News Search Search this site or the web powered by FreeFind Site search Web search Story archive		August 20, 2004 Scotsman AS COUNTDOWN GOES ON, SO DOES THE KILLING Gethin Chamberlain SO, JUST the nine days to go. Nine days for the Sudanese government to clean up its act, disarm the Janjaweed militia and make Darfur safe for the 1.2 million people driven from their homes by the campaign of ethnic cleansing it unleashed against its own people in the devastated region. Nine days: don't hold your breath. For the last three weeks, President Omer Hassan al-Beshir's nasty little regime has done precisely nothing to meet the demands of the United Nations' limp-wristed resolution. Quite the opposite, in fact. Its gunships sit there on the runways in Nyala and Geneina and Fashir, the main towns in Darfur, a matter of yards from the white-painted helicopters of the African Union monitors who are supposed to be keeping an eye on what is going on. The gunships are fully armed, or at least they are when they take off every morning. Later, when they return, it seems that some of them are a little lighter in the armaments department. The reports come in from the refugees flocking into the town and the camps, and from the aid agencies trying to care for them: despite the UN resolution, and Khartoum's empty promises, the Sudanese forces have been bombing again. The Khartoum regime is a bad government and the world would be a better place without it. Unfortunately, the Iraq debacle makes that an unlikely option. It has hummed and hawed, spoken out angrily against the UN resolution, backtracked and offered to comply, then tried to wriggle its way out of its commitments. It doesn't have the bottle to own up and admit that bringing the Janjaweed back in line is entirely beyond its power. The UN might just as well have presented Khartoum with a sack of weasels and given it a month to teach them to tap-dance. It cannot do it, and it does not want to. At least now, the rest of the world has woken up to what is going on in Darfur. Even the Sun newspaper - and this is to its eternal credit - has taken the time and trouble to send a team to Darfur and given over page after page to highlight the worst atrocities. But for those who are still unclear about what is behind what the UN has described as "the world's worst humanitarian crisis", this, in a very simplified form, is the story so far. For centuries, black African farmers have lived in the villages dotted across the vast region, growing crops and tending their animals. To the north, Arab pastoralists have moved around on the edges of the Sahara, grazing their animals wherever they can. In the past, they would pay the farmers to be allowed to bring their animals on to their land. There were always tensions, but the sides were evenly balanced. The desert, however, is expanding. There is less room for the pastoralists. Tensions increased. It was a volatile mixture. Into this situation stepped the Khartoum government. It had a problem; rebel groups in Darfur, fed up with what they perceived as unfair treatment by the government, launched attacks against government forces. Hitting back at the rebels posed another problem for Khartoum; a disproportionate number of its armed forces were drawn from the region. Sending them against their own people could trigger a more serious revolt. So the government hit on the idea of using the pastoralists. Enter the Janjaweed. Now more heavily armed than the farmers, and supported by Sudanese aircraft, often piloted by East European and Russian mercenaries, they swept through Darfur. Villages were attacked and burned; men were killed, women raped, children enslaved to care for the herds of animals that they captured. What the Janjaweed missed, the aircraft hit. This went on for months. Some of the worst attacks happened in February this year. The survivors fled into the towns or into makeshift camps near the towns, in the hope that this would provide them with some security. They sit there today, under plastic sheeting provided by the aid agencies, or in the stick shelters that they build to provide some cover, and recount the tales of slaughter. But what should be worrying the UN is that not all of the stories they tell date back to the beginning of this year, or before that. There are people arriving in the camps on a daily basis with stories of fresh attacks. And not just fresh Janjaweed attacks; fresh attacks by government troops, and government aircraft. Not only has Khartoum failed to disarm the Janjaweed, it has actively continued to support them. For their part, far from being cowed by the international attention, the Janjaweed walk around freely as if they own Darfur. Which, in a way, they do. The UN told the Sudanese government to disarm the militia; instead, it has embraced them, invited them into its army and police force. People who were driven from their homes by the Janjaweed, children who saw parents killed, women who were raped, now have to watch from their makeshift shelters as the killers and the rapists walk through the towns in which the refugees have taken shelter. SOMETIMES they spot animals that were stolen from them; the animals are with the Janjaweed now. Who can they complain to? The police? But the police now contain the very people about whom they wish to complain. So the stories continue to come in. This woman was raped, that child abducted, that man shot dead, those villagers gunned down in a market place ... All of these things continued to happen after the UN issued its vague threat of some unspecified action should Sudan fail to comply with its requests. The reaction of the Sudanese government has been this: it has denied everything. Its UK ambassador gives regular interviews to insist that his country has been terribly wronged. As the bodies mount up, he assures anyone who will listen to him that there is nothing to see. Leave us alone, he says, stop treating us as another Iraq. There is the danger. The UN, faced with overwhelming evidence of ethnic cleansing taking place under its nose, still managed to stop short of endorsing a resolution that threatened sanctions. There can be little doubt that those who opposed punitive measures last month will do so again. Intervention will not work, they will say. Give Khartoum another chance: look, they are making an effort, they have sent more troops and police, they want people to go home. Give them one more month, but this time we mean it. That is what the UN will do, because that is the easiest course of action. But wait. There is a ray of hope. Khartoum is squirming under the unexpected pressure exerted by the African Union. For once, the AU is talking tough, talking about sending thousands more troops. Rwanda has warned that the troops it is sending will not just be observing; they will actively protect civilians. This has come as a nasty shock to Khartoum, and that is something the UN could use to its advantage. Instead of issuing another ultimatum, it should throw its weight behind the AU. If it costs money, then it costs money; better that than spending it on coffins when everything else fails. Swamp Darfur with AU troops if that is what it takes, wrench control of the crisis from Khartoum's grasp. Maybe the AU can teach the weasels to tap-dance.
		................................................................................................................. Copyright ©2004 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved.