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The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
June 23, 2004 Wednesday Home Edition
A QUESTION OF GENOCIDE: Sudan's killing grounds;
Slaughter of villagers sparks concern, debate
by MARK BIXLER
As one of the world's longest and most devastating wars nears an end,
Atlanta-based CARE and the Carter Center are preparing to expand
their work in southern Sudan even as other humanitarian organizations
warn of possible genocide in another part of the country.
In the Darfur region of western Sudan, reports of atrocities
reminiscent of mass killings in Bosnia, Cambodia and Rwanda have
created a troubling dilemma for U.S. officials, who have avoided
characterizing the killings as genocide because doing so would
obligate them to act under terms of a treaty drafted in response to
the Holocaust.
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide, adopted in 1948 and ratified by the United States in 1986,
defines genocide as the "intent to destroy, in whole or part, a
national, ethnic, racial or religious group." Signatories agree to
"prevent and punish" genocide, though the treaty does not define
prevention and punishment.
"No president wants to say there is a genocide and 'Oh, by the way,
I'm not going to do anything about it,' " said Jerry Fowler, director
of the committee of conscience at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
in Washington, which has issued a "genocide warning" for Darfur.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said this month the Bush
administration is trying to determine whether events in Darfur fit
the legal definition of genocide. Other U.S. officials have described
the killings as "ethnic cleansing," a euphemism conceived in the
early 1990s by the Serbs to refer to their practice of targeting
non-Serbs for killing or forced removal.
In Darfur, aid workers and officials say, Arab militias, often
working with the Sudanese military, have killed 10,000 to 30,000
black Africans and forced 1 million others from their homes to remote
areas where food is scarce. The U.S. Agency for International
Development warns that at least 350,000 could die within months.
The United Nations' under- secretary-general for humanitarian
affairs, Jan Egeland, has called Darfur the worst humanitarian crisis
in the world.
Past reports of mass killings, however, have prompted a muted
response from the United States.
In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book "A Problem From Hell," Samantha
Power, who teaches human rights and U.S. foreign policy at Harvard
University, documents a U.S. tendency to avoid decisive action when
confronted with evidence of atrocities.
>From the slaughter of Armenian Christians in modern Turkey in 1915 to
the execution of Bosnian Muslims in the mid-1990s, Power writes,
"decent men and women chose to look away."
In Rwanda in 1994, the international community did little as members
of the Hutu ethnic majority hacked, shot and burned to death 800,000
members of the minority Tutsis. President Bill Clinton said in Rwanda
in 1998 the United States should have done more to stop the killing.
That experience has informed the U.S. response to the "crimes against
humanity" in Darfur, said Jemera Rone, a Sudan expert at Human Rights
Watch/Africa in Washington.
"I think the U.S. and the U.N. learned a lesson from Rwanda," she
said. "They're trying to do the maximum they can without calling it
genocide."
The United States helped arrange a briefing on Darfur at the U.N.
Security Council. It also made clear it will not improve relations
with Sudan unless conditions change. The Security Council called for
a halt to fighting, and Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he plans to
visit Sudan.
'Janjaweed rule'
Still, the United States could do more, said John Prendergast,
director of African Affairs at the National Security Council during
Clinton's second term. He left Washington a few days ago for Chad,
where he plans to meet victims of the Arab militias in Darfur, known
as the janjaweed. He said the United States and United Nations should
threaten war crimes trials for janjaweed commanders and Sudanese
leaders involved in abuses.
"There is a developing consensus that what the militias are carrying
out on the ground is genocide," he said before leaving for Africa.
Problems in Darfur began last April.
Just as a north-south war that has raged for all but 11 years since
1955 appeared headed for negotiated settlement, a new war erupted in
western Sudan. Two rebel groups in Darfur that had not previously
been involved in the fighting attacked a Sudanese military base in
April.
In response, the Sudanese government turned to Arab militias with a
history of animosity toward black Africans in Darfur, Rone said. The
government armed and trained them, she said, even giving satellite
phones to some janjaweed commanders.
