Darfur and the World

While hundreds of thousands have been slaughtered, and millions driven from their homes in Darfur, the world has found plenty of ways to look away. Now slowly, slowly they turn. According to an AP story:

A U.N. human rights team investigating crimes against humanity in Sudan's Darfur region zeroed in on the international community Monday for the first time, accusing the world's governments of an "inadequate and ineffective" response to widespread atrocities. In one of the hardest-hitting and most explicit reports in a series submitted to the world body, the team called for U.N. Security Council intervention, sanctions and criminal prosecution.

The Guardian adds: Headed by the Nobel peace laureate Jody Williams, the UN assessors found the Sudanese government was responsible for waging a ruthless campaign resulting in war crimes and human rights abuses. "The principal pattern is one of a violent counter-insurgency campaign waged by the government of the Sudan in concert with Janjaweed/militia, and targeting mostly civilians. Rebel forces are also guilty of serious abuses of human rights and violations of humanitarian law," Ms Williams's team found.

It calls on member states to raise a protection force in the Sudan. Among its other recommendations are that the UN Security Council "freeze funds, assets and economic resources" of those who commit the violations.

How bad is it? According to Time: If it's possible to degenerate from genocide, Darfur will probably do so in 2007. The four-year war that has caused the world's worst humanitarian crisis has spread and atomized. What was once a war zone the size of France has become an area the size of Western Europe. The 7,000 African Union peacekeepers in Darfur are overwhelmed. The threat of pullout hangs over the aid program in southern Sudan and Chad after persistent attacks on its workers. Last year the journal Science estimated the number killed since 2003 at more than 200,000. If news of another humanitarian crisis in Africa sounds grimly familiar, that's partly because the international response has also conformed to type: divided and ineffectual. China, which has large oil concessions in Sudan, continues to sell the government weapons and block sanctions at the U.N. Darfur is a test of man's humanity to man. So far, we're wanting.

It's not that nobody cares. There are efforts to raise money and awareness, such as Amnesty International's Global Music Activism Project, for which Yoko Ono has donated publishing royalties to the entire John Lennon catalog, to raise money for relief efforts in Darfur. But what little relief efforts are possible there now may be halted completely unless the violence is brought under some control.

While all of this--right down to the benefit concerts--seems sadly familiar, there is one new component: as mentioned in An Inconvenient Truth and supported in more detail by a new article in the Atlantic magazine (via Climate Progress ): one of the major causes of turmoil--the fight over dwindling resources in a prolonged drought--has as a major contributing cause: the Climate Crisis. “This was not caused by people cutting trees or overgrazing,” says Columbia University’s Alessandra Giannini, who led one of the analyses. The roots of the drying of Darfur, she and her colleagues had found, lay in changes to the global climate.

The article points out two conclusions from this: that the Climate Crisis contribution adds to the moral responsibility we have to address the Darfur genocide, because If the region’s collapse was in some part caused by the emissions from our factories, power plants, and automobiles, we bear some responsibility for the dying. And that, as the Climate Crisis continues and gets worse, this is likely to be only our first Darfur, and the first climate war of the century that may be characterized by them.

If this war now engulfs an area the size of western Europe, it comes close to what we call the First World War. It is in many way the whole world's first war of this century.