Mick Hartley

The latest from Eric Reeves on Darfur:

Lakhdar Brahimi, a former UN envoy to Iraq and one of several international eminences know as “the Elders,” briefly toured Sudan last week and declared that the Darfur rebels were being “pampered” by the “international community.” This sentiment represents a growing exasperation on the part of western and African diplomats with the Darfuri rebels for being unable to coordinate a common position from which to negotiate a peace accord. And for this failure, rebel leaders and Darfuri political leaders in the disapora bear a great deal of blame, even as Khartoum has been exceedingly resourceful in its divide-and-rule policies.

But the notion that the rebels are being pampered by the international community is simply nonsense. Diplomatic criticism of the rebel leaders has grown steadily in past weeks and months. Moreover, one has only to look at the anemic Western contributions to the UN/AU hybrid peace support operation to Darfur authorized by UN Security Council Resolution 1769 to see how little pampering has occurred. All evidence suggests that the people of Darfur – civilians and rebels alike – will be left without meaningful improvement in human security for many months to come.

Indeed, the international community’s willingness to commit to a policy of moral equivalence, in which Khartoum is no more responsible for violence and civilian destruction in Darfur than the rebels, shows that it is the Khartoum regime that is pampered, not the rebels…

[W]ith diplomatic pressure largely removed because of Khartoum’s nominal commitment to a peace process, and with the disastrous consequences of the rebel attack on Haskanita, the regime intends to move toward a final military solution of its Darfur problem. Hundreds of thousands of civilian Darfuris are poised to die.

This renewed military solution has already begun in earnest, and Darfur appears on the brink of a resumption of full-scale war. Khartoum has in recent days attacked a number of targets, including humanitarians and civilians, and is gathering its forces across this deeply threatened region. The town of Haskanita, which came under Khartoum’s control following the rebel attack on the nearby AU outpost, has been completely burned to the ground by Khartoum’s regular forces, together with the Janjaweed militia. All the surrounding ethnically African villages have been abandoned, according to Suleiman Jamous, the most respected and credible of the rebel leaders, who also reports that during a rampage of several days more than 100 civilians were killed. The Associated Press has reported that 15,000 civilians were forced to flee the area. Some 130km to the west, according to numerous reliable reports, the town of Muhajeria was bombed on Monday by one of Khartoum’s Antonov aircraft. Amnesty International reports that the plane was painted white, the colour of UN aircraft. At least 40 civilians were killed in this town of 5,000, which also hosts some 45,000 displaced civilians. We should bear in mind that all offensive aerial military flights are prohibited by the March 2005 UN Security Council Resolution 1591, a prohibition that Khartoum regularly ignores because of tepid criticism from precisely the international community Brahimi invokes as pampering the rebels…

Since Khartoum began its genocidal counter-insurgency war after rebel military successes of early 2003, the ensuing destruction has been savagely comprehensive. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Africans have been killed; tens of thousands of African women and girls have been raped; the vast majority of African villages have been burned, along with food and seed stocks. Precious water wells have been poisoned with human or animal corpses. Agricultural implements have been destroyed; mature fruit trees cut down. The notorious Janjaweed leader Musa Hilal articulated the regime’s intention in an August 2004 memorandum: “Change the demography of Darfur and empty it of African tribes.”

When we assess current rebel violence, intransigence and fractiousness, we risk hopelessly distorting the nature of the rebellion and continuing resistance if we ignore the clear evidence of Khartoum’s strategy of genocidal destruction. Similarly, if we ignore the regime’s record of genocide – in Darfur, but also in the Nuba Mountains and the oil regions of southern Sudan – then the baseline for any peace process will also be badly distorted.

Confident that such distortions and ignorance will prevail, Khartoum has moved decisively onto the military offensive. This in turn will make it even harder to persuade rebel leaders to attend the peace talks. Historical myopia, excessive criticism of the rebel groups and growing international unwillingness to acknowledge the realities of genocidal destruction have brought Khartoum steadily closer to a final solution of its Darfur problem.