Last August or September, the militias and armed forces began
attacking hundreds of villages in Darfur. Aid workers say attackers
raped many women and branded some afterward to add to the stigma.
They say attackers hurled dead bodies into wells to poison water
supplies.
"They're going after civilians," Rone said.
The Sudanese government says the violence is the result of tribal
conflicts over resources. On Sunday, President Omar el-Bashir said
his military will disarm warring parties in Darfur, including the
janjaweed.
The militias and their victims both are Muslims, but the janjaweed
are Arabs while most people in Darfur are black Africans.
Prendergast said he believes the Bush administration was slow to
pressure the Sudanese government on Darfur for fear that it would
scare Sudan away from the negotiating table with southern rebels.
North vs. south
The Sudanese civil war pits a northern government of Arab Muslims
against black Africans in the south who follow Christianity and
animist religions. The conflict is mainly over power and resources.
Fighting and war-related famine and disease have killed at least 2
million people since 1983. The war also has displaced more than 5
million people. Most casualties are from southern Sudan.
The northern government and the main southern rebel group, the Sudan
People's Liberation Army, have signed accords that call for a
referendum after six years on whether southern Sudan will secede and
form an independent nation. When talks resume Friday, only procedural
obstacles remain before a final peace agreement is reached.
In anticipation of peace, the United Nations and nongovernmental
organizations are building roads to facilitate the delivery of relief
supplies and encourage trade, said Gary McGurk, CARE's assistant
country director for southern Sudan.
"In order to get peace in southern Sudan, you've got to have
infrastructure and development," McGurk said during a visit to
Atlanta last week.
He said CARE is building or rebuilding 300 schools in southern Sudan.
The Carter Center, meanwhile, has prepositioned filters and medical
kits and hopes to increase distribution in a peaceful southern Sudan
as part of its effort to eradicate Guinea worm disease, said Craig
Withers, who coordinates the center's health programs in Sudan.
Southern Sudan is home to 63 percent of the world's cases of Guinea
worm, an affliction in which larvae from contaminated water grow to
worms inside a human body and break through the skin in painful
blisters.
"We've been planning this for a while," Withers said. "We're ready to
go."
GRAPHIC: Graphic: WHAT IS GENOCIDE?
The Genocide Convention adopted by the United Nations in 1948 says
genocide includes the following crimes committed with the intent to
destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group:
1. Killing members of the group
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
3. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
4. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated
to bring about its physical destruction
5. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
THE SLAUGHTERHOUSES OF THE 20TH CENTURY
1915 to 1923: 1.5 million people of Armenian descent are killed
during a campaign by the Ottoman Empire to expel them from eastern
Turkey. The Turkish government denies it engaged in genocide.
World War II: The systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored
persecution and murder of approximately 6 million Jews by the Nazi
regime and its collaborators. Nazis also target other groups because
of their perceived "racial inferiority": Roma (Gypsies), the
disabled, and some of the Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians, and
others). Other groups are persecuted on political and behavioral
grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses and
homosexuals. The killings are carried out throughout Europe. The most
infamous death camps include Auschwitz, Treblinka and Bergen-Belsen.
1975-1978: An estimated 2 million Cambodians, mainly from the
intelligentsia, die at the hands of the Pol Pot regime in what
becomes known as the "killing fields."
1982: Syrian Baathists under the direction of President Hafiz
al-Assad destroy the city center in the Sunni Muslim city of Hamah
and murder thousands. Estimates of those killed range from 5,000 to
10,000.
1988: Poison gas attack kills between 3,500 and 5,000 Kurds in
Halabja, Iraq, under the regime of Saddam Hussein.
1994: Ethnic Hutu militants in Rwanda slaughter an estimated 800,000
ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus as the world turns away.
1995: Massacre by Bosnian Serb forces of roughly 8,000 Bosnian Muslim
men and boys in the city of Srebrenica. It is ruled as genocide in
April 2004 by the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for
the former Yugoslavia.
