The following is a superbly written article that I checked today on Sudan Watch. I absolutely love it. It explains everything that Sudan Watch, Passion of The Present and I myself have been trying so hard to get across. The damn media talks about the Darfur conflict like they know it all when infact they got so many of their “facts” wrong. At the end of the day it’s you the readers who end up getting distorted information. Please read it and enlighten yourselves to what is truly happening. The rebels are neither heroes nor victims in this tragedy. They are a sick and greedy bunch of people whom the international community shouldn’t sympathize them.
“Strategic Victimhood in Sudan” by Alan Kuperman
THOUSANDS of Americans who wear green wristbands and demand military intervention to stop Sudan’s Arab government from perpetrating genocide against black tribes in Darfur must be perplexed by recent developments.Without such intervention, Sudan’s government last month agreed to a peace accord pledging to disarm Arab janjaweed militias and resettle displaced civilians. By contrast, Darfur’s black rebels, who are touted by the wristband crowd as freedom fighters, rejected the deal because it did not give them full regional control. Put simply, the rebels were willing to let genocide continue against their own people rather than compromise their demand for power. International mediators were shamefaced. They had presented the plan as take it or leave it, to compel Khartoum’s acceptance. But now the ostensible representatives of the victims were balking. Embarrassed American officials were forced to ask Sudan for further concessions beyond the ultimatum that it had already accepted.Fortunately, Khartoum again acquiesced. But two of Darfur’s three main rebel groups still rejected peace. Frustrated American negotiators accentuated the positive - the strongest rebel group did sign - and expressed hope that the dissenters would soon join. But that hope was crushed last week when the rebels viciously turned on each other. As this newspaper reported, “The rebels have unleashed a tide of violence against the very civilians they once joined forces to protect.”Seemingly bizarre, this rejection of peace by factions claiming to seek it is actually revelatory. It helps explain why violence originally broke out in Darfur, how the Save Darfur movement unintentionally poured fuel on the fire, and what can be done to stanch genocidal violence in Sudan and elsewhere. Darfur was never the simplistic morality tale purveyed by the news media and humanitarian organizations. The region’s blacks, painted as long-suffering victims, actually were the oppressors less than two decades ago - denying Arab nomads access to grazing areas essential to their survival. Violence was initiated not by Arab militias but by the black rebels who in 2003 attacked police and military installations. The most extreme Islamists are not in the government but in a faction of the rebels sponsored by former Deputy Prime Minister Hassan al-Turabi, after he was expelled from the regime. Cease-fires often have been violated first by the rebels, not the government, which has pledged repeatedly to admit international peacekeepers if the rebels halt their attacks. This reality has been obscured by Sudan’s criminally irresponsible reaction to the rebellion: arming militias to carry out a scorched-earth counterinsurgency. These Arab forces, who already resented the black tribes over past land disputes and recent attacks, were only too happy to rape and pillage any village suspected of supporting the rebels. In light of janjaweed atrocities, it is natural to romanticize the other side as freedom fighters. But Darfur’s rebels do not deserve that title. They took up arms not to stop genocide - which erupted only after they rebelled - but to gain tribal domination. The strongest faction, representing the minority Zaghawa tribe, signed the sweetened peace deal in hopes of legitimizing its claim to control Darfur. But that claim is vehemently opposed by rebels representing the larger Fur tribe. Such internecine disputes only recently hit the headlines, but the rebels have long wasted resources fighting each other rather than protecting their people.Advocates of intervention play down rebel responsibility because it is easier to build support for stopping genocide than for becoming entangled in yet another messy civil war. But their persistent calls for intervention have actually worsened the violence.The rebels, much weaker than the government, would logically have sued for peace long ago. Because of the Save Darfur movement, however, the rebels believe that the longer they provoke genocidal retaliation, the more the West will pressure Sudan to hand them control of the region. Sadly, this message was reinforced when the rebels’ initial rejection of peace last month was rewarded by American officials’ extracting further concessions from Khartoum.The key to rescuing Darfur is to reverse these perverse incentives. Spoiler rebels should be told that the game is over, and that further resistance will no longer be rewarded but punished by the loss of posts reserved for them in the peace agreement.Ultimately, if the rebels refuse, military force will be required to defeat them. But this is no job for United Nations peacekeepers. Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia show that even the United States military cannot stamp out Islamic rebels on their home turf; second-rate international troops would stand even less chance.Rather, we should let Sudan’s army handle any recalcitrant rebels, on condition that it eschew war crimes. This option will be distasteful to many, but Sudan has signed a peace treaty, so it deserves the right to defend its sovereignty against rebels who refuse to, so long as it observes the treaty and the laws of war. Indeed, to avoid further catastrophes like Darfur, the United States should announce a policy of never intervening to help provocative rebels, diplomatically or militarily, so long as opposing armies avoid excessive retaliation. This would encourage restraint on both sides. Instead we should redirect intervention resources to support “people power” movements that pursue change peacefully, as they have done successfully over the past two decades in the Philippines, Indonesia, Serbia and elsewhere.America, born in revolution, has a soft spot for rebels who claim to be freedom fighters, including those in Darfur. But to reduce genocidal violence, we must withhold support for the cynical provocations of militants who bear little resemblance to our founders.
