The International Herald Tribune Wednesday reported that 300 peacekeeping troops will be sent to the Darfur region of Sudan to protect an African Union fact-finding team. The peacekeeping force will consist of 150 Nigerian troops and – ironically – 150 Rwandan soldiers. It is the 1994 Rwandan massacres, in which one million Hutus and Tutsis died, that are haunting the current Darfur crisis, making everyone wonder if history is about to repeat itself.
Will it? The one million number already applies. Over a million people have been dislocated by the violence between rebel groups on one side and government troops and their paramilitaries on the other. There have been mass killings and rapes and burning villages, but now, with people wandering homeless or packed into refugee camps, does the efficient killing of starvation and dehydration and disease begin.
Unlike Rwanda, the dividing line between the parties goes beyond ethnicity to race. The Darfur people are black Africans; the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed militias are dominated by Arabs.
Murder, rape, pillage and appropriation of territory are common not only to Darfur and Rwanda, but also to humanitarian situations in Kosovo and Iraq. The U.S. failed to intervene in Rwanda, did intervene in Kosovo and Iraq and has yet to commit on Darfur. We can construct an ethical framework to determine whether the U.S. should intervene in humanitarian crises in foreign lands, but ethical frameworks haven’t counted for much at the White House since the Carter administration, so let’s look at some of the real reasons why interventions do or do not happen.
Domestic politics. The Clinton administration failed to intervene in Rwanda for several reasons, but a motivator was the Somalia military disaster of 1993, which made the White House leery of messy African conflicts. Also, Congress was in the midst of its mid-term election campaign and the dominating issues were health care and the economy, not foreign policy.
In 1998, when Bill Clinton chose to intervene in Kosovo, he may have been prompted in part by the Rwanda experience, but many accused him of trying to draw attention away from the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Rwanda was a disaster and his failure to act will always follow Mr. Clinton. Those who opposed the Kosovo intervention now admit the outcome, including the eventual downfall of Slobodan Milosevic, was positive. That’s another factor: muddy motives going in will be wiped clean by a good outcome.
George Bush had all the domestic reasons for attacking Iraq. It was intended to be the second stop on his “strong leader” world tour and it appealed to those segments of his base that lusted for blood or oil or both. It’s clear he will not get a good outcome. The question is: how bad will Iraq get before the U.S. quits?
That’s Iraq – what about Darfur? Between Iraq and the presidential election and continued economic woes, it’s unlikely the U.S. will lead decisive international action any time soon.
Europe – justified as its criticism of Bush in Iraq has been – is working hard to botch the Darfur issue. An EU fact-finding team this week concluded that while there is widespread killing and destruction of homes, all based on racial and ethnic identity, the situation in west Sudan does not constitute genocide and thus European nations are not compelled to act under the terms of the Genocide Convention.
Meanwhile, people die in Darfur. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof writes that in an optimistic scenario, 100,000 will die in Darfur this year. The nations of the world do not need to bomb Khartoum or send in 100,000 troops. We do need to bring as much diplomatic and economic pressure as we can onto the Sudanese government; we need something on the order of 5,000-10,000 well-equipped peacekeepers and all the emergency relief aid we can muster.
The Darfur crisis is real and our failures of the past stand as lessons to what we should have done and what we need to do now.
Lessons of History
The International Herald Tribune Wednesday reported that 300 peacekeeping troops will be sent to the Darfur region of Sudan to protect an African Union fact-finding team. The peacekeeping force will consist of 150 Nigerian troops and – ironically – 150 Rwandan soldiers. It is the 1994 Rwandan massacres, in which one million Hutus and Tutsis died, that are haunting the current Darfur crisis, making everyone wonder if history is about to repeat itself.
Will it? The one million number already applies. Over a million people have been dislocated by the violence between rebel groups on one side and government troops and their paramilitaries on the other. There have been mass killings and rapes and burning villages, but now, with people wandering homeless or packed into refugee camps, does the efficient killing of starvation and dehydration and disease begin.
Unlike Rwanda, the dividing line between the parties goes beyond ethnicity to race. The Darfur people are black Africans; the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed militias are dominated by Arabs.
Murder, rape, pillage and appropriation of territory are common not only to Darfur and Rwanda, but also to humanitarian situations in Kosovo and Iraq. The U.S. failed to intervene in Rwanda, did intervene in Kosovo and Iraq and has yet to commit on Darfur. We can construct an ethical framework to determine whether the U.S. should intervene in humanitarian crises in foreign lands, but ethical frameworks haven’t counted for much at the White House since the Carter administration, so let’s look at some of the real reasons why interventions do or do not happen.
Domestic politics. The Clinton administration failed to intervene in Rwanda for several reasons, but a motivator was the Somalia military disaster of 1993, which made the White House leery of messy African conflicts. Also, Congress was in the midst of its mid-term election campaign and the dominating issues were health care and the economy, not foreign policy.
In 1998, when Bill Clinton chose to intervene in Kosovo, he may have been prompted in part by the Rwanda experience, but many accused him of trying to draw attention away from the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Rwanda was a disaster and his failure to act will always follow Mr. Clinton. Those who opposed the Kosovo intervention now admit the outcome, including the eventual downfall of Slobodan Milosevic, was positive. That’s another factor: muddy motives going in will be wiped clean by a good outcome.
George Bush had all the domestic reasons for attacking Iraq. It was intended to be the second stop on his “strong leader” world tour and it appealed to those segments of his base that lusted for blood or oil or both. It’s clear he will not get a good outcome. The question is: how bad will Iraq get before the U.S. quits?
That’s Iraq – what about Darfur? Between Iraq and the presidential election and continued economic woes, it’s unlikely the U.S. will lead decisive international action any time soon.
Europe – justified as its criticism of Bush in Iraq has been – is working hard to botch the Darfur issue. An EU fact-finding team this week concluded that while there is widespread killing and destruction of homes, all based on racial and ethnic identity, the situation in west Sudan does not constitute genocide and thus European nations are not compelled to act under the terms of the Genocide Convention.
Meanwhile, people die in Darfur. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof writes that in an optimistic scenario, 100,000 will die in Darfur this year. The nations of the world do not need to bomb Khartoum or send in 100,000 troops. We do need to bring as much diplomatic and economic pressure as we can onto the Sudanese government; we need something on the order of 5,000-10,000 well-equipped peacekeepers and all the emergency relief aid we can muster.
The Darfur crisis is real and our failures of the past stand as lessons to what we should have done and what we need to do now.
(c) Mark Floegel, 2004