The Darfur Endgame:Notes for a Comprehensive Plan to End the Genocide in

Darfur

By John Weiss and Elvir CamdzicSeptember 5, 2005

I. The Argument in Brief

Any effective plan for ending the genocide should include:

1. The establishment of an atmosphere of security through quickly and efficiently implemented measures to protect civilians, both genocide victims and aid workers. When this atmosphere of security has been established, the principal objective of all interventions in Darfur, all international actions, can be reached: the return of the uprooted to the sites of their villages.

2. The institution of an overall process for achieving a political settlement, parallel to, and in support of, the protection measures. The experience of Bosnia and the history of Darfur conflict both suggest, however, that no political settlement can be rendered operational until the protective measures mentioned in (1) have been successful and have clearly launched a process of creating the permanent security needed to end the physical and cultural

destruction begun by the Government of Sudan (GoS) and its allied militias.

3. The establishment of procedures for delivering justice and enforcing accountability which are essential to the stability of the societies undergoing the recovery and reconstruction.

Effective action has been made difficult, however, by

1. A mandate to the intervening force which formally precludes protection of civilians or aid workers. The African Union's mandate describes them as observers and verifiers only, with obligation only to protect the small AU observer contingent.

2. The alignment of factions within the American administration1 and the Canadian administration with the plan to let the African Union "have the lead" in interventions. This grant of "the lead" to the African Union, first enshrined in Security Council resolutions of July 2004, was reinforced by the plan, announced in April 2005, to have NATO act as the transporting agency for sending about 5000 additional AU personnel to Darfur between 1 July 2005 and 30 September

1 Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Charles Snyder, and certain others.1

2005. By the end of September it is anticipated that a total of 7731 uniformed personnel, from Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Ghana, Senegal, and Gambia, will be in Darfur. Already, however, complaints have appeared that the project is

behind schedule and, more importantly, seriously short of funds.

The disastrous effects of the crime committed on Darfuri peoples can only be limited, and recovery begun, by the dispatch to that region of an intervening multinational force. This force, supported by references to Chapter 7 of the UN charter in its authorizing document, must have an international composition of such a nature as to give it the capability of effective protective and pro-active measures. It must also have a structure and composition such as to inspire trust on the part of the victim populations.

The core of this force, which must be ready for a possible shift from a “semi-permissive environment” to a “non-permissive environment,” must be a combat-ready, much larger contingent than would be deployed assuming only an observation mandate and a low-risk environment. In other words, the core must come from NATO countries, as is recommended in the International Crisis Group’s Africa Briefing #28.

It should be further noted, however, that none of the planning for this “bridging force,” as the International Crisis Group (ICG) refers to it, envisions the use of American ground troops. But US Air Force assets, such as surveillance, communication, and special ops transport platforms, could be an important part of the intervention.

II. Why Stopping Genocide Merits Highest Priority

In order to resolve policy arguments about the composition and leadership structure of the intervening force, or about whose “capacity” is being built and what it is being built for, it is useful to keep in mind the reason that we are especially concerned with Darfur: the situation is one of continuing genocide. Reversing that genocide, not “stabilization” or even short-term protection, is, arguably, the only objective that can justify such expensive and risk-entailing intervention efforts.

Realistic, neo-Wilsonian, and humanitarian perspectives converge to establish the importance of stopping the multiple genocides occurring in Darfur.

At first glance, a point of view informed by the traditions of diplomatic realism would not seem to incline one to want to act against a genocide. Certainly such action would not seem to have any claim to priority over actions to stabilize countries experiencing subgenocidal violence such as Sierra Leone or Liberia. A realist would seem to have difficulty arguing for an American vital national interest in preventing Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit peoples and cultures, or the cultural configuration formed by the complex of relationships between  African and Arab tribes (i.e., Darfur culture as a whole), from being radically diminished. Darfur is not in a geostrategically important place. In fact, it is in one of the most isolated

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locations on the planet. It commands no important natural resources or industries although the potential for oil discovery there is rated by many as significant.

Realists, moreover, usually appeal to Westphalian traditions recognizing the absolute sovereignty o f national governments: "You can do what you want with your own people. It is no concern of ours." Even  the Nuremberg Trials recognized this principle: no Nazi official was prosecuted for crimes committed against Germans within Germany before the war began. The United Nations Convention on Genocide, however, was one of the early group of  documents that challenged the Westphalian world, a challenge whose latest manifestation is the "Responsibility to Protect" essay, sponsored by  the Canadian government and written by an Australian and an Algerian2. America, however, did not ratify the genocide convention until 1988, and even then it did not pass any enforcement or implementation laws.

Realist arguments for stopping genocide can nevertheless be educed:

1. Failing to take effective action against a genocidal government would thus amount to foregoing the opportunity to deter future regimes from undertaking such policies. Systematic, state-sponsored killings and cultural attacks elsewhere at some  later date might indeed negatively affect vital national interests as defined by realists. Such a failure also might not deter Khartoum itself from undertaking another such venture. In 1995 this same  regime launched a massive attack on the peoples of the Nuba mountains. The UN voted sanctions against them for it, but in fact they  stopped mainly because  some of their generals found out that some of  their targets were Muslims. They therefore refused to continue  the killing.  When the Darfur crisis arose, the Sudanese Government used an Arabist ideology to  trump their previous Islamist line and employed tribal Arab janjaweed militias along with government aircraft piloted by mercenaries and Khartoum-based troops mostly recruited quickly from the slums. They thus eliminated this problem of reluctance among certain generals even though all the Darfuris targeted by Khartoum were Muslims. In any case, recent study by the leading French authority on Darfur, Gerard Prunier, concludes that “the whole of GoS Policy and political philosophy since it came to power in 1989 has kept verging on genocide in its general treatment of the national question in Sudan…”3

2. The existence of a refugee population of 300,000 in Chad could destabilize that country, which captures realists' attention because of its oil. Refugee populations tend to support (or give birth to) populations of "refugee warriors" which can have a further destabilizing effect4. In the  case of Chad, hostilities between the Chadian government and the Zaghawa people had already produced casualties even before the Sudanese Government's attacks on Darfuris began in the spring of 2003.

2 The Responsibility to Protect, by Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun, was published in December 2001 and is available online at www.iciss-ciise.gc.ca.3 Gerard Punier, Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide (2005), p.105. Emphasis in original.4 See Fiona Terry, Condemned   to Repeat? The Paradox of Humanitarian Action (2002).

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3. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times has made the argument that the existence of a substantial victimized - and therefore vengeful population - and Khartoum’s perfected reputation as a genocidal regime, could themselves destabilize Sudan as a whole, which would threaten American interests in the entire Horn of Africa. On the other hand, Khartoum has long and deep experience in controlling and manipulating populations it has abused. There is evidence, moreover, that the Bashir-Taha Government's constantly enhanced reputation for ruthlessness in fact deters many potential opponents from taking action.