SudaneseThinker
SudaneseThinker
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Should we allow Darfur’s army to handle the rebels?
The problem with that approach was exactly what it was the last time they handled the rebels, and that was that they brought in the janjaweed and embarked on a campaign of genocide and systematic abuses against civilians.
So they demanded a vice-presidential seat in the government? A power struggle? Perhaps. Or could it be a voice in the government to ensure this does not happen again as soon as international attention lifts from the region?
No one knows the amount of civilians killed in this conflict because the government has to this point, not allowed humanitarian groups in. Best estimates range from 70,000 to 300,000, depending on what years are covered and who is counted and another 1 million to 3 million villagers displaced.
If your government would have just dealt with the rebels instead of unleashing the janjaweed in a systematic campaign against civilians, I doubt you and I would be having this conversation but even with international attention and pressure, your government has thus far resisted disarming the janjaweed and instead has begun absorbing many of them into the army and police forces.
Darfur Documents Confirm Government Policy of Militia Support
I would prefer not to be involved in this conflict. The US has no economic ties or strategic interests in the area as you like to insinuate, however, when confronted with a humanitarian disaster the size and scope of Darfur, it demands the attention and the involvement of the international community. We, as humanitarians and citizens of the world community at large, cannot allow it to continue. If all countries were united in their approach to these kinds of atrocities, instead of overlooking them in favor of continued economic ties, we would have a much better chance of stemming them in the future.
t
The region’s blacks, painted as long-suffering victims, actually were the oppressors less than two decades ago - denying Arab nomads access to grazing areas essential to their survival.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I don’t get this. They lived there (the region’s blacks) - and it was their property. Why should they be called the oppressors? Nomads have the tendency of moving on and not staying in one place for that long. Why would they (the region’s blacks) start to rebel if they wouldn’t feel attacked in any way?
Was in intern powerstruggle between tribes? Or what?
Take care,
Tse.
I’m kinda new to this blog, but just wanted to say that this posting is interesting. Will be linking to this on my own blog soon.
But just to ask you, do you really agree that we should just leave Sudan to handle the job? I mean Sudan hasn’t fully put into practice its peace deal with South Sudan in the first place to work on this one, and the janjaweed milita that this article is portraying as less “evil” are currently flowing into Chad commiting human rights abuses as we speak now in addition to the many abuses they have already committed. I don’t fully agree with this article, but I appreciate people having different views.
It’s not like to the UN would bring peace at once, it will be a long process, but will help calm the genocide down (I call it genocide, I don’t know what your take is on this).
Hello Drima, Thank you for your kind words and comment. Sorry I’ve not yet had a chance to reply or say how much I appreciate and enjoy your blog. Here is a link to some reactions to Kuperman’s great think piece. If you or any of your readers have time to gather other reactions by bloggers (there are a lot, I’ve not yet browsed Technorati), please blog them and I’ll link to the list. Kind regards from Ingrid, England, UK.
http://sudanwatch.blogspot.com/2006/05/strategic-victimhood-in-sudan-by-alan.html
http://anewerworld.org/?p=473
Drima, did you read that blog?
I’m having doubts about that story of Kuperman as well, (mostly because I don’t trust liberals, ahaha) but also because it seems very odd that landowners would all of a sudden start to rebel…
You, as a Sudanese thinker
could shed some light on that?
Thanks,
Tse.
Hey, great article. Thanks for bringing it to our attention, Drima. It definitely makes things clearer.
