Why doesn’t the UN stop the genocide in Darfur?

The UN Security Council has the power to take action against Sudan. This could ultimately include military action, under the new doctrine of “responsibility to protect”, which allows for collective measures to stop crimes against humanity. So far, it remains empty rhetoric.

The UN’s timid response is part of a pattern of appeasement of genocide. In recent crises, secretariat officials and the Security Council have prioritised realpolitik over the humanitarian obligations of the UN.

In January 1994 Kofi Annan, then head of UN peacekeeping, refused General Romeo Dallaire, the UN commander in Rwanda, permission to raid the Hutu arms caches. Soon after, the Security Council reduced his troops from 2,500 to 250. Hutu extremists slaughtered 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

In May 1995 Yasushi Akashi, the top UN official in former Yugoslavia, refused permission for an airstrike against the Bosnian Serbs because he said it might “weaken” President Milosevic, who he believed was needed for a peace deal. Two months later, Dutch peacekeepers at Srebrenica handed over up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys to the Bosnian Serbs, who then slaughtered them.

Defenders of the UN say that its institutions merely reflect the policies of its members. Omar al-Bashir, the President of Sudan, exploits the divisions skilfully. Knowing that there is little or no appetite in the West for military confrontation with another Muslim country, Sudan filibusters over the terms of the tortuously slow diplomacy over Darfur.

Sporadic attempts by Britain, France and the US at the UN Security Council to call Sudan to account or to institute sanctions have been blocked by Sudan’s main ally, China, which buys Sudanese oil and sells weapons to Sudan. Here is global chaos theory at work: an African child is thrown into the flames in Darfur, so that a commuter may drive to work in Beijing.

The slaughter in Darfur could be curtailed or even brought to a close without military intervention. Measures might include: deploying UN troops in Chad to prevent cross-border raids; targeted sanctions on Sudan’s oil industry; using trade to pressure China to stop its support for Khartoum; and even threats to boycott the Beijing Olympics.

If there were sufficient political will. It seems there is not. If we cannot act to help to stop the killing, at least we could provide a safe home for Darfuris here. On January 27, on Holocaust Memorial Day, government ministers once more pledged “never again”. How empty those words sound now. The Home Office organised the first Holocaust Memorial Day ceremonies. Now civil servants in the same ministry are overseeing the deportation to likely imprisonment, torture, even death, of refugees fleeing the 21st-century’s first genocide. Have we no shame?

Complicity with Evil: the United Nations in the Age of Modern Genocide, by Adam LeBor, is published by Yale University Press.

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