Nada Raad in the Lebanon Daily Star includes an account of how the Amnesty report was received by the Sudanese Ambassador:
Sudanese Ambassador to Lebanon Mohammed Bakhit was present at the AI report's release. He denied the allegations against his government.

"The information present in the report is all wrong, and if there were cases of rape in Darfur they would not exceed two cases," he said.

Bakhit distributed a press release prepared by the embassy and said that AI's report is nothing but a campaign to distort the image of the Arab world.

This is reported at greater length in the same newspaper by Julie Flint:
It was a fine idea - to issue Amnesty International's latest report on Darfur, "Rape as a Weapon of War," not in London but in the Middle East and Africa. In Africa, because Sudan is part of Africa; in the Middle East, in Amnesty's own words, "because northern Sudan is part of the Arab-Islamic world, and the government and government-supported militias which are committing horrific human rights violations in Darfur have benefited from the support or silence of Middle Eastern countries."

If there was any doubt about that support or silence, it was dispelled at the issue of the report at the Press Syndicate building in Beirut this week. The opportunity to engage in a debate about the monstrous goings-on in Darfur was lost as Khartoum's ambassador in Lebanon was allowed to hijack the presentation of the report and turn it into a platform for Sudan's lies and propaganda.

Ethnic cleansing by government forces in Darfur? An invention of the people who brought you Abu Ghraib and who lied about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction! (Loud applause.) A conspiracy against the Arabs! (Louder applause.) Rape? What nonsense! Not more than two cases, the ambassador declared - apparently unaware that, under the relentless accumulation of facts, his own government had been compelled to set up committees to investigate accusations of rape in Darfur and help victims through criminal cases.

I recognized few of the faces from the media at the news conference. Where were the grandees of Lebanese journalism, the editorial writers who are respected not only in their own country, but also across the Arab world? Here was a report - researched mainly by Arabs - about a human rights catastrophe that has left 1.5 million Sudanese Muslims homeless and that may kill 300,000 people by year's end. A catastrophe, it has been said, that will probably go down as one of the greatest crimes of our lifetimes. Rwanda in slow motion.

Where were they all? And who was responsible for throwing neutrality in the dustbin by permitting the Sudanese ambassador to speak to his heart's content (and beyond) from a preferential seat on the podium, from where he questioned the integrity of Amnesty International, heaped scorn on human rights concerns and brazenly asserted that he would offer a visa to Sudan - but only to an "Arab" researcher "under my supervision." (Ecstatic applause.)

After the ambassador, it was the turn of a gaggle of well-upholstered ladies in the front row of the audience, all past the age of traveling to war zones and who apparently represented Lebanese non-governmental organizations, or NGOs. Forget the "N," these were GO ladies. They clapped, they cheered, they smiled. They just loved the ambassador. What they didn't do was ask questions or show any interest in what was happening in Darfur. They knew, you see: It's an American plot, a pure invention by the occupiers of Iraq.

But where was America in all this? The report was Amnesty International's and Abu Ghraib is a continent away from Darfur.

There's rape in every society, one GO lady declared. But not on this scale, madam, and not by men wearing the uniforms of their country. Trust me, I've been there; you haven't. Why, she asked, was Amnesty International interested only in Sudan? It's not, of course: The report is part of a wide-ranging Amnesty campaign called "Stop Violence Against Women." But these women neither knew nor cared. This was "Arabism" at is most ignorant, its most ugly, its most cruel; blind, uncaring and bigoted.

Please read the rest of Julie Flint's article (which is also here). On the ground, the attacks are reported to be continuing:
Scores of terrorised Sudanese refugees who believed government promises that the local Janjaweed Arab fighters had been reined in have been viciously attacked just days after they returned home.

Mounted on camels and waving Kalashnikovs, marauding militiamen rode into the fields near Fasha, 20 miles north of the provincial capital Nyala, on Thursday morning and hunted down black African peasant farmers planting sorghum.

The murderous raid, one of many in recent days across the desolate terrain of Darfur, made a mockery of Khartoum's claims that it is bowing to international pressure to restore security to western Sudan.

Refugees are still moving across the border into Chad:
As the first rains of the wet season promise fresh water to drink along the way, more Sudanese refugees are fleeing the Janjaweed militias in the Darfur region and filtering across the western border into Chad. This wave of new arrivals is creating fresh burdens for a poor country already coping with nearly 200,000 refugees from the 18-month conflict in western Sudan.

Many of those displaced by the Darfur conflict say they prefer to make the treacherous journey to the relative safety of Chad rather than resign themselves to squalid, government-run camps or so-called safe zones in Sudan, which are still well within the reach of the Janjaweed fighters.
.....
''The Janjaweed burned our village. They took about 20 of our men, tied their hands together, and shot them all. Many of the women were raped and kidnapped," said [Goyra] Borgo in a near whisper, almost hiding behind the tangle of mukheit branches holding up her canopy. ''After that, we stayed in the mountains away from the Janjaweed and waited for the rain."

>From within the Janjaweed militia there is confirmation of government involvement in their activities:
Elders from the Janjaweed Arab militia blamed for the world's worst refugee crisis have confirmed they were mobilised by Sudan's government last year to suppress a black peasant revolt in Darfur, and that they are still receiving orders from Khartoum.
.....
"Last year they came to us and asked us to fight. We gave men and we attacked the villages they were using. We did what they asked of us," said Emir Ali Maljurhim, one of the elders, speaking through a translator.