My understanding (by the way, I am not a Liberal) of the war in Darfur is along the lines of a Timeline by CBC (excerpted here below) that the Darfur rebels went to war complaining that their impoverished region had been neglected by the national government. I’d like to elaborate at this point about the oil, uranium, mineral riches in Darfur, rebel bases in Eritrea and Europe and their jet set lifestyles and oil exploration in Darfur and Chad - in fact the whole of my Sudan Watch blog - but it would take a book to explain. There’s much more going on than meets the eye. I believe we don’t know half of it.
From what I have gathered, life in the Sudan is complicated. Blogging news about such a complex (and closed off) culture with a very long history, in a few lines, is difficult while trying to maintain accuracy. There are many different tribes in the Sudan, a country the size of Europe. Within Europe are probably as many factions and differing cultures, dialects, traditions and mindsets as there are in the Sudan. Violent fighting and war has gone on in the Sudan over the past 50 years. Tribal leaders in the Sudan oversee large regions in the Sudan and rule through benevolence and fear in areas where not much has changed since the year dot. Sudan has a long history of fighting. Millions of Sudanese still do not know how to read and write. It will take decades, maybe even hundreds of years for Sudan to get educated and catch up. Water shortage is a major problem.
During the past 50 years alone, there have been 507 conflicts pitting country against country, and 21 instances of actual hostilities, as a result of disagreements over water. The 21st century’s most explosive commodity will be . . . WATER.
I believe drilling for Sudan’s water is more important than drilling for oil and that in conflict areas like Darfur, handpumps are the frontline to peacebuilding and education.
http://sudanwatch.blogspot.com/2006/05/unicefs-clean-water-project-in-sudan.html
- - -
Here is an excerpt from the Timeline by CBC:
“The dire situation in Darfur dates back to March 2003 when the predominantly Muslim militants of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) started attacking government forces and installations in the western region of Sudan.
The militants accused the government of President Omar Hassan El-Bashir of neglecting the region and oppressing black Africans in favour of Arabs in the state of Darfur. About 60 per cent of the people in the area are subsistence farmers, with the rest being nomadic or semi-nomadic herders.
The government, caught by surprise by the militants’ attacks, had very few troops in the region. In response, it mounted a campaign of aerial bombardment in support of ground attacks by an Arab militia, the Janjaweed, that it had recruited from local tribes.”
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/sudan/darfur.html
- - -
Please also note the U.N.’s Timeline commences March 2003 when fighting broke out in Darfur between Government forces and rebels from the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM).
http://www.un.org/News/dh/dev/scripts/darfur_formatted.htm
- - -
More comments re above on milita attacks carried out prior to 2003 can be found at:
http://sudanwatch.blogspot.com/2006/05/darfur-slajem-joint-statement-on-draft.html
- - -
The following is an excerpt from the BBC’s Who Are The Darfur Rebels?
The two groups fighting in Sudan’s Darfur region - the Justice for Equality Movement (Jem) and the larger Sudan Liberation Army/Movement (SLA/M) - have very different ideological backgrounds.
SLA Secretary-General Minni Arkou Minnawi published a political declaration calling for armed struggle, accusing the government of ignoring Darfur. “The objective of the SLA/M is to create a united democratic Sudan.
JEM leader Khalil Ibrahim Muhammad published The Black Book: Imbalance of Power and Wealth in the Sudan, which accuses Arabs of having a disproportionate representation at the top levels of government and administration.
Although JEM and SLA come from different ideological backgrounds they have managed to co-operate in their fight against the government and the Arab militia, the Janjaweed.
But they have continued to maintain separate identities and this has led to tensions.
JEM still has links to Hassan al-Turabi, which is why it is accused by the government of being involved in an alleged coup plot in Khartoum, which it accuses Mr al-Turabi of masterminding.
MACRO ANALYSIS
It is no doubt that Sudan’s government has oppressed the people of Darfur for very long. There is a huge imbalance of wealth and power sharing. The rebels wanted to end that and as such they started the uprisal. The first targets they struck were military and police installations in the region. That sparked off the confrontation between them and Khartoum. The Darfurians and Khartoum government officials are Afro-Arabs but the Darfurians have darker skin though since they’re Sub-saharan Afro-Arabs. The Khartoum government struck back with deadly force especially after it found out that Hassan Al Turabi is involved (the man who harboured Bin Laden and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood). As soon as the conflict started, everything got much worse.
The above is how the media portrays it… a simple story of good VS bad.