4. The success of China's opposition to oil-sales sanctions  against Sudan, especially if such opposition were tested in a public and sincere UN attempt to impose such sanctions, would solidify China's  position as the most important protector of Khartoum. This could affect America's interests, as defined by realists, not only in Sudan but  in almost all African countries.  As is well known, China has been conducting an aggressive  campaign to incorporate northern and eastern Africa, if not all of the continent, into its economic sphere of influence for at least the last decade. In any case, if Khartoum were effectively blocked in its attempted genocide in Darfur, regardless of  the role played by oil sanctions, the value of Chinese protection would have to be revised downward.

The neo-Wilsonian argument for stopping the genocide has at least one important supporting element: failure to impose their will on Darfur would render the National Congress Party-dominated military regime measurably more vulnerable to democratic  reform or even  collapse. Certainly the SPLM officials recently introduced into the Government as part of the North-South  Peace Accord would not lose status because international troops had intervened successfully to clean up the Darfur mess. Substantially powerless at this point in time and for many, many months in the future, these officials (such as Salva Kiir,  John Garang's successor in the Unity government and a figure far less authoritarian and abusive of human  rights than Garang himself) could only gain from a successful counter-genocide campaign in Western Sudan5.

It has always seemed puzzling that neo-Wilsonians' trumpetings of the democratization of the Arab world, and their earnest speculations about what will happen after the pluralistic elections in Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia (at the municipal level, anyway) and maybe even elsewhere! never include Sudan in the scope of their analyses. It would almost seem as if such scholars and government officials prefer a military, dependably criminal government to some kind of opaque Mahdist or otherwise poorly understood regime that emerged from democratic  elections. (The current Bashir-Taha regime overthrew such a government in 1989).

Or is it that such analysts do not consider the Sudanese now holding power to be Arabs? This would certainly be a disappointment to the ruling clique in Khartoum, who base much of their policy and their legitimation upon a racist-

5 Which could be expected to have a positive effect on the war in the East, where Khartoum has been bombing and gunning down civilians with a relatively free hand, and minimal publicity, since at least late 2004. For Garang's human rights abuses, see Marc Lavergne and Fabrice Weissman, ed., In the Shadow of 'Just Wars': Violence, Politics, and Humanitarian Action (2004), 137-161.

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Arabist claim to blood affiliation with ur-Arab countries like Saudi Arabia and Yemen6.

Finally, there is the humanitarian argument that genocide, which Raphael Lemkin originally called "race murder" until he had fully developed his analysis and his conception of genocide, is an absolute evil, an indefensible, unmitigatable crime against the human condition that must be opposed and deterred, at whatever cost and risk to those opposed to it. For millions throughout the world, the slogan "Never Again" still has the power to move, even if those millions do not seem to have many representatives in the seats of power when the decisions actually to move troops and supplies have to be made.

Like virtually every other political word, the term genocide has been subject to abusive and tendentious application. That it nevertheless retains significance as a mot d'ordre is demonstrated by the intensive reflection and heated debate that accompanies the designation of a state's crime as a genocide. The American Congress (in a unanimous vote), and the American State Department, both declared in late summer 2004 that genocide was occurring in Darfur, the first time such a declaration had been made. Certain important international organizations, such as Amnesty International, have not yet officially agreed with this assessment.

What moved Darfur-watching groups to emergency action in the late spring of 2005, however, was the beginning of a trend among certain officials in the UN, the American government, and the Canadian government, to claim that the genocide in Darfur was ending, or that it had reached a new phase, "Phase II," that would require less intensive and expensive action to counteract. This shift in language and emphasis became all the more alarming when it became evident that it paralleled decisions by these parties to adopt the plan for NATO to transport five thousand more weakly  mandated African Union troops to Darfur.  It took  no special measure of clairvoyance to see that sometime in late September the transport effort would thus be declared a success, the ongoing genocide would be downgraded to a "major humanitarian crisis," raising enough aid money  would be seen as the central problem, and pro-Darfur coalitions would be told to move on to other causes: their  State Department now had the problem well  in hand. No more carefully calibrated protests (or desperate pleas) would be needed. And what was even more satisfying: the State Department had solved this problem all by itself, without having to ask for help from DOD or CIA.

Underlying such changes in the way the matter is represented, changes that serve to justify resistance to any really effective actions such as are recommended in this briefing, is a rather distorted understanding of genocide and its role in human history. Lemkin meant his term to apply to a range of situations in which a gens (the Latin word for a "people"), made a distinctive people by their sharing of a distinctive common culture, were radically diminished by the actions of a state. Not all Armenians in the purview of the Young Turk regime were killed or driven out in 1915; those in Istanbul were unharmed. But the Armenian culture of Anatolia was uprooted and driven to exile, never to be the same. It was the case 6 See Robert O. Collins, "Disaster in Darfur". Collins is the acknowledged dean of American scholars of the Sudan.

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of the Armenians that first roused Lemkin, as a law student in Poland, to search to define this crime that was new, without a name, as mysterious as it was, as he perceived,  threatening  to the very nature of the human condition.

Lemkin's foundational insight was that the human condition is one of diversity, with a rich variety of groups, languages, cultures. Actions that diminish these groups, weaken their ability to survive and to flourish, actions that remove the conditions of their survival, are actions that contribute to genocide, that indicate that the crime of genocide has been committed. As we lament the reduction of biodiversity in the world of plants and animals, so we also condemn the reduction of human diversity when state actions intentionally diminish the capacity for culture of entire groups7. A drive  to total physical extermination of a people, as in the case of  the  Nazis' drive to kill every last Jew, is not necessary for that diversity to be reduced. As the Convention's legal definition of genocide states, "acts committed with an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, or religious group, as such" are acts which radically diminish the variety of the human fabric8.

Canadians are especially responsive to another gloss on the notion of genocide. The human race can be envisioned as a mosaic of tiles, of different shapes and colors, shining together in an exciting, dynamic, sparkling pattern. When genocide begins to occur, one or more of those tiles shines less brightly, begins to lose its color and shape, sometimes crumbling altogether9.

So how can that radical diminishing of peoples be reversed? It is here that the American, Canadian, and international political figures who opted for the softer and weaker of the measures that were available in April transformed their willful misunderstanding of genocide into policies guaranteed to continue the crime.

The Darfur genocide will only be stopped when the victimized peoples of Darfur can reverse their uprooting and return to the sites of their destroyed villages or perhaps to some adequate substitute site that they have some role in choosing. This can happen only when an atmosphere of security can be established in all of Darfur, an atmosphere established by convincing acts of protection on the part of intervening military forces. And all the evidence that we have collected, and all the testimony from Darfuri refugees and Darfur expatriates (never consulted, one might add, by any of  the officials who planned the NATO-AU taxi scheme or who declined to push  for  mandate change), indicate that this protection can NEVER be established by actions limited to observation, monitoring, and the [universally disregarded] authorization to intervene in cases where a crime is taking place right in front of the international soldier. Recent AU claims that they have “reprioritized civilian protection” within the current mandate regime remain unsubstantiated and have generally been dismissed by informed observers.