Khartoum insists there is no connection between its forces and the militia and, on Friday, it promised to set up safe areas for uprooted black Africans from Darfur and to disarm any marauding Janjaweed. The "plan of action for Darfur" was reached after talks with Jan Pronk, a United Nations envoy, and if successful would help Sudan avoid sanctions. It is expected to be ratified by the UN tomorrow.

But the Janjaweed... are far removed from the diplomatic niceties of UN headquarters in New York. Maljurhim's interview - along with others conducted with local government employees and the Sudanese army - present a frightening picture of a scorched earth policy that is continuing.

The Arab countries have come to the defence of the Sudanese government, saying it needs more time:
Cairo - Arab states rallied around Sudan yesterday in its bid to avoid sanctions over the conflict in Darfur, calling for an extension to a United Nations-imposed deadline of 30 days to resolve the crisis.

Khartoum should be given an "adequate time frame . . . to meet its commitments" to the United Nations, Arab League foreign ministers said in a declaration after an extraordinary meeting in the Egyptian capital. Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit told reporters that Sudan may need as long as 120 days to bring the situation under control.

(Also here.) And here is a further delay, for fear of 'colonialism':
The African Union has delayed any decision on plans to deploy African peacekeepers to Darfur.

Sudan rejected an AU proposal to send some 2,000 peacekeepers in the region saying it could amount to colonialism.

There may be a case for diplomacy as opposed to intervention, though given what has already happened and seems to be continuing to happen I personally don't find that case compelling. However, Jonathan Steele's suggestion that it's only those favouring some speedier and more decisive action who are guilty of the 'excessive injection of morality into international disputes' is merely quaint. The international order as is, one that repeatedly allows governments to brutalize and slaughter the peoples they rule over, already embodies a grim morality of its own - in need of being comprehensively re-cast.

Monday, August 09, 2004

Lee Smith on political Islam in Sudan (Slate)

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http://slate.msn.com/id/2104814/
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Slate.com
August 5, 2004

Sudan's Osama
The Islamist roots of the Darfur genocide.
By Lee Smith
Posted Thursday, Aug. 5, 2004, at 3:27 PM PT

Last week the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution demanding that the Sudanese government "disarm and prosecute" the Janjaweed. Together with government troops, the armed Arab militia is responsible for the deaths of up to 50,000 African villagers and the displacement of another million from their homes in the country's western province of Darfur. The ruling National Islamic Front has 30 days to comply with the resolution or Sudan will face diplomatic and economic measures. But why would sanctions matter to a government that's been politically and economically isolated for most of the last 15 years? Are they really going to stop the Janjaweed from killing, raping, and looting?

Both Australia and England say they're ready to send troops to Darfur, but what about their Iraq coalition partner, the West's leading proponent of Middle East regime change? While the U.S. Congress declared the mass killing of civilians in Darfur to be genocide, the White House has studiously avoided the word, since using it, according to the 1948 U.N. Convention on Genocide, would require the United States to intervene. Evangelical Christian leaders have urged Washington to act forcefully, but with the U.S. military already overtaxed in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is unlikely President Bush can accommodate a group whose wishes he usually takes to heart, even in an election year. For the time being, at least, the United States is left with diplomatic initiatives, vague threats from U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Danforth, and rhetorical questions from Secretary of State Colin Powell. "What is it that they [the Sudanese government] need a month to do that they can't do right now?" Powell recently asked.

Khartoum argues that it's not a genocide, just a land dispute, and the real culprits aren't the Janjaweed but the Darfur rebels, African Muslims who are trying to settle scores with the government by killing its Arab Muslim sympathizers. It's true that the rebels have contributed to the death toll, and the fact that the press has largely overlooked their culpability only feeds the NIF's paranoid fears that an ascendant West is looking for a pretext to further expand its reach into the Muslim world. If any Western nations do try to intervene in the country's internal affairs, Khartoum promises to confront "the enemies of the Sudan on land, sea and air."

So, the simple answer to Powell's question is that even if the Sudanese government wanted to solve the Darfur crisis, it couldn't do so within a month. Some of the issues date back at least as far as Jan. 1, 1956, when Sudan declared its independence from Great Britain. While oil has been discovered in parts of the country, including Darfur, Sudan's limited natural resources, water among them, have perennially exacerbated serious structural flaws in the political system. Just as the British favored the Arabs when they assembled Iraq, together with Egypt, they did the same in Sudan: Virtually all political power, decision-making, and wealth resides in the Arab-dominated north. Consequently, the largely Christian and animist south has been at war with Khartoum since the country's birth, save for a cease-fire from 1972 to 1983.

President Jafaar an-Nimeiri's decision to impose sharia, or Islamic law, throughout the country in 1983 renewed tensions between the two parties, and war broke out again. Nimeiri's Islamicization project was urged on by Sudan's Muslim Brotherhood, including its leading ideologue and the country's attorney general, Hassan al-Turabi. The man who would later become known for inviting Osama Bin Laden to make his home in Khartoum in 1991 has long been a central figure in Sudanese politics. Turabi's brother-in-law Sadeq al-Mahdi ran the country from 1985 until 1989, when the NIF and current ruler Lt.-Gen. Omar al-Bashir came to power in a military coup that Turabi supported. Indeed, as the one-time spiritual guide of the NIF, Turabi was said to be the power behind the throne and thus most likely supplied the government with its additional rationale for continuing the war—jihad. After all, Khartoum was fighting to protect Islam and sharia against non-Muslims. Many of the Christians and animists who resisted sharia and refused to convert to Islam were killed, with the death toll from two decades of fighting recently estimated at around 2 million.

