History Department

1148 Coddington Road Ithaca, New York 14850 26 January 2009 The Honorable Hillary Rodham Clinton Secretary of State U.S. Department of State 2201 C Street NW Washington, DC 20520 Dear Madam Secretary: You met me before as Amity Weiss’s father, but I am writing now as a human rights activist and professor at Cornell University who has been addressing the problem of Darfur since early 2004. The years since that time have found me engaged in a variety of activities aimed at ending the genocide, including the presentation of briefings and reports to the National Security Council, the State Department’s Sudan Problems Task Force, the President’s Special Envoy on Sudan, and the Parliament Secretary to the Prime Minister of Canada. Long aware of your own interest in the matter of Darfur, and learning from your hearing last week and from that of Ambassador Rice, that Darfur policy is currently under review, I offer you in this letter, and, in the documents referenced therein, an assessment of the prospects for the ending the genocide during President Obama’s administration. I act both as director of the Darfur Action Group-Cornell and as the chief aide to the group of Canadian office-holders and heads of organizations who are currently presenting the attached Proposal to the European Union. They have asked me to make you and Ambassador Rice aware of their campaign to obtain adoption of the proposal and to be ready to answer any questions about it that you might have. Conflicting Objectives? Ending the Genocide During the years since the violence in the Darfur region came to the attention of the world, government officials, editorial writers, spokesmen for humanitarian organizations, and activists have called for ending the genocide; stabilizing the situation; ousting the directors of the destruction, the Government of Sudan (GoS); and creating peace in the region. These are not identical goals. In fact, certain ones interfere with others on the list. Since I hold that ending the genocide should take precedence over all other objectives, I should clarify what that phrase means. I have studied legal and academic constructions of genocide definitions for many years, time which includes work in the papers of Raphael Lemkin, who originated the term. I have also encountered both genocide and opposing genocide in the world of practice. My father, Gerard A.Weiss, an attorney employed by the Department of Justice, has on many occasions given me information gleaned from his experiences interrogating defendants at the Nuremberg Trials. During the war and genocide in Bosnia I headed -2an organization which sent me to Bihac and Tuzla to distribute money, medical supplies, and computer parts. After the war ended in 1995 I returned to Bosnia each summer to train a group of Bosnians, including several survivors of the Srebrenica massacre, in techniques of historical research. This study and this experience have led me to conclude that it is most useful to define genocide as the radical diminishing of a people and their culture accompanied by mass killing and uprooting. In speeches I have used the image of a patterned mosaic, a favorite way my Canadian friends describe Canada’s multi-ethnic society. When the actions of others crack or efface a tile in the human mosaic of cultures, one encounters genocide. Since humans themselves are the chief bearers of a culture, even if other elements of that culture, residing in physical artifacts, may prove less fragile, more enduring than individual men and women who constitute the “people”, killing the group’s members diminishes that culture most dramatically. It is nevertheless true that genocide as experienced historically includes not only murder and causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the targeted group but also the radical reduction of the capacity for culture, that is, a severe limitation of the quality of individual and community life such that the elements of that people’s culture which distinguish it most strongly from those of others, or which give it its energy and its ability to endure, to grow, or to sustain productive relationships with other cultures, have vanished or are threatened with an irreversible decline. Lemkin himself wrote that the objective of genocidal plans was to bring about the “disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence” of targeted groups.1 Camps in Chad, Darfur, and parts of Southern Sudan now warehouse more than two-and-a-half million Fur, Zaghawa, Masalit, Berti, Dajo, Tunjur, and other groups displaced from Darfur homes. The inhabitants’ sense of loss, their physical weakening, their boredom, their depression, and their sense of having recently abandoned hope have struck every outside observer. As the years pass, the hope for a return to the sites of their villages in a climate of reasonable security grows fainter as the insecurity inside and outside of the camps grows greater. Darfuris have hoped to see a fundamental value of their culture, justice, affirmed and enacted, if only in a limited way, by the indictment of President Omer Bashir, but the efforts of the African Union, the Arab League, Russia, and China to 1 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Washington,D.C. 1944), 79. The UN Convention on Genocide requires that the acts be committed with the intent to destroy the targeted group as such. As International Criminal Court Prosecutor Moreno-Ocampo put it, “His pretext was a „counterinsurgency‟. His intent was genocide.” International Criminal Court, 2/05157.Annex A, p. 7. freeze the ICC Prosecutor’s request for such an indictment threatens to close off such a gesture toward the rule of law. Nor would the indictment address an equally urgent justice matter, individual compensation for injuries, something Khartoum has always rejected in all its negotiations, with the South or with Darfur. In the words of Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, a constant critic of inaction in the face the Darfur genocide, “justice is the first condition of humanity.” International peacemakers and -3conflict resolution specialists seldom give justice considerations such a high priority.2 For many Darfuris driven to refuge in the camps, the most important source of hope for betterment and for assurance that they still walk in the True Path, the guidance of an imam in meditation and prayer, has remained in drastically scarce supply because the raids on villages usually made imams a prime target. Yet worries about spiritual deprivation seldom appear in the reports of those who have visited Darfuris or seek to help them. In searching for the sources of our own motivation to action, we confront the fact that the victims are not living in the same sense that you and I are living. They merely survive. As one would say in French, they vivotent. In fact, this sense that the victims of the attacks in Darfur are not truly “living” has been expressed best by a Frenchman, Gérard Prunier, in Paul Freedman’s wise and sensitive film, SAND AND SORROW, a copy of which accompanies this letter . It is this understanding of Darfuris’ existential situation that causes me to wince when someone claims that the genocide has ended. Mass killings and village destruction have trended downward since the fury of 2003-2005:there are not many villages left to destroy. No Nazi-style gas chambers have been built; no besieged cities can yield artillery or sniper victims to television cameras each day, as in Bosnia; no bodies butchered by machetes pile up now in places of confinement or last refuge, as in Rwanda. Yet the radical diminishing of the capacity for culture only becomes more persistent, more apparent, as the years pass. American activists have long pleaded for a more inclusive notion of the forms which humanity’s greatest civilian crime can take. They argue that Darfur is a genocide in slow motion, one continuing to this day. The framing of events in Darfur as the radical diminishing of peoples and cultures leads also to the identification of a targeted group not included in MorenoOcampo’s indictment: Darfur society as a whole, both Arabs and non-Arabs. The Arab supremacist ideology that drives the genocide for most, if perhaps not all, of the Khartoum ruling elite and their Arab Gathering collaborators in Darfur makes 2 Soyinka‟s eloquent concluding judgment in the record of the International Citizens Tribunal on Sudan, staged by activists in New York City on 13 November 2006, where he served as chief judge, can be found at www.judgmentongenocide.org. and printed here in the collection of supporting documents submitted with the letter. génocidaires out of men in certain of the Darfuri clans, tribes and sections such as the Um Jalul of the Abbala Rizeigat. But it has eliminated neither the cautious neutrality of the majority of the Arabs in the region nor the sense of a specifically Darfuri identity on the part of both Arabs and non-Arabs. Most of what is now the three Darfur provinces was a single independent sultanate until 1916, bound together by complex relationships of cooperation and regulated conflict, intermarriage among Arab and “black African” tribes, and common festivals, markets, religious brotherhoods, and political interests. Investigations in Darfur, carried out immediately after the close of the failed talks in Abuja concerning a Darfur Peace