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Leading Article: Darfur: Action not words

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  • Leading Article: Darfur: Action not words

    Leading Article: Darfur: Action not words

    Guardian Leader

    The Guardian/UK
    11 Sept 2004

    America's declaration that genocide is taking place in Sudan has
    injected fresh urgency - and controversy - into the international
    debate about what the UN unhesitatingly calls the world's worst
    humanitarian crisis. It was only to be expected that the Khartoum
    government would reject the charge, but there has also been a lukewarm
    response elsewhere to Colin Powell's statement to the Senate foreign
    relations committee. The US secretary of state says genocide is
    taking place on the basis of evidence that black African villagers
    in Darfur are being targeted with the specific intent of destroying
    "a group in whole or part". Human rights organisations have welcomed
    the shift. Britain's official response is that grave crimes are
    being committed by the government-backed Janjaweed Arab militias and
    that the UN should mount an urgent investigation. Is this a case of
    diplomatic sensibilities masking a brutal truth? Is it right to have
    reservations about using the G word?

    Situations previously characterised as genocide include the Turkish
    massacre of 1.5 million Armenians during the first world war and,
    less controversially, the Nazis' extermination of six million Jews
    in the second world war, when the term was coined from the Greek
    word genos (race or tribe) with the Latin word cide (to kill). It
    has been widely applied to Pol Pot's Cambodia of the 1970s and made
    bloody reappearances in Rwanda in 1994 and in the aftermath of the
    wars of the Yugoslavian succession. Slobodan Milosevic, the former
    Serbian president, is facing a genocide charge at the Hague war crimes
    tribunal. Radislav Krstic, a Bosnian Serb general, was convicted of
    genocide for his role in the Srebrenica massacre of 7,000 Muslim men
    and boys.

    Sudanese officials will admit to nothing more than a humanitarian
    crisis created by ethnic strife and have contemptuously accused Mr
    Powell of seeking black votes in the forthcoming US pres idential
    election. Khartoum also argues that the intervention will undermine
    delicate peace negotiations with Darfur rebel groups in Nigeria. Most
    of the facts, though, are indisputable: 50,000 people have died since
    February 2003 and over a million have been displaced. Aid workers
    yesterday reported a new mass influx of refugees into one camp in
    southern Darfur. Harrowing images have been on our TV screens for
    long enough to fuel demands for something that goes beyond agonised
    handwringing and ineffective quiet diplomacy

    It is true that behind the debate in the US lies guilt about
    the shameful failure to act when the first reports of genocide
    emerged from Rwanda a decade ago. That is only natural. The genocide
    characterisation may also be intended to galvanise the international
    community -though targeted sanctions such as an assets freeze and a
    travel ban on senior Sudanese officials would be more effective than
    the oil embargo currently being proposed by Washington. That is opposed
    by China, an importer of Sudanese oil and a security council member,
    as well as by Pakistan and Algeria. And there is the familiar dilemma
    that such sanctions are a notoriously blunt instrument, as the Iraqi
    experience taught. But urgent though the crisis is, Washington and
    London are still not trying the sort of heavy-duty arm-twisting they
    tried when seeking a second UN resolution authorising war on Saddam.

    Mr Powell's intervention puts the US a step ahead of the EU, which
    says it wants a UN investigation. But the real question is not about
    a dictionary definition of genocide. No one can claim that Sudan
    is not experiencing a terrible human tragedy. As Oxfam has been
    warning in appeals for help to save lives: time is short and people
    are dying. Recognising the scale of human suffering is a prerequisite
    to action. Words, however resonant, are not enough.
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