Rwanda/Sudan: Crime without punishment

Africa’s vicious genocides over the last 15 years have posed agonising dilemmas for the international community, with the March indictment of Sudan’s president raising new ones

Fifteen years after the extermination of 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis and moderate Hutus, there are still no international institutions with the credibility and capacity to respond quickly to mass killings of civilians.


The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) issuance of an arrest warrant on 4 March for Sudan’s President Omer el Beshir for war crimes in Darfur may yet advance the cause of international justice, but its capacity to end the war looks questionable in the short run. To make real progress in Sudan, the ICC’s warrant would need massive, determined, internationally-coordinated action to protect civilians and greatly increased diplomatic pressure on the Khartoum regime.


It might have helped if the ICC’s chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo had been able to start with trials of lower-ranking officials. After the ICC announced the arrest warrant, there was a dreadful silence as the Khartoum regime expelled most of the aid agencies in Darfur and closed down local human-rights organisations.


African governments’ concerns about the warrant centred on the fear that Khartoum would redouble attacks on the Darfur people and close down the AU peacekeeping mission there, Ethiopia’s Premier Meles Zenawi told the The Africa Report. “The political implications of the arrest warrant weren’t thought through,” Meles said. “If it’s about a regime-change agenda, there was no plan there… If it’s about political pressure, there’s no more leverage once you’ve announced the warrant.”


The road to the arrest warrant for Beshir goes back to Rwanda’s genocide in 1994 when survivors pledged that “justice will be done”. And those foreign politicians who ordered the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers at the time – while the murderers went to work in Rwanda – have gradually made their apologies, quietly repeating the “never again” mantra.


Responsibility to protect


Partly as a result of that, the UN General Assembly in 2005 passed a resolution establishing the UN’s ‘Responsibility to Protect’ which gave the UN the responsibility to use “appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means …to help protect populations from genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”


But the international response remains tragically slow. The Darfur war in western Sudan reached its peak in 2004, almost a decade after Rwanda’s genocide. Estimates of the deaths caused by the war range from 200,000-400,000. Some 2.5m people have been chased from their homes and into camps. Almost all UN and human-rights groups’ reports hold the Khartoum government responsible for the vast majority of deaths and displacements. 


The response was inchoate and dilatory. The AU started with a monitoring mission protected by 300 soldiers as the UN began a long deliberation, commissioning several investigations into the Darfur crisis.

Rhetoric saves no one


Western rhetoric was far more strident than the quiescent approach to Rwanda in 1994, when President Bill Clinton’s administration barred officials from describing the killings as genocide for fear that it would compel the US to intervene. 


There is little argument about the extent of the Darfur crisis, but there is fierce debate about whether it was right for the UN Security Council to mandate the ICC to investigate the killings there.


Nick Grono, a director of the International Crisis Group sees the arrest warrant as a “welcome and crucial step towards challenging impunity that has worsened conflict in Darfur and elsewhere in Sudan”. Grono says that Khartoum might look for a way out by making tactical concessions and stalling for time, and argues that the ICC should make it clear that it will investigate those responsible for violence against peacekeepers, aid agencies and people in camps.


Many diplomats opt for a pragmatic approach. President George Bush’s Sudan envoy, Andrew Natsios, says he changed his policy because hostility did not work: “The best way for Washington to proceed is not by confronting Khartoum but by engaging it… Moral outrage is no substitute for practical policies aimed at saving lives and promoting stability.”


Ultimately, it is the Sudanese who will decide, and they are keeping their counsel. Southern Sudan’s President Salva Kiir has pointedly not attended any of the state-sponsored warrant protest rallies. None doubt that many opponents of the regime are quietly celebrating the ICC’s action.


For now, southern politicians want to hold Beshir and his allies to the north-south peace accord which provides for national elections this year and a referendum on southern independence in 2011. If Khartoum starts to tamper with that schedule, using the warrant crisis as a pretext, then there will be a high risk of the country slipping back towards the killing fields of 2004.