The Sudanese government has recently accepted a United Nations peacekeeping mission and a peace agreement with the SLA rebel movement. This might be a turning point. Who knows?! But as The New York Times points out in a new
article of May 7; if peace has arrived in Darfur many has not heard about it.
The Janjawedd militia is still killing, still plundering. According to Jan Egeland, top emergency aid official at the United Nations, 250,000 people have been driven from their homes in the past three months. Thus adding quarter of a million to those couple of millions or so that have already fled.
In addition to convince the rebel groups who has not yet signed the peace agreement, their are severeal dark clouds at the horison. According to the N.Y.T., "the coming months of the rainy season will bring deeper misery. A shortage of money has forced the World Food Program to halve rations in Darfur, and other aid agencies also face deep cuts after a slump in donations."
In Gereida refugee camp, where over 100,000 people live, the humanitarian situation is "desperate" according to Leonard Tedd, a public health engineer for Oxfam.
According to N.Y.T. "Mr. Egeland was supposed to visit this camp last month, but the Sudanese authorities abruptly told him not come. They gave a variety of reasons — the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, then the furor over the cartoons depicting the prophet in a Danish newspaper, then concerns that they could not guarantee the security of Mr. Egeland, who is Norwegian."
Now that the Sudanese government has accepted UN presence in the Darfur region, the N.Y.T. says that Mr. Salah Mostafa, the deputy governor of Southern Darfur, stated at a meeting with Mr. Egeland in Nyala, that "We will spare no effort" to secure the peace(!).
Hope is said to be the last thing that abandons us. Those who have died in or were forced out of Darfur might add that the international community was the
first thing to abandon them.
It's really too bad for the victims of Darfur that the UN was as capable of dealing with this genocide in slow motion as it was capable of dealing with the Rwanda genocide in lightning speed. Those thinking of organising a genocide in the future has most likely not been deterred by the way that the UN/international community has handled Rwanda and Darfur. Especially as long as:
1. several states has
not accepted the Genocide Convention, and
2. the Convention is interpreted the way that it apparently is by the countries who has signed it.
The only clear conclusion that I can draw from the Darfur case is that:
a.) The Genocide Convention is, incorrectly, interpreted in
practical foreign policy in the following way: the international community must have
full proof evidence of an
ongoing genocide in order to intervene.
b.) That is, we cannot stop a potential genocide. We must be certain that the perpetrator has already executed, so to speak, the genocide and killed its victims on a massive scale.
c.) I mean, otherwise it can in fact be nothing more than your ordinary ethnic cleansing or massacre or whatever...
So, basically, we only have a responsibility to protect those already killed or, in a worst case scenario, those who is on the run from their slaughters. Or?
