The Foreign Service Journal, December 2004

T he Darfur crisis continues on its grim course as these words are being written in early November, and likely will not be fully resolved by the time this appears in print. But some lessons for U.S. diplomacy and our future role in the world are already clear — and deeply troubling. The six years of my Foreign Service career I spent as a policy plan- ner inculcated in me the urgency for the State Department to get ahead of the headlines and push the interna- tional diplomatic community — as well as the U.S. bureaucracy — to react rapidly to situations like Darfur. So I commend Secretary of State Colin Powell, in particular, for his fre- quent and impassioned calls for action, including his midsummer visit to Sudan, and his insistence on calling the atrocity what it is: genocide. But it quickly became apparent that President George W. Bush had no intention of using his “bully pulpit” to gain domestic support for interven- ing in Darfur if the international com- munity failed to act — in sharp con- trast to his approach to Iraq a year earlier. And that realization freed the Sudanese government to break every agreement it entered into and ignore every ultimatum the U.N. belatedly issued. Let me be clear: The lion’s share of blame belongs to the regime in Khartoum for instigating this latest reign of terror against its own citizens, using the forces of the Jinjaweed (also known as the Janjaweed) to do their dirty work for them. But the Sudanese government’s gamble that the world would not go beyond rhetoric has paid off handsomely. Many of our allies have worked to thwart or at least delay any effective multilateral action, both at the United Nations and elsewhere. Their mo- tives varied: some had commercial interests (e.g., Sudanese oil), while others asserted they could not inter- vene in another country’s internal affairs, no matter how badly it mis- treated its own people. But the result was the same: a green light for the killings to proceed. In particular, Russia, China and France — and, eventually, a majority of the U.N. Security Council — wast- ed no time in making clear that they would not support any effective sanc- tions against the Sudan government. (China went so far as to threaten a veto.) Sec. Powell had to labor might- ily to get the Security Council to set a 90-day deadline for Khartoum to cease its support for the killers and to provide access to the region for the delivery of humanitarian assistance and African Union monitoring — but with no enforcement mechanism and next to no resources to implement the intervention. When Khartoum ignored that demand, barely bothering to conceal its contempt, we then went to anoth- er 30-day ticking clock — all the while witnessing even more deliberate dev- astation of the Darfur people, with thousands dying by the week. Some progress finally seemed to be made this fall as more assistance was allowed to get in, but the aid remained under Sudan’s control. In addition, the Khartoum government simply dressed the Jinjaweed in uni- forms, assigning them duty as guards for the displaced persons camps — a classic case of letting the foxes guard the henhouse. As I write in November, after yet another so-called deadline expired, reports of murder, rape, forced relo- cation and government carnage con- tinue. Yet the international communi- ty, including the U.S., inexplicably continues to insist it needs the coop- eration of the Khartoum government to intervene more aggressively. Averting Our Eyes Mindful of that background, one can make a case that even strong U.S. leadership might not have sufficed to energize the international communi- ty. But I would contend that the Bush administration’s failure to follow up decisively on Sec. Powell’s welcome declaration that the Darfur situation constitutes “genocide” doomed all efforts to intervene effectively from the start. That is not to say the U.S. has done nothing to help; quite the contrary. Not only are we one of the very few governments to consistently advocate an end to the killings, but we have given concrete unilateral and multilat- eral assistance. As Sec. Powell testi- fied to Congress in early September, U.S. government humanitarian assis- tance in response to the Darfur crisis in Sudan and Chad (where thousands of refugees have fled) already totaled $211.3 million as of Sept. 2. This The Lessons of Darfur B Y H ARRY C. B LANEY III D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 15 S PEAKING O UT