While most Western press accounts have avoided the word jihad, they've sketched out the ways in which the government's current western campaign differs from its earlier southern war, now ended under a fragile peace accord. That was a religious conflict pitting Muslims against Christians and animists; this time around, when Arab Muslims are fighting black Africans who are also Muslims, it's ethnic cleansing. However, given the fairly fluid sense of ethnicity and the complex relationships between nomadic and agricultural tribes in Sudan, that scheme doesn't entirely hold up. As the United Nations' emergency relief coordinator told Al Jazeera, "The same tribes are represented both among those who are cleansed and those who are cleansing." Indeed, the ethnic cleansing explanation has obscured what appears to be at the root of the conflict. As the NIF exploited sectarian lines in its siege against the south, Hassan al-Turabi has manipulated ethnic divides in order to wage war against his former protégé, Omar al-Bashir.

"There is a power struggle within the NIF, and Turabi is using Darfur to undermine the Khartoum government," Sudanese law scholar Abdullahi Ahmed an-Na'im told me. "This is part of a palace coup."

Turabi was arrested in March for allegedly plotting against Bashir and, for reasons that remain unclear, he is expected to be released soon. Four years ago, Turabi was put under house arrest and formed the Popular Congress. When the PC was looking for allies to bring down the central government, writes Danish aid worker Anders Hastrup, "The marginalized region of Western Darfur, with its Islamic tribes and its ambivalent and, occasionally, rebellious attitude towards Khartoum was an obvious place to look." The PC made common cause with the Darfur rebels and also circulated The Black Book, a pamphlet that, Hastrup writes, documented "Khartoum's neglect and ostracism of the western tribes in the decision-making process, and showed that the great majority of important positions in the country were filled by figures from a northern Arab background."

Ammar Abdulhamid is a Syrian writer and rights activist whose Tharwa Project Web site documents the status of minorities throughout the Middle East and North Africa. He explained to me that "there is a very serious issue of racial discrimination, of Arabs against non-Arabs, in Sudan," which Turabi turned to his advantage. "He was reaching out to non-Arab elements in his struggle against Bashir," says Abdulhamid. "And he's become the rebels' spiritual guide."

It's worth remembering that, as the NIF's chief ideologue, Turabi played on the other side, against Africans, when he boasted of wanting to "Arabize Africa." Over the last several decades, this spiritual guide for hire has not only determined most of Sudan's political and military battlegrounds, he also helped turn the country into a well-known international jihadist resort: Bin Laden, who reportedly married one of Turabi's nieces, and Ayman al-Zawahiri both spent part of the '90s in Sudan.

Nonetheless, during that time, a number of Western academics and journalists saw Sudan as an exciting experiment in Islamic governance, and Turabi, its architect, wrote Georgetown professor John O. Voll, "had an international reputation as an imaginative advocate of renewal and rethinking the foundations of Islamic law." Turabi was a media darling. Milton Viorst once described him as "a man of brilliant intellect and ineffable charm … admired by many, and even more feared by some. He is at ease in both tie and turban." This was in 1995, during the jihad years when the sartorially versatile Islamist was exhorting his countrymen to slaughter each other.

"I think many Westerners saw the Islamists as indigenous, self-determining voices, the true voice of the south," says an-Na'im, a liberal Muslim thinker who teaches at Emory Law School. "They understood Islamism as a way of countering Western hegemony, but they overlooked the fact that these movements suppressed their own populations."

An-Na'im, who advocates a reinterpretation of Islam in accordance with human rights, was a disciple of Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, the Sudanese Muslim religious leader and political activist hanged in Khartoum for apostasy in 1985. Taha understood that the biggest problem facing Islam was its historical treatment of women and non-Muslims, and his work is a powerful argument against the forced Islamicization and sharia that have plagued Sudan for 20 years. If there's a positive side to Sudan's troubles, an-Na'im contends, it's that Taha's legacy has been partly realized. "The Islamist idea, Wahhabism, the Muslim Brotherhood project are totally discredited. Not just for the Sudanese, but throughout the Muslim world."

It's not clear whether George Bush or John Kerry are paying any attention to Sudan right now. The president has defined America's war as a war against terrorism. But it's not. It's a war that requires us to take on the toxic Arab-world ideologies that breed terrorism. He says he wants to bring democracy to the Middle East, but he doesn't seem to have noticed that, like Saddam's Baathist state, Sudan's Islamist experiment has been exposed as a murderous authoritarianism. The region's ugliest political ideas are the enemies of liberal democracy and the United States. This is a part of America's war.

John Kerry says he's the man to bring our allies aboard, when he knows very well that neither France nor Germany have any intention of committing troops to Iraq. What does he have to lose by proposing a robust multilateral coalition to separate the two sides in Sudan? At the very least, it would show that Kerry knows leading the nation isn't about accepting our allies as the arbiters of right but of convincing the American people that what he believes is right.

Lee Smith, who lives in Brooklyn, is writing a book on Arab culture. You can e-mail him at LHS462@hotmail.com.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2104814/

Alex de Waal, "Counter-Insurgency on the Cheap" (LRB)

An illuminating and thought-provoking (and un-encouraging) analysis. Some highlights:
The war in Darfur at the end of the 1980s was more than a conflict over land: it was the first step in constructing a new Arab ideology in Sudan.

