Y'all be careful saving Darfur and what not

I just read a review of what appears to be a fascinating book on the Darfur conflict, Rob Crilley's Saving Darfur: Everyone's Favourite African War. In it, he apparently takes to task the "save" Darfur movement for wandering around with blinders that prevent them from 1) failing to fully comprehend the complexity of the conflict and 2) thereby thwart efforts to end the conflict. I've added the book to my wish list, and I look forward to your ordering it for me so that I can read it. ;)

Back when I was a starving grad student, I once turned down an internship offer from one of these Darfur "saving" organizations, on the grounds that the organization was led by someone a year younger than me (this is important for someone who is the baby of their grad class). I later kicked myself for that for a bit, as the internship I did take ended up being less than fruitful. However, having since come to realize the deeper implications of what the wonderful ladies at Wronging Rights refer to as "raising awareness" without doing much else, I'm now rather glad to not have been associated with the whole thing.

Hat tip: Texas in Africa.

Sudan and the ICC

As expected, we learned today that the International Criminal Court will indeed bring charges of genocide against the president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir. Part of me says "fantastic!" Yet my more pragmatic side thinks that the road ahead will be fraught with disaster.

For some far more detailed analysis than I could ever hope to provide, see this post by Alex de Waal over at Making Sense of Darfur. It includes a synthesis of the posts he solicited last month on what might happen if Bashir is indicted. Very much worth taking a look at.

U.S. Africa policy quick takes

This is what happens when you do nothing for far too long.

This is the kind of thing we should be doing when things goes wrong (give that man a medal).

And this is what we end up doing because we lack sufficient credibility to do anything else.

I think that's all pretty self explanatory.

Global politics quicky

Because I'm too lazy too actually analyze things, I give you a bulleted list.

• One of these days, I too shall appoint myself as President Prime Minister, or perhaps "Mr. Speaker the President of the United States."
  
• Ban Ki-moon may have actually expressed an emotion regarding the rapidly descending spiral that is Darfur.
• Dear Mahmoud: It's ok to be gay in New York, and a Jewish man wants to love you. (Hat tip: Daniel Drezner -- too good not to miss.)
  
• Burma: Far scarier than we thought. Several protests with monks and Burmese Americans hit DC this past week, including one I witnessed yesterday. Now people seem to think that threatening to boycott a sporting event might change something? Color me unconvinced.
  

And briefly on the homefront.

• DC: No water to fight fires on the high ground.
• ENDA: Still discriminatory. Those of you with actual congresspersons, please do something.
  

Refugees and repatriation

This week in my human rights & conflict class, we were discussing refugee issues. The conversation didn't quite go where I was hoping it would go, plus I was hopped up on cold pills and thus easily confused. Anyway, I thought I would say here what I had hoped to say there, as this is an issue that is increasingly important to me.

In their chapter in the book Problems of Protection, Erik Roxstrom and Mark Gibney discuss the circumstances surrounding UNHCR's involvement in handling individuals who fled the Bosnian war in the mid-90s. UNHCR encouraged very reluctant Western European states to accept Bosnian refugees on the grounds of so-called "temporary protection," which was a classification assigned en masse to all fleeing Bosnians. This was apparently to ease concerns the would-be host states had over taking in and then keeping a large refugee population indefinitely. Yet it led to a period wherein Bosnians found themselves unable to integrate into new societies and thus unable to do much to fend for themselves. It was obviously unsafe for them back home, what with ethnic cleansing going on and all, but these individuals were seen with contempt by the countries to which they fled. That, to me, is most distressing.

This summer while I was at the Liberian refugee camp in Ghana, I noticed huge UNHCR posters all over that proclaimed "Go home! Liberia is safe!" These struck me on a number of levels. For one, the pictures of children sitting in well-kept schools were obviously false. An accompanying DVD I later got to watch that had been developed particularly for inhabitants at this camp also showed several things that clearly were one-hit wonders, so to speak, including pictures of schools at that very camp which didn't actually exist. Many people at the camp were of the belief that if UNHCR was willing to lie to them about conditions right under their noses, they certainly couldn't be trusted to tell what was really going on back in Liberia. These refugees argued, quite effectively, that they had no business going home when every communication with family and friends revealed one of two things: 1) residual violence was still common, and thus repatriation was unsafe, or 2) the local economy in their home village was so destroyed that there was almost literally nothing to return to.

