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Avoiding Genocide: The right to bear arms could have saved Sudan.

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  • Avoiding Genocide: The right to bear arms could have saved Sudan.

    The National Review
    Aug 18 2004


    Avoiding Genocide
    The right to bear arms could have saved Sudan.

    By Dave Kopel, Paul Gallant, & Joanne Eisen

    [T]he sovereign territorial state claims, as an integral part of its
    sovereignty, the right to commit genocide, or engage in genocidal
    massacres, against peoples under its rule, and...the United Nations,
    for all practical purposes, defends this right. To be sure, no state
    explicitly claims the right to commit genocide - this would not be
    morally acceptable even in international circles - but the right is
    exercised under other more acceptable rubrics.... - Leo Kuper,
    Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century
    On July 22, 2004, both houses of Congress upped the ante in Darfur,
    Sudan, by calling the situation there genocide instead of "ethnic
    cleansing." That legal change in terminology was inspired by the 1948
    U.N. Convention on Genocide, in which all the signatories promise to
    prevent and punish the crime of genocide.

    The definition of "genocide" was very tightly written. According to
    Matthew Lippman ("A Road Map to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention
    and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide," Journal of Genocide
    Research, 2002), "measures directed towards forcing members of a
    group to abandon their homes in order to escape ill-treatment" - what
    we now know as ethnic cleansing - is not considered genocide
    according to the U.N. definition.

    For months, the world has bickered over what to call the situation in
    Darfur. According to Article 8 of the U.N. Convention: "Any
    Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the United
    Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United nations
    as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of
    acts of genocide..." The U.S., which signed and ratified the Genocide
    Convention, is a "Contracting Party," and has forced the world to
    accept the fact that another genocide is taking place.

    If the U.N. follows its own laws, it must now intervene on the side
    of the victims. But the world's governments cannot agree on an
    effective remedy. At the heart of the U.N.'s failure is a grave
    misunderstanding of national sovereignty: the notion that
    "sovereignty" belongs to the government, not the people. And this
    mistaken notion of sovereignty precludes consideration of one of most
    effective ways to prevent genocide: arming the victims.



    TOO LATE - AGAIN
    As the U.N. Security Council tried to craft language every government
    could support, the threat of sanctions against Sudan was dropped. The
    final resolution that passed the Security Council on July 30, 2004,
    included an arms embargo. Notwithstanding the practical difficulties
    of imposing a successful embargo, such a policy is too late.

    As many as 50,000 people have been killed, and more will probably
    starve to death. Livestock and food have been destroyed; the dead
    animals have been used to poison the wells, and trees have been
    uprooted. Rape is used as an instrument of warfare, and, because of
    the Islamic culture of Darfur, it has irrevocably destroyed many
    families. Fifteen-year-old Aziza recalled: "Five of them raped me
    twice...they were armed...I am still in pain." The situation
    continues to deteriorate.

    Even if all hostilities ceased at this very moment, if all weapons
    were destroyed, if all aid groups could bring all the necessary food,
    water, and medical supplies into the refugee camps - even if it were
    safe for the refugees to return home - during the months that the
    world diddled, the culture of Darfur has been demolished. There is no
    going back.

    Despite all the platitudes about "never again," the world did let it
    happen - again.



    ARMED RESISTANCE
    Sudan is the largest country in Africa, over four times the size of
    Alaska. Its capital is Khartoum, and it shares its northern border
    and the Nile River with Egypt. Sudan became independent from the U.K.
    in 1956. Darfur, about the size of France, is situated in the western
    part and shares a border with Chad. Islamist Arabs run Sudan;
    Sudanese Arab nomads have been persecuting the black Muslims of
    Darfur, who are mostly farmers.

    Because of the scarcity of natural resources, and desertification in
    the area caused by two decades of drought and poor land management,
    the Arab tribesmen have, in the last few years, invaded the farming
    communities. Two self-defense forces arose among the black
    population: the SLA (Sudan Liberation Army) and the JEM (Justice and
    Equality Movement). Although it is very difficult for ordinary
    citizens to obtain firearms legally, the black self-defense groups
    were able to procure black-market arms, and therefore were able to
    protect the farming communities.

    In mid-2003, the Sudanese government began to arm the Arab Janjaweed
    militias. Although the government claims to deplore the Arabs' war on
    the blacks, the government has assisted the Arabs by bombing black
    villages and by allowing the Janjaweed to attack the blacks at will.
    Approximately 100,000 refugees have been forced into Chad, and it is
    estimated that about one million people have been displaced
    internally.