7 Especially eloquent and informed lament for the loss of biodiversity can be found in Edward O. Wilson., The Future of Life8 This wording is quoted from Article 4, Genocide, of the Statute of the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.9 See Peter Dudley in Embassy Magazine, 10 August 2005.

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Anyone with any military experience at all - the  senior author of this Briefing served eight years in the United States Army - can appreciate the fact that pro-active, "offensive" actions such as roundups of suspected criminals or disarmament of units (on all sides, as was done in Bosnia) are an absolute necessity. Yet neither the African Union, nor the American or Canadian leadership, nor the United Nations, has called for such a change in the mandate or an upgrading of troop quality and numbers that would obviously be required to carry out such robust protection measures.

The voices that have indeed called for such measures, such as the International Crisis Group, former NATO commander Wesley Clark (in the views of many the only man who ever stopped a genocide in the making - Kosovo, 1999), or the American and Canadian organizations that have rallied around  M.P. David Kilgour, still find no sympathetic ear in the highest halls of power.

What happens when no atmosphere of security has been established has been chronicled by a number of observers, most notably America’s leading analyst of Darfur, Eric Reeves,10 who has described and tabulated many aspects of the Sudanese Government’s “genocidal stranglehold” on Sudan:11

(1) Starvation. (2) Disease, with residence in crowded camps producing a higher vulnerability.(3) Boredom and despair. (4) Collapse of spiritual resources (Imams, Muslim worship leaders, were a

special target for janjaweed raiders). (5) A wide variety of distortions of social structures as a consequence of the

uprooting and the disproportionate killing or driving into hiding of adult males.

(6) Increased vulnerability to excessive losses from natural disasters. The recent floods in the El Fashir region hit refugee camps hard, causing far more destruction than would have occurred if the camp inhabitants had been home in their villages. The same may be said for the locust swarms that have just arrived in North Darfur.

(7) Pathologies from overcrowding. (8) Resented dependencies on aid workers and ad hoc power hierarchies within

tribal groups. These include riots and other collective violence, already reported in many camps.

(9) Other manifestations of the loss of cultural values and the capacity to maintain pre- genocide patterns or to create adaptive ones.

It should be noted that all the above are compatible with the characterization of the situation in Darfur as “stabilized” and “improved”. In other words, the genocide goes on but the advocates of no-risk (or very low risk) policies such as the enhancement of weak-mandated, understaffed observation-and-display AU forces

10 See Reeves’ authoritative website, <www.sudanreeves.org>.11 See Reeves’ bulletins for August 2005, his use of the term "genocide by attrition" in his 20 May 2005 bulletin discussing the proliferation of expedient misrepresentations, and his bulletin of 7 May 2005 reacting to the announcement of the NATO-Taxi-AU plan: "Proposed Increases in African Union Monitoring Presence in Darfur: Still no serious response to insecurity facing civilians, humanitarian workers."

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can deter robust actions with claims that – anticipated, incidentally, by all anti-genocide experts and activists – that September has brought us close to solving the problem.

Depicting the damaging consequences of this stranglehold in such a way as to command prime time television news space, however, has proved difficult. No Christiane Amanpour has appeared on a  major network  every other night in front of a scene equivalent to the shelling of Sarajevo. The segment of CBS SIXTY MINUTES  program screened on 28 August 2005 (almost entirely a repeat of a segment produced one year earlier) suggested no remedial actions; raised none of the crucial issues about the African  Union, the  nature of genocide, or the 'Phase II" debate;  and will probably be the only treatment of the matter on CBS for the rest of the century.

As suggested above, therefore, the field has been left to those who argue that the situation has “improved” because the rate at which villages are burned and their inhabitants massacred or driven out has dropped off. After all, there are not many villages left to destroy.

So Phase II has supposedly arrived. And thus the establishment of an atmosphere of security should be an easier matter since direct combat against the janjaweed militias and the Sudanese Government’s attacking vehicles, Antonov bombers, and attack helicopters is no longer necessary.

The genocide, as described above, will continue, however.

III. Why Leaving the AU "In the Lead" Will Guarantee the Continuation of the Genocide

It should be kept in mind that the genocidal stranglehold of the GoS on the African peoples of Darfur continues in part because the Bashir-Taha regime has always had a controlling presence in the bodies making the decisions about supposed remedies. The African Union, with its headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, was founded in July 2002,  the successor to the widely ineffective and discredited Organization of African Unity. All African countries but Morocco are members12.

Most importantly, Sudan is a member. The Security Council's grant to the African Union of the mission to carry out the 30 July 2004 UN resolution calling for the reining in of the janjaweed can be fairly likened to a situation in which the League of Nations had asked some kind of Central European Union to round up the killers and imprisoners of Jews and Poles, but that Germany sat on the executive committee of this union along with, say, Bulgaria, Hungary, Finland, Greece, and Yugoslavia.

The conflicts of interest evident in the AU decision-making process became even more evident last week when South Africa signed a contract with Sudan for the

12 Morocco refused to join because the Polisario movement that claims Western Sahara was made a member.8

delivery of important quantities of oil. South Africa has been one of the strongest opponents of intervention by a non-African strongly mandated protection force.

In mid-summer 2004, when the AU was attempting, with great difficulty, to cobble together the first troop contingents of the AMIS (African Union Mission in Sudan) force, NATO reportedly offered to send its Rapid Reaction Force to Darfur. (Apparently, it did not at that time dispute the observation-only mandate. It is not clear whether the mandate had received final wording  at the time). The African Union leadership responded with a claim that such an offer showed a lack of respect for their organization and its member countries.13 They thus spent the next eight months slowly sending in small contingents of troops from Nigeria, Rwanda, and South Africa. By the end of  that time they still had not reached their authorized level of 3000.

The AU deployment did not  go well:

1. Attacks on villages continued. In some cases AU observers were able to identify the janjaweed or GoS commander, and in a smaller number of cases those names became public. In general, however, information gathered by unarmed AU observers and AU troops is filed with the field headquarters in El-Fashir or with AU main headquarters in Addis Ababa and remains inaccessible to investigators.

2. Rapes and murders of women leaving the refugee camps to gather firewood continued. This pattern of attacking women on the peripheries of camps was described by the American journalist Samantha Power in a much-cited New Yorker article and also during her television appearance in the fall of 2004. It also became widely reported that the GoS itself responded to such incidents by arresting  not  the rapist but the rape victim, accusing such  women of falsely defaming the Government. Not a single case in which AU troops prevented such attacks has come to the attention of Darfur observers in America.

3. At a Nairobi meeting of the UN Security Council in November 2004 the mandate of the AU was expanded to include the authorization to intervene if a crime were taking place within the soldier's personal field of vision. This was a rather problematic modification, however, since no power of arrest was specified and, in any case, such an arrest of a group of armed militiamen would require a larger, better-trained,  and better-equipped force than can usually be found at specific locations in Darfur, a region  the size of  France.