My problem, then, is with the repatriation issue is handled. Refugees should be able to enjoy the full protections offered under the Refugee Convention and other relevant international instruments. They should also be able to seek and receive permanent asylum if there is a genuine fear of persecution. Temporary protection then doesn't quite reach the same standard. It allows for host states to relegate refugees to poor conditions and second-class (or worse) status by refusing to let them work. I'm not saying that all refugees should be automatically integrated into the country to which they've fled, but that they should be protected under the law, and at least be allowed to find some means of subsistence, especially when international aid is not forthcoming. Indeed, most people who flee their homes as refugees don't want to be integrated into someplace new. They want to go home, but they want to go home when it safe to do so. In the meantime, they want to ensure that their children are fed and sheltered, which is often why they left in the first place.

Repatriation in most instances is still a voluntary choice. But with asylum regulations tightening around the globe, safety outside one's home country is becoming harder to find. Also, UNHCR has been instructed to do more to prevent refugee crises from beginning. This doesn't mean that people are no longer being displaced by conflict, just that they're now mostly staying within their own borders. These people, known as internally displaced persons (IDPs), are especially vulnerable, and there are virtually no international legal protections for them, and no institutionalized mechanisms to deal with them. Thus in pressing situations like Darfur, you find large camps of displaced people that are essentially sitting ducks, waiting to be targeted once again by the very people they fled.

I think the push for repatriation (especially when based on false information) is problematic mostly because it fails to take into account why people left in the first place. While it is obvious that refugees shouldn't have to face refoulement (return to place of origin where there is valid evidence that they will face persecution), not having to face persecution and enjoying security or economic viability are very different things. I think Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf put it well when she said that of course the Liberian government wants all its people to return home, but only when there is sufficient infrastructure to support a large group of people who will obviously need assistance in rebuilding their lives. Should they come home before this point, they just further drain already stretched networks of support.

Yet if we're only going to insist upon repatriation when it refugees can viably subsist at home, then many nations need to seriously reexamine their asylum and relevant immigration laws. Asylum is increasingly difficult to claim as Western nations clamp down on immigration as part of their anti-terror efforts. Fact is, if UNHCR has to beg a wealthy country like Germany to take in some refugees from nearby, then a dirt poor country like Chad has little incentive to take in refugees of its own free will. If people are are fleeing persecution, mass violence, or some other sort of disaster, the decent human being in all of us should kick in and we should protect these individuals and provide for their basic needs. Only after that is done should we even think to start asking about when they'll go home.

Help for the UN, version 1.0

It seems as though your world peace and security apparatus is dysfunctional.

What would you like to do?

1) Plead with the world's only remaining superpower to stop ignoring it whenever said superpower can't get its way.

2) Send yet another terse letter to that pesky African dictator who keeps thwarting its plans, reminding him that the decisions of the peace and security apparatus are legally binding.

3) Create another committee, to create subcommittees, to think about how one might make the peace and security apparatus less resemblant of the Stone Age.

4) Outsource to regional conglomerates, regardless of capabilities.

5) Have Lakhdar Brahimi make it work -- they don't call him Mr. Fix-it for nothing.

6) Replace all apparatus members with high school students and hope that they can do better.

Photo from here.

From the office of unqualified hacks

Ladies and gentlemen, Rev. Franklin Graham is going to save Darfur.

Now isn't that nice?

Here's the deal. Billy Graham's significantly dumber son is going to get Omar Bashir to stop slaughtering people by encouraging policy types to be nice to the dictator. Then, to top it all off, Rev. Graham is going to build or rehabilitate hundreds of churches in Sudan, through his aid group, which is of course funded by USAID.

Not bad for a man who thinks Islam is a religion of hate, intolerance and violent proselytizing. Then again, Graham the Younger's doctrine of Christianity seems to meet those criteria pretty well. Perhaps these two have more in common than they first thought back in 2003.