It is hard to find a news account of the present war in Darfur that does not characterise it as one of 'Arabs' against 'Africans'. Such a description would have been incomprehensible twenty years ago, when Darfurian conceptions of ethnicity and citizenship were still cast in the mould inherited from the Sultanate of Dar Fur and the string of comparable Sudanic states that stretched westwards to the Atlantic. The short but dramatic political career of one Fur politician, Daud Bolad, illustrates the way in which the terms 'African' and 'Arab' took such a hold.

The atrocities carried out by the Janjawiid are aimed at speakers of Fur, Tunjur, Masalit and Zaghawa. They are systematic and sustained; the effect, if not the aim, is grossly disproportionate to the military threat of the rebellion. The mass rape and branding of victims speaks of the deliberate destruction of a community. In Darfur, cutting down fruit trees or destroying irrigation ditches is a way of eradicating farmers' claims to the land and ruining livelihoods. But this is not the genocidal campaign of a government at the height of its ideological hubris, as the 1992 jihad against the Nuba was, or coldly determined to secure natural resources, as when it sought to clear the oilfields of southern Sudan of their troublesome inhabitants. This is the routine cruelty of a security cabal, its humanity withered by years in power: it is genocide by force of habit.

Sheikh Hilal's world, with its stable cosmos and its relaxed reciprocity between farmer and nomad, has disappeared, as he feared it would. Unrelenting poverty has been transformed into violence by misgovernment and imported racisms. What to do now in the face of genocidal massacre and imminent famine?

The biggest help would be peace. In theory, there's a ceasefire; in practice, the government and Janjawiid are ignoring it, and the rebels are responding in kind. The government denies that it set up, armed and directed the Janjawiid. It did, but the monster that Khartoum helped create may not always do its bidding: distrust of the capital runs deep among Darfurians, and the Janjawiid leadership knows it cannot be disarmed by force. When President Bashir promised Kofi Annan and Colin Powell that he would disarm the militia, he was making a promise he couldn't keep.

Cheers,
Jeff Weintraub

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http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n15/waal01_.html
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London Review of Books
August 5, 2004 Counter-Insurgency on the Cheap
Alex de Waal

Alex de Waal is the director of Justice Africa and the author of Islamism and Its Enemies in the Horn. A revised edition of Famine that Kills: Darfur, Sudan 1984-85 is due from Oxford.

Darfur's landscapes have a cruel beauty, and few are more unyielding than the nomadic encampment of Aamo. It is in a stony wasteland on a plain ringed by mountains formed from ancient volcanic cores. A distant sweep of pink sand marks the course of a seasonal river, Wadi Kutum. Many years ago, I stayed there as a guest of the nazir ('paramount chief') of a clan of Arab nomads known as the Jalul. With their broad black tents pitched on the sand, camels browsing on the thorn trees, and sparse but finely worked possessions, they were the stuff of coffee-table ethnography books. Today, Aamo lies at the centre of the violence that is disfiguring Darfur: tens of thousands are already dead and hundreds of thousands have been driven from their homes. The first massacre of the conflict took place just a few miles from Aamo, when the Janjawiid militia murdered several dozen villagers who had sought safety in the town of Kutum.

I met the elderly nazir, Sheikh Hilal Musa, in 1985. His tent was hung with the paraphernalia of a lifetime's nomadism - water jars, saddles, spears, swords, leather bags and an old rifle. He invited me to sit opposite him on a fine Persian rug, summoned his retainer to serve sweet tea on a silver platter, and told me the world was coming to an end. At that time, Darfur was gripped by drought and disturbing changes were afoot. The Saharan winds were blowing sand onto fertile hillsides, and when it rained the water was cutting gullies through the rich alluvial soil along the wadi. Worse, the villagers who had always played host to camel nomads were now barring their migrations, and stopping them from using pastures and wells.

Hilal rebuked me for not speaking Arabic like an Englishman: all colonial officers had been schooled in classical Arabic, not the Darfurian Sudanese version I had picked up. He said that the last Englishman who had enjoyed his hospitality was Assistant District Commissioner Thesiger, who had served in Kutum. Thesiger was famous in Darfur chiefly as a crack shot. In those days, only British officers were permitted to own rifles with enough power and accuracy to bring down a lion. By the time of my visit in 1985, privately owned firearms were a rarity. The nazir gave me a giraffe-tail fly whisk when I left. More as a result of ecological change than colonial hunting parties, lion and giraffe have now vanished from all but the southern fringes of Darfur, where the forests stretch into southern Sudan and Central African Republic. In the semi-arid plateaux of north Darfur, as the savannas fade into desert, we saw only the occasional gazelle.

Hilal was a commanding figure, even in his eighties, thin, stooped and nearly blind. The Sufis - and almost all Darfurians are followers of one or another Sufi sect, mostly of West African origin - talk of baraka, a God-given charisma or blessing. 'Sheikhdom comes from God,' Hilal believed. 'The degrees of sheikhdom are man-made.' Rather than the formally superior title of nazir, he stuck with the lowlier but more meaningful sheikh: he was known across the vastness of Darfur simply as Sheikh Hilal. Today the name of his son Musa is known even more widely: Musa Hilal is the leader of the Janjawiid; his name is first on the US government's list of suspected war criminals.

Sheikh Hilal was unbendingly proud of his nomadic way of life. He insisted that everyone in his tribe possessed camels. 'Look at that small boy,' he said, pointing to his grandson. 'Even he owns camels.' This was probably true: even in those straitened times, Hilal's family was reputed to have several thousand, although the sheikh was too old to ride a camel and rarely saw them. His herds were three hundred miles to the north, pasturing on the sweet grasses of the desert, after the rains. His nephew had recently sold 120 camels to provide food for hungry kinsmen, and Hilal had loaned many to poor relatives, from a herd that was shrinking faster than he knew. 'We assist each other. No Jalul will ever need to cultivate,' he said.