The African Union commanders have ignored the Nairobi "expansion" of their mandate. This fact became public in February 2005 when a film produced by Cassandra Herrman aired on the PBS FRONTLINE/World show. She had interviewed the commander of the AU troops several weeks after the Nairobi meeting. In the interview he made it clear that he saw his orders as confining him to observing and note-taking in all cases. Since that time, moreover, no case of an AU intervention when witnessing a flagrante delicto situation has been reported.

13 Xinhua News Agency, “Long Way to Go for NATO to Play Greater Role in Africa,” 29 July 2005.9

A fundamental principle: Without the power to arrest (which, in such situations necessarily involves the risk of combat) and to disarm, no soldier can offer any civilian effective, credible, or lasting protection, nor carry out any genocide-reversing return of the displaced. The speciousness of the argument that "no mandate change is needed" will be evident to anyone with the slightest knowledge of the history of peacekeeping or, for that matter, warmaking.

Arrests of janjaweed and Government troops are something that the GoS wants to avoid at all costs. In order to pre-empt such events, it even staged its own arrests of supposed janjaweed in August 2004. Some of its constant deceptions fail, however. In the same New Yorker article cited above Samantha Power (supported by a separate article in the New York Times  by Marc Lacey) established that the arrestees had never been militiamen but were in fact a group of known petty criminals, "usual suspects" waiting to be rounded up.

The ineffectiveness of the African Union against the militias, many of whom have been integrated into the very police that control the refugee camps, is well known to all Darfuris. The exceptional cases where certain AU field commanders, by the use of various ruses and displays, have been able to temporarily deter militia/GoS attacks, have not changed the general attitude14.

This general attitude, moreover, is one of complete and pervasive mistrust. All our sources, within the Darfur  refugee community, within the expatriate Darfur communities in Canada and the US, within the SLA, and within the Sudanese population as a whole, join with the observation of almost all the non-Darfuri observers, journalists, aid workers, and officials to confirm that the African Union is considered "a disaster": Corrupt, controlled by Khartoum, inclined to send to Darfur only poorly trained and poorly equipped  troops who are likely to act professionally only when non-African observers are present, and ignorant about Darfur and about the history and current realities of the genocide15.

Not all of these accusations are accurate. Generalizations about armies can be as counterproductive as generalizations about countries. Certainly there are exceptions. Rwandan troops, for instance, get better marks from sources such as the American personnel charged with transporting them to Darfur.

The point is that if the Darfuri population believes that African Union troops are untrustworthy, that is the operational fact. No atmosphere of security can be established until the situation is reversed. And in the  killing  meantime, five thousand more of the same kind of AU contingents, constrained by  the same mandate, will have little effect on the continuing genocide described above, except

14 Such cases were described, but as exceptional, by Marine Capt. Brian Steidle in his appearance on the ABC NIGHTLINE show aired on 2 May 2005. The rest of Steidle's presentation gave many examples of AU ineffectiveness, as had Herrman and Costello's FRONTLINE/World film.15 Most  recently, Jerry Fowler and John Heffernan wrote in the Washington Post (29 Aug 2005) after their return from Chad: "The refugees we interviewed were unanimous in saying that the African Union alone cannot provide the type of security they need to go back. A more robust and sustained international presence is crucial to complement it."

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to make it worse by increasing the despair when the victims conclude that this is the only action their would-be rescuers  intend to take.

IV. The rise of the NATO Taxi plan and the triumph of "capacity building"

One of the slogans that appeared in the discourse of several AU leaders - including  Sudan officials - and their supporters in the UN and  the American State Department was "African Solutions for African Problems." The phrase has a long history, stretching back at least to 1972,  when  the State Department hoped that the Organization for African Unity would act in such a way as to allow the US to avoid intervening in the slaughter of thousands of Hutu by the Tutsi-dominated government of Burundi16.  It plays well, not only with AU leaders thirsty for unearned  "respect" and with Khartoum leaders always alert to avoid interveners they may not be able to manipulate, but also with Western diplomats and UN officials  always ready to pass the buck to the locals and to circumscribe the commitments and responsibilities of their own institutions.

It does not play well, however, with observers of the Bosnian  genocide who remember American acquiescence in European (especially British) demands that they be allowed to "keep the lead" in efforts to stop the Bosnian genocide. This campaign to impose "European solutions on European problems", successful until the summer of 1995, has been listed as one of the principal causes of the persistence of the killing, uprooting, and destruction in Bosnia17.

As an abstract statement of a long-term goal, "African Solutions to African Problems" may have some validity. If one objects that it subverts notions of general human solidarity, assuming that problems of poverty and disease can  be conquered without international assistance, the reply would be that unlike problems of political security in particular countries, AIDS, for example, is not an African problem, but a worldwide one. And genocide?

In any case, it should be noted that in the case of proposals for a middle-term solution to a specific problem, bringing security, peace, and reconstruction to Darfur, the eventual installation of a capable, effective peacekeeping force in Darfur staffed mostly by Africans remains on the agenda of almost all parties, even those, like the International Crisis Group, who are most aware of the deficiencies of AMIS.

By the early months of 2005 it was clear to many observers that AMIS was failing. Exactly where the idea for an AU troop buildup supported by  NATO transport (and limited training) assets originated is as yet unclear to the authors of  this brief. Published documents establish only that the chair of the AU  16 Samantha Power writes in A Problem from Hell, p. 83: "US policymakers placed their hope in the Organization for African Unity (OAU) and the UN. 'Our general prescription is that Africans should settle African problems," [US Ambassador to Burundi] Melady wrote. But the OAU pledged 'total solidarity; with the genocidal Burundian government; the UN mustered only an ineffectual fact-finding mission; and the killings continued unimpeded."17 The matter is treated in greatest detail in Brendan Simms, Unfinest Hour: Britain   and the Destruction of Bosnia (2001), with additional material to be found in David Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals (2002). The authors of this Briefing were both witnesses to the Bosnian genocide of 1992-1995.

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Commission, Alpha Oumar Konare, requested NATO logistical support in a letter sent in April 2005 to the latter's Secretary General, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. In the coming weeks details of the NATO Taxi  plan were announced. The Military Staff Committee of the African Union concluded that the size of the AU Mission should be increased to 7731, of which 6171 would be for the military component and 1561 for the Civilian Police Component. The Military Component was to be divided into a headquarters component (557 men), sectors staffed by two infantry battalions and one platoon (4912), and military observers (702), of which 96 were "Party Representatives" from the GoS, the SLA (the main rebel group), and the JEM (whose current official status as an opponent of the GoS is highly questionable)18. At this  meeting, as at all  other meetings of AU officials, no mention was made of a need for a change in the AMIS mandate.

NATO support for this buildup, as requested by the AU commission, was secured, according to his own account, by Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick in a meeting with NATO Commander General James Jones. Implementation began on 1 July 2005 and is scheduled to be complete by 30 September 2005.

