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The
danger of Sudan repeating Rwanda
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
October 6, 2004
LONDON - Last week, Sudan's
minister of state for foreign affairs told a press
conference in Khartoum that the Darfur crisis was "a
smokescreen" to hoodwink the international community into
aiding political opponents who seek to overthrow the
government.
I immediately phoned up Olusegun
Obasanjo, the president of Nigeria and the current
chairman of the African Union. Obasanjo who is hosting a
peace conference later this month between the warring
parties and Nigeria, along with Rwanda, has sent
peace-keepers to Sudan to monitor the conflict. As usual
Obasanjo was to the point: "If there is any smokescreen
at all it is coming from the Sudanese
government".
I asked him if the situation today
was very different from the one that preceded the
massacres in Rwanda a decade ago when the U.S. and
Britain squashed attempts in the Security Council to beef
up the tiny UN presence in Rwanda. "I'm sure", he
replied, "this time the international community does not
want another Rwanda."
So this time it is going to be
different. But how long do we have to wait? Since the
international community prefers to deploy African troops
and there are few of these trained for the task it is
going to be, Obasanjo admits, a slow task.
An optimist will say at least
something is being done. A year ago it was also a slow
business getting Nigerian and Ghanaian troops on the
ground in Liberia but, as I saw first hand, once there,
with some useful back up help from American soldiers,
they did a first class job. Liberia has now had a year of
peace. A pessimist would say much killing would have been
avoided if the peace-keepers had arrived in Liberia
earlier and that 50,000 people have already died in
Darfur. Whilst this does not compare with the 800,000
murdered in Rwanda, every day the numbers are
climbing.
I am in the pessimists' camp. I
have spent a decade trying to unearth what went wrong in
Rwanda and the search has convinced me of only one thing
- the big powers only act when press, parliaments and
public opinion batter the doors down. We cannot count on
the big powers not to finesse the situation again.
Although in a remarkable step forward U.S. Secretary of
State Colin Powell has termed the Sudanese situation
"genocide", the U.S. is briefing the press that it is
Chinese, Russian and Arab resistance that is holding up
the Security Council throwing its combined weight into
action. Powell doesn't like to admit that the U.S. has
used up all its credibility at the UN over Iraq and that,
of course, there is a legitimate nervousness about a
U.S.-organized "take-over" of another (mainly) Muslim
country.
But I don't just blame the Bush
Administration for a lack of American credibility. It
goes back further than this. I was in the room three
years ago when former president Bill Clinton was asked
why he didn't act over Rwanda. He replied that for
inexplicable reasons the issue was never brought to his
desk until it was too late, but that he was determined in
the course of researching his memoirs to get to the
bottom of why. The memoirs were written and recently
published. There is barely a word on Rwanda and certainly
no explanation.
And I don't just blame the
Americans. The British were equally tight lipped and
misleading. And what is worse so was the UN leadership
itself. A reading of the meticulous report, "On the
Actions which the UN took at the time of the genocide in
Rwanda", commissioned by the secretary-general and
written by Ingvar Carlsson, the former prime minister of
Sweden, reveals that the peacekeeping department (then
headed by Kofi Annan) "did not brief the
secretary-general" about a key cable warning of what was
likely to happen from the UN's force commander in Rwanda,
General Romeo Dallaire of Canada, and "the Security
Council was not informed". Later in the report Carlsson
writes, "Several members of the Security Council have
complained that the quality of information from the
Secretariat was not good enough".
When I asked Carlsson if Annan
should have resigned he said diplomatically, "I don't
know". But how can Annan really have the credibility to
lean hard on China, Russia and the Arabs when he himself
was so inept last time round?
I fear for the worst. The
resolutions in the Security Council may be a little
tougher than they were at the time of the Rwanda crisis
but in relation to the speed at which the murders and
raping are proceeding in the Sudan real substantive
action is still grossly inadequate. In ten years' time
will we still be analyzing what went wrong or will we
shout now?
Copyright © 2004 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Follow this
link to read about - and order - Jonathan Power's book
written for the
40th Anniversary of
Amnesty International
"Like
Water on Stone - The Story of Amnesty
International"
Här kan
du läsa om - och köpa - Jonathan Powers bok
på svenska
"Som
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