While Khartoum applauds UN move to slash the peacekeeping force (UNAMID), displaced Darfuris displaced call it a “major disappointment and flagrant mistake.” For its part Human Rights Watch has declared that the deep cuts planned by the UN are “misguided” and based on a “false narrative.”
The UN Security Council is poised to reduce the presence of UNAMID in Darfur in enormously consequential ways—targeting for reduction police personnel, military personnel, and logistical/administrative personnel. The effect of this action will be to put millions of Darfuris at greater risk, both from intensifying insecurity and the inevitable reductions in humanitarian access, much of which is made possible only by virtue of UNAMID escort.
Three million Darfuris remain displaced from their homes and unable to return: 2.7 million Internally Displaced Persons and 300,000 Darfuri refugees in eastern Chad, living in miserable conditions but too fearful to return to Darfur. One might think that the deaths of more than half a million people—either directly or indirectly from Khartoum-orchestrated and countenanced violence—might give the UN Security Council pause—but that is not the case. Indeed, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has not published any mortality data or promulgated a single mortality estimate since April 2008, when OCHA head estimated that 300,000 people had died from the effects of violence.
In more than nine years the UN has said nothing about deaths that are the consequence of genocidal violence.
That violence continues and is reported on a daily basis by Radio Dabanga. Aggregations of incidents, attacks, and security deterioration as reported by Radio Dabanga reveal that far from gradually coming to an end, violence that began to surge in 2012 has remained at intolerably high levels. I have written extensively on the violence in Darfur in recent years and concur with Human Rights Watch that the decision by the Security Council to slash UNAMID is based on a “false narrative:
• “Changing the Demography”: Violent Expropriation and Destruction of Farmlands in Darfur, November 2014 – November 2015" | December 1, 2015 | http://wp.me/p45rOG-1P4
• Continuing Mass Rape of Girls in Darfur: The most heinous crime generates no international outrage | January 2016 | http://wp.me/p45rOG-1QG [Arabic translation of this report | http://wp.me/p45rOG-1Rr ]
UNAMID was always a catastrophically misconceived “hybrid” operation shared between the UN and the African, and was in no way comparable to the peacekeeping mission authorized by the Security Council in August 2006 (Resolution 1706). Instead of the robust peacekeeping mission authorized under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, the Chinese-proposed July 2007 UN Security Council authorization of UNAMID was the end result of countless disabling compromises with Khartoum and the disastrous hubris of the African Union, which not only declared falsely its ability and capacity to carry out such a mission but would at various junctures declare that violence in Darfur had essentially come to an end—the “false narrative” that Human Rights Watch has referred to.
UNAMID’s failure has been overwhelming, and yet it remains the only civilian protection force in Darfur; and we may be all too sure it will not be replaced or supplemented once reduced (44 percent of the military personnel are targeted for withdrawal; 33 percent of the police forces, crucial to any form of security in the IDP camps; and many UNAMID posts away from the major cities in Darfur will simply disappear). To the extent it has provided some protection—for civilians and humanitarians—the UN Security Council has said it no longer cares about this provision of protection. This is the same attitude that led to the misbegotten force created by UN Security Council Resolution 1769.
The original failures of August 2006, and the subsequent authorization of the compromised force known as UNAMID in July 2007, are now compounded by international expediency, callousness, and indifference to the suffering of millions of people.
Genocide Continues in Darfur
This is particularly dismaying since Darfur remains in the throes of genocide, although this is rarely acknowledged by international actors of consequence, whether at the UN or elsewhere. The Parliament of the European Union which voted almost unanimously in 2004 to declare that realities in Darfur were tantamount to genocide is now engaged in rapid rapprochement with the regime responsible for the genocide and is still led by President Omar al-Bashir, who has been charged by the International Criminal Court with multiple counts of genocide and massive crimes against humanity.
President Obama—who declared Darfur to be genocide as senator, presidential candidate, and President—appointed as his first special envoy for Sudan Air Force Major-General (Ret.) Scott Gration, a man who promptly and incoherently spoke of there being only “remnants of genocide” in Darfur. Two subsequent Obama special envoys for Sudan refused altogether to characterize Darfur as genocide. The U.S. Congress, which once declared unanimously—in a bipartisan, bicameral resolution—that Darfur was the site of genocide—has wearied of the issue.
The African Union has never used the “g-word” about Darfur, nor has the Arab League, the Organization of Islamic Conference (despite the fact that all in Darfur are Muslim). Japan, powerful Latin American countries, and many others now simply ignore Darfur’s continuing genocidal violence.
But there can be no doubt that what continues in Darfur, even if the ethnically-targeted violence has mutated in form, is genocide. And this is what makes the UN abandonment of a serious concern for civilian protection and humanitarian access so shameful. I conclude with an extended excerpt from a Human Rights Watch report on the most powerful militia forces in Darfur, now officially incorporated into the armed forces of Khartoum’s genocidal regime (Human Rights Watch, "Men With No Mercy’: Rapid Support Forces Attacks against Civilians in Darfur, Sudan” | September 9, 2015).
In the report, Human Rights Watch reports a speech by Vice-President of this regime, Hassabo Mohammed Abdel Rahman, addressing troops about to begin assaults on civilian in the area known as East Jebel Marra; it is recalled by a defector from the paramilitary "Border Guards":
“Ahmed, a 35-year-old officer in the Border Guards, spent two weeks at a military base in Guba in December 2014 before being sent to fight rebels around Fanga. Two senior RSF officials, the commanding officer, Alnour Guba, and Col. Badre ab-Creash were present on the Guba base.
“Ahmed said that a few days prior to leaving for East Jebel Marra, Sudanese Vice President Hassabo Mohammed Abdel Rahman directly addressed several hundred army and RSF soldiers:
“‘Hassabo told us to clear the area east of Jebel Marra. To kill any male. He said we want to clear the area of insects… He said East Jebel Marra is the kingdom of the rebels. We don’t want anyone there to be alive.’”
That this last paragraph has had so little consequence in the thinking of the international community should shock us. That it does not tells us much too much about the world we live in.