G8: Few Concrete Steps Proposed for Darfur

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Michael Deibert

PARIS, Jun 27 2007 (IPS) - This week’s summit in Paris on the crisis in Sudan’s Darfur region broke up with few concrete steps towards a rapid solution, analysts say.

This was despite public agreement among participants that more must done to stem a conflict that has claimed an estimated 200,000 lives, mainly civilians, since 2003.

The Jun. 25 conference, held at the bequest of France’s new President Nicolas Sarkozy and his foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, brought together the Group of Eight industrialised nations (the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and Japan) as well as China, which buys more than half of Sudan’s oil exports.

Sudan itself was not invited to the conference, and member states of the African Union, the body of 53 African states formed in 2001 with the ostensible aim of integrating the region’s currency and its defence forces, as well as promoting human rights, also did not attend.

But officials of the 22-nation Arab League, the United Nations and the European Union attended the conference.

“With the Sarkozy administration, Darfur was clearly going to be an area where France would upgrade its activities, and it’s an area of common ground between Sarkozy and the foreign minister,” Alex Vines, head of the Africa programme at Chatham House, a London think tank specialising in foreign policy and international affairs, told IPS.

Foreign minister Kouchner was previously best known as co-founder of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning charity group Medecins Sans Frontieres.

The conference concluded with the European Union pledging to spend 42 million dollars in addition to its current commitments to provide relief assistance to Darfur in coming months, with host France offering to contribute 13.5 million dollars to help finance any peacekeeping force.

“There are limits to how far this particular meeting in Paris can go but it is an important stepping stone to get a more coherent policy,” said Vines.

Though initially the crisis centred around the Sudanese government’s response to two non-Arab rebel groups, the Justice and Equality Movement and the larger Sudan Liberation Movement, which were waging war against the central government for its alleged victimisation of non-Arab residents in Darfur, the chaos engulfing Darfur has since grown in intensity and scope.

Sudanese military and government-aligned Janjaweed militia forces are accused of carrying out war crimes against the civilian population in the region, while the rebel groups themselves have splintered and re-formed with dizzying speed and in an ever-shifting array of alliances.

Various peace agreements between the sides lie in tatters. During recent months, the fighting has also spilled over Sudan’s borders into neighbouring Chad and the Central African Republic. In March 2007, Janjaweed forces crossing into Chad were said to have killed up to 400 people in villages in that country’s border region with Sudan.

Though the government of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashiral agreed to a November 2006 United Nations plan to strengthen an African Union force present in Darfur, it was accused of dragging its feet over implementation.

Earlier this month, under intense international pressure, the al-Bashiral government agreed to a combined United Nations and African Union peacekeeping force of more than 20,000 troops and civilian police, but observers doubt that the government in Khartoum will keep its word.

“We would hope that the Khartoum government would accept an international force in Darfur and that they stop bombing runs there,” says Diagne Chanel, vice-president of Urgence Darfour, a group comprising more than 120 French civil rights, human rights and civil society organisations. “But we don’t trust the Khartoum government because in the past they have always accepted peace agreements, while at the same time choosing war.”

United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters before the conference that “the international community has not as of yet discharged its responsibilities very effectively.” Addressing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in September 2004 after a visit to Sudan, then U.S. secretary of State Colin Powell declared that “genocide has been committed” in Darfur, and denounced what he said was a “consistent and widespread” pattern of atrocities against civilians there.

The United States and Britain have previously demanded that international sanctions be introduced against the Sudanese regime if it fails to open its doors to UN troops. The punitive steps would include the possibility of a no-fly zone over Darfur to prevent Sudanese military aircraft from attacking civilian targets.

Earlier this month, French military planes commenced airlifting food and relief supplies to refugee camps in eastern Chad housing the tens of thousands of Sudanese civilians that have fled there since October.

With the crisis having been labelled genocide, there would appear to be broad international cover for the UN to act.

Article One of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide states that parties adhering to the convention must “undertake to prevent and to punish” genocide “whether committed in time of peace or in time of war.”

Article Five of the same convention states that signatories must “undertake to enact, in accordance with their respective Constitutions, the necessary legislation to give effect to the provisions of the present Convention, and, in particular, to provide effective penalties for persons guilty of genocide.”

Meanwhile, the situation on the ground in Darfur continues to deteriorate, according to those who work there.

“The need now is greater than ever, there are more people displaced from their homes, there are more people dependant on the aid agencies,” Alun McDonald, spokesperson for the relief agency Oxfam told IPS in a telephone interview from his base in Khartoum.

“And our ability to actually get to these people is worse now than it’s been over the entire conflict. We’re holding on at the moment, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to stay, our staff is being attacked every day.”