1995: A national inquiry concludes that the Australian government had
knowingly pursued a policy of genocide in regard to the Aboriginal
peoples between 1870 and 1970.
1998: Yugoslav forces under the leadership of President Slobodan
Milosevic execute scores of ethnic Albanian civilians in Kosovo and
are believed to have detained as many as several thousand men whose
fate is unknown; they also engineer the greatest refugee crisis in
Europe since World War II, emptying villages and cities in forced
expulsions that send more than 500,000 ethnic Albanians into exile.
Darfur conflict
The largely Arabic Janjaweed militia, backed by the government in
Khartoum, rampages through the villages of mainly African farmers in
Darfur. Activists say the attacks amount to genocide.
Reason for conflict
Grazing rights; soil in Darfur region is fertile. And for
generations, nomads have fought farmers for soil and cattle rights.
Sources: Armenian National Institute, United Nations, Web Genocide
Documentation Centre, Genocide Research Project, Knight Ridder
Tribune, Photos by Associated Press
Research by ALICE WERTHEIM / Staff
/ MICHAEL DABROWA / Staff; Photo: Arab and African horsemen parade
before Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir last month as a show of
solidarity in Nyala, capital of Darfur. / BERT WESTON / Courtesy of
the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; Photo: Mukama Tharcisse, 74, one
of the survivors of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, is one of the
guardians of the memorial of the genocide in Nyamata. The memorial
houses remains of 20,000 victims. / Associated Press; Photo: Slobodan
Milosevic / Associated Press; Photo: Armenian deportees in a camp of
makeshift tents inhabited mostly by women and children in the barren
Syrian desert. / Associated Press; Photo: The remains of huts burnt
by militia in Sudan's North Darfur village of Bandago on April 29.
UNICEF has said the fighting in Darfur has forced 1 million people
out of their homes and into camps in Sudan, while 200,000 people have
taken shelter in cities and towns in the region. About 110,000 people
have taken refuge in neighboring Chad. / Associated Press; Map: Map
pinpoints the location of Darfur in Sudan.
June 23, 2004 Wednesday Home Edition
A QUESTION OF GENOCIDE: Sudan's killing grounds;
Slaughter of villagers sparks concern, debate
by MARK BIXLER
As one of the world's longest and most devastating wars nears an end,
Atlanta-based CARE and the Carter Center are preparing to expand
their work in southern Sudan even as other humanitarian organizations
warn of possible genocide in another part of the country.
In the Darfur region of western Sudan, reports of atrocities
reminiscent of mass killings in Bosnia, Cambodia and Rwanda have
created a troubling dilemma for U.S. officials, who have avoided
characterizing the killings as genocide because doing so would
obligate them to act under terms of a treaty drafted in response to
the Holocaust.
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide, adopted in 1948 and ratified by the United States in 1986,
defines genocide as the "intent to destroy, in whole or part, a
national, ethnic, racial or religious group." Signatories agree to
"prevent and punish" genocide, though the treaty does not define
prevention and punishment.
"No president wants to say there is a genocide and 'Oh, by the way,
I'm not going to do anything about it,' " said Jerry Fowler, director
of the committee of conscience at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
in Washington, which has issued a "genocide warning" for Darfur.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said this month the Bush
administration is trying to determine whether events in Darfur fit
the legal definition of genocide. Other U.S. officials have described
the killings as "ethnic cleansing," a euphemism conceived in the
early 1990s by the Serbs to refer to their practice of targeting
non-Serbs for killing or forced removal.
In Darfur, aid workers and officials say, Arab militias, often
working with the Sudanese military, have killed 10,000 to 30,000
black Africans and forced 1 million others from their homes to remote
areas where food is scarce. The U.S. Agency for International
Development warns that at least 350,000 could die within months.
The United Nations' under- secretary-general for humanitarian
affairs, Jan Egeland, has called Darfur the worst humanitarian crisis
in the world.
Past reports of mass killings, however, have prompted a muted
response from the United States.