MICRO ANALYSIS
By looking deeper at the underlying factors and micro analysing the situation, the picture starts looking radically different. In order to micro analyse, you must be very aware of many details.
1- I’m a Muslim Sudanese myself as such I understand the Sudanese mentality and culture of tribalism very well.
1- I don’t respect or even admire the Khartoum government for any of its dark deeds and past. They have caused my people a lot of pain and are responsible for the merciless killings of some of my family members back home. As such I’m not biased towards supporting them.
2- I know family friends who live near the affected areas. I also have Sudanese friends in Malaysia who had some family in Darfur that were slaughtered and killed by
rebels.
3- I know relatives and friends who work in the UN in Sudan.
4- I do my best to eliminate emotions out of the equation when assessing the Darfur conflict.
If the rebels fought the Khartoum government using ethical ways then I would fully support them.
“SLA Secretary-General Minni Arkou Minnawi published a political declaration calling for armed struggle, accusing the government of ignoring Darfur. “The objective of the SLA/M is to create a united democratic Sudan.”
A united democractic Sudan???? Hell ya, I would desperately love to see that day.
People in the Darfur region and based and divided into tribes. Those tribes had many problems amongst themselves for a long time. The a killer only cares for his own tribe and not others’ even if they’re also Darfurians. To explain this in detail and how “tribal law” functions and judges when it comes to issues such as grazing rights will take very lenghy and detailed post. Even I myself am not very well versed in those areas.
All I can tell you is that THIS IS NOT A GENOCIDE. This is mainly a struggle for equal share of money and power. The Sudanese government is corrupted and greedy. They keep most of the money from the economy in their pockets and invest whatever is left mostly in Khartoum. The rebels have a right to rebel and demand improvements to their impoverished region. It is a struggle I support in principle but not in application. This is simply because the rebels aren’t “good” as you think. When the conlfict errupted, I would say the Khartoum government and Janjaweed were responsible for the deaths if innocents. However in the last year the rebels should be blamed as decades of old tribal conflict errupted and became infused with the current one. As such the rebels started killing people in villages of different tribes. They killed innocent civilians. At the end of the day, the rebels aren’t fighting for their people. Each tribe member simply cares for his tribe.
The reason I loved this article is that because it is the first I saw by a daring American to actually get most of the facts right. It also pointed out one of the most and fundamental things people are missing which is that THE REBELS ARE ALSO A SICK AND EVIL BUNCH OF PEOPLE. They’re the ones mostly killing each other. You should not sympathize with them. However I must say that no matter what, the Khartoum government is ultimately responsible for all this.
Drima, thank you very much. Now it’s clear(er) to me.
The Darfuri rebels started the uprising, were knocked out by the Khartoum government, they got aid from the janjaweed, people were displaced, villages rampaged and all that, but the rebels just started to join in the killing of their own people as long as they were not of their own tribe.
(I didn’t know a rebel (Hassan Al Turabi) harboured OBL…. this is very confusing, why would he be interested in the rebel-site of the conflict?)
Thanx again,
Tse.
Hassan Turabi was part of the Sudanese government in the 90’s but then there was a power struggle between him and president Omar Al Bashir. So then Oman Al Bashir kicked him and put him on arrest. Only recently he was released as a sign of good faith. Turabi is keen on becoming president and taking over Sudan (that would be VERY disasterous). He is in the opposition now. Any thing that would trouble the Khartoum government would be an advantage to him and as such he had a “helping hand” in the rebellion. The president could have Turabi executed but that would be a very risky move as there are so many who are very loyal to him and consider him to be a “Sudanese Messiah”… I hate the guy. Believe me President Omar staying in power is much better than Turabi taking over.
And Tsedek, no problem you’re always welcome. It’s my pleasure.
The Khartoum gov’t is only interested in filling their own pockets.
The rebels wanted fair share and started to rebel.
Turabi wants the take over power because he wants to be in the position to do what the gov’t is doing now = filling his own pockets? And, therefore hijacked the rebellion….
Is he a fundementalist wanting something like the Iran regime for Sudan? For else - I couldn’t figure out why OBL would come to him i/o asking protection from Omar al Bashir….
Yeah - you’re great Drima, being so patient to explain all this to me. But still I feel I’m asking too much from your patience *blush*….
This is so much clearer and straightforward though from all the media (incl. help organizations’) explanations (which only got me more confused) - for the first time I’m beginning to understand it a little bit. Therefore again: thank you very much!