In diplomatic circles in North  America and the UN, and probably also in Europe, this highly expensive transport exercise, (coupled with limited logistics training for about 80 AU officers to take place in Kenya, and training for some Senegalese troops by Canadian soldiers in Senegal) became the principal means for "building AU capacity," an achievement whose value seems to be, for these officials, close to infinite. It  is certainly more valuable to them than the preservation of  the lives and cultures of the Darfur victims, whose decline under Khartoum's genocidal stranglehold will continue unless military units with a capacity for something more than note-taking and monitoring arrive in Darfur in the very near future. The ETA of the African Union's capacity  for effective protective action, through military and police measures, is probably about the same as the ETA of the return of America's legacy airlines to profitability.

Once the NATO/AU fifty-troops-a-day transport plan began  to be implemented, however, proposals for mandate change and the supply of sufficient troops to carry out effective protective  action were pushed farther back in the in-boxes of American, Canadian, and UN officials, all the way, in fact, to oblivion. "Building African Union capacity" became the partner to encapsulating the suffering occurring in Darfur in the semantic and bureaucratic frame labeled "humanitarian crisis." Just send money.

Taking seriously the stopping of the genocide has almost entirely become the province of outsiders. A former "insider," Canadian M.P. David Kilgour, always the advocate of strong rescue action, had been a critic of AMIS from the moment it was conceived.  At one point in April 2005, when it appeared that his vote was necessary to maintain Paul Martin's Liberal government in power, it looked as if  Kilgour's proposals for sending troops with effective mandates and the power to enforce protective measures might  be implemented. A last-minute exercise of the Government's power to cash chips with newly appointed life Senators, and to 18 Conclusions of the Third Meeting of the Military Staff Committee held on 25 April 2005 at Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

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bestow other political rewards, enabled the Martin Government to escape its dependence on Kilgour, by one vote. Kilgour, with partners and supporters on both sides of the 49th parallel, remains the leading elected political figure active on the matter of Darfur.

At the international level the most important rescue effort then became ICG Africa Briefing #28, "The AU's Mission in Darfur: Bridging the Gaps."19 Appearing on 6 July 2005, during the week when NATO aircraft began their taxi operation, the plan's publication followed up an article in the Wall Street Journal by ICG chief executive Gareth Evans, "Bridging the Gap in Darfur," published on 6 June. 

The ICG  document outlines the most effective, perhaps the only effective plan for stopping  the genocide in Darfur. It is the single most important piece of required reading for anyone concerned with the problem.

V. Blowing the whistle on the AU

Central to making any proposal for robust protective measures is an assessment of the performance and potential of the African Union forces in Darfur. ICG Briefing #28 makes clear that it has not so far been capable of approaching a solution. It labels the AU-NATO plan to bring Darfur force levels to 7731 by the end of  September, under the existing mandate, as "an  inadequate response to the crisis." Like most commentators, the authors note the AU has "had a positive impact on security in some areas by going  beyond the strict terms of its mandate," but that "its ability to protect civilians and humanitarian operations is hamstrung by limited capacity, insufficient resources, and political constraints."

The key to the ICG   plan is a stronger mandate. The ICG Briefing recommends that "The African Union must strengthen AMIS's mandate  to enable and encourage it to undertake all necessary measures, including offensive action, against any attacks or threats to civilians and humanitarian operations."

There is no better indication of the African Union's current unwillingness to undertake a general policy of protection, or to admit that it will remain for an extended period incapable to providing such protection, or for that matter incapable of doing much beyond filling the Addis Ababa filing cabinets with reports of its observers, than its failure to request a change in the mandate.

Nor has the AU ever produced a reasoned, detailed explanation for why it chose to consider that 5000 additional personnel would be adequate for the accomplishment of even its limited mission.

The inadequacies of the African Union's Darfur operation have begun to draw attention. In a searing guest editorial published in the Washington Post on 7 August, Susan Rice, assistant secretary of state for African affairs between 1997 and 2001, blew the whistle on the "conspiracy of absolution" whereby the African Union had "absolved reluctant Western countries of any responsibility to 19 Available online at http://www.crisisgroup.org.

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consider sending their own troops." She described the intervention at a press conference in Dakar, Senegal, by the Foreign Minister of that country, Cheikh  Tidiane Gadio, which "exploded the myth...that the AU  troops alone can stop the killing in Darfur." To the evident irritation of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who had insisted that Western efforts had been able to "avert some of  the humanitarian disaster that was forecast," Gadio called the situation totally unacceptable. He called upon the Secretary of State to "deal with the facts on the ground....Those militias, they're still very  active...killing people, burning villages, raping women."20

Less than three weeks later in the same newspaper Jerry Fowler, staff  director of the Holocaust  Memorial's Committee on Conscience and John Heffernan, senior investigator for Physicians for Human Rights, reported on their just-concluded visit to Chad. The rate of violence in Chad had mounted since their last visit, but refugees there were "still safer than the approximately 2 million people  who remain displaced inside Darfur." The overall security situation remained dire. At the same time, Fowler and Heffernan offered an explanation for the victories of the perpetrators:

“The great tactical advantage that the perpetrators of this genocide have had throughout the crisis is that their focus has been intense and relentless, while the high-level attention from the international community has been only episodic  --a photo-op visit here and there for the most part. [Secretary of State Rice's visit to Darfur in July lasted 90 minutes]. The risk is now that what look like positive

developments - fewer attacks on villages, creation of the new government [the "unity government" in Khartoum], an expanded African Union monitoring force - will cause international attention to become even less consistent.”

Fowler and Heffernan indicated that their understanding of genocide parallels that used in this Briefing when they concluded that "the demise of the targeted victim groups will proceed through attrition, a steady grinding down of their lives and identities." Finally, they concluded with the observation that "the refugees we interviewed were unanimous in saying that the African Union alone cannot provide the type of security they need to go back. A more robust and sustained international presence is crucial to complement it."21

VI. Implementing the First Part of the Comprehensive Plan: Robust Protection-and-Return Measures

What kind of mandate?

20 Susan Rice, “Why Darfur Can’t Be Left to Africa,” Washington Post (7 Aug 2005), p. B04. Gadio made the comment in response to the question from Andrea Mitchell, the NBC reporter who was shoved out of the conference room by Sudanese guards at the press conference with Rice and Bashir in Khartoum after asking Bashir a tough question about his government's involvement in the Darfur genocide. For Mitchell’s questions, Gadio’s full comment and Secretary Rice’s response, see the transcript of the July 20 press conference in Dakar at http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2005/49837.htm.

21   Jerry Fowler and John Heffernan, "No Respite in Africa," Washington Post (25 August 2005), p. A19. Emphasis added.14

The ICG Briefing advocates, as do most others who want to move beyond the current observe-and-verify instructions, a mandate that would authorize the protection of victims,  other Darfur civilians, and international aid workers.  Such protection would necessarily include "offensive  actions," a fact that promoters of the African Union-only solution usually refuse to recognize.