Agreement, discovered the re-emergence of a “historic Darfur consensus”. The central political consensus group of Fur, Baggara Arabs, Masalit, Zaghawa, Tunjur, and smaller tribes has been the “historic bedrock” -4of Darfur society and the foundation of the region’s stability.3 The window of opportunity to reconstitute Darfur society along these lines may be closing rapidly, however. Stabilization For diplomats and heads of humanitarian organizations, probably the most frequently mentioned objective is “stabilization.” The possibility that such a goal may not coincide with ending the genocide arises in part because stabilization is a broad concept that can encompass situations where human rights are still grossly violated as well as situations where rational regulation of conflict under the rule of law shapes behavior. The history of American foreign policy reveals an uncomfortably large number of cases where stable dictatorships were preferred to unstable democracies. In the case of Darfur, some advocates for the region have argued that huge camp-bound refugee populations inherently produce an instability inimical to American interests. Such sweeping statements are seldom followed, however, by detailed explanations that specify degrees of instability and how that is measured, the causes of fluctuations in stability, exactly what national interests are threatened, what other national interests might be threatened by attempts to restabilize refugee camps that entail varying levels of challenge to the central government, or how “vital” these allegedly threatened national interests actually are. I suggest therefore that a situation could arise where humanitarian organizations and officials of concerned governments conclude that stabilization of the situation has occurred: the convoys of trucks with food, tents, and medical supplies are able to reach a satisfactory number of camps and other displaced person concentrations without being attacked by SAF troops, janjawiid militias, rebels, or bandits; incidents of violence within the camps have attained “manageable levels”; housing constructed in the camps by Khartoum-based [!] subcontractors of American 3 Abdul-Jabbar Fadul and Victor Tanner, “Darfur after Abuja: A View from the Ground” in Alex de Waal,ed.,War in Darfur and the Search for Peace, 297. firms continues at a satisfactory pace; and UNAMID hybrid force units, although still useless in preventing the “intermittent” atrocities, have sorted out their supply problems and are holding frequent meetings with representatives of all sides and reporting regularly on complaints and grievances. Certainly this point has not yet been reached. On the contrary, Prof. Eric Reeves, who has monitored the long death of Sudanese cultures for a decade, reports that the situation is only getting worse, not better.4 Should the most powerful international actors ever encounter a situation with the characteristics described above, thus concluding that Darfur had been “stabilized,” they would most likely put Darfur lower on their action agendas and move on to other problems. But the genocide would not have ended. There would be no returns to sites of homes or other suitable places to rebuild lives, no justice meted out --opponents of the ICC’s actions on Sudan argue, on the contrary, that preventing Bashir’s indictment is, in fact, a necessary condition for peace and stabilization in Darfur-- no reunification of Darfur, no sense that Darfuris have any measure of control over their own destiny. In -5short, “stabilization” does not necessarily produce a sustainably federal, decentralized, democratic Sudan. Nor does it guarantee that the genocide has ended. Regime change Because the waves of attacks on civilian villages by locally recruited militias supported by GoS ground and air units were initiated by the military regime in Khartoum, driving that regime from power –the entire collectively operating leadership, not just the “celebrity dictator” Omer Bashir -- has appeared to many as a goal of first importance. Darfuri groups have often called for such action, joining their voices to many others in the Nuba Mountains, Southern Sudan, the East, and the prison-like “peace camps” south of the capital. The ICC prosecutor’s request for an indictment of Bashir on charges of genocide thus seems amply justified on legal grounds. Bashir’s war of terror and destruction against Sudanese peoples did not start in Darfur, after all, but in the Nuba Mountains, immediately following the seizure of power by the jihadist National Salvation Revolutionary Command Council.5 The Government of the Republic of Sudan has become the longest-lived genocidal regime in history, surpassing the Nazis by seven years. In 2009 it will mark its twentieth year in power. Advocates of regime change have their critics, however, even among the GoS’ opponents. The most frequent objection to removing Bashir and his colleagues, that the resulting dispersal of power will only bring in a collection of rulers equally as destructive, has a long pedigree. In the past as today, those averse to the political and humanitarian risks involved in taking action against nasty leadership groups, from the pashas of the Ottoman Empire to the generals of Burma, have seldom failed to 4 5 See his postings at www.sudanreeves.org, esp. 28 October 2008, 24 November 2008, and later. Alex de Waal, Facing Genocide:The Nuba of Sudan (London, 1995), 71-71. Bashir at one point declared himself the “imam of the jihad” in the Nuba Mountains. invoke this argument. It is nevertheless unpersuasive when addressed to the case of a regime already committing humanity’s greatest crime with skill and persistence. Opponents of regime change sometimes reinforce their pessimism about possible successors with the “failed state” thesis: a Sudan government overthrown (“merely” to stop a genocide?) will result in a failure of the state, a collapse of its ability to carry out essential functions, and, at worst, a Somalia situation. I find this thesis unconvincing. 1. Sudan has witnessed changes of regime before, mostly recently from the authoritarian rule of Jaafar al-Nimeiry to the constitutional government of Sadiq alMahdi to the present authoritarian rule of Bashir and his National Congress Party.6 2. The argument does not adequately distinguish between regime, state, and political class. Sudan’s military and other state institutions, the structure and -6personnel of which are partly a legacy of Ottoman and Anglo-Egyptian rule, are populated at the middle levels largely by well educated riverain Arabs who are capable of deploying bureaucratic and management skills with a degree of professionalism far in excess of those available to Somalia. Again unlike the latter country, the Sudanese political class is only partly organized by clan loyalties, the operation of which proved fatal to the Siad Barre regime in Somalia. Khartoum’s control of its military institutions (and lack of diamonds, coltan, or cassiterite) has been such that it has been able to deter the development of major warlords in its own territory, manipulate such leaders in the areas it contests in the South, and keep its paid Arab tribal militias like the murahileen on the margin, not in a position to pose a serious threat to Khartoum. 3. Sudan is most usefully categorized not as a failed state or nation-state, but as a successful predatory empire. This government’s survival in its current form, with the core in the Khartoum-Omdurman area and the peripheral areas (the rest of the country) subject to extreme forms of exploitation and/or neglect, may be in the interest of no one but its ruling elite and their dependent followers in the capital7. For centuries the South of Sudan served mainly as a source of slaves for the North. Enslavement of non-Muslims continues, despite being declared illegal in the 6 Following the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005, Sudan is theoretically ruled by a Government of National Unity, which includes non-NCP “opposition” parties of the North as well as representatives from the autonomous Government of Southern Sudan. Few take seriously the idea that these latter included groups have any role in major decisions. On the other hand, some observers argue that the DUP, NDA, or Umma party, among others, had responsible governing roles in the pre-Bashir past, and they could most probably assume expanded duties in a post-Bashir future, co-opting, perhaps, some of the less objectionable members of the current regime. 7 I develop this argument further in “Lessons from the Failure to Rescue Darfur,” forthcoming in Failed and Failing States in Africa: Lessons from Darfur and Beyond (Cornell University, Institute for African Development) and available now at www.weaversofthewind.org, website of the Darfur Action Group-Cornell. constitution. 