Stalling in SudanTHE WATERED-down resolution the UN Security Council passed Friday on the genocidal crimes being committed in Darfur, Sudan, is of so little help to the multitudes facing death that it amounts to a diplomatic form of complicity.
Because of objections from Pakistan, China, Russia, Algeria, Egypt, and other countries, no explicit threat of sanctions survived in the resolution's final draft. Revisions of earlier US drafts inserted language "underscoring Sudan's sovereignty" and removed a call for a "special adviser on genocide" in Darfur. Instead, the Security Council gave the regime of the National Islamic Front in Khartoum another 30 days to persuade the Arab militias it has armed to cease killing and raping people of the non-Arab tribal groups, the Fur, the Massaleit, and the Zaghawa. Noting that he and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan visited Sudan a month ago and were told that Khartoum's leaders would disarm their militia allies known as the Janjaweed, Secretary of State Colin Powell described the import of the much-revised UN resolution: "This resolution gives them another month but says at the end of that month the Security Council . . . will look at it again and see what measures might be necessary." Viewed from the perspective of human rights -- or simply as a matter of compassion for fellow members in the family of man -- this diplomatic dithering in the shadow of a genocide is unpardonable. Tens of thousands of people have perished already. A report by Africa Union monitors has described villagers, among them young girls, who were chained together and burned to death by the Janjaweed. More than 1.2 million have been driven from their villages. Their villages have been burned to the ground, the wells poisoned, the livestock slaughtered or stolen. More than 2 million people are at risk of death by starvation or disease. Relief and humanitarian organizations that have been trying to provide basic needs -- food, shelter, and medicine -- to the uprooted agricultural peoples at campsites in Darfur or across the border in Chad describe a human calamity that is growing worse by the day. The killing continues, and torrential rains have created the preconditions for cholera and dysentery in the camps. Under current conditions there is not enough food, medicine, blankets, or shelter to meet the need. The mortality rate may soon reach several thousand per week.
The United Nations is failing these victims of a man-made catastrophe. Instead of mounting a humanitarian intervention to provide security in Darfur for relief missions, UN members are defending their precious principle of national sovereignty at the cost of hundreds of thousands of human lives. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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