Never? Well Hardly Ever?

Deja-vu in Darfur

Thirteen years after the Srebrenica massacre, history is repeating itself for the UN's peacekeepers in Sudan
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* Ian Williams, Guardian Comment is Free
*
o Friday July 11, 2008


It's déjà vu all over again. On the eve of the 13th anniversary of the massacres of some 8,000 Bosnians in Srebrenica, with the tacit connivance of the under-supported and demoralized Dutch peacekeepers, the Janjaweed, Khartoum's surrogate militia in Darfur killed seven African UN peacekeepers and wounded 19 more. The militia outgunned the peacekeepers – and escaped with impunity.

No one, except the several hundred thousand victims in Darfur has paid any price. We can take it for granted that any group that thinks it has the impunity to attack peacekeepers, assumes that it has a license to kill civilians too. While the seven dead UN soldiers hit the news, the continuing attrition of civilians has become so habitual that it would take another Srebrenica, and probably one recorded with cameras, to get any news recognition.

After Srebrenica, the phrase "Never Again" was again on everyone's lips. In international Diplo-Speak, maybe that phrase misses punctuation. Maybe it should be written "Never! Again?", meaning something like "Whoops."

Certainly, the UN's own reports on Srebrenica and Rwanda have a lot of
relevance to what is happening now in Sudan.

Touted as 26,000 strong with robust capacity, the UNAMID peacekeeping force is still at 10,000, under-equipped, underpaid, demoralized and deep into an action replay of the ineffectuality of Unprofor in Bosnia.

I doubt whether the Janjaweed militiamen who attacked the convoy had studied the Balkan wars, but certainly their masters in the Sudanese government have. They have emulated every trick that Slobodan Milosevic tried so successfully with the peacekeepers, including getting their international allies to invoke sovereignty to cover crimes against humanity.

Until the end when the international worm finally turned, the peacekeepers in Bosnia served the same function as those now in Sudan. They were there to send a message to the concerned electorates back home that governments were deeply concerned and doing their best. In Bosnia, confident of their governments' backing, the Scandinavian contingents took robust action when confronted with murderous militias, as later on did the French and British, but most of the force was there to protect itself and "monitor" crimes, not to prevent them.

So in Bosnia, Bangladeshi peacekeepers in summer kit were besieged in Bihac over the winter, fired upon and starved. The Serb militia knew that the Bangladeshi Air Force was not going to come over the hills to punish their persecutors, let alone NATO, whose planes stayed resolutely grounded later when the Dutch in Srebrenica came under attack.

The Dutch peacekeepers in Srebrenica were culpably weak and ineffectual – but the message they had from headquarters was that they were on their own. They were almost as much victims of cynical real politik and diplomatic persiflage as the eight-thousand dead – except of course that they were alive.

So who are the guilty in Darfur? As in the Balkans, there is plenty of blame to go round. Firstly of course, the Khartoum government and the Janjaweed it arms, pays and directs; the Chinese government, who have provided diplomatic cover for them; then the British and Americans who diplomatically disarmed themselves with their attack on Iraq. Of course, it does not help that Washington wasted a decade fighting a rearguard battle against the International Criminal Court, whose indictments are so far the nearest thing to tangible multilateral action against the perpetrators.

But collectively, the West while fending off their domestic do-gooders with the enhanced UN-African Union force, failed to provide money, logistics or weapons for the African contingents that were already there, let alone any reinforcements. The US Congress is full of grandstanders seizing the opportunity to berate yet another Arab, Islamist government for its human rights violations in Darfur, while bilking the peacekeepers there of hundreds of millions in assessed contributions. The US debt to the UN is around $2bn largely because of legislative action by self-professed Darfur savers.

As a result, the force lacks aircraft, both planes and helicopters which means that the Janjaweed's horses are almost high tech compared with UNAMID's equipment.

There are huge complexities in Darfur, and no easy feasible solutions. But one "never again" the UN might adopt is that they will never again put peacekeepers into a conflict without cash, equipment and military and diplomatic backup. And they should have a primary mandate to protect civilians from attack.

You can't Pick and Chose Human Rights

In this week's Tribune

Heating up in Absurdistan

Last week the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee voted to condemn the Turkish genocide of the Armenians in 1915, sparking a powder train of diplomatic consequences.

