Wednesday, Aug 11, 2004
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By Rory Carroll
KHARTOUM, AUG. 10. The E.U. said yesterday there was widespread violence in the Darfur region of Sudan but the killings were not genocidal, a potentially crucial distinction which underlined its reluctance to intervene. ``We are not in the situation of genocide there,'' Pieter Feith, an adviser to the E.U.'s Foreign Policy Chief, Javier Solana, said in Brussels after returning from a fact-finding visit to Sudan. ``But it is clear there is widespread, silent and slow killing and village burning of a fairly large scale.
Considerble doubts
There are considerable doubts as to the willingness of Sudan's Government to assume its duty to protect its civilian population against attacks.''
He said in the absence of willingness to send a significant military force, the E.U. and others had little choice but to cooperate with Khartoum. The announcement is bound to anger those impatient for stronger international pressure on Sudan . Last month the U.S. House of Representatives voted by 422 votes to nil to describe Khartoum's actions as genocide, a conclusion shared by several analysts who say there is no other term for the systematic slaughter, rape and expulsions. But the White House, the African Union and groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have so far avoided using the g-word. At least 30,000 people are thought to have died and 1 million displaced in what the U.N. has called the world's worst humanitarian crisis. Genocide is defined as a calculated effort to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, but the debate over its meaning is political, not semantic. The genocide convention, adopted by the U.N. in 1948, calls on signatories to `prevent' and `punish' genocide. If governments accept events in Darfur amount to genocide they would be obliged to intervene. Given the risk of such a logistical and military challenge, that is something few governments are willing to contemplate. Instead of sending troops the E.U. and the U.S. have called for support from the African Union, a pan-African body which Khartoum could not so easily brand imperialist. Documents from the Clinton administration show soon after Rwanda's slaughter started in 1994, officials were privately calling it genocide but refrained from doing so publicly lest pressure grow for a U.S. deployment which the administration did not want.
Peace talks
In a separate development yesterday, Mustafa Osman Ismail, Sudan's Foreign Minister, said his Government would take part in peace talks in Nigeria this month. ``We open the door wide to reach an agreement on the agenda and issues,'' he said. ``We do not have conditions and we would not accept prior conditions.'' Sudan expected to meet a U.N. deadline to improve security and human rights by the end of the month, the Minister added. — Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
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