In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book "A Problem From Hell," Samantha
Power, who teaches human rights and U.S. foreign policy at Harvard
University, documents a U.S. tendency to avoid decisive action when
confronted with evidence of atrocities.
>From the slaughter of Armenian Christians in modern Turkey in 1915 to
the execution of Bosnian Muslims in the mid-1990s, Power writes,
"decent men and women chose to look away."
In Rwanda in 1994, the international community did little as members
of the Hutu ethnic majority hacked, shot and burned to death 800,000
members of the minority Tutsis. President Bill Clinton said in Rwanda
in 1998 the United States should have done more to stop the killing.
That experience has informed the U.S. response to the "crimes against
humanity" in Darfur, said Jemera Rone, a Sudan expert at Human Rights
Watch/Africa in Washington.
"I think the U.S. and the U.N. learned a lesson from Rwanda," she
said. "They're trying to do the maximum they can without calling it
genocide."
The United States helped arrange a briefing on Darfur at the U.N.
Security Council. It also made clear it will not improve relations
with Sudan unless conditions change. The Security Council called for
a halt to fighting, and Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he plans to
visit Sudan.
'Janjaweed rule'
Still, the United States could do more, said John Prendergast,
director of African Affairs at the National Security Council during
Clinton's second term. He left Washington a few days ago for Chad,
where he plans to meet victims of the Arab militias in Darfur, known
as the janjaweed. He said the United States and United Nations should
threaten war crimes trials for janjaweed commanders and Sudanese
leaders involved in abuses.
"There is a developing consensus that what the militias are carrying
out on the ground is genocide," he said before leaving for Africa.
Problems in Darfur began last April.
Just as a north-south war that has raged for all but 11 years since
1955 appeared headed for negotiated settlement, a new war erupted in
western Sudan. Two rebel groups in Darfur that had not previously
been involved in the fighting attacked a Sudanese military base in
April.
In response, the Sudanese government turned to Arab militias with a
history of animosity toward black Africans in Darfur, Rone said. The
government armed and trained them, she said, even giving satellite
phones to some janjaweed commanders.
Last August or September, the militias and armed forces began
attacking hundreds of villages in Darfur. Aid workers say attackers
raped many women and branded some afterward to add to the stigma.
They say attackers hurled dead bodies into wells to poison water
supplies.
"They're going after civilians," Rone said.
The Sudanese government says the violence is the result of tribal
conflicts over resources. On Sunday, President Omar el-Bashir said
his military will disarm warring parties in Darfur, including the
janjaweed.
The militias and their victims both are Muslims, but the janjaweed
are Arabs while most people in Darfur are black Africans.
Prendergast said he believes the Bush administration was slow to
pressure the Sudanese government on Darfur for fear that it would
scare Sudan away from the negotiating table with southern rebels.
North vs. south
The Sudanese civil war pits a northern government of Arab Muslims
against black Africans in the south who follow Christianity and
animist religions. The conflict is mainly over power and resources.
Fighting and war-related famine and disease have killed at least 2
million people since 1983. The war also has displaced more than 5
million people. Most casualties are from southern Sudan.
The northern government and the main southern rebel group, the Sudan
People's Liberation Army, have signed accords that call for a
referendum after six years on whether southern Sudan will secede and
form an independent nation. When talks resume Friday, only procedural
obstacles remain before a final peace agreement is reached.
In anticipation of peace, the United Nations and nongovernmental
organizations are building roads to facilitate the delivery of relief
supplies and encourage trade, said Gary McGurk, CARE's assistant
country director for southern Sudan.
"In order to get peace in southern Sudan, you've got to have
infrastructure and development," McGurk said during a visit to
Atlanta last week.
He said CARE is building or rebuilding 300 schools in southern Sudan.
The Carter Center, meanwhile, has prepositioned filters and medical
kits and hopes to increase distribution in a peaceful southern Sudan
as part of its effort to eradicate Guinea worm disease, said Craig
Withers, who coordinates the center's health programs in Sudan.