Tse.
Neat analysis Drima, thanks. After two years of closely following news on Darfur, you are the only person online (aside from Kuperman and 70% of Julie Flint’s writings) I agree with when it comes to writings on the war in Darfur!
Note, Prof Kuperman’s opinion piece is published in full at the website of the Sudanese Embassy in Washington DC.
http://www.sudanembassy.org/default.asp?page=viewstory&id=475
Tsedek, here is a link to further information on Sudanese Islamist leader Sheikh Hassan Al-Turabi:
http://sudanwatch.blogspot.com/2006/05/turabi-cancels-london-visit-after.html
Don’t you wonder who funds the rebels, how they make a living and pay for their jet setting lifestyles, bases in Europe (why Europe?) and Eritrea, satellite phones, shiny new suits and uniforms … and all the ammunition used over the past three years? I do but have never been able to find out. I’m surprised journalists don’t look into it.
http://thehumanprovince.blogspot.com/2006/06/kuperman-and-provoking-genocide.html
I would like to comment on Alan Kuperman’s polemical piece in the New York Times yesterday (31 May), “Strategic Victimhood in Sudan.” In this particular article, Kuperman tells us that the regime in Khartoum responded to Darfuri rebel insurgency with genocide, and that “[b]ecause of the Save Darfur movement … the rebels believe that the longer they provoke genocidal retaliation, the more the West will pressure,” which has in turn led the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) movement and Nur’s part of the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) to reject the recent peace treaty signed at Abuja.
Kuperman’s analysis of events is not specific to his take on Sudanese politics; rather it is but further evidence of his larger hypothesis. Generally speaking, the crux of his argument can be found in the first sentence of an article he wrote on the Rwandan genocide, “Provoking genocide: A revised history of the Rwandan Patriotic Front”: “In most cases of mass killing since World War II — unlike the Holocaust — the victim group has triggered its own demise by violently challenging the authority of the state.”
Although he emphasizes that his theory is “not intended to excuse of justify the genocide in any way, but merely to understand more fully its causes,” Kuperman’s argument seems to come dangerously close to blaming the victims. While he would surely protest that he is blaming rebel groups and not the victims of the genocide (a polemical claim in and of itself), this is not at all clear when he says, “the victim group has triggered its own demise.” (To be fair, with the exception of the opening sentence, the article focuses mostly on the RPF, not Tutsis in general.)
But I’ll save the more general moral debate about whether or not a genocidal regime’s culpability can be shared with a rebel group that has purportedly “provoked” genocide for another time. What I would like to focus on here is the specifics of Darfur.
I don’t pretend to be an expert on Sudanese or Darfuri politics, and I agree with Kuperman when he says that the situation in Darfur is complex. However, it seems strange that after stressing that the situation there is not the “simplistic morality tale purveyed by the news media and humanitarian organizations,” he would himself make claims like these:
The region’s blacks, painted as long-suffering victims, actually were the oppressors less than two decades ago — denying Arab nomads access to grazing areas essential to their survival. … [The rebels] took up arms not to stop genocide — which erupted only after they rebelled — but to gain tribal domination.
To paint the situation during the maja al-gatila (the famine that kills) in Darfur in 1984-5 as one in which “blacks … were the oppressors” is terribly simplistic in more than one way. Without lingering on the complexities of ethnicity in Darfur and the difficulty in categorizing Darfuris as either “black” or “Arab,” the facile claim that “blacks” were oppressing “Arabs” seems to overlook the fact that the nearly 100,000 deaths during the famine were largely due to apathy or incompetence on the part of Khartoum. According to Prunier,
Everyone knew that this catastrophe would have been perfectly preventable with a little bit of planning, money and, especially, political will. Everyone knew that the mass deaths [hécatombe] were the result of Khartoum’s negligence. But the consequences happened to be unequally distributed [translation mine].
The drought and famine forced the nomads to prematurely go south in search of grazing areas, which just so happened to be the meager and not-yet-harvested fields of the farmers. Alex de Waal, who has studied the famine in depth, describes the delicate balance that was violently disturbed in 1985 as the “moral geography” of Darfur.