8 As will be argued further below, from the perspective of those who see limiting genocide as a primary goal, a federal Sudan with largely autonomous regional institutions, including regional armed units, and a minimal presence (or total absence) of the central state in these areas, which have been ruled as internal colonies, is probably the only acceptable way for Khartoum to be considered a successful state from a human rights, antigenocide point of view.9 At the same time, it is probable, but not absolutely certain, that complete regime change is a necessary condition for ending the genocide. After all, the combination of predation and neglect from Khartoum has continued throughout all of Sudan’s post-independence regimes. The regimes that ruled during the period between the fall of Jaafar Nimeiry in 1983 and the military coup of 1989, one of them more or less constitutionally elected, continued the war against the rebels the South, firmly rejecting any claim to regional autonomy and holding to the goal of the supremacy of Islamist law and Northern dominance throughout the entire country. 10 -7It is possible, although not likely, that if Sudan’s internal colonies (Darfur, the South, the East, Nuba Mts, et al) imposed a truly federal structure giving them autonomous institutions, including territorial police under their control –the key military resource shaping Bosnia’s successful defense in 1992 -- while actually providing for the rapid enforcement of their claims upon resources from the center (something that did not occur with the CPA), at least some of the middle-level officials who now administer the central institutions and, as part of the regime, make or execute its daily decisions, could be left in place. Peace Since no one thought that the Bashir regime would just dissolve itself and turn the reins of power over to the rebels or to some coalition the opposition groups in its colonies, (1) self-determination for Darfur, at least as much as was promised to the South in 2005, with seriously empowered and well resourced autonomous institutions and (2) a reunification of the Darfur region were top objectives of the armed movements’ leaders who met Khartoum’s representatives at the Abuja peace talks. The Government of Sudan, on the other hand, has consistently treated these objectives as unacceptable. This was the case in negotiations that took place before 8 A convincing description of how such enslavement occurs may be found in Deborah Scroggins, Emma's War: An Aid Worker, a Warlord, Radical Islam, and the Politics of Oil--A True Story of Love and Death in Sudan (London,2004), in the publications of the American Anti-Slavery Group, and, most recently, in “Thousands Made Slaves in Darfur,” BBC News, 17 December 2008. 9 Moreno-Ocampo‟s indictment (See footnote 1 above) contains parallel conclusions concerning Sudan‟s predatory center, destructive marginalization of its provinces, and reprisals against opponents anywhere. 10 See Douglas H.Johnson, The Root Causes of Sudan‟s Civil Wars (Bloomington, IN,2006), 7981 the meetings in Nigeria, and it was no different at the peace talks at Sirte, Libya, that took place after them. A serious federalism, after all, threatened to block or hamper the operation of the ruling elite’s indispensable mechanism for staying in power: creating chaos on the periphery.11 It is difficult to determine whether or not the parties to the talks at Abuja held the same notion of the “peace” that was supposed to emerge from the talks: did they expect it to be a)not much more than an extended and heavily monitored cease-fire; b)a suspension of major hostilities between the two armies while the extraction of underground wealth took place and matters still open to contention were placed on back burners or ignored, as in the North-South agreement; c)a prelude to power-sharing and compensation; d)a permanent modus vivendi whereby the GoS would absent itself from Darfur; e)an agreement on rules that would produce a virtually complete absence of conflict in the region? At times it has appeared that whatever the GoS and the rebels thought, the latter notion of peace has guided the thinking of the African, European, and American mediators and facilitators. In any case, once it became clear that Khartoum would never yield any ground on the matters of regional reunification and robust federalism, and that they were deploying their usual divide et impera tactics, the notion that a comprehensive peace accord could emerge from Abuja was on the road toward becoming largely a creation of the mediators’ wish-fulfillment rather than a serious prospect. -8One key to understanding the tension between the AU/UN/mediators’ concept of peace and other observers’ goal of ending the genocide lies in obtaining the clearest possible picture of the objectives of the victims, especially the civilian Darfuris in camps in that region, in eastern Chad, in the C.A.R., or in the Bahr-elGhazal. Can one assume that the Darfuris who have suffered injury, loss, expulsion, and abridgement of dignity “just want peace”? Surprisingly, little attempt has been made to answer this decisive question. In the first half of 2006 our Darfur Action Group-Cornell polled members of the Darfuri Diaspora through the group’s website. Respondents clearly indicated a preference for a policy of the removal of all agents of Khartoum, whether military or civilian, from Darfur, regardless of the problems this might present to those hoping for a secure, non-violent, i.e. “peaceful” outcome. (They also gave evidence justifying their unanimous distrust for the African Union mission in Darfur). The next year an energetic and intrepid Canadian aidworker, operating clandestinely in refugee camps in eastern Chad, obtained sixty thousand written (in Arabic) replies to her own poll concerning Darfuris’ political attitudes. 11 See J.H.Weiss, “The Tragic Fate of an Attempt to Make Peace,” an essay- review of Alex de Waal, ed., War in Darfur and the Search for Peace, in Genocide Studies and Prevention, forthcoming. A version is now available at www.weaversofthewind.org. Again, the elimination of the GoS’ presence in the entire Darfur region and the rendering of a large measure of justice were the respondents’ principal concerns.. A significant number even wanted complete independence from the rule of Khartoum. Certainly the victims and their compatriots abroad want some kind of peace, but serious inquiry into their expressed priorities reveals other goals whose relationship to achieving peace is, to say the least, problematic. When told in early 1941 that Americans were reluctant to enter World War II on Britain’s side because they believed that “nothing was worse than war,” Winston Churchill replied quickly: “Slavery is worse than war. Dishonour is worse than war.”12 Reasons Current Proposals To End the Genocide Will Probably Fail Sudan’s Cooperation in the War Against Terror Shortly after the US attack on the Taliban in October 2001, the GoS, as another radical Islamist regime which had played sympathetic host to Osama Bin Laden for several years, began suspecting that it might be next in line for a visit from well armed Americans. The United States, after all, had tilted toward the Southern People’s Liberation Movement during the latter’s long war with that regime. The GoS thus began offering the CIA information about the activities of Al Qaeda members remaining in Sudan after Bin Laden left in 1996. In the following months it sweetened the Americans’ ration further, allowing the CIA to question suspected terrorists living in Sudan, then later detaining foreign militants moving through the country to join the insurgency in Iraq. Finally, in April 2005, the CIA flew the head of Sudanese Intelligence and Security, Salah Abdallah Gosh, to Washington to “strengthen the relationship” and, according to State Department officials, “send a political signal to the [Sudanese] government that Darfur would not prevent Sudan from winning support in Washington.”13 -9Later press inquiries have revealed that the more recent counterterrorist intelligence Sudan has supplied is of disputed value, but the pattern of support has been established.. In fact, Sudan’s double game, feeding the United States information about Al Qaeda sympathizers while training its own international terrorists, does not seem to have deterred the CIA from continuing the cooperation. Two years ago the Darfur Action Group received reports that elements of the GoS dealing with “intelligence and surveillance” in Darfur had begun to recruit selected militia members for advanced training. Acting in collaboration with dissident elements in the Egyptian intelligence community, they were sending such Arab militia members with proven records of combat and civilian killing for the supremacist cause to training camps both in Sudan and in at least two other Arab countries. The defector supplying this information was convinced that the terrorist 12 13 Martin Gilbert,The Churchill War Papers, (London, 1995), Vol I, 322. Ken Silverstein in the Los Angeles Times of 29 April and 17 June 2005. In the second quotation Silverstein cites Ted Dagne, Sudan specialist of the Congressional Research Service. America had declared the GoS‟ actions in Darfur a genocide in September 2004. tactics being practiced in these camps were intended for application against the enemies of “Arab Sudan” both at home and abroad. High-level officials of two American security agencies confirmed to us that such activities were taking place. At the same time, American officials apparently saw no reason to attempt to stop the training or sanction Sudan for doing it. After all, America was in the process of cooperating with the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Agency who had been playing a very similar double game, supporting the Taliban and receiving support from the US for its “war on terror” against Al