"The ongoing conflict in Darfur, Sudan, which started in 2003, was declared a "genocide" by United States Secretary of State Colin Powell on 9 September 2004 in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Since that time however, no other permanent member of the United Nations Security Council has followed suit. In fact, in January 2005, an International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, authorized by UN Security Council Resolution 1564 of 2004, issued a report to the Secretary-General stating that "the Government of the Sudan has not pursued a policy of genocide." Nevertheless, the Commission cautioned that "The conclusion that no genocidal policy has been pursued and implemented in Darfur by the Government authorities, directly or through the militias under their control, should not be taken in any way as detracting from the gravity of the crimes perpetrated in that region. International offences such as the crimes against humanity and war crimes that have been committed in Darfur may be no less serious and heinous than genocide." - Wikipedia June 26, 2023.
20 years ago not a single African(or European) leader had the courage to say that what was happening in Darfur was a genocide. A welcome change that still might not make a difference. https://t.co/qrhPGr6ppA
— Cameron Hudson (@_hudsonc) June 24, 2023
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Report at France24
Published Friday 23 June 2023 - here is a full copy:
Kenyan President William Ruto: 'There are already signs of genocide in Sudan'
In an interview with FRANCE 24 on the sidelines of the Summit for a New Global Financing Pact, Kenya President William Ruto said the world's multinational financial architecture needs to be "fixed". He also reacted to the ongoing conflict in Sudan, saying "there are already signs of genocide". More than 2,000 people have been killed there since fighting broke out on April 15.
"We pay, especially those of us from the Global South and on the African continent, up to eight times more for the same resources, because of something called risk," Kenya's Ruto said. Calling the current system "broken", "rigged" and "unfair", Ruto said the multinational financial architecture needs to be "fixed". He also insisted on the importance of clarifying climate financing in order to deal with poverty and the "existential threat" of climate change.
Ruto narrowly won re-election in August 2022, but his opponent Raila Odinga claims to have won instead and has since been organising protests. Ruto said: "I don't have a problem with Raila Odinga, we are competitors. I have no problem with Raila Odinga organising protests (...) It's part of democracy."
Turning to the deadly conflict in Sudan, he said: "There are already signs of genocide. What is going on in Sudan is unacceptable. Military power is being used by both parties to destroy the country and to kill civilians. The war is senseless, the war is not legitimate in any way."
Ruto said he had a regional meeting about the situation in Sudan two weeks ago in a bid to stop the war. But he added: "The issue will not be resolved until we get General al-Burhan, General Hemedti, political leaders and civil society – women's groups and youth groups – to the table." He insisted that this was "feasible".
View original: https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/the-interview/20230623-kenya-president-william-ruto-there-are-already-signs-of-genocide-in-sudan
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Further reading
Sudan Watch - April 08, 2006
What is the difference between genocide and ethnic cleansing?
https://sudanwatch.blogspot.com/2006/04/what-is-difference-between-genocide.html
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From ICC website - Darfur, Sudan - excerpts:
Situation referred to the ICC by the United Nations Security Council: March 2005
ICC investigations opened: June 2005
Current focus: Alleged genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Darfur, Sudan, since 1 July 2002 (when the Rome Statute entered into force)
Current regional focus: Darfur (Sudan), with Outreach to refugees in Eastern Chad and those in exile throughout Europe. ...
The situation in Darfur was the first to be referred to the ICC by the United Nations Security Council, and the first ICC investigation on the territory of a non-State Party to the Rome Statute. It was the first ICC investigation dealing with allegations of the crime of genocide.
Former Sudan's President Omar Al Bashir is the first sitting President to be wanted by the ICC, and the first person to be charged by the ICC for the crime of genocide. Neither of the two warrants of arrest against him have been enforced, and he is not in the Court's custody.
See the ICC Prosecutor's reports to the UNSC on the investigation.
Read more: https://www.icc-cpi.int/darfur
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Darfur: A Short History of a Long War and Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 August 2006
Extract
Darfur: A Short History of a Long War. By Julie Flint and Alex de Waal. New York: Zed Books, 2005. 176p. $60.00 cloth, $19.99 paper.
In the last two years, the Darfur region in western Sudan has moved from relative international obscurity to become a symbol of humanitarian crisis and mass violence. Political scientists who research genocide, ethnic conflict, civil war, humanitarianism, and African politics all have taken interest in the region, and Darfur is likely to command scholarly attention in years to come. Yet the academic literature on the region remains thin. To date, scholars have relied primarily on journalistic accounts and human rights reports, which detail the violence but, by their nature, provide only cursory historical background. With the publication of these two short but informative books, Darfur's political history and the path to mass violence are substantially clearer. That said, the books are not designed to build theories of ethnic violence or genocide, nor do the authors explicitly engage in hypotheses testing. The books are useful primarily as detailed, lucid case histories from two sets of well-informed observers.
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Darfur, the Ambiguous Genocide
By Gérard Prunier
212pp, Hurst, £15
Review by Dominick Donald published in the Guardian - here is a full copy:
During 2003, occasional reports emerged in the international media of fighting in Darfur, a huge tract of western Sudan bordering Chad. Over the next year the picture became confused, as - depending on who was doing the talking - a minor rebellion became a tribal spat, or nomads taking on farmers, or Arab-versus-African ethnic cleansing, or genocide.
An outside world that understood political violence in Sudan through the simplistic lens of the unending war between Muslim north and Christian/animist south - a war that seemed to be about to end - had to adjust. And nothing that has emerged since has made that adjustment easy. If Darfuris are Muslim, what is their quarrel with the Islamic government in Khartoum? If they and the janjaweed - "evil horsemen" - driving them from their homes are both black, how can it be Arab versus African? If the Sudanese government is making peace with the south, why would it be risking that by waging war in the west? Above all, is it genocide?
