"Paving the road to hell"
Bush says his new sanctions will stop genocide in Darfur, but they only
show Sudan that America is unwilling to take serious measures.


There has been a strangely uncritical response to President Bush's
announcement that he is imposing additional sanctions on Khartoum for
failing to halt the grim genocide by attrition in the Darfur region of
western Sudan. Indeed, it would seem that - given the inertia in Europe,
the cynicism of the Arab League and Organization of Islamic Conference,
and the callously rapacious attitude of China - anything is better than
nothing. But such a view reflects a dangerous failure to understand how
these weak and finally meaningless efforts actually encourage Khartoum
in its belief that it can sustain the immensely destructive status quo
in Darfur.

The conflict in Darfur has now entered its fifth year and is certainly
different in character from the massive, ethnically targeted human
destruction of 2003-2004, in which the vast majority of non-Arab or
African villages were burned and plundered. This destruction has
displaced some 2.5 million people, most into squalid camps that have
become cauldrons of suffering, rage and despair. The rebel movement that
emerged in early 2003 has fractured; the Arab populations that had
sought to stay out of the conflict have been remorselessly drawn in;
and, terrifyingly, insecurity may force the exit of aid organisations
now providing a critical lifeline for what the UN estimates are a
staggering 4.5 million conflict-affected human beings in the greater
humanitarian theatre of Darfur and eastern Chad.

There is little dispute that both civilians and humanitarian workers
need a much more robust force than the current weak and demoralised
African Union mission to protect them - in the camps, in rural areas,
along transport corridors, and during the first tentative efforts by
refugees to return to the sites of their former villages and resume
agriculturally productive lives.

But President Bush's new sanctions do nothing to bring about that
change. Beyond seeking to impose financial punishment on two mid-level
regime officials and a rebel leader, they would deny 31 Sudanese
companies access to international contracts for American dollars. This
is little more than a bookkeeping inconvenience: a valuable, fungible
international commodity such as crude oil - by far Sudan's largest
export - will always find a buyer, whether the contract is denominated
in Euros, Yen (Japan buys huge quantities of Sudanese crude) or Chinese
Yuan.

Do the new sanctions offer any hope of pushing Khartoum to accept the
required international protection force, of the sort authorised nine
months ago by UN Security Council Resolution 1706? Do US currency
sanctions on the 31 companies bring to bear any real pressure on
Khartoum's génocidaires, the senior officials responsible for loosing
the Janjaweed militia and its deadly military aircraft on thousands of
defenceless African villages?

Not in the slightest. On the contrary, by working so hard to suggest
that this small step will make such a significant difference (Bush spoke
unctuously early Tuesday morning, knowing that his comments would
dominate the international news of the day in the US), the Bush
administration has let Khartoum know that is unwilling to take more
serious steps. America's weaknesses appear all the more glaring in the
ghastly wake of Iraq, and Europe is less than eager for another
international adventure. It hardly helps that Bush's only rival for
posturing on Darfur is the soon-to-be-unemployed Tony Blair.

Even the Bush administration's incongruously part-time special envoy
for Sudan, Andrew Natsios, signaled that nothing of substance had been
proposed. The Guardian reports that Natsios thinks "the sanctions were
intended to be largely symbolic" and says, "The purpose of these
sanctions is not the sanctions [but] to send a message to the Sudanese
government to start behaving differently." Send Khartoum a message?
One might have thought that more than half a dozen UN Security Council
resolutions would have sent the necessary "message" - in particular,
Resolution 1556 (July 2004), which "demanded" that the Islamist
regime disarm the Janjaweed and bring its leaders to justice.

No, the problem is not communicating with Khartoum; rather, it's
convincing these brutal men that there will be consequences for failing
to heed such messages. To date there have been no penalties for
genocidal counterinsurgency warfare; no penalties for ongoing
indiscriminate aerial bombardment of civilian targets; no penalties for
harassing, abusing and assaulting humanitarian workers and impeding
delivery of aid supplies. And the Janjaweed continue their savage
predations, often after having been recycled into the paramilitary
guises of the "Border Intelligence", or "Popular Defense
Forces", or local police, even within the camps.

The key is to internationalise sanctions and, even more critically, to
expend the diplomatic capital necessary to make oil-guzzling China see
that it must cooperate in halting human suffering and destruction in
Darfur and eastern Chad. To date, China shows no signs of cooperating in
serious fashion, although the rapidly increasing opprobrium attached to
their hosting the 2008 Summer Olympic Games may soon change this. In
this key effort, Bush's sanctions stunt adds nothing.

Eric Reeves
Smith College
Northampton, MA  01063

413-585-3326
ereeves@smith.edu
www.sudanreeves.org