But only an hour's walk away, we found an encampment of Jalul who had lost their camels and goats during the drought and had settled in an attempt to farm. The local villagers, from the Tunjur group (a close relation of the Fur, the largest ethnic group in the region), had given them only dry, sandy soil, keeping the alluvium next to the wadi for themselves. Famous for its sweet dates, Wadi Kutum is among the most valuable farmland in north Darfur, and the Tunjur were careful to register it long before other farmers realised the importance of legal title to land. The Jalul farmers were resentful, scratching at the arid uplands in an attempt to grow a few heads of millet. Their sheikh did his best to keep up pretences. In the evening he served a lavish meal of goat and rice, and gave us directions to where we could find his sons and camels. When we finished, having eaten more than enough, he called out to his niece: 'Bring the next course!' There was no next course.

The British conquered Dar Fur ('Land of the Fur') in 1916, defeating the army of Sultan Ali Dinar, descendant of the 17th-century founder of the Fur sultanate, Suleiman Solong, whose long neglected grave lies in the mountains a day's drive south of Aamo. Like many of Darfur's key political leaders, Solong was of mixed ancestry, the son of an Arab father and a Fur mother. Despite talk of 'Arabs' and 'Africans', it is rarely possible to tell on the basis of skin colour which group an individual Darfurian belongs to. All have lived there for centuries and all are Muslims.

Many maps of Darfur have tribal names scrawled across wide territories, implying that some areas are inhabited exclusively by one of the region's thirty or more ethnic groups. This can be misleading: there is such a long history of internal migration, mixing and intermarriage that ethnic boundaries are mostly a matter of convenience. Individuals, even whole groups, can shed one label and acquire another. When the British overran the region, they found it convenient to suppose that paramount chiefs had precisely demarcated authority over ethnic groups and jurisdiction over the corresponding territory. Darfurians concurred with this fiction, which helped the British administer Darfur with just a handful of colonial officers. The key to making this 'native administration' system work was to award a territory, or dar, to each group. It wasn't land ownership exactly, but the paramount chiefs were allowed to allocate land rights to residents. Until the drought of the 1980s, there was enough land to provide newcomers, of whatever ethnicity, with a plot to farm.

The nomads were an anomaly in this system. Most of those conventionally described as nomads are in fact herders who occupy well-defined areas, but there were a few true nomadic groups in Darfur, such as Sheikh Hilal's Jalul Rizeigat. They moved vast distances between dry-season grazing areas in central and southern Darfur and wet-season pastures on the edge of the desert in the north. In the 1970s, the socialist government of Jaafar Nimeiri gave the Jalul a 'rural people's council' in the form of a village called Fata Borno (where we left the road to find Aamo), but this was merely an administrative convenience, a place where they could register to vote and send their children to school. For pasturing their herds, the Jalul relied on mobility, traversing the migration routes between the farms of Fur and Tunjur villagers, grazing their camels on the hillsides. Sheikh Hilal described what can best be thought of as a 'moral geography' of Darfur. It resembled a chequerboard, with the red squares representing farms, and the white the pastures his herds could graze. 'Wherever there is grass and rain, Allah provides that that is my home,' he said. Ahmed Diraige, a former governor of Darfur and, since then, a long-time opposition politician, recalls how his father, Ibrahim, a Fur shartai (shartai is another word for a paramount chief), hosted Sheikh Hilal's clan and their camels every season in his village, Kargula, on the southern slopes of the mountain of Jebel Marra. Shartai Ibrahim would slaughter a bull to welcome the Jalul, who would pasture their camels on the harvested fields, thus fertilising them, and help the villagers transport their grain to market. When he left, Hilal would present two young camels to his host. Like many other Darfurian Arabs, Hilal casually used racist epithets, such as zurga ('black'), to refer to the Fur and Tunjur farmers. The farmers in their turn described the bedouin as savages and pagans. But the two communities relied on one another, and their leading families intermarried.

Without a dar, the Jalul and the handful of other nomadic groups relied on a socio-geographical order that gave them customary rights to migrate and pasture their animals in areas dominated by farmers. This worked for decades, but by the 1980s, drought, desertification and the expansion of farms were threatening these rights. Sheikh Hilal's moral geography had been disturbed: the cosmic order had given way to chaos. But he would rather die than change.

'Native administration' was local government on the cheap. The chiefs were paid a pittance, receiving their reward through local despotism. After Sudan achieved independence in 1956, successive governments attempted to build up local services such as police, schools and clinics. The positions of sheikhs and nazirs were formally abolished and 'people's councils' set up to do the same job. But Khartoum never delivered the funds and, by the early 1980s, local government was bankrupt. If the governor of Darfur wanted to mount a police operation against bandits, he had to commandeer vehicles and fuel from two rural development projects funded by the World Bank, or from an aid agency. If he wanted to hold an inter-tribal conference to resolve a dispute, he had to ask wealthy citizens to cover the expenses.

A succession of local conflicts erupted in Darfur in the wake of the drought and famine of 1984-85. On the whole, the pastoral groups were pitted against the farmers in what had become a bitter struggle for diminishing resources. The government couldn't intervene effectively, so people armed themselves. A herd of a thousand camels represents more than a million dollars on the hoof: only the most naive herd-owner would not buy automatic rifles to arm his herders. The villagers armed themselves in response. There was an attempt at a reconciliation conference in 1989, but its recommendations were never implemented.