Qaeda14. Two measures insured that the American Government would not initiate any actions that might actually prove effective enough to seriously threaten or annoy the GoS: 1.The African Union was “given the lead” as the UN’s subcontractor charged with monitoring the ephemeral ceasefire and reporting about Sudan’s response to UN resolutions asking that it “rein in” the janjawiid militias. Since the GoS was a near-dominant member of the African Union, the young successor to the singularly ineffectual Organization of African Unity, no disruptive challenge to GoS policies was expected from that source. And none came. 2. Arrangements within the State Department hobbled those advocating robust actions. The President’s Special Envoy to Sudan continued to be only a parttime position, with a limited staff housed in the State Department.15 Recent statements by activist groups have made public what has been known for some time in policy circles: the Assistant Secretary of State for Africa regularly blocked the consideration of promising countergenocide actions, preventing them from reaching the Principals’ level. -10The Bush Administration nevertheless consistently gave the Sudanese counterterrorist intelligence feed priority over stopping the genocide. Those of us who have followed events in Darfur since the beginning of the disaster are thus asking if, after receiving the transition briefings by outgoing officials and other government experts in which they present analyses of Sudan’s role in the “war on terror,” the Obama Administration will make the same decision.16 14 Ahmad Rashid, Descent into Chaos, The United States and the Failure of NationBuilding in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York, 2008), 219-239. 15 Andrew Natsios, appointed to succeed Sen. John Danforth in October 2006 continued to teach his courses at Georgetown, collecting per diem for his frequent trips to Sudan; his successor Richard Williamson spent most of tenure at his Chicago law office. 16 Cassandra Robertson, a Canadian member of Cornell‟s Team Darfur, is preparing a briefing for delivery during the Team‟s projected visit to Washington in February that presents the results Avoiding Threats to the Comprehensive (North-South) Peace Agreement Trumps Proposed Darfur Rescue Solutions Since at least September 2005, proposals for action to end the genocide have met resistance in the National Security Council and the State Department because of the fear that such actions, should they provoke Khartoum sufficiently, would threaten the implementation of the North-South Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Here ironies abound: 1.In part, the CPA was signed at the expense of Darfur: as a condition for the Bashir government’s signature the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement was required to cut off any support for the largest Darfur rebel group, the Sudan Liberation Army. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan repeatedly complained that the CPA could not be called Comprehensive because of its failure to include Darfur. 2.Negotiating skill, patience, and the ability to compromise certainly played a role in bringing about the signing of the agreement, but other factors were probably more important. The most important: the Sudan People’s Liberation Army had fought the GoS to a standstill. In addition, once oil was discovered, the hindrance to exploiting it brought by continued conflict raised for both sides the opportunity cost of further conflict.17 Better to quit the war and split the proceeds. Finally, the American attack on Iraq, following upon the attack on the Taliban, made some GoS members feel that they, too, might soon be in the crosshairs of an American Government that had always officially sided with the South, however limited was the support it actually offered. Fear that full-scale war will break out again between Khartoum and the SPLA has produced many scenarios in Washington policy circles, with terms such as “bloodbath” and “the gates of hell” freely used to describe threatened outcomes.18 The GoS continues to purchase high-performance combat aircraft from Russia and -11China, while pirates’ seizure of the Ukrainian ship MV Raina revealed T-72 tanks and anti-aircraft weapons destined for the Government of Southern Sudan. of recently conducted research seeking to determine at what level in the hierarchy of government agencies occurs the coordination of the intelligence gathered from Sudan and the intelligence derived from the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Initiative (TSCI). She finds that since the CIA handles the intelligence from Sudan whereas the Army, through the European Command (EUCOM), handles TSCI intelligence, the information and analysis are being integrated, if at all, only at the level of the Homeland Security Council or even the Principals Committee itself. 17 This reason for the GoS and SPLA turn to serious peace negotiations was stressed in the writings of America‟s premier Sudan expert, the late Robert Collins. 18 See Andrew Natsios, “Beyond Darfur,” Foreign Affairs (May-June 2008),77-93. If Darfur did not exist, however, the probability that civil war along the Nile will resume would not be much lower. Only a minority of the CPA-collapse scenarios include the Darfur conflict as a cause. And when they do, the connection is not spelled out with any precision. After all, should the South and Darfur rebels carry out a joint campaign against the Bashir regime, the result might not be an opening of “the gates of hell”, but a quick victory of this alliance, especially if part of the GoS’ armed forces refused to back up the regime. (They have mutinied several times in the past. A very large proportion of the regular Sudanese Army –some claim as much as 60 per cent –are from Darfur). On the other hand, if Darfur followed the Afghan model and tried to achieve a full regional autonomy backed up by international forces (see below), Khartoum might conceivably abrogate the CPA to show that any solutions entailing autonomy or referenda on independence were unacceptable. But would it back up that abrogation with an attack on the South, or on Abyei, with international teeth threatening their western flank?19 In any case, those who insist that no action should be taken to help Darfur unless that action is framed in an all-Sudan policy raise considerations that cannot be ignored. Several of the most active and best organized Darfur rebel groups, especially the Justice and Equality Movement, have put constitutional changes at the level of the Sudanese state high on their list of goals. At the same time, they include a serious federalism, with a full menu of regional institutions and offices, in their programs, as did John Garang, leader of the SPLM/A, who also presented a vision of a New Sudan, not a new South Sudan20. Such opposition groups might be persuaded to participate in a constitutional conference that produced arrangements enforceable only in Darfur, but they would most likely see this as a temporary compromise, opening for them the possibility of using a new Darfur, reunited and freed of Khartoum’s agents, as a secure base from which to maneuver for a reform of the Sudanese state as a whole. The Fatal Deficiencies of UNAMID, the African Union – United Nations “Hybrid” Force Those committed to doing whatever it takes to end the genocide in Darfur have long been haunted by the fear that the stationing of troops and police in Darfur under a UN mandate will gain final ascendancy in the struggle among competing solutions. The African Union was originally charged by the UN with monitoring the ceasefire between Government and rebels agreed to at N’Djamena, Chad, in May 2004. When this ceasefire broke down almost immediately, the three hundred-odd troops continued to carry out as best they could a mandate charging them with -12- 19 It has already brought about the destruction of Abyei at least once, in May 2008, despite (or because of) the CPA‟s attempt to solve the border dispute concerning this key oil-region town. 20 Roba Gibia, John Garang and the Vision of a New Sudan (Toronto, 2008). What is unclear, of course, is how many citizens of Southern Sudan now hold to his vision in preference to complete separation. The most important JEM statement of goals recommends shifting the capital of the country away from Khartoum. providing protection and logistical support to the small group of civilians who were employed by the AU to monitor developments.21 Protection for the monitors was the mission; protection for Darfurians was what the victims and their advocates expected. The interests of the African Union (of which Sudan was a dominant member), anxious to prove that it was far more effective than its discredited predecessor, the Organization of African Unity, converged with those of the State Department, anxious to make a gesture of support for the cause of stopping the genocide without taking any of the political risks involved in more robust measures. The foundation had been set for the pattern of behavior that has characterized responses to the Darfur crisis: soaring condemnatory rhetoric followed by grotesquely limited planning, highly constrained operating conditions, and constantly underresourced action. One month before the United Nations World Summit unanimously approved the document charging each