Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s chances of avoiding an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for genocide are growing slim, yet China’s support is unflagging now that Western nations have been too hard hit by the economic crisis to compete with China in African nations. Hence Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s aggressive speech in New York last week demanding that control over American policy in China be given to diplomats and not to economic officials.
In short, the Sudanese government is in luck. The U.N.-A.U. peacekeeping force in Darfur is paltry: Last month, when Sudanese government planes bombed a rebel town in southern Darfur, peacekeepers were about as defenseless as the 1,000 civilians who were forced to leave their homes and take shelter in a peacekeepers’ compound. A child’s life was taken, and the surviving civilians are hardly more fortunate.
This is not to say the U.N. peacekeepers were being useless or cowardly — they are simply outnumbered. And this time we cannot simply blame the Bush administration as usual, though it is not completely blameless in the matter — after all, the administration took much too long to airlift vehicles and other equipment to Darfur, a decision made only last month. To its credit, the Bush administration, among other major powers, haggled endlessly with the Security Council last year to send a peacekeeping force to Darfur.
The A.U. provided only one-tenth of the 20,000 troops it had promised to deploy to Darfur; no wonder the peacekeepers retreated — they knew it was a lost battle. But this is not entirely the fault of the U.N. For one thing, President Bashir has consistently refused to allow non-African peacekeepers into Darfur and has strictly limited the number of helicopters that the peacekeeping forces are allowed to use.
One can also take an extreme point of view and say that Bashir simply had no other choice but to use violence to protect his government from the rebel forces which rose up because of the discrimination it had suffered from Arab leaders. In this case, it is easy to defend the actions of all the players in this global tragedy: the Bush administration, the United Nations and even the Sudanese government. But this is a very precarious way to think because all of the major powers involved deserve blame for not trying hard enough, because the child in southern Darfur did not have to die. This cannot be denied.
And so everyone should be deemed responsible in this conflict. For that reason, many of us are willing to give up anything if it means putting an end to the rapes and murders that take place in the refugee camps. But even with the moral determination that many Americans have, the choices are difficult and heartbreaking. We can increase the aid we send to Darfur, but the refugees will still be trapped in the camps, vulnerable to the atrocities committed by the Janjaweed and other rebel groups. And so we hope that President Obama will take tougher measures than Bush did. When we hear that a bombing campaign against Sudanese aircraft and military assets may be well on the way, we breathe a sigh of relief because the Darfuri people at last have some hope of receiving aid. But what was it that all those humanitarian organizations were protesting about last year when the Bush Administration almost decided to take military action against the Sudanese militia? It was because another war would risk the lives of the Darfuri civilians who were supposed to be protected.
One could say that it would be better to die in the midst of a war between the Americans and the Sudanese than to go through what Darfuri people are going through right now in the hands of the militia and the rebel forces. Does that make the risk worth taking?