The International Community's Failure to Act Perpetuates Genocide in Darfur

December 15, 2006

The international community has failed to protect the people of Darfur. A series of high-level meetings held by diplomats and government leaders over the past month have only served to underline a complete lack of resolve when it comes to ending the genocide in Sudan. The United Nations continues to delay sending an international peacekeeping body to Darfur despite its adoption in August of Resolution 1706, which mandates the deployment of such a force. The agreement in principle to deploy a hybrid force of AU and UN peacekeepers has also been stymied by the Sudanese government, which plays on fears of neocolonialism to straightjacket leaders in the United Nations.

An effective multi-lateral peacekeeping force is the only possibility for ending the atrocities that are being committed daily in Sudan. The current African Union (AU) force of 7,000 troops is woefully undermanned and is ill-equipped to keep Janjaweed militias backed by the Sudanese army from continuing their campaign of rape and murder against Darfurian civilians. The events of last weekend, in which at least three civilians were killed by AU troops during protests in Al-Geneina, and two AU troops were kidnapped, suggest than an inefficient AU force may in fact exacerbate the situation in Darfur. Thus the recent decision to extend the mandate of the AU force for another six months beyond December 31, 2006, in the absence of United Nations support, amounts to a death sentence for the people of Darfur.

The government of Sudan has continued its complete disregard of international agreements that are intended to safeguard the lives and livelihoods of the people of Darfur. It employs arguments based on nationalism and territorial sovereignty to justify its resistance to non-AU troops being deployed in Darfur—despite the fact that a 10,000 troop UN peacekeeping force is currently on the ground in southern Sudan. It is clear that the Sudanese government prefers an ineffective AU force to UN peacekeepers, because it has sanctioned and fully supports the ongoing genocide in Darfur.

The United Nations must disregard the transparent maneuvering of the Sudanese government, whose own claims of sovereignty are based on power seized in an illegal coup. Immediate action must be taken to send effective peacekeepers to Sudan. Since 2003 alone, at least 400,000 civilians have been been killed, another 2.5 million have been displaced in the harshest of living conditions, and countless others have been raped, injured and maimed. The only fact that makes this tragedy even more disgraceful is that it is prolonged by the failure of the international community to take action.

The genocide in Darfur will end. The only questions remaining are whether nations of conscience will take action to end it, and whether or not, at that point, there are any people in Darfur left to save.