member with the Responsibility to Protect civilians in all countries from human rights abuses, the inadequacies of the African Union's Darfur operation began to draw attention. In a searing guest editorial published in the Washington Post on 7 August, Dr. Susan Rice, now Ambassador to the United Nations, revealed the "conspiracy of absolution" whereby the African Union had "absolved reluctant Western countries of any responsibility to consider sending their own troops." The Western countries were willfully ignoring signs that the African Union had little prospect of solving the crisis. She described the courageous intervention at a press conference in Dakar, Senegal, by the Foreign Minister of that country, Cheikh Tidiane Gadio, which "exploded the myth...that the AU troops alone can stop the killing in Darfur." To the evident irritation of your predecessor, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who had insisted that Western efforts had been able to "avert some of the humanitarian disaster that was forecast," Gadio called the situation totally unacceptable. He called upon the Secretary of State to "deal with the facts on the ground....Those militias, they're still very active...killing people, burning villages, raping women."22 The UNAMID hybrid force, authorized to reach a level of 26,000 by UN Resolution 1679, has remained firmly on the path of failure. It has achieved little improvement in security, built no confidence in the population to be protected,23 and remains dependent upon the Government of Sudan for critical supplies, access, and 21 The best-known of these monitors was the American Brian Steidle, who won an Academy Award for the documentary film based on his experiences, also recounted in Brian Steidle and Gretchen Steidle Wallace The Devil Came on Horseback:Bearing Witness to the Genocide in Darfur (New York, 2007). 22 Susan Rice, “Why Darfur Can‟t Be Left to Africa,” Washington Post (7 Aug 2005), p. B04. Gadio made the comment in response to the question from Andrea Mitchell, the NBC reporter who was shoved out of the conference room by Sudanese guards at the press conference with Rice and Bashir in Khartoum after asking Bashir a tough question about his government's involvement in the Darfur genocide. For Mitchell‟s questions, Gadio‟s full comment and Secretary Rice‟s response, see the transcript of the July 20 press conference in Dakar at http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2005/49837.htm. Wasid Ali, “African Union Becoming a Tool in the Hands of Sudan in Darfur,” Sudan Tribune (13 August 2007) is a comprehensive early Sudanese critique generally supporting the 23 -13permission to take almost any sort of significant action. Its recruitment and deployment of troop contingents has been dangerously slow, moving only from a roster of 9065 in December 2007 to a level of 12,374 in December 2008. The Bush Administration’s announced on 7 January 2009 that it would assist UNAMID by delivering equipment now stockpiled in Kigali and intended for the Rwandan contingent. It is not likely that this will make much difference in the matter of civilian security, much less in ending the genocide. UNAMID is fully handicapped by the series of concessions and restrictions under which it will operate as a result of the UN's negotiations with the GoS. Most UNAMID troops, moreover, are "rehatted" AU troops, who have already established their ineffectiveness and capacity to evoke the distrust of the Darfuris. In at least one sector UNAMID troops are not even equipped with flashlights. Despite the fact that UNAMID operates under Chapter VII of the UN charter, it appears that it has not yet used its weapons to protect civilians, as its mandate authorizes. It may never do so. The Dutch Battalion at Srebrenica in 1995 had a similar mandate. Eight thousand men and teenage boys were slaughtered by Serb forces when Colonel Karremans and his troops failed to implement their mandate to use “any means necessary” to protect the population placed in their charge. Nor did the UN ever authorize effective air attacks on Mladic’s forces.24 The African Union announced on 24 January that it will reach the level of 26,000 troops and police by June of this year, a doubling of the size of the contingent. However, UN and AU officials accompanied the announcement with the caveat they had made many times before:they “desperately needed logistical help” and a peace agreement. Characteristically, the announcement did not mention the need for a change in mandate or the agreement with Sudan that restricted the possibility of a Chapter VII mandate ever being enforced. In any case, is doubtful that even if UNAMID reaches its authorized level of troops and police it will accomplish much more than bringing a many postings of Eric Reeves at his www.sudanreeves.org website. The failure of UNAMID in this regard was presented to the public in a documentary produced by the PBS series WIDE ANGLE (the summer counterpart of the FRONTLINE series) resulting from the visit of the WIDE ANGLE team (host:Aaron Brown) to Darfur in March 2008. Film may be viewed at www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/episodes/heart-of-darfur/heart-of-darfur-introduction/606/. For an earlier account of African Union officers’ determination to take no action at attacks and looting occurring within eyesight (and as they were being interviewed), see the film by Cassandra Herrman and Amy Costello, “Darfur: the Quick and the Deadly,” broadcast on the PBS show FRONTLINE in early 2005 and included by permission in the composite DVD “Darfur Crimes 2004: Five Video Investigations,” included with this letter. A detailed account of peacekeepers’ subordination to the GoS and its inability to protect its own personnel and equipment can be found in De Waal and Flint, Darfur:A New History of a Long War (London, 2008), 262-267. More recently, in a series of articles in the widely respected Christian Science Monitor during October 2008, reporter Heba Aly described how UNAMID troops stood by without intervening when GoS attacks on villages took place. 24 Adam LeBor, “Complicity with Evil”:The United Nations in the Age of Modern Genocide (New Haven, CT, 2006, 93-111; David Rohde, Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica,Europe‟s Worst Massacre Since World War II (New York, 1997), 135-180; Nijaz Masic, Srebrenica:Agresija, Otpor, Izdaja, Genocid (Sarajevo, 1999),159-160; small measure of security to certain sectors in Darfur, a region the size of France, probably in the larger towns. It is very unlikely that it will end the genocide. As suggested in the earlier sections of this letter, ending the genocide would entail the -14acquisition by the Darfuri people of a substantial measure of self-determination, including the ability to pursue justice; the removal from the region of all of Khartoum’s agents, military and civilian; and the return of the expelled victims to the sites of their villages. None of these three conditions has any prospect of being accepted by Khartoum. Permit me a thought experiment, Madam Secretary, that begins with the premise that the United States begins to task high-level personnel in the UN mission, the Pentagon, and the State Department with planning American support for the rapid deployment of the remainder of the authorized UNAMID contingent. 1. They will encounter objections from Khartoum, of course, and will be unable to dispense with negotiations with the regime. It is unlikely (I hope) that they will accept the constraints already imposed by Khartoum in its negotiations with the UN, some of which I have mentioned above. In these negotiations they will nevertheless encounter skilled, experienced, and scruple-free officials, who are expert practitioners of the tactics of delay, obfuscation, prevarication, and feigned agreement followed by reneging. Dr. Susan Rice can fill you in on details, updating herself –I doubt it will be necessary -- with briefings by just about anyone who has dealt with this regime, from Roger Winter, former State Department official now advising the ENOUGH project, 25 to any of the Presidential special envoys. 