Interventions (15 page)

I also found a strong and determined partner in France's Jacques Chirac, in particular over the intractable crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). In 2003, and with the withdrawal of thousands of Ugandan troops from the peacekeeping mission who had been based in the eastern Congo province of Ituri, a collapse in the security situation threatened to engulf the entire civilian population of the area. A firm military intervention, of the kind that went beyond the impartial peacekeeping that had been implemented hitherto in the province, was urgently necessary to buy time for the peacebuilding process in the area. The problems of eastern Congo were deep and protracted, and remain so, but Chirac responded to my call for a force to protect the people of Ituri from at least this imminent danger. He swiftly dispatched a well-armed French unit to lead this brief but essential intervention by a wider European force to strengthen the UN presence in the DRC.

While the debates on humanitarian intervention were often divisive—challenging as they did a right to noninterference that justly was considered sacred by developing countries in particular—the question of a “responsibility to protect” was, by definition, more inclusive, cooperative, and nonconfrontational. It was a brilliant innovation, which helped take the argument further. The launch of my report
In Larger Freedom
in 2005 generated a formal member state endorsement of the Responsibility to Protect. Six years after I had launched the debate on sovereignty and intervention, the members of the United Nations formally adopted a principle of individual and collective dignity.

This was less of a radical break with United Nations practice than its opponents would suggest. Of course, a legitimate concern was the fear of selective application of the principle by some members of the Security Council, guided by other, less noble, motives. Still, the old orthodoxy of distinguishing between internal conflicts and “threat to international peace and security,” in the language of the Charter, was never, in fact, absolute. The Charter, after all, was issued in the name of the “We the peoples,” not the “We the governments” of the United Nations. Its aim is not only to preserve international peace—vitally important though that is—but also to “reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person.” The Charter was never meant as a license for governments to deny human rights or human dignity. Sovereignty always implied not just power, but responsibility.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was not meant as a purely rhetorical statement. The General Assembly that adopted it also decided, in the same month, that it had the right to express its concern about the apartheid system in South Africa. There the principle of international concern for human rights took precedence over the claim of noninterference in international affairs. And the day before it adopted the Universal Declaration, the General Assembly had adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which puts all states under an obligation to “prevent and punish” the most heinous of crimes.

The Responsibility to Protect is a deceptively benign-sounding concept. In fact, as we've seen, it represents a deep and disturbing challenge to those leaders who wish to treat their people with impunity. As Kosovo and East Timor taught us, the realities of power, the utility of force, and the summoning of political will can on occasion come together in a near-perfect combination for reality to match rhetoric in the commitment to shield civilians from gross abuses of human rights.

But if anyone doubted the limits of the new understanding of sovereignty and intervention, or the scale of the ever-present challenge of political will, events in the remote Sudanese province of Darfur would show just how far one government could go in persecuting a people, and how little the world would do about it.

D
ARFUR
: T
HE
F
AILURE TO
P
ROTECT

Just as the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect was beginning to make progress in the corridors of international diplomacy and the minds of statesmen, the practice of protecting civilians was collapsing into one of its greatest and most agonizingly protracted failures in history: Darfur.

In December 2003, I issued my first statement of alarm at the situation in Darfur. But with a Security Council that had no desire to place the complicated and heavy demands of Darfur on its agenda, I could do little more than make verbal appeals and try and negotiate throughout this protracted period—but with few carrots and sticks in my hands.

Where Rwanda was staggering in its intensity, leaving eight hundred thousand dead in just one hundred days, Darfur was equally so in its protraction. Many chart the beginning of the conflict from February 26, 2003—only days before the United States and the UK conducted their invasion of Iraq without Security Council authorization—when a largely unknown rebel group conducted a raid on a small airfield in a corner of Darfur, an act that few, including the UN in New York, took any notice of at the time.

While the Sudanese government's response began in only the weeks and months after, Darfur's population, in truth, had been in the grip of insecurity and violence for years. Hard-pressed communities had long faced sporadic attacks on their villages, livelihoods, and bodies. The absence of any rule of law or government sources of protection partly underpinned the rebellion that triggered the conflict. But what came in the months after February 26, 2003, was a torturously long, unfolding war that would bring violations of human rights on a colossal scale.

Even before the raid in March 2003, the government of Sudan was already embroiled in several other violent conflicts within its borders, tying up most of its military resources. First, it was faced with a conflict in the east, near the border with Eritrea. More important, there was the issue of the south, where the government was still dealing with the remains of a twenty-year civil war with that region's secessionist movement—a conflict in the final throes of an arduous and, until then, long-faltering peace process. On top of these wars, Khartoum now faced another, and highly potent, insurrection drawn from the non-Arab communities of Darfur. Under these circumstances, with stretched military resources, the government of Sudan, from mid-2003, began developing its counterinsurgency strategy for Darfur: a war by proxy and atrocity.

To tackle the threat of the Darfur rebellion, the government unleashed a lawless coalition of proxy actors. It was a form of warfare waged through local militias, armed bands, and other tribal groups. It was fluid and shifting, but it came together to create a terrifying and devastating force against the people of Darfur in a process that became increasingly apparent to the international community by late 2003. It was at this time that my senior UN staff began to issue public warnings to the international community that something terrible was unfolding in Darfur.

The core component of this marauding army of gangs and tribal fighters was the camel- and horse-mounted Janjaweed, armed herders from the Arab Baggara tribes. They were supplied with weapons by the Sudanese army and were allowed free rein to carry out raids on the non-Arab villages of Darfur. The previous pattern of sporadic raiding in the region was now replaced with an unrestrained and systematic assault on the lives and livelihoods of the non-Arab communities across the province. The brutal strategic logic underpinning this method was simple: if the population was driven from its places of refuge, then the rebels would be, too.