An atmosphere of security is no more convincingly established by sentry duty at camps and villages alone, or by escort duty alone, than it is by taking notes and photographing after the attack has been made (actions permitted under the current mandate). Aside from the fact that widespread and pervasive sentry and escort duty calls for a far larger number of troops, even when such troops are equipped with advanced transport modalities  such as armored personnel carriers (not especially effective during the rainy  season in mostly unpaved and usually impassible Darfur) and helicopters, than is likely to be available in the near term, the presence in Darfur of 10-20,000 janjaweed militia members in intact formations, as well as an equal number of GoS regular Army troops, acts to forestall any atmosphere of security. The same can be said for the Darfur Sudanese police, many of whom are former janjaweed war criminals in different uniforms.

Effective protection operations would most likely include arrests of suspected criminal militia units, actions that would often require - certainly in the first set of operations - large combat-ready units provided with close air support. It should be pointed out, however, that hunting down particular individual janjaweed leaders or criminal Sudanese army officers, as was attempted in Somalia, is not the modal type of exercise envisaged here. Janjaweed formations usually attacked villages in units of several hundred men, and their bases, such as "Border Intelligence Division" barracks, house populations of at least company size. Thus roundups, well photographed and publicized, may be a better way to describe such initial protective measures.

Needless to say, it is precisely such arrests of the agents of their genocidal operations that the GoS regime most wishes to forestall. At the same time, our conversations with Darfuris indicate that it is only such arrests that will convince  them that Darfur can become inhabitable again, that the genocide can be halted, and that their thirst  for justice can begin to be assuaged.

On the other hand, it is possible to imagine pro-active protection measures other than roundups or forced disarmament. For example, commanders in the field, especially if chosen from armies with political cultures stressing initiative-taking by officers, might be able to negotiate quickly a permanent withdrawal of all janjaweed militias from Darfur and a “reassignment” to other regions of GoS police and other security forces suspected of criminal activity or prior militia membership. The history, politics, and anthropology of the janjaweed indicate that such a withdrawal to Kordofan or Bahr-el-Ghazal, if it could be accomplished at all, would not last more than a month or two, however.

Another source of options for commanders with a broad protection mandate may arise from closer attention to the problem of the low trust accorded currently to AU troops. What measures by intervening troops would in fact restore the trust

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in international intervention? When we asked Darfur victims and survivors that question, they replied, not surprisingly, that they would feel most secure if all janjaweed militias were rounded up or made casualties, all GoS personnel disappeared from Darfur, and the level of both international troop presence and international aid inflow remained high. Their further comments to us, however, indicated that some victims might feel at least a degree more secure even if not all these conditions were completely fulfilled. They offered other criteria, moreover, such as the effectiveness of a no-fly zone extended to the Eastern region of Sudan, where many Darfuris live and where bombing of villages continues at this moment. The arrest of janjaweed units made “exemplary” by videotaping was another suggested trust-builder that would not entail immediate neutralization of the entire militia component of GoS forces in Darfur.

VII. Implementing the Overall Political Process of Settlement

Such protective military measure in Darfur can only contribute to a long-term solution, however, if they are part of a wider political strategy. Our consultations with the authors of the ICG briefing paper made it clear that such a strategy is considered indispensable. At the start, one of the goals of this strategy would be the isolation of Darfur from Khartoum, the cutting off of the most destructive effects of its influence in this region. No one, not even rebel groups, talks of an independent Darfur, but the connection to the regime in Khartoum, in matters of administration, public information, and security, should be rendered minimal during this early phase of the intervention.

A second part of this wider political strategy, implemented simultaneously with the security-building measures, would be the integration of all the local stakeholders into the planning structure for the region. The majority of the Arab tribes in Darfur, for example, have stayed on the sidelines, resisting recruitment into either militias or rebel formations. They must nevertheless be made part of any settlement, as must be the legitimate rebel groups who now claim to control 90 per cent of Darfur territory.

A third part of this political plan might be the locating of a “commanding broker.” Such a participant in the peace process, with a role similar to that played by Slobodan Milosevic at the Dayton peace talks, would be able to play a decisive role only after important military actions had taken place that established the preponderance of the intervening “bridging” forces. Such was the case, after all, in Bosnia in the late summer of 1995, when NATO bombings combined with major advances by Bosnian forces (supported by Croatian artillery) to render the military situation of the Bosnian Serbs distinctly unfavorable.

Who would play that role? Since the suggestion that the Sudan might find someone to play a Dayton Milosevic is intended only as an example of the tactics that might be part of a settlement ending the genocide, not too much weight should be given to our choice of a possible example. It is nevertheless clear that both Ali Osman Taha, the Sudanese First Vice President, and his security chief, Salah Abdallah Gosh, call the shots in Darfur (as did Milosevic in Bosnia), operating principally through messages to Musa Hilal, the janjaweed leader. It is

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not inconceivable that methods might be found to induce Gosh and Taha to permit the enactment of a settlement that would leave Hilal vulnerable to intervention force sanctions.

Whose mandate?

At least two paths to the shaping of the mandate and two authorizing bodies can be envisioned.

Path A. A member of the UN Security Council introduces a resolution asking for action along  the lines of the ICG recommendation. This is the policy currently advocated as a first option by the ICG and by Gen. Wesley Clark, in conversations with the authors, and by leaders of several other organizations. It has been stated since mid-2004 that an effective mandate would be blocked by permanent members such as China or Russia and opposed by other Security Council members such as Algeria. We submit that such opposition is likely but not certain:

1. The usual discussion refers to a motion for UN sanctions imposing an embargo on the sale of oil, for which China is a primary customer of  the Sudanese. When the matter concerns only Darfur security operations, things may be different and Chinese opposition may be less blocked.

2. Russian opposition is claimed to rest upon its status as a supplier of weapons, especially aircraft, to the Sudanese government. It is not immediately clear, however, that operations in Darfur, whatever their outcome, would jeopardize future sales. And as for the Russian pilots who fly some of  the Sudanese planes: it is also not clear that protecting one's mercenaries trumps other considerations. In any case, more Ukrainians serve in Sudan as pilots (for  all sides) than do Russians.

3. China has in certain crucial international security cases abstained rather than exercised its veto. It is not out of  the question that it might use such a tactic in the case of a Darfur authorization, whether it is based on Chapter VII or on some robust interpretation of Chapter VI.

The United States may be the most likely introducer of such a motion to authorize a more effective operation. We think that it is just possible that the realist, neo-Wilsonian, or humanitarian considerations discussed at the beginning of this briefing may carry more weight with Ambassador Bolton (or even Secretary of  State Rice, once she becomes better briefed) than some fear of injuring the sensibilities of UN members more willing to accommodate the Sudanese Government. France, which has shown a preference for developing a European Union Rapid Reaction Force that could be charged with such missions (and which would exclude the US), can nevertheless be  expected to allow the use of its bases in Chad. It might even introduce the resolution in tandem with the United States.

The United Nations route has public support both in the United States and in Africa. A GlobeScan/PIPA poll of 10,809 Africans and 812 Americans reported on 29 June 2005 that 61 per cent of Americans favor the UN intervening in Darfur to "stop human rights abuses such as genocide" and 65 per cent of Africans believe

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that the UN Security Council should have the same right, with only 19 per cent of Africans opposed.22

The ICG recommends a force that puts the African Union troops already in Darfur under the  command of a "bridging force" that had NATO at its core. At the same time, American ground troops do not enter into most projections: the consensus is that such troops are already heavily committed to Iraq  and Afghanistan. On the other hand, US Air Force assets could be expected to play a central role.

