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Too little, too late in Darfur?

BY TINA SUSMAN | Newsday Staff Writer

May 7, 2006

The Bush administration led last week's efforts to push the warring parties in Sudan's Darfur region to sign a peace deal, but critics of the United States' handling of the crisis say it should have been far more aggressive two years ago when it first declared the war a genocide.

Now, they say it may have bulldozed through a flawed agreement that has only partial support from Darfur's rebel factions, who accuse Sudan's Arab-led regime of discrimination against Darfur's non-Arab tribes. "There's no point to peace at any cost, because it won't be carried out on the ground," Anne Bartlett, director of the Darfur Center for Human Rights and Development in Chicago, said Friday after Darfur's main rebel faction and Sudan's government signed a plan in Abuja, Nigeria to end the 3-year-old war.

Two rebel groups refused to sign, saying the plan did not satisfy their demands for sharing power with President Omar Hassan al-Bashir's government. The faction that did sign acknowledged it did so "with some reservations" about power-sharing and security arrangements.

Even U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, who flew to Abuja last week to salvage the peace talks, said the signing was "only a step" toward ending what Bush, in September 2004, called a state-sponsored genocide against non-Arabs.

Had the United States acted more decisively back then, foreign policy experts say, things might be far different today in the arid, remote region, where international aid groups estimated that anywhere from 180,000 to 400,000 civilians have died, and where 2 million people have been forced from their homes.

"The fact that there was no [U.S.] interest in acting beyond making the declaration of genocide really took the wind out of the sails" of the accusation, said Juan Mendez, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's special adviser on the prevention of genocide.

It also sent a message to the Sudanese government and to other regimes accused of atrocities that the world is reluctant to confront them, he said. "No government wants to be called genocidal, but now they know even if they're called genocidal, that leaves open the question of what the consequences are."

By declaring a genocide, the United States invoked a rarely used and politically loaded term that, under a 1948 United Nations convention, is defined as the attempt to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Signatories to the convention, who include the United States, commit themselves to prevent genocide and punish its perpetrators.

While the convention is not legally binding, it implies a moral duty to intervene. That makes countries hesitant to use it, as in 1994 during the Rwandan genocide. The 100-day slaughter of about a half-million members of the country's Tutsi minority was nearly over by the time the U.N. Security Council acknowledged that genocide was occurring. Then-President Bill Clinton later apologized for the United States' and the world's failure to react in time.

Susan Rice, who was Clinton's assistant secretary of state for African affairs, said the Bush administration's approach to Darfur showed that it had not learned from Rwanda. "They have repeated that error, with the added moral burden of instead of failing to act in a three-month period to halt a lightning-fast genocide, they failed to act effectively in a three-year period," said Rice, who is now at the Brookings Institution think tank.

Bush administration officials have insisted that their willingness to accuse Sudan of genocide when no other nation did, along with their support for U.N. resolutions threatening sanctions against Sudanese officials, proves they have been committed to ending Darfur's war from the start.

Last week, as the Abuja talks appeared near collapse, Bush telephoned the Sudanese president to urge him to accept a peace deal and deployed Zoellick to Abuja.

Even if Zoellick can persuade the other rebel groups to sign onto the plan, foreign policy experts say the Bush administration's job is far from over in Darfur. It still must force Sudan's government to disarm allied militiamen in Darfur - something al-Bashir has promised but failed to do repeatedly since 2003.

Rice said it must also ensure that U.N. troops are allowed into Darfur to implement the accord and that their mandate is not dictated by al-Bashir, who has opposed U.N. intervention. "The perpetrators of genocide should not get a veto over stopping genocide," she said.