It is sometimes argued that since Armenians in Istanbul, were untouched it could not have been genocide. That is as dubiously relevant as survival rates of German Jews compared with Polish Jewish, or the relative immunity of Bosniaks in Belgrade as their compatriots were slaughtered back home.

However rationality flies out of the window on these massacres over eight decades ago. Irrefutably, the Ottoman government conducted massacres and ethnic cleansings of Armenians on a scale that certainly counts as genocide compared with other more recent killings so termed, from East Timor to Darfur.

Nonetheless, European legal moves to penalize people who question that there was an Armenian genocide, or indeed the Holocaust, are an abuse of freedom of expression and dangerous precedent., almost as dangerous as the Turkish practice of arresting writers who confirm that it happened.

Abhorrent though some of Leninist left iare when they become apologists for mass murder by Milosevic in Bosnia and Kosovo, I would never call for the arrest of Fidel Castro or Tariq Ali and his likeminded comrades for ignoring the continual ooze of charnel pits being exhumed across the Balkans.

History should never be left to Leninists or legislators, let alone the police. Indeed, almost as puzzling as the irrational left canonization of Milosevic, the murderous thug, election-fixer, black-marketeer and peculator of public property is the present Turkish defence or denial of the deeds of the Ottoman sultanate.

Ataturk’s revolution was, after all, against the legacy of the Sultans. Indeed, the pre-war Ottoman state was overtly multi-ethnic and, in one of those historical ironies, the most active persecutors of the Armenians were actually Kurds, whose very existence is now denied by Turkish nationalists, who are being barely restrained by the US from crossing into Iraqi Kurdistan to whack Turkish Kurd insurgents based there.

The full House of Representatives is unlikely to adopt the resolution, because both Bush and the Israel Lobby want to support Turkey, but that did not stop Ankara from recalling its Ambassador and threatening to withdraw its logistical cooperation with the Coalition forces in Iraq. That would not be bad thing in itself, but it would be rash to assume that that was the motive behind the resolution.

In fact, the Turkish government’s reaction rather calls into question the Turkish government’s understanding of democracy and freedom of speech in other countries, with disturbing implications for its own domestic application of democracy.

But then, US democracy all too often resembles government of the lobbies, for the lobbies, by the lobbies. The Armenian lobby is powerful in Washington, and carries in its train human rights activists, not least those who take the concept of “never again,” seriously.

Although the Greek Lobby is, predictably, weighing in behind the Armenians, the Turkish Lobby has a more redoubtable champion in the Israel Lobby, whose diehard section has a “never before or again” concept: that victimhood in genocide is not only a uniquely Jewish, but also a uniquely Israeli, property. Such people, for example, argued furiously in the early days of the US Holocaust Museum against recognizing the Roma genocide as equivalent to “their own.”

Israel’s only ally in the region is Turkey, and one of the things that Israel offers in return its lobbying power in Washington. As far back as 1990 AIPAC alienated Senator Bob Dole “lending” Turkey a dozen senators to withdraw the votes they had pledged for his resolution to commemorate the 75 Anniversary of the genocide.

The affair also highlights the current argument about the power of the Israel lobby and the dangers of assuming that it is the Jewish Lobby. Most American Jews are understandably deeply concerned about human rights and genocidal killings. Those, who, for example, recently had Archbishop Desmond Tutu disinvited from a Montana University because the hero of the anti-Apartheid struggle is deemed anti-Israel and therefore anti-Semitic, are operating on different standards - “another country, right or wrong.”

If Israel needs the strategic alliance with Turkey (and more precisely with the Turkish military) then for the Lobby, principles human rights, genocide, American self interest, can all go out the window as far as they are concerned.


So where does all this lead? Even though the Ottoman State killed millions of Armenians, the modern Turkish state should indeed apologise, not because it was responsible, but because it has foolishly tried to defend the indefensible for so many years.

But on a broader scale, it reinforces the essential point that would-be defenders of human rights should condemn the deed, and not try to cherry pick the perpetrators. We should condemn mass murder, or indeed small and medium sized murder, no matter what cause the perpetrators invoked in committing their crimes.

But sadly, we will continue to see condemnations of our chosen enemy’s violations, and defence, or at best silence about “our side.” Pro-Israelis will be as blind to Palestinian suffering as Republicans were to Central American massacres. “Anti-imperialists” will defend Mugabe or Castro, while fervently condemning the PATRIOT Act. Human rights should be a principle in themselves, not an expedient weapon with which to beat our enemies.

