If You Like Bosnia, You'll Love Darfur

Cross-posted from American Princess.

There was, a month or so ago, an increase in interest in invading Sudan as an alternative to the Iraq War, as though holding the United States to a higher standard made a winnable war an undesirable endavor. Sudan is great, if you like civil unrest where both sides are essentially responsible for the massacre of innocents, and interestly enough, keep it going so that they might gain control of land thats been in dispute for centuries.

Sudan's government last month agreed to a peace accord pledging to disarm Arab janjaweed militias and resettle displaced civilians. By contrast, Darfur's black rebels, who are touted by the wristband crowd as freedom fighters, rejected the deal because it did not give them full regional control. Put simply, the rebels were willing to let genocide continue against their own people rather than compromise their demand for power.

International mediators were shamefaced. They had presented the plan as take it or leave it, to compel Khartoum's acceptance. But now the ostensible representatives of the victims were balking. Embarrassed American officials were forced to ask Sudan for further concessions beyond the ultimatum that it had already accepted.

Luckily, Khartoum gave over more land, with the wonderful side effect of...encouraging the black rebels to continue the violence for even longer.

Despite Amensty International insisting that the Janjaweed are massacreing millions without cause, and right-wingers who are quick to take the side of the "rebels" because they arent "Islamofacists," neither side is without fault in Darfur. Certainly, the Janjaweed have been all too happy to murder without thought millions of black "rebels" in payback for the decades of abuse they received before they gained power, but the rebels themselves are also happy to allow innocent bystanders to lose their lives if it means that the West--and the United Nations--is willing to step in on their behalf and force the Janjaweed to turn over land that they "stole" from the rebels, who started the whole mess trying to regain lost land. The massacres came afterward.

Because of the Save Darfur movement, however, the rebels believe that the longer they provoke genocidal retaliation, the more the West will pressure Sudan to hand them control of the region. Sadly, this message was reinforced when the rebels' initial rejection of peace last month was rewarded by American officials' extracting further concessions from Khartoum.

In other words, its nothing but a major civil war, very much like Bosnia, where we entered on a massacre of Albanians, and left a massacre of Serbians. And to top it all off, the Janjaweed aren't even the most fundamentally Islamic group fighting in this thing. That title belongs to one of the three rebel factions, the largest one, but not the most powerful.

Nice. Sounds like, if we were to enter into this mess, a great time would be had by all. Where's Wesley Clarke when you need him? What did he say about running international conflict operations with the United Nations at the helm? Oh right, that the idea sucked. Big time.

The answer is probably not withdrawal or ignorance. So long as third world dictatorships and corrupt governments continue to exist on the African contient, much of the Wests generoisty will go without any verifiable success. In other words, if we simply leave this alone, the entire Live 8 concert will have been for nothing. But the answer is not international military intervention, either.

We have an International Court of Justice for a reason. For so long, its been used to hammer the United States with requests to turn over government officials and attempt to overturn international custom at the whim of European secularists and One World Document signatories, but its never fulfilled its actual purpose: that is, hammering warlords over their crimes of genocide. Here, there is a legitimate use for the ICC, but instead the United Nations would rather insist that corrupt governments and insiduous land grabs are not responsible for the poverty and death. In the grand liberal scheme, throwing money at a problem is always a solution, and perhaps thats consoling on a small scale medicaid operation, but when thousands of people are dying because two sides are using them as pawns in an international chess game, theres an obvious issue.

Three hundred thousand lost their lives to Saddam, perhaps ten thousand to these two yahoo factions, and the United Nations cannot yet decide on a course of action that is not Security Council discussion-oriented. The mistakes are costing lives around the globe.