2. They will have to contend with a regime that has survived by constantly protecting its priorities: A. Maintaining its sovereignty over the peripheral colonies of its empire, such as Darfur. It will invoke its sovereign rights whenever it feels they are challenged and will have prepared arguments about why the Responsibility to Protect agreement, the only revision of the Westphalian principles that have guided international relations since the seventeenth century, does not apply to the case of Darfur. It will complain to your envoys that the destruction has been hugely exaggerated by Zionists, the Christian Right, and rebel movements and that the situation is already stabilized, reduced to occasional banditry and continuations of the tribal conflicts that were always at the bottom of the whole business. B. Maintaining its capability to influence events in Darfur by a combination of selective malign neglect and chaos-creation, a.k.a. divide and rule ( perhaps more accurately, disrupt and render unruly).26 Without at least temporarily cutting off Khartoum’s communication links to all Darfur groups, those who have become clients (such as the janjawiid), those who opposite it, and those who have remained neutral but are subject to influence, it will be almost impossible to prevent 25 26 Roger Winter, rwinter4700@yahoo.com. This line of analysis is pursued further in Weiss, “Tragic Fate”, attached. the GoS from achieving this objective. It has been successfully carrying out such policies for twenty years, after all. C. Arabization. Maintaining Arab supremacy in Darfur has been one of the objectives of the regime from the beginning, and thus one of the motivations for the genocidal measures. Those pursuing this objective have found many ways to combine it with Objective B., of course. One of the keys to understanding the nature of the Khartoum regime, however, is that racialist arguments, such as those -15articulated by Abdalla Ali Masar, who served as President Bashir’s advisor for Darfur affairs in the mid-1990s, probably do not hold first importance for some members of the regime.27 Objective B is all they need subscribe to in order to acquiesce in, or actively participate in, policies with genocidal consequences. Arabization has led not only to offers of land, employment, and immediate citizenship to Arabs from other African countries and discrimination against non-Arabs in virtually all Sudanese institutions (the Army being the most sensitive), but also to the settlement of recently arrived Arab immigrants in townsites from which non-Arabs have been driven by the attacks of the Government-supported militias, Government aircraft and PDF or SAF ground troops. Janjawiid militias have also settled in many of these towns. Exit from camps or other refuge in Darfur, Chad, and the South and voluntary resettlement in an area chosen by the victims themselves is a sine qua non for ending the genocide. The previous history of UN operations, however, indicates that it is extremely unlikely that an AU-UN hybrid force would be given a mandate to undertake, or, even given the mandate, be able to undertake, actions to resettle victims in towns or rural areas where recently immigrated Arabs or militias have been placed with their families. These parts of Darfur are, however, just about the only locations available for sustainable human habitation. Darfurian victims have lived and shaped their cultures in sahel areas or in partly forested areas such as the Jebel Marrah. Most of the rest of Darfur is desert. In the light of UN behavior in Bosnia, where UNPROFOR troops in fact found themselves abetting the ethnic cleansing of towns, busing away non-Serbs from areas Serbs had violently occupied in order to protect them from further attacks, real or threatened, it is more likely that UNAMID will transport any remaining non-Arabs from towns occupied by janjawiid or immigrant families than it is that they will undertake to return nonArabs to their homes in these towns. It is also highly unlikely that UNAMID would intervene to prevent total control by the GoS of the process of exploiting the extraordinarily large underground lake the discovery of which was announced in July 2007.28 It is far more likely that they would be assigned to protect Khartoum’s drilling rigs and pipe-laying teams from forces opposed to Khartoum. The water from this aquifer, the 27 28 De Waal and Flint, Darfur:A New History, 50. www.BBC.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6904318.stm. The exploitation of such underground aquifers in Libya has produced a thriving tomato-growing industry, which now has become and important supplier of the Italian market. potential source of one of Darfur’s rare hopes for economic progress, will thus have little chance of contributing to the welfare of the people of Darfur. 4. The capacity to construct a notion of justice and to seek its implementation is, as the writer and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka has said, part of being wholly human. In her study of survivors’ actions after the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, Elizabeth Neuffer has shown how many of those who suffered losses sacrifice food, health, marital relationships, income, and time for all other activities in order to pursue the perpetrators of crimes against their families or community.29 To do otherwise seemed to them not to be human. -16The original UNAMID agreement with the GoS, however, specifically bars the international forces from pursuing those accused of war crimes. It is highly unlikely that future negotiations will bring about a modification in this regard. It is even less likely that UNAMID will do anything to assist Darfuris’ effects to establish an independent judicial system, or a reworking of tribal elders’ courts, that would permit local settlements in matters of murder or the theft of non-Arabs’ property. 5. The thought experiment must also consider the following question: “Well, maybe UNAMID full deployment will not end the genocide, but it is hard to see how it cannot bring increased security to some proportion of the victims.” This influential argument calls forth a double response: A. The presence of UNAMID troops could prevent stronger measures that might have a greater likelihood of ending the genocide. It would be feared that such measures would provoke retaliation against the AU-UN hybrid force. UNAMID troops would thus become hostages to the better-equipped, more numerous, and battlehardened forces of the génocidaires. This is what happened in Bosnia during the first three years of the war there. Many pro-Bosnia officials and activists in America, Britain, France, and elsewhere were calling for air strikes against Serb targets and for the dispatch of a far more robust force, well armed and ready to act quickly against Serb attacks and measures of non-compliance with agreements. The British Government, which had worked hard to keep its “lead” role on Bosnia policy after being ceded it by the Americans, successfully opposed such action on the grounds that the Serbs would retaliate against the underequipped and tactically vulnerable UNPROFOR troops already there in their humanitarian and monitoring roles. 30 29 Elizabeth Neuffer, The Key to My Neighbor‟s House: Seeking Justice in Bosnia and Rwanda (New York, 2001). 30 See Brendan Simms, Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia (London, 2001),115,170 and passim. For the political, bureaucratic and psychological processes that dilute the effectiveness of all peacekeeping missions, see Michael Barnett, “The Politics of Indifference,” in Thomas Cushman and Stjepan Mestrovic, eds., This Time We Knew:Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia (New York, 1996), 128-162. Barnett also offers evidence B. Focusing on the UNAMID solution threatens to preclude the consideration of more robust alternatives in the planning and policy centers of concerned governments. Fear that this might happen played an important role in the thinking of the Canadian signers of the Proposal to the European Union.31 The Joint Darfur/Sudan Planning Commission described in that document is designed to make its investigative and planning powers available for the advancement of any serious solution has a slight chance of ending the genocide, including full UNAMID deployment. -17However, an examination of the Attachment to the Proposal’s first sample of “questions” with which the JDPC might be tasked, as well as the documents cited there (and posted on the website www.weaversofthewind.org), indicates that the signatories place their greatest hope in the execution of some version of the “ Three Part Plan.” This proposed action policy was inspired by the sequence of events in Afghanistan and Bonn in the period late 2001 to early 2003. A meeting of leaders in Germany without the participation of Taliban or al Qaeda leaders followed by two loya jergas in Kabul produced an interim administration, a constitution, and an elected government.32 I should point out, Madam Secretary, that the list of Canadian signatories to the Proposal, a document motivated in large part by skepticism about UNAMID’s role in a Darfur/Sudan solution, includes a number whose knowledge of UN operations is anything but academic.33 Romeo Dallaire served as commander of the UN forces in supporting Simms‟ point that for the first three years of the war, the sparse military actions of the intervening powers had as their primary motive the protection of the peacekeepers, not the civilians. 31 See also “Khartoum Opens the Trap:The Deadly Consequences of the Project to Implement UN Resolution 1706 (31 August 2006),” accompanying this letter. 32 An early version of the Three Part Plan, currently being updated, can be found within the document “Darfur:The Final Solution---And How to Stop It”, submitted with this letter. In the opinion of sources closest to the operations of the Afghan government in the first postTaliban years, these promising early measures met a crippling obstacle when American personnel, expertise, and equipment were drawn down in Afghanistan and assigned instead to preparations for the attack on Iraq. See also Ahmad Rashid, Descent into Chaos :The United States and the Failure of Nation-Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia,(New York, 2008) 133-4, 182, 185. 