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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (7624)	5/7/2006 6:49:19 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

The Devil in Darfur Reasons to doubt the new peace deal will hold. Saturday, May 6, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT At last, the news about Darfur appears to be good. In Abuja, Nigeria yesterday, the government of Khartoum and the largest of the Darfuri rebel factions, the Sudan Liberation Army, agreed to a peace deal. Terms include disarming the Arab Janjaweed militia, a proxy force through which Khartoum has killed 200,000 Darfuris and sent another two million into exile. The deal also calls for compensating refugees, transferring some of the government's oil wealth to the region and enlisting thousands of Darfuri rebels into the regular Sudanese Army. It sounds promising, and if it sticks it will be a diplomatic triumph for the Bush Administration, which has so far provided $1 billion in humanitarian aid to the region and which sent Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick to help arrange the deal. But we have seen Sudanese governments violate too many previous agreements to place too much stock in this one. Between 1983 and 2005, Khartoum killed as many as two million people (and enslaved hundreds of thousands) in its war against the black Christians of southern Sudan. That war itself began when Khartoum violated the 1972 Addis Ababa Accords, which had ended a previous civil war, in a bid to Islamicize the south. In 1989, current Sudanese President Omar Bashir took power in a coup to prevent the ratification of a peace deal. In 1997, he agreed to a "Declaration of Principles," spelling out the elements of a workable peace deal. Mr. Bashir also co-opted factional leaders of the rebel movement by offering them government jobs in exchange for cooperation against their erstwhile allies. But his war against the south continued, ending only in 2005 after the rebel movement under John Garang achieved a military stalemate. Garang was killed in a helicopter crash later that year. Mr. Bashir has established a similar pattern in Darfur, a war which began as Khartoum's battles against the south were ending. In April 2004, his government signed the Humanitarian Ceasefire Agreement with rebel groups in N'Djamena, Chad. But Khartoum continued to kill Darfuris via the Janjaweed. In November, Mr. Bashir agreed to grant unrestricted access to humanitarian aid groups. Yet as Jan Egeland, the United Nations' emergency relief coordinator, wrote in The Wall Street Journal Thursday, "Aid workers in Darfur are forced to cope with threats, intimidation and an Orwellian nightmare of unending bureaucratic restrictions [by the Sudanese government] that effectively--and intentionally--impede our ability to help those in need." Put simply, Sudan's track record inspires no confidence that it will abide by the agreement it has now signed. Unlike the 2005 deal with Garang, Khartoum isn't under any serious military pressure from the rebels, nor is there any looming threat of external military intervention. It may serve Mr. Bashir's purposes to co-opt the main rebel faction, not least as a way of breaking the back of the movement and destroying the rebels who remain. That doesn't bode well for ordinary Darfuris, whose most realistic hope of salvation is their ability to mount an effective self-defense. A larger problem is the unwillingness of the international community to treat Sudan as the outlaw state it is. While unsparing in his criticism of Khartoum, Mr. Egeland is at pains to emphasize violence "by all sides." When the U.N. Security Council voted to sanction four Sudanese individuals, two of them were rebel leaders. More broadly, the Darfur crisis is a reminder that the very institutions that, prior to the Iraq war, were said to be the only legitimate arbiters of international intervention turn out to be the least helpful when intervention is most needed. At a regional level, the African Union has done what it can to broker peace and has sent a poorly equipped and operationally limited 7,000-man force to police Darfur, an area the size of France. The AU's efforts are at least well-intended. This is more than can be said for the Arab League, which held its most recent summit in Khartoum and has backed Mr. Bashir to the hilt. America's allies in Europe have rejected an Administration proposal to deploy NATO forces to Darfur. The U.N.'s humanitarian agencies have done yeoman work to feed and shelter refugees. But the Security Council has been unable to impose broad and effective sanctions on Khartoum thanks to Chinese and Russian opposition. This leaves the United States, the only country in the world with the capability and, potentially, the will to aid Darfuris and every other group threatened with genocide or brutal oppression. President Bush has certainly been engaged with the crisis in Darfur, more so than any of his alleged moral betters in places such as France and Sweden. Yet having endured so much opprobrium and resistance to his last two acts of international hygiene--the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq--it's no wonder he's reluctant to carry another burden, particularly when American interests are not directly at stake. There's a lesson here for all of those liberal internationalists who now demand the Administration "do something" in Darfur: If you want to stop genocide, don't shackle the world's only policeman. opinionjournal.com