WORLD IGNORING DIRE NEED TO ACT IN DARFUR, CHAD
The Star Phoenix (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan) Canada
March 6, 2007 Tuesday
Final Edition
Considering the scale of the crimes under consideration, the decisions
that emanated from the World Court and the International Criminal
Court last week seem wholly inadequate.
The World Court ruled on the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia,
while the ICC filed information against two accused masterminds of
Darfur’s ongoing slaughter.
At least indirectly, both cases deal with events that led to the murder
of more than 200,000 people in each of the former Yugoslavia and Sudan,
as well as the rape, humiliation, mutilation and deportation of more
than a million more.
These crimes are almost impossible to comprehend. What is even harder
to fathom, however, is that the world seems unable to do anything to
stop them.
The World Court deemed as a crime of genocide what happened in
Srebrenica, where Bosnian Serbs sorted out thousands of Muslim men
and boys and systematically murdered them. And while it exculpated
Serbia from the more serious charge of being the first state to
be found guilty of genocide in the nearly 60 years since the world
community recognized it as a punishable offence, the court insists
Serbia must take responsibility for allowing the crime to take place.
Serbia "could and should" have prevented the genocide, the court ruled,
adding the country also should have punished those responsible for
the July 1995 murders rather than give them sanctuary. The country
is still suffering sanctions from European neighbours and NATO for
failing to hand over those responsible, although the Serbian government
claims it’s unable to catch them.
Almost simultaneous to that court’s ruling, the ICC called for the
arrest of Ahmad Harun, a former minister in charge of Darfur security,
and Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-al-Rahman, a militia commander, on charges
that they participated in genocide in Darfur.
Although the UN doesn’t sanction the ICC, the court is backed by
104 nations and has a broad mandate to investigate war crimes and
crimes against humanity. According to the evidence presented in its
94-page report, the ICC can link the two men at last to 51 acts of
unspeakable brutality.
The world has watched in silent horror for years as the people of
Darfur and now Chad are subjected to some of the worst atrocities
imaginable, including the systematic rape of Muslim women to stigmatize
them and cause their families to reject them.
The methods used were "indiscriminate attacks against the civilian
population, murder, rape, inhumane acts, cruel treatment, unlawful
imprisonment, pillaging, forcible transfer and destruction of
property," the report says.
For example, witnesses describe how in December 2003, Abd-al-Rahman
"personally inspected a group of naked women (in the town of Arawala)
before they were raped by men under his command."
This is a similar to the tactic used in Bosnia by Serbs who
incorporated rape as an instrument of their ethnic cleansing policy.
While the world can, with some legitimacy, claim it was unaware at the
time of either the Holocaust or the Ottoman attack on the Armenians —
the two highest profile incidents of genocide that gave this gruesome
crime its name — there can be no such denial about what happened in
the former Yugoslavia or is happening in Darfur.
While the world community eventually took steps to end the genocide
in the Balkans, it has no will to act to save lives in Darfur.
Last-year’s signing of a peace agreement in Nigeria only served to
ramp up the horror, while ill-equipped, out-gunned and outnumbered
African Union troops stand by impotently.
Meanwhile the powerful Khartoum regime continues to get rich from the
sale of oil — most of which goes to China, which blocks sanctions
against Sudan.
It took a commitment from the United States to bring NATO to help
UN efforts to end the bloodshed in the Balkans. America no longer
has the capacity and NATO is too dysfunctional to act in Darfur,
and there is no other world power to fill the gap.
Although the world placed a lot of hope on the power of courts to end
such bloodletting, the two decisions last week demonstrate there can
be no justice without a willingness to back it with force. The ghosts
of victims in such places as Srebrenica and Arawala accuse us all of
failing to do what’s right.
If Serbia is complicit in the Bosnian genocide for doing nothing to
stop it and failing to pursue the perpetrators, what of the rest of
us when it comes to Darfur and Chad?
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress