The Challenges of Darfur

Darfur is clearly an unstable and immensely dangerous area, with problems so immense it seems it would be impossible to resolve them. For one thing, there are so many questions and gray areas. Is there an ethnic component to the violence in Darfur? No ethnic component because the people mostly all look as if they belong to the same race and differentiate between Arabs and non-Arabs somewhat loosely? Is climate change (and lack of water) a deciding factor, or is that an insulting assumption? Is it President al-Bashir’s fault? Who can stop it, and why don’t they? Is the situation genocide? Does it matter if it’s genocide? Is it necessary to deploy military forces from other countries to calm things down, or just to impose economic sanctions? It gets worse. However, the hardest, most tragic facts of the matter stand: Between 200,000 and 400,000 people in Darfur have been killed, and some 2.4 million have been displaced. Hunger, theft, fire, and especially rape are all used as potent weapons.

My main question is why the US seems to be pressing so strongly for China to impose sanctions on Sudan. Financially, it makes perfect sense—China has more economic leverage with Sudan than any other country, and economic sanctions against Sudan could severely impact Sudan’s cash flow from its oil resources. This doesn’t mean that China is the only country with leverage, though, or that the violence in Darfur would necessarily end if China was working a bit harder against it. Now, China should, of course, do something—but when the US has been so reluctant to assign the term genocide to the situation in Darfur because the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide requires that states using the term genocide take responsibility and do something to stop it, it makes our telling China to step up and do something seem cowardly and, ultimately, ineffective. Similarly, it’s worth noting that the US never ratified the treaty creating the ICC, yet we expect other countries, like Sudan, to follow it, even if they didn’t ratify it, either. This seems unfair.

As the main article was written in 2008, this article (http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1916107,00.html) is interesting as a more recent take (August 2009) on what has happened with Sudan’s President al-Bashir. In March of 2009, he was indicted of war crimes, and the ICC indictments require that he be arrested on sight by any of the world’s other nations. However, he has managed to be visible without being arrested. This is not particularly encouraging. Anyway, much of the article harks directly back to the background section of the main article.

Interestingly, I found two very recent articles dealing with the idea that Sudan (not just the Darfur region, but Sudan as a whole) is poised on the brink of a huge civil war. The first, from TIME (http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1952418,00.html), says that Sudan is caught up in so many struggles it seems almost inevitable it will plunge into even more, and, even though it outlines some hopeful solutions or aids, ends on the note “Whatever the calls for the world to act, to a great extent the future of Sudan — war, peace, unity, disintegration — will be left to the Sudanese to decide.” The second article, from CNN (http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/africa/01/07/sudan.violence.report/index.html), discusses the escalation of violence between Sudan’s northern and southern regions, and how this makes it unlikely for Sudan to resolve any of its crises, particularly that in Darfur. Both of these articles mentioned the impact of the ICC and international pressures and aid on whether or not conflict escalates into full-blown war, which reminded me of the main article’s emphasis on foreign sanctions and aid to help Darfur.