Kosovo and Darfur
Posted on behalf of Cara Parks of the New Republic
Yesterday on the New Republic website we ran an editorial on Darfur that I think your readers would really enjoy. The piece uses the declaration of Kosovo’s independence last week to look back at NATO’s involvement in the region — and then compares this experience with the ongoing crisis in Darfur. It’s a provocative piece that urges help for the Darfur region, and I think you and your readers would find it interesting.
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Yesterday’s New Republic invited us to consider the difference between Kosovo and Darfur. The argument is one we have heard many times: “the people of Darfur are waiting (still!) for the West to come to their rescue.”
It’s a provocative argument though hardly a new one. But the parallel has its perils. When Anthony Lake, Susan Rice and Donald Payne wrote an Oped calling for Kosovo-style action on Darfur in the Washington Post in October 2006, the implications were not lost on the government of Sudan. The Republican Palace espied an American agenda of Darfurian secession and Khartoum regime change under the cover of a humanitarian intervention. I am not saying Khartoum’s view was correct, just that Opeds have consequences, and one of them is how the opinions are interpreted by the targets of advocacy. In this case, it was taken seriously as a statement of intent by people who would likely have a leading role in shaping the foreign policy of a future Democrat administration.
In the wake of the Kosovo campaign, there was a debate among humanitarians as to whether the intervention was justified. Critics pointed out that the majority of the violations occurred during the air campaign itself, and therefore that the NATO operation could be said to have prompted the abuses that it was designed to halt. I am not persuaded by this criticism. Slobodan Milosevic was a serial aggressor and ethnic cleanser and it would have been foolish to trust him to change his behavior. But nonetheless, we need to be alert to the unintended consequences of declaring military action—it’s likely that the adversary will respond militarily, and strike first. So it has been in Sudan. In August and September 2006, when Khartoum feared an imminent non-consensual deployment of UN troops, it went on the offensive in Darfur and Chad to try to create a fait accompli. Many hundreds died. Just a month ago, days before the scheduled deployment of the European Force in Chad, Sudanese security did something rather similar. Many hundreds died. That is at least fair warning that if (for example) an incoming U.S. president were to take office with a public commitment to military action in Darfur, we could expect a repeat performance.
For me, the strongest argument against military intervention is its imprudence. Similar considerations apply when considering making a threat of intervention or a non-consensual or non-neutral military deployment.
In calling for armed international intervention in Darfur, the New Republic ignores the all-important differences between Kosovo and Darfur. Kosovo was a small territory with well-defined armed groups. Kosovans were overwhelmingly in favour of foreign intervention. Darfur is a vast area with a chaotic and ever-changing mess of armed groups. (The fragmentation that has long affected the non-Arab rebels is now spreading to the Arab side of the divide too.) Most crucially, many of Darfur’s people – its Arab tribes especially — are radically opposed to armed intervention by outside forces. The most likely result would not be a ‘happy ending’, but vastly increased civilian death and the collapse of an international aid programme that is keeping millions alive. An ending more akin to what armed intervention has wrought in Iraq than the fairy tale of the editorialist’s imagining.
The offensive in Jebel Mun is criminal, but wholly predictable. Where was the voice of the New Republic when JEM took control of these villages last year and began a campaign of government-baiting that was bound — designed? – to get a response? JEM comes from the NIF; its leaders are children of the NIF. As it threatened to seize the state capital, claimed massive new Arab support, spoke of shooting down planes and congratulated Chadian President Idriss Deby on his "success" in defeating his own rebels (a success in which JEM played a vital role), Khalil Ibrahim’s men must have known how Khartoum would respond because this government has only ever had one way of responding — from the Nuba mountains of central Sudan, to the oilfields of southern Sudan, to Darfur in western Sudan: through extreme violence targeted at civilians. JEM knows this better than anyone.
From the beginning of this conflict, JEM has been trying to deligitimize the Khartoum government through ‘genocide’. As the New Republic itself says, the current west Darfur offensive is the deadliest ‘in many, many months.’ Compiled reports by humanitarians and the UN indicate that violent civilian deaths over the previous 36 months were approximately 200 a month, in the last year half of them Arab. It’s very easy to take the high moral ground after the fact. It’s far harder to sound a warning voice in time and attempt to prevent such tragedies.