33 We did not to make the proposal a widely circulated petition. We decided to acquire the signatures of a group of Canadians who have been most prominent in fighting for the cause of Darfur (and all of Sudan). We have succeeded. Signatures are expected from a few more prominent human rights activists and political figures to whom we have sent the proposal, but with this collection of signatures we have achieved our goal of establishing the importance of the Proposal in the campaign to find an appropriate and effective international response to the destruction caused by the Bashir regime. Rwanda during the genocide of 1994; David Kilgour, a former Secretary of State for Africa, has worked extensively with UN and AU officials; Stephen Lewis served as UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa; Deborah Bodkin, a Canadian police official who served on both the US State Department Atrocity Documentation Team and the UN Commission of Inquiry concerning Darfur and Rosemary Monreau, who has carried out humanitarian work for two organizations, have spent many months in daily contact with AU and UN personnel in Darfur and in Chad. The Weaknesses of Solutions Based on Divestment, Sanctions, Shaming UNAMID full deployment owes part of its appeal as a solution for the Darfur problem to doubts about the effectiveness of policies not involving troops. Divestment by state governments or private organizations from Sudanese companies or from those dealing with Sudan served to raise awareness of Darfur atrocities among the general population, but the impact on GoS behavior has so far been close to zero. State Department officials, meanwhile, have argued that -18divestment in fact has a negative effect on the possibility of influencing the GoS because not having a stake in companies dealing with the regime means losing leverage and even the sense that one has an owner’s stake in the problem. Economic sanctions –capital market sanctions, financial transaction blocks, or trade blocks –have a poor record in the matter of shaping the sanctioned country in the desired direction. At least in the public record, the US Office of Financial Assets Control, a highly regarded agency, has not been able to establish the effectiveness of any policies directed against Sudan. Studies of the full range of twentieth-century sanctions reveal that two-thirds of them fail outright, while almost all cannot avoid high costs to the sending country and to innocent parties in the receiving country.34 High-impact sanctions such as cutting off Sudan’s ability to export its oil encounter additional difficulties: 1. Many foreign policy experts, both inside and outside governments, conclude that oil blockades constitute an act of war and thus are not worth the risk of major conflict 2. In the case of an oil sanction against Sudan, the most important purchasing country, China, is also a Permanent Member of the UN Security Council and is likely to use its veto power to block any such move. In the case of bans on the sales of weapons, both major selling countries, Russia and China, are P5 members. Since the UN ban only applies to weapons being used in the Darfur region of Sudan, however, it is easily evaded or, in the case of aircraft moved to the El Fashir and Geneina airfields from elsewhere, simply defied. 35Even if this UN structural impediment did not exist, however, a determined attempt to evade any sanctions is likely to succeed. Sudan has been under some form of sanction since 34 See the recently concluded thesis by Janet Massa, Sanctions: Economic Coercion or Policy Evasion? A Case Study of Darfur, Sudan. (Cornell Insitute of Public Affairs, 2008), 1-9. 35 Ibid, 111. Amnesty International, Sudan:Arms Continuing to Fuel Serious Human Rights Violations in Darfur, AFR54/019/2007, 28. 1995: there is every indication that its agencies in charge of planning countermeasures will continue to successfully carry out their mission. Shaming the Sudanese government by turning the international spotlight on its activities, indicting members of the Government for genocide –Salah Abdallah Gosh and Ali Osman Taha are said to be next once the requested indictment of Bashir is pronounced by the judges--or imposing personal travel bans are all worth doing for various reasons, not the least of which is the satisfaction it would give to victims in the camps, but the impact of such shaming is limited by the GoS’ superior management of public relations, especially with regard to the Middle East. Sudan, the most destructive empire in Africa, plays the anti-imperialist card with energy and skill, combining it with appeals to suspicions that anti-Arab feelings drive the attacks. At the same time, it has managed to severely limit access to the regions. Although the official press in most countries follows a pro-Khartoum line more faithfully than the independent press, most of the Middle Eastern public regards the situation as either under control or eventually manageable by forms of regional cooperation, negotiations, and limited peacekeeping. The respondents in a Zogby International for the Arab-American Institute in May 2007, in fact, held the GoS, the rebels, and the United States equally responsible for the disaster! -19For now, the GoS has won the media war. That this may be changed, however, was demonstrated in early 2008 when Save Darfur Coalition officer Allyn BrooksLaSure led a group of Arab and African journalists to refugee camps in Chad. Once they had unobstructed contact with the victims, they began to write stories far less sympathetic to Khartoum’s line. One of the major limitations of all of the above action proposals is that they assume that everyone has a clear idea of what their answer would be if Khartoum capitulated. If Bashir and Co. suddenly said “Okay, we give in. Now, what do you want us to do?”, it is far from certain that we the victors would be able to ask for actions that would truly end the genocide. “Rein in the janjawiid and stop bombing villages” would not really do it. Khartoum has always played a double hand on the janjawiid question, claiming they do not, and cannot, control the militias but at the same time allowing agreements about moving them to cantonment or disarmament locations on a given date to be written into GoS-rebel contracts such as the Darfur Peace Agreement of May 2006. At the same time, a no-fly zone not tied to ground combat forces and a road map to a political solution entailing the elements mentioned above has little prospect of producing a lasting settlement. The GoS, athough still bombing villages as recently as today (25 January), can accomplish their goal of chaos-creation and control of critical assets by setting up ground attacks that do not require attack helicopters or bombers in support. They have amply demonstrated this capability over the last few years. But the final limitation on power of the UNAMID full-deployment threat as well as the sanctions/shaming threat is that the GoS sees the cost of compliance with a demand to give Darfur self-government/autonomy and a unified region (and also, in the process, allow the establishment of an independent judiciary), award individual compensation for injury and loss (and thus admit responsibility for the crimes), and facilitate voluntary returns by victims (and thus accept a limit on Arabization), as much higher than the cost of being targeted for sanctions, shaming, and divestment or “encumbered” by a large number of peacekeepers. As explained above and in the paper “Khartoum Opens the Trap” appended here, the bluehelmeted peacekeepers can in fact be rather useful to Khartoum by giving them intelligence about rebel groups ( something that happens not infrequently at the present time), arresting errant journalists and turning them over to the GoS (as happened in the case of Slovenian photographer and Presidential peace emissary Tomo Kriznar), and providing the simulacrum of a “peace process” with lots of long meetings and monitoring sessions. -20Solutions A No-Fly Zone Since international attention was draw to Darfur in late 2003, 36 establishing a no-fly zone over Darfur (or, in some versions, all of Sudan) has been frequently proposed by many observers, including the addressee of this letter. The proposal has not been without its critics. When the head of the Save Darfur Coalition authorized a notice in national newspapers asking for the implementation of this policy, the Coalition’s board asked for his resignation. Aid organizations predicted that if implementation of such a zone were begun, the GoS would ban relief flights to Darfur. Since these NGOs had become almost completely dependent upon Khartoum airfields as the transit base for their aid, they argued that this would have disastrous humanitarian consequences. In addition, they felt that enforcers of a no-fly zone would not be able to avoid shooting down genuine humanitarian flights, especially 36 The attempts by the UN leadership to suppress the first reports about the magnitude of the crisis are described in Lebor, “Complicity with Evil”, 153-161,272. because the GoS has been painting its attack aircraft white to imitate UN and other relief planes for at least three years.37 For achieving an end to the genocide, there are several weaknesses in a policy which asks merely that a no-fly zone be established, without linking it to a political and security mission on the ground and in the media: 1. Although the bombing of villages and other civilian concentrations continues38, many attacks, especially those on the edges of refugee camps, are carried out solely by militias, PDF formations, or regular troops mounted