The Foreign Service Journal, December 2004

“war on terrorism,” the Bush admin- istration has continued on a path of accommodation with a regime that can best be described as little more than thugs and killers. And it has done so knowing full well that only the application of force and effec- tive sanctions, or at least a direct and unquestioned threat of it, along with a massive commitment of humani- tarian resources, could prevent the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Darfur civilians, most women and children. Lessons to be Learned In a Sept. 20 editorial, the Financial Times observed: “The search for maximum consensus has clashed with the need to send a suf- ficiently robust message to Khartoum to make it crack down on government-linked militias.” The paper speculated that the United States was more focused on getting the crisis “contained” than on stop- ping the killings and punishing the perpetrators. Sadly, that interpreta- tion seems borne out by the facts. We are going through a period of debate about what role America should play in world affairs. Leaders and opinion-makers who have led us into Iraq for what they now call humanitarian and democ- racy-related reasons fall silent before the genocide in Sudan. Once again we stood aside at a critical juncture to prevent another geno- cide of horrendous dimensions. That was a real choice and says a lot about our nation and its leaders. It is a story that has been repeated from the days of the Holocaust to the killing fields of Cambodia and Uganda, to Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda and elsewhere — and now in Sudan. We keep repeating “never again,” but because we close our eyes, it comes back again and again, stronger than ever. The ineffectiveness of U.S. actions and policies were apparent even as late as the first week in November, when the Sudanese army and police surrounded sev- eral refugee camps in Darfur and denied access to humanitarian groups — making it clearer than ever that the African Union moni- tors are powerless to intervene. (The timing of the action — during the U.S. elections, which diverted American public attention — is surely no coincidence.) The U.S. and U.N. protested the action, but the security situation has deteriorat- ed to the point that many relief organizations have had to withdraw their staff. And press reports of killings and other acts of barbarism taking place against black civilians and internally displaced people con- tinue. In short, even after two U.N. Security Council resolutions, threats of sanctions, an African Union sum- mit in Libya, and American assis- tance to airlift a small group of A.U. troops, the Khartoum government still felt confident enough to send its troops into the Al-Jeer Sureaf camp housing 5,000 refugees and lay it to waste. The State Department spokesman could only say that the Bush administration “stands with the international community in holding the government of the Sudan responsible for the violations and requests immediate return of the camp residents.” Not only did our diplomacy fail more than a million people in a far- off land. We failed in our contin- gency planning, our preventive and pre-crisis actions. We also failed to build an effective international struc- ture that could act preventively. There is no reason we cannot give the United Nations the kind of in-house capacity and funding to intervene quickly with humanitarian support and blue helmets quickly in instances of genocide. There is also no substi- 18 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 4 S P E A K I N G O U T