Julie Flint in the Daily Star reports on the failure of the international community in Darfur, one year after Jan Egeland, the UN under-secretary for humanitarian affairs, first talked of “the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis” to describe the situation.
At that point, according to Amnesty International, hundreds of civilians had been killed, more than 600,000 people had fled the countryside to seek safety in towns, and tens of thousands more had taken refuge in Chad.
Today, according to the UN’s conservative statistics, 2.2 million people are affected by the conflict, including 1.6 million displaced and 200,000 refugees in Chad. Sudan analyst Eric Reeves, one of the few to attempt a serious analysis of mortality in Darfur, estimates that approximately 370,000 people have died since the rebels of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) came to international attention in February 2003. Reeves puts the current mortality rate at approximately 35,000 per month and warns that this figure is likely to grow rapidly in light of food deficits forecast for early 2005, increasingly weakened populations that are only very partially served by current humanitarian operations, and accelerating violence that is severely curtailing humanitarian access and transport capacity.
She goes on to blame the UN Security Council for its pathetic response:
The council passed its first, feeble resolution on Darfur on July 30, 2004 – 16 months after the crisis erupted – and ever since then has failed to back up earlier ultimatums with strong action. Wholly meaningless sanctions have been placed on a few leaders of the government-backed Janjaweed militia, but no sanctions were ordered against Khartoum for organizing, directing and participating directly in the conflict – with its air and ground forces and continuous logistical support for its local allies and proxies. The buck has been passed to the AU, which hasn’t been given the resources to deploy even an adequate monitoring force, far less a peacekeeping force.
Perversely – presumably with her Arab audience in mind – she goes on to criticise the US for talking of “genocide”, as this “seems likely to make [the conflict] more intractable, and more entrenched, by widening the already lamentable divide between the West and the Arab world”. As she admits, “genocide” is in fact an appropriate description, and if the Arab world rallies round the Sudanese government in a display of Arab solidarity, they are, disgracefully, turning a blind eye to mass murder.
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