Path B. Should the UN Security Council refuse to authorize a sufficiently sized and appropriately mandated intervention force, the NATO-AU "Kosovo" option could be considered. (NATO's  Kosovo intervention, probably the only military operation that ever stopped a nascent genocide, was never authorized by the United Nations). The ICG Briefing may be quoted here:

“The UN Security Council should authorize the mission with a civilian protection mandate but if it does not, the AU and NATO would need to assume the responsibility and agree on an appropriate mandate. If the Sudanese government does not accept such a mission, NATO and the AU would need to provide a much larger one to operate in a non-permissive environment. [This larger mission would include] enforcing the Security Council ban on offensive military flights. The AU and NATO should agree on enforcement measures to be applied if Khartoum violates [this] prohibition.”

Path C. Finally, in the [likely] case of continued high mortality rates and declines in Darfuris’ "capacity for culture", consideration should be given to a third, quicker option: a coalition of the willing organized by DOD in cooperation with the Rapid Response forces of other powers, which would move in on its own, in advance of any Security Council authorization and in anticipation of a non-permissive environment.

VII. Implementing the Requirements for Justice and Accountability

Once the international intervening forces are in control of the Darfur situation, bringing justice to the perpetrators and instituting a restitution apparatus for those who have suffered property and personal losses can begin. Certainly such implementation will not be a simple matter, as the cases of Bosnia and Iraq illustrate. The list of perpetrators handed to the International Criminal Court by the UN investigation commission headed by Antonio Cassese is thought to contain the names of many high GoS officials who will mostly likely remain in Khartoum, safe from arrest.

22 See GlobeScan/PIPA, “The Darfur Crisis: African and American Public Opinion,” 29 June 2005, available at http://www.globescan.com. Note that this is a different poll from the one Zogby International did in May 2005 for the International Crisis Group and which found that over 80% of Americans support a tougher response to the current situation in Darfur.

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Expertise on the matter of administering justice can be solicited from groups such as the Coalition for International Justice or the UN High Representative for Bosnia-Herzegovina. At this point, we will note simply that the leading student of the question of the administration of post-atrocity justice and its political impacts on the victim society argues that the maintenance of open, fair, and procedurally impeccable court trials for those defendants who are in custody can have a positive effect that works to offset the fact that many of the perpetrators remain beyond the reach of the law or that particular verdicts are unpopular with particular groups in the country that is the site of the conflict.23

VIII. Why the Genocide Continues: The Elements of Khartoum's Power

Skillful Political Management of the Dictatorship

Since its overthrow of the constitutional government in 1989, the National Islamic Front - now National Congress - regime has demonstrated its shrewdness, toughness, strategic flexibility, and survival skills. When under pressure, it knows how to concede the precise amount needed to counter the threat and to render it temporary.

It has proved a master of the art of pretending to negotiate --in Abuja, in Cairo, in Naivasha, or elsewhere --while employing tactics that leave its negotiating partners divided and confused.

It has managed to co-opt, or neutralize through arrests, threats, and shootings, almost all internal opposition groups. Recent estimates of the number of protesters killed in the riots that followed John Garang's death have reached as high as 430.

It has successfully resisted all the cross-national bodies that have tried to make it do what it did not want to do, from the UN to international NGOs to the Arab League to IGAD to the African Union. Through its control of Operation Lifeline Sudan it has made the flow of aid to war victims a source of patronage jobs, military intelligence, and immense sums of cash. The same can be said for all the aid operations aimed at helping Darfur.

It has exploited the calculated naîveté of UN officials like Kofi Annan and Jan Pronk, frightened visiting Canadian Senators into advocacy of patently ineffective policies, and manipulated visiting American Congressmen into recommendations that say nothing of mandate change, force levels needed to carry out a changed mandate, implementing refugee returns as the main objective, or the crucial bridging role of non-AU troops. It has persuaded American diplomats such as Robert Zoellick and Charles Snyder (Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs) that existing sanctions against Sudan, still listed (accurately enough) as a 23 Mark Osiel, Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory, and the Law (1997).

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state sponsor of terrorism, are sufficient and that when combined with incentive payments pledged to Sudanese who carry out the North-South Peace Accord, they will change its behavior, making it "do more" in Darfur.

Control of Information

The regime's near-total control of information about Darfur, and access to the region, is an important element in its power. The most intensive phase of its genocide had been going on for ten months before any journalist reported about it. And these journalists - the first was the British videographer Philip Cox, the second the Lebanon-based British journalist Julie Flint - had to enter by illegally crossing the Chad border. It controls the domestic press through direct control of press personnel, the arbitrary closing, reopening, and closing of opposition newspapers, and other forms of intimidation. Any reading of this domestic press, or perusal of longer works such as former American Ambassador Donald Petterson's Inside Sudan or the highly detailed accounts of Robert O. Collins (Revolutionary Sudan; Requiem for the Sudan) establishes quickly that Sudanese spokesmen can adhere to a lie when truth stares them in the face with an enthusiasm and determination that, in comparison, would make Baghdad Bob - the Iraqi Information Minister at the time of the American attack - look like Abraham Lincoln.

Especially sensitive to foreign Arab media coverage, which has gone so far has to expose the corruption and subservience of its judiciary, the GoS has been remarkably successful in ensuring that Arab TV screens remain empty of accounts of the massacres in Darfur. When the pro-Arab TV station al-Jazeera dared to film a documentary about Darfur in early 2004, its Khartoum office was immediately closed, its equipment seized, and it local staff prosecuted.24

Oil

The GoS has given top priority to control of Sudan's oil assets. Its military tactics in the long war with the South were dictated by considerations of security in the oil fields. It has shrewdly marketed this petroleum. Although the share of Sudanese oil in total Chinese oil imports declined from 6.9 per cent in 2003 to 4.7 per cent in 2004, China remains acutely sensitive to any direct threat to this access.25

Meanwhile, Sudan obtained large and lucrative contracts to deliver oil to India in the fall of 2004. Sudan has also created an important domestic market for its oil. The German firm Siemens has built south of Khartoum the world's largest diesel oil-fueled power station.

Threats of Massive Resistance to Intervening Forces

General threats

24 Gerard Prunier, Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide, (2005), p.187.25 David Zweig and Bi Jianhai, “China’s Global Hunt for Energy,” Foreign Affairs (Sept-Oct 2005), p.28.

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One of the GoS’ most frequently employed weapons has been the use of overheated and hyperbolic rhetoric in its response to various perceived threats to its interests. In the summer of 2004, fearing a forceful and effective intervention by Western forces, especially Americans who had just labeled its atrocities a genocide, the GoS Ministers promised “rivers of blood” that would make Vietnam seem a minor matter in comparison. In response to UN Resolution 1564, that contained the possibility of oil sanctions, the speaker of the Sudanese rubber-stamped Parliament, Ibrahim Ahmed Al-Taher, warned Western nations that any foreign intervention would open “gates of hell.”