It was also in 1989 that the Islamists toppled Sadiq al-Mahdi's government in Khartoum. (Sadiq had won elections in 1986, the year after Nimeiri was deposed.) The head of state was now the devout and ruthless soldier, Omar al-Bashir, who ruled in uneasy alliance with Hassan al-Turabi, the charismatic leader of the country's Islamist party. With the Islamists in power, the Darfur regional government tried to compensate for the rarity with which it caught criminals by the savagery of the punishments it meted out: execution and public display of the corpse for armed robbers, amputation for thieves. In 1994, the government brought back the old native administration council and allocated territories to chiefs. With no funds to provide services, a suddenly renewed authority to distribute land (now becoming scarce) and self-armed vigilantes all around, this was a charter for local-level ethnic cleansing. Immediately after this administrative reform, there was another round of killings in the far west of Darfur. Much of the present conflict, then, has its origins in land rights and the shortcomings of local administration. But central government, too, is implicated in Darfur's plight, with neglect and manipulation playing equal parts.

Geography is against Darfur. The large town of el Geneina, at the westernmost edge of Darfur, close to the border with Chad, is said to be further from the sea than any other town on the continent. This part of Darfur, popularly known as Dar Masalit after the dominant group, was only absorbed into Sudan in 1922, by a treaty between the sultan and the British. Quite recently, the sultan's grandson, holding court in a decrepit palace, used to joke that he still had the right to secede from Sudan, and he pointedly hung maps of Dar Masalit and Africa on his wall, but not of Sudan.

The train from Khartoum terminates at Nyala in southern Darfur after a three-day journey. It is at least another day's drive to el Geneina, if the road is not cut by wadis carrying rainwater from the massif of Jebel Marra. Khartoum has ignored Darfur: its people have received less education, less healthcare, less development assistance and fewer government posts than any other region - even the Southerners, who took up arms 21 years ago to fight for their rights, had a better deal. Within Darfur, Arabs and non-Arabs alike have been marginalised, and it is Darfur's tragedy that the leaders of these groups have not made common cause in the face of Khartoum's indifference.

Another geographical misfortune is that Darfur borders Chad and Libya. In the 1980s, Colonel Gaddafi dreamed of an 'Arab belt' across Sahelian Africa. The keystone was to gain control of Chad, starting with the Aouzou strip in the north of the country. He mounted a succession of military adventures in Chad, and from 1987 to 1989, Chadian factions backed by Libya used Darfur as a rear base, provisioning themselves freely from the crops and cattle of local villagers. On at least one occasion they provoked a joint Chadian-French armed incursion into pursuing them. Many of the guns in Darfur came from those factions. Gaddafi's formula for war was expansive: he collected discontented Sahelian Arabs and Tuaregs, armed them, and formed them into an Islamic Legion that served as the spearhead of his offensives. Among the legionnaires were Arabs from western Sudan, many of them followers of the Mahdist Ansar sect, who had been forced into exile in 1970 by President Nimeiri. The Libyans were defeated by a nimble Chadian force at Ouadi Doum in 1988, and Gaddafi abandoned his irredentist dreams. He began dismantling the Islamic Legion, but its members, armed, trained and - most significant of all - possessed of a virulent Arab supremacism, did not vanish. The legacy of the Islamic Legion lives on in Darfur: Janjawiid leaders are among those said to have been trained in Libya.

It was in the mid-1980s, when Nimeiri was overthrown, that the Ansar exiles began to return. A few weeks after meeting Sheikh Hilal, I went in search of his sons, herding their camels in the desert. As we travelled north, we saw the tracks of military vehicles crossing the desert heading south. In 1987, returnees from Libya took the lead in forming a political bloc known as the Arab Alliance. At one level, the Alliance was simply a political coalition that aimed to protect the interests of a disadvantaged group in western Sudan, but it also became a vehicle for a new racist ideology. The politically insignificant racist epithets of earlier times began to take on an alarming tinge in Darfur. The Alliance also latched onto the dominant ideology of the Sudanese state, the very different Arabism of Nile Valley. The war in Darfur at the end of the 1980s was more than a conflict over land: it was the first step in constructing a new Arab ideology in Sudan.

It is hard to find a news account of the present war in Darfur that does not characterise it as one of 'Arabs' against 'Africans'. Such a description would have been incomprehensible twenty years ago, when Darfurian conceptions of ethnicity and citizenship were still cast in the mould inherited from the Sultanate of Dar Fur and the string of comparable Sudanic states that stretched westwards to the Atlantic. The short but dramatic political career of one Fur politician, Daud Bolad, illustrates the way in which the terms 'African' and 'Arab' took such a hold.

Bolad was one of the leading young Islamists of his generation, but abandoned political Islam after leaving Khartoum University and joined the Sudan People's Liberation Army, led by John Garang. Nothing could be further from the Islamist doctrines Bolad had once championed - and nothing more inimical to them - than the ideology of the SPLA. Although Garang is a Southerner and many in his movement urge a separate state for southern Sudan, he is not a separatist himself. He believes that the non-Arabs in Sudan - an alliance of Southerners and marginalised groups in northern Sudan, such as the Fur - form a numerical majority and should dominate a secular, pluralist and united Sudan. Garang has therefore recruited from exploited non-Arab communities on the fringes of northern Sudan, such as the Nuba, and the string of peoples along the Blue Nile valley close to Ethiopia. In 1992 the Sudan government launched its largest ever offensive, aiming to empty the Nuba region entirely under the banner of jihad. It failed and today the Nuba have achieved modest autonomy within the wider framework of a peace deal signed in Kenya in May.