What's the rationale for this bold and daring plan? Why, it's the fact that Bashir signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement with the SPLM/A in Southern Sudan back in 2005. That apparently means that he's a reasonable man who's willing to compromise (though not reasonable enough to meet with Bill Frist, Graham's travel companion). Never mind the fact that the civil war in Southern Sudan raged for some twenty years before it was ended, or that there is some evidence that Bashir is undermining the agreement.

Thanks for the hard work, Brother Franklin! The rest of us will change course right away, by sending Bashir some lovely Valentine's cards, complete with those little heart candies with the cute messages.

Briefly on Darfur

I'm concerned that things still appear to be getting worse in Darfur, and that the international community is still ham-strung over what to do. While New Mexico Governor (and now presidential candidate worth looking at) Bill Richardson managed to get the Khartoum government to accept a ceasefire (of uncertain date or timing) acting only as a representative of U.S. NGOs, official diplomacy seems to be going nowhere, while the military and humanitarian situation continues to decline, to put it mildly.

In his most recent post to his controversial blog, Jan Pronk, who served as UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Sudan until the end of the year, provided rather disturbing information regarding the state of UN-Sudan relations, the recalcitrance of the UN Security Council and Secretariat, as well as an update on the lack of diplomatic initiatives by great power nations. It's worth a read, but it is far from uplifting.

It seems that now more than ever, there needs to be greater activism and advocacy for effective and determined engagement to end this now three year old crisis. Otherwise, the cries of "never again" that followed Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda are proving themselves to be hollow promises. For information on what you can do, I recommend visiting the Save Darfur Coalition.

UN Security Council and Western nations need a wake-up call

I meant to write this a week or so ago, but personal circumstances prevented me from getting it done. As you are all well aware, this has been a busy summer with regard to "the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression." Israel, the world leader in failing to grasp the concept of a proportional response, went and blew the hell out of Lebanon in a failed effort to rescue two of their captured soldiers. The peace agreement in Darfur has effectively collapsed and only succeeded in creating a shift of alliances on the ground. And yet at the same time, international responses to these and other crises have been half-hearted at best.

On the Lebanon front, the UN Security Council managed to approve a resolution that called for a cease-fire and a 15,000 strong peacekeeping force (sans Chapter VII mandate), but only after weeks of wrangling. Even then, the European countries that had been so adamant about the need for a strong peacekeeping force then initially refused to cough up any respectable number of troops for it. Indeed, getting troop committments from them required an extended period of "intense prodding and pleading" by the UN from Kofi Annan and others.

In Darfur, the situation on the ground continues to detiorate, in spite of the May peace agreement, and possibly because of it. Again, the UN Security Council has authorized a peacekeeping force, this time of 24,000 personnel, but on the contention that the Sudanese government must approve the mission's deployment. Sudan, of course, has said no. After all, they're pursuing a genocidal policy, so why should they agree to letting the world curtail such activities?

There are two main lessons here that the world, especially the wealthy and powerful nations, seem to be missing.

1) All peacekeeping missions have a certain element of risk. Contributing nations (usually developing nations with big militaries) should be aware that some of their soldiers and police may be injured or killed. These peacekeeping operations don't just go anywhere, they deploy in places where there is a genuine need to prevent further violence, and the role of such forces is to basically stand between combatants and then work to consolidate a more durable peace arrangement. For the French (or any) government to assert that the potential loss of even one of its troops is too high a cost for the protection of a substantial group of people is preposterous on any number of levels.

2) The UN General Assembly opening summit in 2005 agreed that all nations have a "responsibility to protect" (R2P) their own civilians from genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, and that the international community has an obligation to ensure that this responsibility is met both at home and abroad. Clearly, in Darfur, Lebanon and elsewhere, this principle has been violated. Honestly, R2P is a pretty basic concept that should have been adopted well before 2005, but that's beside the point. The fact remains that governments have agreed that this is a core concept of international relations, and thus it needs to be enforced.

