How Serious Is The World About Darfur?
We know that the suffering, tormented people of Darfur are little better off now than they were when their plight was fully brought to the attention of the world. The government of Sudan has effectively blocked plans to deploy UN peacekeepers to replace the struggling African Union troops, unable to contain the violence continually visited against the area's black farming communities.China, which has some sway with the Sudanese through its trade in oil and investments in the country, merely politely enquired of Sudan's president Omar Hassan al-Bashir whether he could see his way clear to observing basic human rights. China could use its economic muscle to persuade Sudan that it is not in its best interest to continue its criminally brutal persecution of black Sudanese, but it has embraced the idea of non-interference.
Britain's Tony Blair, meanwhile has raised the issue of a no-fly zone monitored by the UN to stop Khartoum from using air power against refugees and displaced people in direct bombing missions; four million Sudanese are badly in need of aid, living in refugee camps or directly threatened by the fighting between local rebels and the Sudanese pro-Arab government. Over two hundred thousand people have been killed, more than two million fled to refugee camps.
The Khartoum government is wealthy, thriving as most governments do whose principle natural resources are energy extraction in an energy-hungry world. The government chose to ignore the needs of its indigenous Muslim black populations in the countryside, engendering an insurgency born of neglect, discrimination and resentment. Its response was not to answer to its responsibility but to arm and deploy Arab janjaweed to burn, pillage, rape and engage in wholesale murder in the black villages.
Refugee camps in neighbouring Chad have not been free from janjaweed and Sudanese troops' incursions, and the level of the conflict appears to be heightening and spreading. The crisis in Sudan is now considered to represent one of the world's worst humanitarian crises. The UN continues to be frustrated by the Sudanese government's ongoing refusal to allow it to deploy peacekeeping troops, it awaits permission to intervene.
Meanwhile, UN agencies are assisting the homeless in refugee camps but the situation threatens to continue to deteriorate at which time aid agencies, as they've done in other refugee camps in the area, will feel forced to pull their workers out of harm's way, leaving the Darfurians to once more face the deadly intent of the Sudanese government and its proxy army.
Sudan is intent - despite the horror the rest of the world expressed in its helplessness - on committing genocide. The question is why is the combined strength of the international body along with its allies not capable of behaving in a supranational, humanitarian manner to launch a mission to defend the targets of Sudan's deadly assaults?
Haven't the UN and its members agreed in principle that there are times when it has a responsibility to intervene when a sovereign state targets segments of its population for extermination? Where is the resolve?
Labels: World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, March 27, 2007
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