Action not words

["F A B I O C C H I::" <eco_fabiocchi at tin.it>]

 Action not words 

Leader
Saturday September 11, 2004
The Guardian 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sudan/story/0,14658,1302135,00.html

America's declaration that genocide is taking place in Sudan has injected fresh 
urgency - and controversy - into the international debate about what the UN 
unhesitatingly calls the world's worst humanitarian crisis. It was only to be 
expected that the Khartoum government would reject the charge, but there has 
also been a lukewarm response elsewhere to Colin Powell's statement to the 
Senate foreign relations committee. The US secretary of state says genocide is 
taking place on the basis of evidence that black African villagers in Darfur 
are being targeted with the specific intent of destroying "a group in whole or 
part". Human rights organisations have welcomed the shift. Britain's official 
response is that grave crimes are being committed by the government-backed 
Janjaweed Arab militias and that the UN should mount an urgent investigation. 
Is this a case of diplomatic sensibilities masking a brutal truth? Is it right 
to have reservations about using the G word? 
Situations previously characterised as genocide include the Turkish massacre of 
1.5 million Armenians during the first world war and, less controversially, the 
Nazis' extermination of six million Jews in the second world war, when the term 
was coined from the Greek word genos (race or tribe) with the Latin word cide 
(to kill). It has been widely applied to Pol Pot's Cambodia of the 1970s and 
made bloody reappearances in Rwanda in 1994 and in the aftermath of the wars of 
the Yugoslavian succession. Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian president, 
is facing a genocide charge at the Hague war crimes tribunal. Radislav Krstic, 
a Bosnian Serb general, was convicted of genocide for his role in the 
Srebrenica massacre of 7,000 Muslim men and boys. 

Sudanese officials will admit to nothing more than a humanitarian crisis 
created by ethnic strife and have contemptuously accused Mr Powell of seeking 
black votes in the forthcoming US presidential election. Khartoum also argues 
that the intervention will undermine delicate peace negotiations with Darfur 
rebel groups in Nigeria. Most of the facts, though, are indisputable: 50,000 
people have died since February 2003 and over a million have been displaced. 
Aid workers yesterday reported a new mass influx of refugees into one camp in 
southern Darfur. Harrowing images have been on our TV screens for long enough 
to fuel demands for something that goes beyond agonised handwringing and 
ineffective quiet diplomacy 

It is true that behind the debate in the US lies guilt about the shameful 
failure to act when the first reports of genocide emerged from Rwanda a decade 
ago. That is only natural. The genocide characterisation may also be intended 
to galvanise the international community - though targeted sanctions such as an 
assets freeze and a travel ban on senior Sudanese officials would be more 
effective than the oil embargo currently being proposed by Washington. That is 
opposed by China, an importer of Sudanese oil and a security council member, as 
well as by Pakistan and Algeria. And there is the familiar dilemma that such 
sanctions are a notoriously blunt instrument, as the Iraqi experience taught. 
But urgent though the crisis is, Washington and London are still not trying the 
sort of heavy-duty arm-twisting they tried when seeking a second UN resolution 
authorising war on Saddam. 

Mr Powell's intervention puts the US a step ahead of the EU, which says it 
wants a UN investigation. But the real question is not about a dictionary 
definition of genocide. No one can claim that Sudan is not experiencing a 
terrible human tragedy. As Oxfam has been warning in appeals for help to save 
lives: time is short and people are dying. Recognising the scale of human 
suffering is a prerequisite to action. Words, however resonant, are not enough.