Kuperman’s other claim, that the rebels “picked up arms … to gain tribal dominance,” also seems to be woefully ill-informed. According to Julie Flint and de Waal, the roots of JEM go back to 1993, when the original aim was to reform the National Islamic Front (NIF) from within. Dissidents like Nur compiled evidence illustrating the economic and political marginalization of Darfur into a document they called “The Black Book.” JEM purports to combat Darfur’s status as an outlying periphery dominated by the center of Sudanese economic and political life. Nur explains the situation in Darfur thusly:
There was too much suffering. I travelled 60 kilometers to go to primary school, in Kornoi, when I was 7; 350 kilometers to go to intermediate school, in Geneina; 400 kilometers to go to secondary school, in Fasher; and 1,000 kilometers to go to university, in Khartoum. It was forbidden to speak the Zaghawa language in school. In primary school, the teacher gave us a blue ticket to pass to any boy who spoke Zaghawa. At the end of the day, anyone who had the ticket was whipped. The whole of Kutun province, with a population of more than 551,000, had one general doctor and no specialists. Women walked more than eight hours daily to get less than 60 liters of water. We were excluded from all key posts and had no way of communicating with the international community to ask for help.
JEM’s five-point manifesto calls for a national solution to the Sudan’s problems. It calls for a unified country, justice and equality rather than political repression, “radical and comprehensive constitutional reform,” basic services for all Sudanese and human development in all the regions of Sudan.
The SLM/A, on the other hand, has its roots in Darfuri irregular militias that were created in the 1980s and continued throughout the 1990s when conflict was already rife in the region. In 1999 already, over 100,000 Masalit had fled to Chad.
The fact of the matter is that the events leading up to the genocide in Darfur are many and varied, involving the famine, the political situation in Chad, Libyan involvement and sometimes de facto ruling of Darfur, Islamic movements (both domestic and imported from Tripoli or Cairo) and a politics of systematic neglect of the periphery by the center in Khartoum. To say that the rebels provoked genocide by vying for tribal domination is either disingenuous or uninformed.
This is not to say that the Darfuri rebel movements are saints; we know that they are not. But that’s not the point. Whether the rebel movements have “provoked” Khartoum is neither here nor there in the long run. The rebels, despite their claims to represent all of Darfur, are not the ethnic groups as a whole, just as the RPF is not synonymous with the Tutsis in Rwanda.
De Waal sums up the situation quite succinctly in his piece in the London Review of Books, “Counter-insurgency on the cheap”:
The atrocities carried out by the Janjawiid are aimed at speakers of Fur, Tunjur, Masalit and Zaghawa. They are systematic and sustained; the effect, if not the aim, is grossly disproportionate to the military threat of the rebellion. The mass rape and branding of victims speaks of the deliberate destruction of a community. In Darfur, cutting down fruit trees or destroying irrigation ditches is a way of eradicating farmers’ claims to the land and ruining livelihoods. But this is not the genocidal campaign of a government at the height of its ideological hubris, as the 1992 jihad against the Nuba was, or coldly determined to secure natural resources, as when it sought to clear the oilfields of southern Sudan of their troublesome inhabitants. This is the routine cruelty of a security cabal, its humanity withered by years in power: it is genocide by force of habit.
And this brings me to Kuperman’s advice not to intervene: …we should let Sudan’s army handle any recalcitrant rebels, on condition that it eschew war crimes.” It’s hard to believe that such a naïve statement could be penned by anyone who has read much about the regime in Khartoum. We’re talking about “routine cruelty” and “genocide by force of habit.” What Kuperman doesn’t see is that the Sudanese regime is “handling” the rebels in the same way it dealt with the South and the Nuba Mountains.
To lay the blame for such acts at the feet of the rebels (rather than at the feet of the regime committing genocide), or even worse, the “victim group,” is morally irresponsible. The Fur and Zaghawa and other “black” tribes in Darfur are no more responsible for the organized campaign to destroy them than the Armenians were for their forced march into the sands of Syria.
If Alan Kuperman is content to take Khartoum at its word and trust that it will “eschew” the “war crimes” that it denies committing in the first place, allowing the regime to “handle” the rebels and “defend its sovereignty” in the meantime, I, for one, am not.
Kuperman advises the United States to announce a policy of non-intervention. This is confusing to me, because after all, isn’t that the policy that Samantha Powers describes so well in her book, “A Problem from Hell”? Isn’t that the policy that has been silently announced throughout the twentieth century to Armenians, Rwandans, Iraqi Kurds, Cambodians and now the Sudanese?
Leave a Comment