    The destruction of black society in Darfur has made it difficult for
    the populace to protect and provision the self-defense groups. So the
    refugee camps are vulnerable and unarmed, and cannot fill basic human
    needs, including food and water. And the camps are guarded by the
    Arab Janjaweed, the very people who caused the refugee crisis in the
    first place.

    The pattern of arming Khartoum's allies began decades ago when,
    during the civil war against blacks in southern Sudan, the Khartoum
    government gave arms to the Arab militias and attempted to disarm the
    Christians and Animists. According to Douglas H. Johnson, the central
    government waged war through surrogates, so as to maintain plausible
    deniability. The policy continues today in Darfur.



    INTERNATIONAL IMPOTENCE
    The rainy season now makes roads nearly impassable, so supplies must
    be airlifted in. A lack of sufficient sanitation is expected to make
    the refugee camps breeding grounds for cholera, malaria, and
    dysentery. With the refugees already weakened from their ordeals,
    their resistance to potentially fatal diseases will be low. And while
    genocide includes outright murder by machete, gas, or bullet, it also
    includes techniques such as those used by the Turks against the
    Armenians, and those Pol Pot used against the Cambodians: forced
    migration without supplies. Genocide can be accomplished by ensuring
    debilitation, starvation, and disease - as it is now in Sudan. And as
    it denies complicity in this genocide-in-progress, the government in
    Khartoum continues its delaying tactics and has threatened the
    nations attempting to save lives.

    For example, the BBC News reported that Sudan's military called the
    U.N. resolution "a declaration of war." The BBC also observed a
    placard at a public demonstration that stated, "Darfur will be a
    foreign graveyard."

    According to the July 9, 2004, New York Times, Sudan's Foreign
    Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail warned: "The American and British
    voices that call for the imposition of sanctions on Sudan are those
    that dragged the world into the Iraq problem.... I hope that they
    will not drag the world into a new problem from which it will be
    difficult to extricate itself and that is the problem of Darfur."

    Recently, the Arab League passed a resolution declaring its support
    for Khartoum, apparently under the principle that the mass murder of
    Muslims is not a problem when an Arab tyranny is doing the killing.
    Sudan's junior foreign minister, Najuid al-Khair Abdul Wahab,
    explained: "We regard this...[as] a violation of our country's
    national sovereignty."

    For years, the U.N. has been attempting to promote the notion of a
    rapid-reaction constabulary force responsible only to itself - which
    would be triggered by warnings from genocide scholars, who are
    presently studying the early warning signs of impending genocide.

    But genocide scholar Donald Krumm described "the paralysis induced by
    sovereignty.... This is the fundamental difficulty to be overcome.
    Actions based on early warning generally would require interventions
    inside another nation-state, which the United Nations and its member
    states are loath to do." As late as June 30, 2004, the BBC News
    reported that "U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan refused to use the
    term genocide, which would carry a legal obligation to act."

    Krumm's prediction was correct. The international threats, warnings,
    and admonitions have accomplished almost nothing. Furthermore, Sudan
    has rejected proposals for 2,000 soldiers to be supplied by the
    African Union. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has talked tough,
    but there is no force to back up his words. According to the BBC
    News, "Analysts say that 15-20,000 troops would be needed to secure
    Darfur and no one is talking about sending anything like that
    number."

    The U.N. remains impotent against genocide.


    DISARMED, THEN ABANDONED
    If genocide is to be averted, it is essential to understand that once
    a victim population has been disarmed, those victims require
    protectors. If the protectors are absent or refuse to act, then the
    killing continues - as when the French garrison abandoned 20,000
    Armenians in February 1920, and when U.N. forces stood idle in
    Srebrenica and Rwanda.

    In Rwanda, U.N. personnel knew that the victim group had been
    previously disarmed by laws enacted in 1964 and 1979. Early in the
    genocide, thousands of Rwandan civilians gathered in places where
    U.N. troops were stationed. The Rwandans believed the U.N.'s promise
    that its troops would protect them. If Rwandans had known that the
    U.N. troops would withdraw, the Rwandans would have fled, and some
    might have survived. According to the Report of the Independent
    Inquiry into the Actions of the United Nations During the 1994
    Genocide in Rwanda: "The manner in which troops left, including
    attempts to pretend to the refugees that they were not, in fact,
    leaving, was disgraceful." The victims were slaughtered.