Southern Sudan is home to 63 percent of the world's cases of Guinea
worm, an affliction in which larvae from contaminated water grow to
worms inside a human body and break through the skin in painful
blisters.
"We've been planning this for a while," Withers said. "We're ready to
go."
GRAPHIC: Graphic: WHAT IS GENOCIDE?
The Genocide Convention adopted by the United Nations in 1948 says
genocide includes the following crimes committed with the intent to
destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group:
1. Killing members of the group
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
3. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
4. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated
to bring about its physical destruction
5. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
THE SLAUGHTERHOUSES OF THE 20TH CENTURY
1915 to 1923: 1.5 million people of Armenian descent are killed
during a campaign by the Ottoman Empire to expel them from eastern
Turkey. The Turkish government denies it engaged in genocide.
World War II: The systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored
persecution and murder of approximately 6 million Jews by the Nazi
regime and its collaborators. Nazis also target other groups because
of their perceived "racial inferiority": Roma (Gypsies), the
disabled, and some of the Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians, and
others). Other groups are persecuted on political and behavioral
grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses and
homosexuals. The killings are carried out throughout Europe. The most
infamous death camps include Auschwitz, Treblinka and Bergen-Belsen.
1975-1978: An estimated 2 million Cambodians, mainly from the
intelligentsia, die at the hands of the Pol Pot regime in what
becomes known as the "killing fields."
1982: Syrian Baathists under the direction of President Hafiz
al-Assad destroy the city center in the Sunni Muslim city of Hamah
and murder thousands. Estimates of those killed range from 5,000 to
10,000.
1988: Poison gas attack kills between 3,500 and 5,000 Kurds in
Halabja, Iraq, under the regime of Saddam Hussein.
1994: Ethnic Hutu militants in Rwanda slaughter an estimated 800,000
ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus as the world turns away.
1995: Massacre by Bosnian Serb forces of roughly 8,000 Bosnian Muslim
men and boys in the city of Srebrenica. It is ruled as genocide in
April 2004 by the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for
the former Yugoslavia.
1995: A national inquiry concludes that the Australian government had
knowingly pursued a policy of genocide in regard to the Aboriginal
peoples between 1870 and 1970.
1998: Yugoslav forces under the leadership of President Slobodan
Milosevic execute scores of ethnic Albanian civilians in Kosovo and
are believed to have detained as many as several thousand men whose
fate is unknown; they also engineer the greatest refugee crisis in
Europe since World War II, emptying villages and cities in forced
expulsions that send more than 500,000 ethnic Albanians into exile.
Darfur conflict
The largely Arabic Janjaweed militia, backed by the government in
Khartoum, rampages through the villages of mainly African farmers in
Darfur. Activists say the attacks amount to genocide.
Reason for conflict
Grazing rights; soil in Darfur region is fertile. And for
generations, nomads have fought farmers for soil and cattle rights.
Sources: Armenian National Institute, United Nations, Web Genocide
Documentation Centre, Genocide Research Project, Knight Ridder
Tribune, Photos by Associated Press
Research by ALICE WERTHEIM / Staff
/ MICHAEL DABROWA / Staff; Photo: Arab and African horsemen parade
before Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir last month as a show of
solidarity in Nyala, capital of Darfur. / BERT WESTON / Courtesy of
the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; Photo: Mukama Tharcisse, 74, one
of the survivors of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, is one of the
guardians of the memorial of the genocide in Nyamata. The memorial
houses remains of 20,000 victims. / Associated Press; Photo: Slobodan
Milosevic / Associated Press; Photo: Armenian deportees in a camp of
makeshift tents inhabited mostly by women and children in the barren
Syrian desert. / Associated Press; Photo: The remains of huts burnt
by militia in Sudan's North Darfur village of Bandago on April 29.
UNICEF has said the fighting in Darfur has forced 1 million people
out of their homes and into camps in Sudan, while 200,000 people have
taken shelter in cities and towns in the region. About 110,000 people
have taken refuge in neighboring Chad. / Associated Press; Map: Map
pinpoints the location of Darfur in Sudan.