Threats of a pan-Muslim, international Jihad against intervening forces

Western sensibilities about the use of the term Jihad to describe the response to an intervention by NATO have been successfully exploited in a few cases. Persuaded by such posturing and claims of a massive resistance on Jihadist grounds, some of those who had heretofore made the most persuasive arguments for mandate change and effective protective action entailing robust intervention by NATO (or other “white troops”) now argued that such moves would be seen as “Northern crusade” by adventurous cowboys.26 Such arguments that intervening “Northern troops” would face a “bloodbath” from latter-day Saladins are less than convincing to most students of the subject.27

In the first place, the argument that the Muslim world as a whole would see an intervention by “Northern troops” (including Muslim Turks), acting in cooperation with units from partly Muslim Nigeria, Senegal and Gambia in order to help a group of Darfuris who are themselves almost all Muslims, is something of an insult to the intelligence of educated Arabs and other non-Sudanese Muslims. In the second place, those less-educated, more manipulatable Muslims who might conceivably answer such a call are already engaged in what they see as a jihad in Iraq and Afghanistan. Finally, the principal proponent of an internationalist, universalist (i.e. non-Arabist) extreme Muslim fundamentalism, Hassan al-Turabi, is the ideological father of the Justice and Equality Movement, a rebel group, not of the janjaweed.

Threats of resistance to intervening forces by the regular Sudanese army

It is unlikely that regular Sudanese military formations would mount a conventional resistance to intervening forces. They have not been especially effective event against SPLA. Their Air Force, described in the ICG Africa Briefing #28, is small, inexperienced (except for its helicopter gunships and Antonov bombers, which have proven effective in bombing villages and slaughtering unarmed civilians), and highly vulnerable to countermeasures by advanced

26 See Romeo Dallaire, “The Solution for Darfur,” Ottawa Citizen, 30 June 2005.27 A general rejection of such possibilities can be found in Jilles Kepel, The War for Muslim Minds: Islam in the West, 2004, and on somewhat different ground Alex de Waal, ed., Islamism and Its Enemies in the Horn of Africa, 2004.

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militaries since, according to ICG experts, it does not have any military radar useable for surveillance, target acquisition, or target illumination.

Threats of resistance using jihad-inspiring irregular formations

The GoS has used this tactic in its war with the South. Whenever its own regular army was in need of reinforcement or was becoming unreliable Khartoum has used appeals for a jihad in recruiting Popular Defense Forces (PDFs) from the slums of Khartoum and Omdurman. Given little training and minimal ammunition for their Kalashnikovs, such armed mobs were sent against Southern positions in many cases. The results were rather worse than mixed. It is hard to find any major victories attributable to the PDFs, even when their opponents were significantly less powerful and less well equipped than would be any multinational intervention force.

Finally, GoS invocation of the memory of the Mahdi, who defeated the British general Gordon in 1885, would seem vitiated by the fact that the best-organized opposition to the GoS is now headed by Sadiq al-Mahdi, grandson of that same national hero. It was Sadiq that Bashir and Company overthrew in 1989.

Threats of resistance by the creation of an “Iraq-style” insurgency

To begin with, the most important current insurgent group, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA), is the GoS’ strongest opponent. Our sources within that organization have assured us that they would not oppose an international intervening force, even though they realize that their own disarmament could be a consequence of such an intervention.

The transformation of janjaweed militias into insurgents is not likely to increase the number of those who would resist an intervening force since one must presume that they would do so, anyway. Whether the fact of the invasion would increase the attractive potential of the janjaweed to other Arabs in Darfur is not a question that can be answered with certainty, but it is worth noting that the janjaweed already have based their recruitment upon both jihadist and racist-Arabist appeals. Alex de Waal and Julie Flint have described the janjaweed “Qoreishi” ideology as “a convergence of Arab supremacy and Islamic extremism.”28 The janjaweed may have saturated the market for such calls to arms, especially since, as noted above, the majority of the Arab population in Darfur, especially the tribes in the Center and South, have remained neutral in the conflict.

It is possible, however, that the GoS may try to create an insurgency using the remaining Darfuri elements in the Sudanese regular forces (mostly now stationed in the South), in the same way that some of the Iraqi insurgency leaders use Suni Baathist former soldiers. This would reduce the strength of the GoS forces now holding Southern towns and protecting oil sites, a fact that the SPLA forces would be expected to notice and, quite possibly, attempt to exploit. If the price of creating an insurgency in Darfur were the loss of the South and its oil, and all the benefits 28 Alex de Waal and Julie Flint, “Ideology in Arms: the Emergence of Darfur’s Janjaweed,” Beirut Daily Star (30 August 2005).

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expected from the formation of the new “Unity” government of North and South, would the Khartoum leaders be willing to pay it?

The loss of life in Darfur still runs far higher than the loss of life in Iraq. The threat of genocide in Iraq, as was attempted by Saddam Hussein against the Kurds and Marsh Arabs, has ended, but the genocide in Darfur continues. The cost of countering a possible GoS-led resistance to an intervening force must be weighed against the human cost of not intervening, not protecting, not insuring the return of refugees to their home sites. The reader must ask: if the displaced population in the camps were not black Africans but Americans, or Canadians, would the present policies limited to AU capacity-building seem adequate? Would the risk of facing an insurgency seem worth the price if it were paid to stop a genocide? Speaking for ourselves and for the vast majority of those we met in our travels in America and Canada in recent months, we answer in the affirmative.

The Gosh Factor

With regard to the possibility of deterring any effective action against its Darfur policies, Sudan's most powerful asset may be Salah Abdallah Gosh. As the man who controls the GoS security and intelligence apparatus as the executive officer for Vice President Taha, Gosh can plausibly claim to be, operationally, Sudan’s top génocidaire. His value to Washington stems, however, not from his activities in Darfur but his role as chief of intelligence, a job that began during the early years of the regime when Osama bin Laden lived, and recruited, in Sudan, an honored, well supported guest. Despite Bin Laden's departure at the end of the 90s, Gosh's information still seems to be valuable to the CIA, who invited him to Washington in April 2004, more than a year after the slaughter in Darfur began. Sudan, after all, ranks among the top four countries supplying the place of origin for foreign terrorists in Iraq.

It is unclear at this time what quid pro quo Gosh extracted from CIA director Porter Goss during his April visit. What does seem clear, however, is that any plan for an effective intervention in Darfur will need to include measures to insure that Gosh is protected when the loss of Sudanese capability for continuing the Darfur genocide becomes evident to Khartoum.

John H. WeissFounder, Darfur Action GroupAssociate Professor of History, Cornell UniversityTel: 607.277.6744E-mail: jhw4@cornell.edu

Elvir CamdzicCo-Founder, San Francisco Bay Area Darfur CoalitionExecutive Director, Bosnian-Herzegovinian Center of San FranciscoTel: 415.731.5850

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E-mail: elvir@darfursf.org

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