The Foreign Service Journal, December 2004

Instead, we were fed a pablum of reports about the Olympics, murder trials, the upcoming television season and so forth Even in my own NGO community, which had the courage to send people into harm’s way on the ground in Sudan, some have tended to wring their hands instead of demanding that Washington, and the world, act with force or effective sanctions. At a major conference about Darfur held at American University on Sept. 24, the despair of the NGO representa- tives was so deep that many speakers argued it was useless even to urge direct intervention by American troops. Their preferred alternative was action by the African Union, which has consistently said it would only act with the Sudanese govern- ment’s approval. Reinforcing that message, Khartoum’s ambassador in Washington attended the conference and largely refused to acknowledge the government’s own responsibility for the situation in his remarks to the conference. He also insisted that his government would never allow inter- national peacekeepers to enter the country and protect civilians. Eventually, Khartoum grudgingly agreed to allow some African Union observers and troops to enter Sudan, albeit with a limited mandate — but not nearly enough to be effective or even upset the government. As the New York Times reported on Oct. 26, the A.U. monitors are not permitted to intervene to protect civilians even as they are being killed or raped. Yet African Union leaders actually praised the Khartoum government for its cooperation during their mid-October meeting in Libya. Thus, the African Union mission appears more and more a sham, and our support for it seems to be mostly a fig leaf in terms of stopping the killing. In retrospect, it seems clear that our ongoing involvement in both Iraq and Afghanistan distracted Washing- ton policy-makers from addressing yet another crisis. And the presidential and congressional elections made a decision to intervene with our own military forces even more inoppor- tune and difficult. I was heartened that, in the first presidential debate on Sept. 30, Senator Kerry pushed a bit on the need for American support for intervention, if not clearly an on-the- ground role for American troops. But in response, Pres. Bush said America was already engaged, and ruled out any change in the U.S. script for deal- ing with Sudan. And that “script” is the real prob- lem. In the interest of pursuing the 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 17 S P E A K I N G O U T