To be perfectly honest, I'm tired of sitting around and waiting for the world to respond to the various crises that pop up each year. I'm tired of Nigeria, Pakistan and Bangladesh being the biggest peacekeeping troop contributing countries. If the Western world has all these wonderful values about protecting civilians and ensuring international peace -- the U.S., after all, essentially wrote the UN Charter -- then they should step up and do something about these conflicts. To fail to act smacks of everything from irresponsibility to racism. Yet to claim these lofty values from some higher level of morality while refusing to stand up for them simply reaks of the most arrogant hypocrisy. We need to not only reform the United Nations. We must also reform the way our leaders here in the West act and think.

That whole Darfur thing...

As someone who follows African conflicts basically all the damn time, I feel obliged to weigh in on the Darfur issue right off the bat.

The conflict is Darfur is absolutely miserable. There are multiple factions, multiple agendas, multiple interpretations of history and the present, and multiple attempts to either end or ignore the conflict itself. I'm one of those that believes that genocide is in fact taking place, and that this has been the case for at least two years now. Finally, a peace deal was signed late last week between the Khartoum government and the largest rebel faction, the SLM/A. Even though this has allegedly opened the door for UN peacekeepers, I'm still not terribly hopeful about the situation.

My primary concern is that the peace deal was signed by only one of three major factions. See, for things like ceasefires to work, you kinda have to get all sides to cease firing. Further, I have absolutely no confidence in the Khartoum government. Even though it has been relatively faithful to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that it signed with forces that had been fighting in Southern Sudan, there is still evidence that President Bashir and his cronies still try to sidestep the South, while taking in part of its oil money.

But part of my concern lies with the rest of the world too. Thanks for your protest last week. That was important. But it was a little late, no? Where were you two years ago? What kind of world is it that genocide takes two years to get a response?

Oh wait, we're talking about Africans being slaughtered. See the Rwanda example.

Why the Western interest now? We realized there might be oil in them there desert hills.

I'm not trying to be overly cynical. There are, in fact, boatloads of people who have expressed their concern over Darfur from the very beginning. I applaud those people, and I wish that I had been more vocal myself. But what we haven't seen in two years is real international action.

The African Union stepped up when nobody else did or would. They have fielded a peacekeeping operation in Darfur since 2004, although that mission is too small and lacks key equipment and essential funding. The mission should and now likely will be replaced by a UN operation. Yet this won't be any ordinary UN peacekeeping mission.

A peacekeeping operation in Darfur must be massive. After all, we're talking about a place the size of France. It took 21,000 peacekeepers in Sierra Leone to secure a peace that was more stable and in a country far smaller. It took 17,000 in Liberia. There are 17,000 more in Democratic Republic of Congo, and they can only cover about a third of that vast country. There are 10,000 coming to Southern Sudan, but again, that peace is more stable. In Southern Sudan, the war had raged for 20 years and it ended as much out of exhaustion as it did a real desire for some sort of peace.

So what should a UN mission in Darfur look like? Personally, I think you need at least 50,000 troops, complete with tanks and lots of helicopters. Those fighting in Darfur have not shown signs of exhaustion and don't seem terribly keen on this peace deal. This will be more peace enforcement than peacekeeping. It will be the biggest thing the UN has ever done. It will be ridiculously expensive. It will require huge logistical support. And it is entirely necessary. One of my former co-workers half-jokingly referred to this as "the invasion option." I don't think that's quite accurate. We don't need to conquer anything, we just have to stop the massive bloodshed. The whole original concept behind peacekeeping was to simply stand between two parties and refuse to let them kill each other.

A gentleman I met with tonight suggested that we first needed to buy off some of the parties in Darfur. However, with the discovery of oil wealth in the region, it will be impossible to buy off the spoilers unless they are promised a cut of the revenues. But wealth and power sharing can also be ensured by expanding the Government of National Unity to include Darfur representatives, and in short, some sort of political voice for the disenfranchised. It won't be perfect, but it's a start.

The fact of the matter is that Sudan is crumbling. In five years, the South will likely exercise its secession option. I think those in Darfur would like a similar option. There is also brewing conflict in Eastern Sudan that will likely lead to calls for independence, or at least autonomy. That leaves the Khartoum dominated center, which, by the way, has no resources at its disposal.
Thus the best we can do is make the disintegration a relatively calm one. Bashir and company are going to fight tooth and nail to stop it, and thus must be contained. The situation therefore requires a tremendous show of international resolve if we are to prevent further slaughter.