Bolad and a clandestine network of local activists were Garang's entrée in Darfur. As he had done for the Nuba and Blue Nile, he dispatched a small expeditionary force into Darfur in 1991, aiming to begin an insurrection. It was a disaster. Bolad and his troops had to cross a vast distance in the dry season. The only water available was in deep boreholes, which were situated in villages and carefully guarded. Moreover, the territory was occupied by cattle-herding Arab groups, who were fiercely hostile to the SPLA. The government quickly traced Bolad's unit and hunted it down, using both the regular army and a militia of Beni Halba Arabs. A handful of fighters escaped and walked for months through Central African Republic back to southern Sudan. Bolad was captured and interrogated by the governor, Colonel al-Tayeb Ibrahim, a military doctor and leading Islamist known as 'Sikha' or the 'Iron Rod', because of his skill at wielding reinforcing rods during student demonstrations when he was bodyguard to the leader of the Khartoum University Islamists - Daud Bolad. There is no record of the encounter between the two. Bolad was never seen again. Worst of all, his diary was seized. In it were names and details of every member of his clandestine network.

Many disappeared into prisons and 'ghost houses', others were so unnerved by how much was known to their interrogators that they renounced their cause and were freed, although they were sure that their every movement continued to be watched. A generation of opposition leaders was annihilated or neutralised. Thereafter, radical Darfurian leaders were suspicious of the SPLA, fearing that it would swallow them whole, or misuse them for its own purposes. But as the SPLA continued to resist everything the Sudanese army could throw at it, and gained a high international standing, they, too, learned to characterise their plight in the simplified terms that had proved so effective in winning foreign sympathy for the South: they were the 'African' victims of an 'Arab' regime.

The 'African' label may have played well to international audiences in the 1990s, but it had little purchase in Sudan. One reason for this was the prevalence of radical Islam and its appeal to many Darfurians - the result of the success of a political experiment by the regime in Khartoum, masterminded by Hassan al-Turabi. Historically, political Islam in Sudan was dominated by an Arabised elite originating in Nile Valley, with strong links to Egypt. Theirs was a conservative movement, identified with the Arabisation professed by all of Sudan's rulers, both military and civilian. But Turabi broadened the agenda and constituency of the Islamist movement. For example, he insisted that women had rights in Islam, and today more than half of the undergraduates at Khartoum University are women. He also recognised the authenticity of western Sudanese and West African Islam, thus embracing the traditions exemplified by the early 19th-century Fulani jihads and the wandering Sufi scholars of the Maghreb.

In ensuring that citizenship was extended to all devout Muslims, Turabi revolutionised the status of the Sudanese of West African origin, known as the Fellata. This group, several million strong, consists of ethnic Hausa and Fulani whose ancestors were from Nigeria, Mali and Niger and settled in Sudan either on their way to Mecca or as labourers for colonial-era cotton schemes. The Fellata are famous for their piety. Until the Islamist coup of 1989, they were not recognised as Sudanese citizens; Turabi also increased the status of the Fellata sheikhs, thereby correcting a longstanding anomaly and creating an electoral constituency. In Darfur, too, he reached out to the religious leaders of the Fur, Masalit and other groups. As governor of Darfur, al-Tayeb Ibrahim made a point of praising the Fur for their piety and took lessons in the Fur language. The concept of common citizenship through common faith seemed for a time to be a route to Darfurian national emancipation.

But the Islamist promise was a sham. In practical terms, little changed. Only a handful of Darfurians were elevated to high positions in the party and the administration. The national government was relatively even-handed in its treatment of the region's Arabs and non-Arabs, but only in the context of continuing neglect. Local government was still bankrupt; banditry was still rife; drought and desertification continued to spark local conflicts that the governor could not, or would not, try to stop. And before long Sudan's 'westerners' found that their version of Islam was not, after all, accepted on its own terms: they were regarded as true Muslims only if they adopted Arab values and culture.

In the decade following the 1989 putsch, the differences between President Bashir and the mercurial Turabi became ever more apparent. Turabi had ambitions for revolution throughout Africa and the Middle East; Bashir held to the traditional view of Sudan as the possession of an Arabised elite. It was a protracted struggle, over ideology, foreign policy, the constitution and ultimately power itself. Bashir won: in 1999 he dismissed Turabi from his post as speaker of the National Assembly, and later had him arrested. The Islamist coalition was split down the middle. Most of the administration, and all of the security elite in control of the military and various off-budget security agencies, stayed with Bashir. The students and the regional Islamist party cells mostly went into opposition with Turabi, forming the breakaway Popular Congress. Among other things, the dismissal of Turabi gave Bashir the cover he needed to approach the United States, and to engage in a more serious peace process with the SPLA - a process that led to the signing of the peace agreement in Kenya.

The Bashir-Turabi split reverberated in Darfur. Many Darfurians who had come into the Islamist movement under Turabi's leadership now left government - and decided to organise on their own. In May 2000, they produced a 'Black Book' which detailed the region's systematic under-representation in national government since independence. It caused a stir throughout the country and showed how northern Sudan was becoming polarised along racial rather than religious lines.