    Sometimes genocide against disarmed victims ends when another nation
    invades, for the invader's own interests, as when the Allies invaded
    Germany, when Vietnam invaded Cambodia, or when Tanzania - defending
    itself against incursions by Uganda's military - invaded Uganda and
    overthrew Idi Amin.

    Unlike Hitler, Pol Pot, and Idi Amin, however, the genocidal regime
    in Sudan has been careful not to violate any other nation's
    sovereignty. Accordingly, the international community is, in
    practice, respecting the "sovereign" power of Sudan's dictatorship to
    perpetrate domestic genocide.

    According to provision (1) of Article 25 of the U.N. Declaration of
    Human Rights, adopted on December 10, 1948: "Everyone has the right
    to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of
    himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing, and
    medical care." But in Darfur, the government has been complicit in
    depriving its citizens of these basic necessities.



    THE FIFTH AUXILIARY RIGHT
    The Darfur genocide is more proof that the human rights ostensibly
    guaranteed by U.N. documents often disappear when the people are
    disarmed, and are thereby unable to prevent a tyranny from usurping
    their sovereignty. As the American Founders recognized, political
    power often does grow out of the barrel of a gun. If you are
    disarmed, you are at the mercy of an armed government.

    In Sudan, it is virtually impossible for an average citizen to
    lawfully acquire and possess the means for self-defense. According to
    gun-control statutes, a gun licensee must be over 30 years of age,
    must have a specified social and economic status, and must be
    examined physically by a doctor. Females have even more difficulty
    meeting these requirements because of social and occupational
    limitations.

    When these restrictions are finally overcome, there are additional
    restrictions on the amount of ammunition one may possess, making it
    nearly impossible for a law-abiding gun owner to achieve proficiency
    with firearms. A handgun owner, for example, can only purchase 15
    rounds of ammunition a year. The penalties for violation of Sudan's
    firearms laws are severe, and can include capital punishment.

    International gun-control groups complain that Sudan's gun laws are
    not strict enough - but the real problem with the laws is that they
    can be enforced arbitrarily. The government can refuse gun permits to
    the victims in Darfur and execute anyone who obtains a self-defense
    gun. Meanwhile, the Arab militias can obtain guns with government
    approval, or the government can simply ignore illegal gun possession
    by Arabs.

    The blacks in Sudan therefore face a situation somewhat like that of
    blacks in the 19th-century American south. There, ostensibly neutral
    gun-control laws were enforced vigorously against blacks, amounting
    to de facto prohibition. Meanwhile, the governments of the
    post-bellum south allowed the terrorist KKK to arm with impunity, and
    the Sudanese government does the same for Arab terrorist militias.
    The result: second-class citizenship for American blacks, and
    genocide for Sudanese blacks.

    The solution to the worldwide violation of the Universal Declaration
    of Human Rights is the worldwide recognition of one more human right.
    As the great English jurist William Blackstone explained, core human
    rights would be "the dead letter of the laws" if not guarded by
    "auxiliary rights." So the law "has therefore established certain
    other auxiliary subordinate rights of the subject, which serve
    principally as barriers to protect and maintain inviolate the three
    great and primary rights, of personal security, personal liberty, and
    private property."

    Thus, "The fifth and last auxiliary right of the subject...is that of
    having arms for their defence, suitable to their condition and
    degree, and such as are allowed by law. Which is also declared by the
    same statute ...and is indeed a public allowance, under due
    restrictions, of the natural right of resistance and
    self-preservation, when the sanctions of society and laws are found
    insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression."

    The Darfur genocide - like the genocides in Rwanda, Srebrenica,
    Cambodia, and so many other nations in the last century - was made
    possible only by the prior destruction of that fifth auxiliary right.


    It is long past time for the United Nations and the rest of the
    international community to do more than bemoan genocide after the
    fact. It is time for formal international law to recognize the
    natural right of self-defense, and to acknowledge the universal human
    right of "having arms for their defense" so that, as a last resort,
    victims can "restrain the violence of oppression." As history has
    shown, as long as dictatorships exist, the only way to ensure the
    primary right to life is to guarantee the auxiliary right to arms.

    - Dave Kopel is research director, and Paul Gallant and Joanne Eisen
    are senior fellows, at the Independence Institute. Their most recent
    academic publication is "Firearms Possession by Non-State Actors: The
    Question of Sovereignty."

    http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/kopel_gallant_eisen200408180824.asp
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