With Friends Like These, NAM, Darfur and Palestine

There's No Monopoly on Hypocrisy

In an exemplary display of chutzpah this week, John Bolton and former Israeli Ambassador to the UN Dore Gold called for the International Criminal Court to go after the Iranian President. Please note that this is the International Criminal Court whose founding Rome Treaty Bolton "unsigned" and which he has spent six years trying to sabotage.

One has to admit that having Bolton as the US Ambassador was a good excuse for a lot of silly behavior by alienated Third World delegations. But it is not a good enough excuse for their collusion in covering up violations of human rights. Since the controversial Human Rights Council was established, the Non-Aligned have behaved as if they deliberately trying to vindicate Bolton and the pro-Israeli anti-UN lobby.

Of course I am not complaining that the Council sees fit to criticize Israel for its human rights violations--often. After all Israel often violates the human rights of its Palestinian and Lebanese neighbors and the various pro-Israeli UN-Watch and NGO-Monitor sites could productively suggest to the Israeli government that the best way to avoid being in the dock is to stop committing crimes.

But providing cover for tyrannies like Uzbekistan or Belarus, as the non-aligned majority has done this year, blocking resolutions on their practices, is to give the Palestinian cause a bad name in an equally hypocritical way. Human Rights are too important to indulge hypocrisy.

In his valedictory speech to Human Rights Watch last Friday, Kofi Annan pointed this out and more. In a recent interview with me, he commented that "The question of double standards is a question you never get away from when you touch the Middle East, whether you are discussing the Middle East in the region or outside the region. We’ve often been accused that UN resolutions are implemented selectively, and I try to explain that we can only implement these resolutions with the cooperation of the member states. In situations where the member states concerned do not cooperate it’s extremely difficult for the UN to impose any resolutions."

In particular, of course, is the issue of Darfur, where all the objective evidence shows that the Sudanese government is backing a murderous militia in mass killings, rapes and ethnic cleansing of local people. Having outvoted a resolution that named the government, the Non-Aligned and Muslim countries on the Human Rights Council supported an African Union resolution that passed condemning the killings--without mentioning the government that was organizing the murders.

This is a travesty that plays into the hands of Israel supporters. Most of those campaigning for Darfur are sincere humanitarians, but there many among them who see it as a wonderful opportunity for anti-Arab propaganda. And who can blame them--it is a wonderful opportunity, handed to them on a plate by the Arab and African governments who will not speak up against Khartoum.

However, as a testament to the efficacy of international and popular pressure, including strong words from Annan, in the end, the Council realized it was losing all credibility and was forced to agree to hold a special session this week, which decided to send a team to Sudan to investigate. But even now, the only references to the Sudanese government are to thank it for its cooperation. The five person team will be picked by the President of the Council after "informal consultations" among members, which means that he will have to resist governmental pressures to appoint those who will not rock the boat with Khartoum.

There are some caveats here. The situation in Darfur and Sudan is much more complex than some of these lobby groups would have us believe. Some of them take the UN to task because it refuses to call what is happening there genocide, which makes one suspect their motivation. In fact the UN inspectors reported that what the Jinjaweed were doing may be "no less serious and heinous than genocide."

For a close look at the complexity of the issues see Alex De Waal's piece in the current London Review of Books.

Darfur should matter to the Palestinians, despite the large cheque the Sudanese handed over to the Hamas Prime Minister Ismael Haniyah. Diplomatically, the Palestinians have lost ground, not least because of the large, and very important, European Union bloc whose support for entirely correct resolutions has wavered. The EU members are under heavy pressure from the US, and they have a Trojan horse in their midst, in the form of Tony Blair’s Britain. But externally, the Non-Aligned’s stance on overall human rights issues, and its seeming refusal to accept that anyone other than Israel violates international humanitarian law, has certainly made it easier for Blair and Bush to pull the EU away from its former commitment to international law on the Middle East to a more expedient view.

That is a much larger threat than the handful of Pacific coral atolls which are the only active supporters of Israel that the US can muster. And the way to deal with it is for delegations that really care about the Palestinians to is to do the right thing by supporting human rights wherever they are violated, regardless of which government is doing the violating – or indeed even if it is terrorists depriving people of the fairly fundamental right to life.. There is really no excuse for democracies like India and South Africa to cover up for Uzbekistan, Belarus--or Sudan, just as there are no real excuses for EU collusion with Israel's violations.