Gérard Prunier has the answers. An ethnographer and renowned Africa analyst, he turns on the evasions of Khartoum the uncompromising eye that dissected Hutu power excuses for the Rwanda genocide a decade ago. He is never an easy read. While his style is fluid, there's too much brilliant, obscure but pivotal erudition, too much confident summarising, and not enough readiness to compromise for the reader cramming in another five pages on the tube.
He isn't helped by the fact that he is usually offering an incisive user's manual for a machine most of us have never seen before. But stick with him. For he deploys his fierce logic to a powerful moral purpose. He builds an understanding of a community and a culture in all its complexity to then strip away the convenient truths and confused equivocations that guilty or disinterested politicians use to explain why nothing should be done. Read Darfur and you will be in no doubt at all that the government of Sudan, whatever it says, is responsible for what is happening there. The killings are the consequence of a logical, realist's policy, stemming from a racial/ cultural contempt. You will also wonder whether anything substantive will be done to stop them.
Prunier's Darfur is a victim of its separateness - not just from Khartoum, but from everywhere else in Sudan. Geographically, culturally and commercially it always looked west, along the Sahel, rather than east to the Nile, north to Egypt, or south to Bahr El Ghazal. Its Islamic practices fused Arab with African, unlike the more ascetic, eschatological Muslim brotherhoods prevalent along the Nile, or the animism or polytheism adhered to in the south. Above all it retained a political and cultural identity apart from the homogenising forces of what became Sudan. The Sultanate of Darfur tottered on, essentially independent, until 1916; the Ottomans never established a foothold there, the Mahdists were resisted and co-opted, while once the British brought it into the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, they ruled through paternalistic neglect.
Even when Darfur was key to politicians in an independent Sudan - for instance, as a bedrock of support for the neo-Mahdists who ruled the country for much of its first two decades - it was ignored. Ravaged by the 1985 famine - Khartoum effectively denied it food aid - and proxy battles for Chad, it saw in the new century with a marginal economy and a government which, when it paid attention to Darfur, did so through the medium of militias encouraged to define tribal or cultural groups as the enemy.
As Prunier shows, it is the economics and the militias that lie at the heart of the atrocities in Darfur. The Sudan Liberation Army, recognising that the Naivasha power-sharing peace process between Khartoum and the SPLA/M in the south was going to leave Darfur even further behind, took up arms in 2002. All the government could do was unleash the militias in the hope that it could deal with the problem before southerners arrived in government and vetoed any repression. Now probably half of Darfur's population has been driven into camps for internally displaced persons (IDP), beyond the reach of international food aid, where malnutrition and disease are carrying them off at the rate of perhaps 8% a year. This suits Khartoum just fine. For while the international community havers about what it cannot see, Khartoum is free to pay lip service to the Naivasha peace process that will ensure regime survival, keep the Americans off its back, and allow the élite to exploit Sudan's oil.
It is this peace process that ensures the tragedy of Darfur goes on. The UN Security Council has passed powerful-sounding resolutions demanding the Sudanese government behave in Darfur. But it doesn't have the physical tools to coerce anyone. The African Union force it dispatched there is small, immobile, unsighted and with a weak mandate, and neither the US, UK nor France has the troops to send in its place. Above all, it won't apply too much pressure on Khartoum for fear of scuppering Naivasha - the deal that will end 50 years of on-and-off fighting, and bring a recalcitrant Sudan back into the embrace of the international community.
Yet Naivasha will almost certainly fail anyway. The Sudanese government probably has no intention of sticking to the Naivasha deal; it has never stuck to its deals before, choosing to obscure non-compliance with sorrowful tales of lack of control and warnings that enforcement will bring in the bogeyman. The process is driven by external actors, and so is hostage to their brief, easily distracted political attention spans. And it will bind the international community to Khartoum as tightly as vice versa - who will be coercing and who will be coerced? The international community believes it can't pull out of Naivasha in the face of Sudanese non-compliance for fear of losing oil deals, or an Islamic supporter in the war on terror, or of ushering in something worse. In reality it has saddled up a spaniel and sent it over the sticks, ignoring the sturdy point-to-pointer waiting in the wings.
Is what is happening in Darfur genocide? As Prunier points out, in the terms of the 1948 Genocide Convention ("deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part"), it is - particularly what is happening in the IDP camps. Yet in his superb book on the Rwandan genocide, Prunier argued for a different definition, namely "a coordinated attempt to destroy a racially, religiously, or politically pre-defined group in its entirety". Why quibble about definitions? After all, they're irrelevant to Darfuris - their suffering will be the same, whatever tag is used. They're a concern for the international community alone. But for them, he concludes, the "G" word really matters.
In the west, "things are not seen in their reality but in their capacity to create brand images ... 'Genocide' is big because it carries the Nazi label, which sells well." Unfortunately what is happening in Darfur doesn't look like Treblinka. So the international community finds itself fixated on a distraction - a legal genocide, that doesn't look like a genocide.
Instead it should ignore the "G" word and focus on the key issue. The Sudanese government is responsible for the deaths of perhaps more than 200,000 Darfuris as an instrument of policy. It is weak, profoundly unpopular, and hugely vulnerable. It needs the pretence of Naivasha. It can be coerced. Let's get on with it.
· Dominick Donald is a senior analyst for Aegis Research and Intelligence, a London political risk consultancy
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