In describing Daud Bolad as a 'martyr', the 'Black Book' marked a symbolic rapprochement between the Islamists and the secular radicals of Darfur. Hence the unlikely alliance between the latter group, who were busy putting together the Darfur Liberation Front (renamed in early 2003 the Sudan Liberation Army, or SLA) and the Islamist-leaning Justice and Equality Movement (JEM). The rebellion should have taken no one by surprise. But observers of the Sudanese political scene - myself included - had become so accustomed to the quiescence of Darfur that we thought the militants were crying wolf when they predicted a major insurrection. Evidently, the Sudanese government was just as surprised: its peace overtures in the early months were as half-hearted as its military preparations. In April last year, the rebels attacked el Fasher airport, destroyed half a dozen military aircraft and kidnapped an airforce general. The SPLA had managed nothing of the kind in twenty years. The rebels in Darfur had mobility, good intelligence and popular support.

Critically for Bashir, the central pillar of the Sudanese state - a cabal of security officers who have been running the wars in Sudan since 1983 - was still in place. Faced with a revolt that outran the capacity of the country's tired and overstretched army, this small group knew exactly what to do. Several times during the war in the South they had mounted counter-insurgency on the cheap - famine and scorched earth their weapons of choice. Each time, they sought out a local militia, provided it with supplies and armaments, and declared the area of operations an ethics-free zone. The Beni Halba fursan, or 'cavalry', which had been used against the SPLA in 1991, was an obvious instrument to employ in Darfur. The northern camel nomads, including former Islamic legionnaires, were also on hand. Some claim that their name - the Janjawiid - derives from 'G3' (a rifle) and jawad ('horse'), but it is also western Sudanese dialect for 'rabble' or 'outlaws'. Unleashing militias has the added advantage for the security cabal that it may derail the near complete peace process with the SPLA and allow them to retain their extra-budgetary security agencies; it also immunises them against being charged in the future with committing war crimes.

The atrocities carried out by the Janjawiid are aimed at speakers of Fur, Tunjur, Masalit and Zaghawa. They are systematic and sustained; the effect, if not the aim, is grossly disproportionate to the military threat of the rebellion. The mass rape and branding of victims speaks of the deliberate destruction of a community. In Darfur, cutting down fruit trees or destroying irrigation ditches is a way of eradicating farmers' claims to the land and ruining livelihoods. But this is not the genocidal campaign of a government at the height of its ideological hubris, as the 1992 jihad against the Nuba was, or coldly determined to secure natural resources, as when it sought to clear the oilfields of southern Sudan of their troublesome inhabitants. This is the routine cruelty of a security cabal, its humanity withered by years in power: it is genocide by force of habit.

Sheikh Hilal's world, with its stable cosmos and its relaxed reciprocity between farmer and nomad, has disappeared, as he feared it would. Unrelenting poverty has been transformed into violence by misgovernment and imported racisms. What to do now in the face of genocidal massacre and imminent famine? Legal action - trying Musa Hilal and his sponsors as war criminals - is essential to deter such crimes in future. But condemnation is not a solution. The Janjawiid's murderous campaigns must not obscure the fact that Darfur's indigenous bedouins are themselves historic victims.

As they did twenty years ago, the people of Darfur face destitution, hunger and infectious disease. Apocalyptic predictions of mass starvation were made after the 1984 drought - up to a million dead, aid agencies said, if there wasn't food aid. The food didn't come, and many died - around 100,000 - but Darfur society didn't collapse because of the formidable survival skills of its people. They had reserves of food, they travelled huge distances in search of food, work or charity, and above all they gathered wild food from the bush. Today, food reserves and animals have been stolen, and what use is the ability to gather five different kinds of wild grasses, 11 varieties of berry, plus roots and leaves, if leaving a camp means risking rape, mutilation or death? Predictions of up to 300,000 famine deaths must be taken seriously.

A huge aid effort is grinding into gear. But the distances involved mean that food relief is expensive and unlikely to be sufficient. It's tempting to send in the British army to deliver food, but this would be merely symbolic: relief can be flown in more cheaply by civil contractors, and distributed more effectively by relief agencies. The areas controlled by the SLA and JEM contain hundreds of thousands of civilians who are not getting any help. As soon as an intrepid cameraman returns with pictures of this hidden famine, there will be an outcry, and pressure for aid to be delivered across the front lines. There's no reason to wait for the pictures before acting, although it's clear that cross-line aid convoys will need to carry armed guards.

The biggest help would be peace. In theory, there's a ceasefire; in practice, the government and Janjawiid are ignoring it, and the rebels are responding in kind. The government denies that it set up, armed and directed the Janjawiid. It did, but the monster that Khartoum helped create may not always do its bidding: distrust of the capital runs deep among Darfurians, and the Janjawiid leadership knows it cannot be disarmed by force. When President Bashir promised Kofi Annan and Colin Powell that he would disarm the militia, he was making a promise he couldn't keep. The best, and perhaps the only, means of disarmament is that employed by the British seventy-five years ago: establish a working local administration, regulate the ownership of arms, and gradually isolate the outlaws and brigands who refuse to conform. It took a decade then, and it won't be any faster today. Not only are there more weapons now, but the political polarities are much sharper.

A detachment of 60 African Union ceasefire monitors is in Darfur with a slightly larger number of African troops providing security for them. So far no one is providing security for Darfur's terrified civilian populace. If troops are to be sent from outside Africa, this should be their mission. If the local intelligence is good, and a political process is afoot, the hazards should be minimal. But reconstituting Darfur will be slow, complicated and expensive. Understanding what has been lost may be a good place to start.

23 July