James Smith, head of the Aegis Trust, on Darfur:
Peace talks, of course, are essential but we should have learnt from the Balkans and Rwanda, that they also allow genocidal governments cover and time to carry on mass murder. The latest diplomatic round was won again by Khartoum last month. Kofi Annan jumped on a plane to Addis Ababa, grasping the straw that the Sudanese Government was now prepared to let Darfuris receive protection. Ministers around the world misled the media into believing an agreement had been reached to allow the UN to deploy troops alongside the AU in Darfur. Predictably, once the pressure was off, Sudan said it never agreed to this.Instead, in South Darfur, Antonov bombers supported the Janjawid and the Sudanese Army in destroying villages. One witness interviewed by Aegis had seen 70 villages destroyed since August this year, the last in mid-November, before he was forced to flee the region. He made an appeal to Tony Blair; “Please, please come and save us.” But today, after three years of strong words and empty threats, our Prime Minister still has no new plans for action — just more words: “if rapid progress is not made, we will need to consider alternative approaches.”
Sudan is also destabilising neighbouring Chad in order to assist its campaign in Western Sudan. The ideologues in Khartoum, just as they are doing in Darfur, want to “Arabise” Chad and topple its black African president. Last week Sudanese-backed rebels in Chad briefly took Abeche, a town that is crucial to getting aid across the border and into Darfur.
What is happening in Chad revives bleak memories of Congo. The UN’s failure to mobilise sufficient forces on the Rwanda-Congo border allowed Rwandan genocidaires to slip across the border and spark a civil war in Congo that left four million dead. The UN is still there now, picking up the pieces. We know that genocidal violence does not respect borders and can quickly become a regional problem, yet we are standing by and allowing it to spill over from Darfur into Chad. Once security is lost in Chad, the aid agencies that use bases there to reach the four million Darfuris that depend on them will have to withdraw.
Negotiating with Khartoum to allow a UN peacekeeping force into Darfur is a waste of time. Sudan will never consent to allow UN troops on its soil and China will veto any intervention by force. In the meantime, more people die and the crisis deepens.
So let’s stop fiddling and deploy UN forces into Chad, on the border with Darfur. This will serve three purposes — helping to stabilise the region, putting UN soldiers in striking distance of Darfur’s camps if all-out attacks require immediate intervention, and signalling to Khartoum that the international community takes the protection of civilians seriously. Finally, the UN Security Council should sanction a no-fly zone. We lent our Awacs equipment to monitor the Winter Olympics last year. Why can’t we lend it to monitor the safety of desperate human beings in Africa?
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