on horseback, camelback, or in motor vehicles. (I have yet to locate a case where the AU or UN/AU troops intervened to stop such attacks, even when they were occurring in close proximity to their base.) The role of bombings in the execution of the Darfur genocide may even have declined since the full-scale campaign of 2003-2005. Certain rebel groups have acquired significant anti-aircraft capability which may deter the use of expensive aircraft and explain the recent GoS preference for ground attack alone. Without being linked to a strategy that deals effectively and quickly with ground-only conflicts, a no-fly zone risks having its operation become irrelevant to the solution of the most important security problem. In the same dispatch sent to me yesterday by the Justice and Equality Movement describing the bombings in the Muhajaria area on 25 January, it was reported that GoS ground forces have surrounded the huge Kalma IDP camp and are preparing to attack it once the -21indictment of Bashir is announced. Can one seriously expect that UNAMID, incapable of responding to the Muhajaria bombings on 25 January and having not initiated a single armed action in the entire history of its deployment, will be able to act as an effective auxiliary to the air force implementing a no-fly zone? 2. A no-fly zone will have only minimal effect if it is not integrated into a well planned and well resourced program of political action on the ground, in the media, and in diplomatic sites. This was the conclusion of our Third Report on Implementing A No-fly Zone in Darfur (www.weaversofthewind.org). An early version of such a plan of action, now being updated, can be found on the same website under the title “Three Part Plan”. The international community has a long way to go, however, before it has assembled the information and expertise needed to carry out the provisions of this plan. 37 The history of previous no-fly zones implemented by the US Air Force offers little basis for this fear. Nor did the military officers consulted for our third report on no-fly zones consider the risk that this might occur, a very slight one, a mission-stopper. 38 As noted by Senator Robert Menendez and others in the hearings held by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee prior to the confirmation of Dr. Susan Rice as Ambassador to the United Nations, 14 January 2009. Attached at the end of the eversion of this letter is a description of last Sunday‟s attack distributed by the Justice and Equality Movement. The Canadian Proposal to the European Union: A Joint Darfur/Sudan Planning Commission The underresourcing of all aspects and phases of Darfur rescue actions, from the staffing of the planning agencies to the gathering of needed intelligence to the media campaign to the military logistics to the prepositioning of equipment, has lain at the root of the failure to make any progress in ending a genocide that will enter its seventh year at the beginning of this summer. In recognition of this fact, a group of Canadian elected officials and private citizens has prepared, with assistance from me, the Proposal to the European Union referred to above. The Proposal makes several important advances over previous plans: 1. It calls for adequate funding. The calculations concerning the funding level needed have not yet been completed. In our initial contacts with EU parliamentarians and other office-holders, we have used a figure of ten million euros per month to indicate that the proposers acknowledge that the various planning operations envisaged will need major support. High-level UN officials with extensive experience in budgeting full-scale military operations as well as polling, public relations projects, and other likely exercises are cooperating with us in the compilation of estimates, as are American and Canadian experts. 2. The Proposal authorizes a commission that can explore the full range of options for action. It will not exclude any proposed planning exercise because of expected obstacles such as the possible failure to obtain an appropriate mandate, the inability to immediately identify an international community member willing to supply needed troops and weaponry, the opposition of the GoS, or any anticipated lack of cooperation from certain aid organizations. 3. The Joint Darfur/Sudan Planning Commission will have the resources to actively explore options. An example: determining the current political views of Darfuris. There will be many obstacles to carrying out such a survey, such as the difficulty of recruiting and protecting personnel capable of distributing questionnaires or the opposition of both GoS and rebel forces who might conclude that the findings would not play to their advantage. On the other hand, if a single Canadian aidworker (albeit an experienced, courageous and committed one) can collect the written opinions of -22sixty thousand Darfuris in the camps in a short period of time, supported mainly be personal funds, it is to be expected that a team with JDPC support could expand considerably the pool of respondents. The fact that merely asking victims of genocide for their opinions, their hopes, and their goals is a significant political and psychological act that will have a substantial impact upon the respondent has not gone unnoticed by the Canadian proposers. During the six years of massive destruction in Darfur, the voices of ordinary Darfurians have been heard but sporadically. Their losses and their injuries have been apparently been considered the only copy material needed to make readers adequately informed. Any reporting about their hopes or political visions, if such material has actually been filed, became the first target of the editor’s delete button. 4. The Proposal provides for planning both operations that focus solely upon Darfur and operations that involve all of Sudan outside Khartoum. As indicated above, some activist organizations such as the ENOUGH project, as well as investigative and reporting entities such as the International Crisis Group, argue that any permanent solution must include the other regions of Sudan in its provisions and its action plans. There are counter-arguments, however, which posit the demonstration effect of a secure, autonomous, operational Darfur, free of all types of Khartoum’s agents. The JDPC will be able to proceed in both directions, investigating both types of claim. 5. The Proposal enables JDPC experts to investigate and plan out implementations for the most comprehensive current versions of no-fly zones. The Third Report of Weiss and Camdzic referred to above incorporated advice and assistance from seven military experts, including Gen. Merrill (Tony) McPeak, former Chief of Staff of the Air Force, and Col. Mark Bucknam, currently Chief of Plans at the Pentagon, as well as seven civilian experts. In preparing the Fourth Report consultations with these experts and others have continued. Important new information has been gathered concerning, for example, the enhanced target acquisition capabilities of the A-10 Thunderbolt, the leading American ground attack plane; the ground attack capabilities of the aircraft of other countries who might participate in a no-fly zone; availability and capability of the JSTARS system; threat estimates concerning new types of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles; enhanced and flexible methods to deploy ground controllers to the widely dispersed towns of Darfur so that they can produce quick responses to attacks; and indications that no-fly zone operations could also be used to enhance the security of locations occupied by the large number of Arab tribes, such as the southern Rizeigat, who have so far remained mostly neutral in the GoS-rebel fighting. The Fourth Report will also include updated information about matters such as the political structure of the Darfur rebel organizations, the impact of the May 2008 JEM-led attack on Omdurman/Khartoum, and possible host locations and facilitators for the crucial “Bonn” conference of all non-GoS forces outlined in the Three Part Plan. -23Madame Secretary, I write this letter as an American human rights activist and informal chief of staff to the Canadian signatories of the enclosed Proposal. I hope you will find usefulness in my clarification about the various objectives of those addressing the Darfur crisis, my arguments about why current proposed action policies will fail to end the genocide, and my information about possible solutions. When we concluded that America alone would not undertake effective action to end the genocide, the Canadians and I decided to address ourselves to the European Union. We have just begun that project, but we shall apply our energies to it over the next weeks with a determination born of watching the avoidable suffering of the Sudanese people for many years. We think our Proposal embodies elements of “smart power,” to be wielded be Europeans, North Americans, and Africans acting not separately but in concert. With this letter we seek your support for our Proposal, public or private. I would like to give you a briefing about this at any time. (The drive from Ithaca to Washington takes about six hours). Sincerely yours, John H. Weiss Associate Professor of History Director, Cornell Action Group Cornell University 607-277-6744 jhw4@cornell.edu cc: Amb. Susan Rice David Kilgour