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.