Obasanjo and the Darfur Genocide
Nigeria and the World
ike okonta
The UN Security resolution demanding that the Arab-dominated Government of Sudan disarm the Janjaweed, the ethnic Arab militias it has been using to murder and rape in Darfur expires this week.
General Olusegun Obasanjo, chair of the African Union, presided over talks between the Arab government and the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), the two main opposition groups, for several days in Abuja last week.
It remains to be seen whether whatever agreement reached will hold. Khartoum had agreed to a ceasefire last April but then honoured it in the breach. As I write smoke is still rising from the burning homes of the people of Darfur. An estimated 50,000 have been murdered by the Arab government and the Janjaweed so far. Over a million have fled, seeking safety in neighbouring Chad. But even in these camps, the Janjaweed are still assaulting them, abducting women to rape them, killing men and young boys, stealing valuables.
When I employed the word 'Genocide' to describe the atrocities still unfolding in Darfur in this column last month, many, particularly in northern Nigeria, took exception and questioned my objectivity. They preferred to see this tragic drama as an ethnic conflict, a face-off between farmers and nomadic herders.
They claimed that the number of casualties was so low that describing it as genocide was tantamount to giving Khartoum a bad name in order to pave the way for American bombs.
But when does slaughter become genocide? If an entire people who share kinship and a similar way of life and who happen to inhabit a small village are slaughtered, what word would you use to describe what had happened? Should we argue that because 6 million people did not die then genocide could not be said to have taken place?
I am relieved that independent human rights groups, on the strength of the evidence of their own eyes, and on the strength of interviews they conducted with survivors in the death camps in Chad, are now using the 'genocide' word too. Nigeria & the World is not alone in this frank and sobering assessment.
All of which begs the question: now that genocide has been established in western Sudan, what should be done to the perpetrators? Once a case of genocide has been established, the UN is obliged to intervene in the area, and international law, backed by force, is expected to move in, apprehend the perpetrators, and compel them to account for their crimes against humanity.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has been equivocating as usual, claiming that there is not as yet sufficient evidence to enable his organization conclude that genocide is taking place in Darfur. But Mr. Annan is in familiar territory. He was head of UN peacekeeping when the Rwanda genocide took place in 1994. He did not lift a finger to prevent it, or when the slaughter finally got under way, to end it quickly.
It is significant that in a report to the UN Security Council the same week the G-8 meeting was taking place in the United States, Mr. Annan set out the scale of challenge in Sudan were his organization to intervene and set up a peace monitoring mission in the country. Sudan, he pointed out, was 35 times larger than Sierra Leone where the largest UN peacekeeping force in the world has so far gulped billions of dollars.
Might the cost implications of international intervention explain the reluctance of the Big Powers to order a UN-led peace mission to move into Sudan and save the dying people of Darfur? Yes, cost is a big factor. But so also are the calculations of the transnational oil companies and the host countries that back them.
Washington's unilateral designation of Sudan as a 'state sponsor of terrorism' in 1997 has meant that US oil companies, obeying the economic sanctions imposed on the country by the American government, have lost out on the emerging Sudan oil bonanza. The Bush White House is presently under tremendous pressure from its Big Oil financiers to lift the sanctions so they can move into the lucrative Sudanese oil fields.
But they are a little too late. The Chinese, Indians, and Malaysians have snapped up the concessions that Canada and some European countries abandoned when the fighting in southern Sudan, led by John Garang's Sudan Peoples Liberation Movement (SPLM), got too hot for comfort. China abstained from the UN Security Council July 29 Resolution, no doubt seeking to cement its relations with the Arab junta in Khartoum and also protect its investments in the oil fields.
India, for its part, invested 750 million dollars in the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company of Sudan in 2002, and is presently negotiating a further 2 billion dollar investment in the country's oil sector. The Indian government is also backing a 200 million dollar project to lay an oil pipeline linking Khartoum to Port Sudan.
A full-fledged UN intervention will likely see China and India robustly resisting the peacekeepers, who, in typical international realpolitik fashion, will be depicted as surrogates of Anglo-American interests. Indeed, recent comments emanating from the Chinese and Arab-Sudanese officials claim that America's sudden interest in the Darfur crisis, and its eagerness to impose UN sanctions on Sudan, is the opening move preparatory to seizing the country's oil fields, Iraq-fashion.
Faced with this self-serving Big Power oil game, African countries must exert themselves to put out the fire in their own land. It is unfortunate that General Obasanjo waited for the US to raise its voice concerning Darfur before he jumped onto the bandwagon and convened a meeting of the warring parties in Abuja last week. The only construction objective analysts can put on the coincidence in timing is that Obasanjo is dancing to George Bush's song yet again.
Which is a great pity because the leadership of a credible, independent and respected African Union is needed more now than ever. With over a million Darfur inhabitants displaced and forced into unhealthy and overflowing refugee camps, with disease threatening to reap a grim harvest with the coming rains, and the Janjaweed Arab militias still murdering and raping women unrestrained, an African force has to intervene with or without Khartoum's consent.
I do not see Obasanjo providing this muscle or the intellectual savvy necessary to justify and sustain this intervention on the global stage. Obasanjo is his own foreign minister, hence Nigeria's lackluster performance on the international stage since his second coming in 1999.
Obasanjo may be current African Union chairperson, but Nigerian opinion leaders, journalists, and other critical players have to accept that right now the only African leader capable of taking on Khartoum is President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa. South Africa has the financial and military muscle. Even more important, Mbeki has successfully cut the image of an independent, but robustly pan African, player on the global stage. And he has broken his curious silence and called openly for the intervention of the African Union in Darfur.
When the Darfur crisis erupted in February 2003 and the Fur, Massaleet and Zagawa, some of whom have Nigerian origins, were dying, Obasanjo's government did not utter a single word or raise a finger in their defence.
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