With the Janjaweed supplied by Sudanese military intelligence, and closely supported by government military assets in the form of helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft loaded with rockets, bombs, and heavy machine guns, there was little Darfur's people could do to protect themselves from this hybrid modern-medieval rampage of pillaging and mass rape. There could be no refined targeting with a force such as the Janjaweed. The government of Sudan had willfully unleashed and supported a process that would grow without restraint into an assault against an entire population. The choice for civilians, when faced with Janjaweed attacks, was to be raped, mutilated, and killed, or flee and take to the barely preferable desert landscape.

—

E
arly in the crisis, on March 29, 2004, in the midst of a series of telephone calls to other heads of state and actors engaged in the conflicts in Sudan, with knowledge of these terrible developments in Darfur heavy on my mind, I made a personal telephone call to the president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir. I was in Bürgenstock, Switzerland, involved in hard negotiations on the Cyprus peace process, which we were trying to herd into an endgame. Juggling multiple crises was our bread-and-butter by now, and I had been trying to reach Bashir for some time, so I broke from the proceedings when this opportunity finally arose.

“I'm calling about the situation in Darfur, which I consider to be grave,” I said, pausing to allow the interpreter to convey my words. “The situation is very bad, indeed,” I continued. “I have received sustained and credible reports that Janjaweed fighters are continuing to rape, murder, and drive people off their lands. There are an estimated seven hundred thousand internally displaced persons, as well as large numbers of refugees in Chad. The people need protection from the Janjaweed. This is a situation that is urgent and, I must stress, unacceptable.”

I saw no point in cloaking the purpose or tenor of my call, but I was acutely aware that my statements to Bashir were a slim recourse compared with the threats of force—whether implicit or explicit—that would surely be needed to have any hope of obtaining Khartoum's full compliance with our demands. But with the Security Council taking little interest in its responsibilities for the plight of Darfur's civilians, and without any member state with the resolve necessary to issue serious and credible threats of an intervention in Darfur, this was the only route I could take.

Even so, in the face of my frank words, I was still amazed by the response from Bashir. Greased with easy diplomacy, he even thanked me for my concern. He waved away my worries with the claim that the situation was entirely overblown in the media. “The situation in Darfur is quiet,” he said. As far as he was concerned, the only problems in the province were those caused by the rebels, not the government-backed Janjaweed.

He then evaded a question I put to him on his view of the feasibility of a cease-fire. He was not going to offer me, or anybody, a promise to soften his government's counterinsurgency campaign. Without any Security Council resolve I knew, as he knew, that there was nothing I could do to push his government off a course it was determined to take.

But I was able to try to pressure Bashir, at least, on the issue of access for humanitarian supplies and humanitarian workers. In our conversation, he repeatedly claimed that, given the “quiet” situation in Darfur, there was no obstacle to humanitarian supplies across the province.

“So, if my people have difficulties with humanitarian access or deliveries, they can come to you?” I inquired. Given his stance, I sensed that even a slight personal desire to maintain his credibility, if only on an amicable level with me, meant that he would have to agree to this suggestion. This would be a promise that I could then hold him to later. “OK,” Bashir affirmed, in an uncharacteristically curt response.

Using his words to box him into this slight corner seemed to give us a small result. The one thing that did improve in the coming weeks was the increase in the accessibility of humanitarian supplies to certain parts of Darfur. This was barely a positive outcome, given the magnitude of the situation. But I thought it might at least do something to help some people in Darfur who otherwise would have suffered or died without this assistance.

That phone call, and other conversations that followed regarding Darfur, happened in a dangerous vacuum—one of political pressure and political will among powerful states regarding Darfur, particularly on the Security Council. Over the coming months and years, as the conflict wore on, estimates suggested that upwards of a half million people would die as a result of the Sudanese government's strategy in Darfur, alongside millions more who were forcibly displaced and their livelihoods destroyed. The government of Sudan was not willing or able to protect its population from mass violations of human rights—and it would prove this time and again over the weeks that became months that became years of crisis.

The solution was clear, if difficult. Outside actors had a responsibility to protect civilians in Darfur, to step in and stop the assault—with or without the permission of the government of Sudan.

By late 2003, different voices were calling for action, including our own at the UN. The international community had to do something. After Rwanda, the world had said “Never again.” But the Security Council refused to provide the leadership and resolve necessary to tackle the crisis in Darfur head-on. This reluctance appeared at the earlier stages to be motivated by well-meaning concern for the success of the Sudanese North-South peace process, which we all hoped was nearing an end in late 2003 and early 2004. The North-South civil war in Sudan had lasted over twenty years and had taken millions of lives, hitherto proving impervious to any peaceful resolution. Ending this conflict was a huge prize for peace, which the parties to the negotiations—led by a troika of the United States, the UK, and Norway—were rightfully determined to see through. When the reports of violence against Darfur's civilians began to accumulate in December 2003 and January 2004, it was explicitly recognized among all diplomatic parties to the negotiations that to hammer hard on the Darfur issue now could derail the entire North-South peace process—and with it the benefit to millions of Sudanese.

In December 2003 and early January 2004, given the stakes in the conflict in the South, and with peace there within our grasp, I agreed with this analysis. I instructed my staff that if we were not to lose the North-South peace process, we would have to, for now, only subtly pursue the emerging Darfur issue, discussing it on the margins of other meetings, rather than allowing it to appear center stage in negotiations with the government. It was terrible to have to make such a choice. We could either pursue a condemnatory route, which could potentially then destroy the delicate peace processes in the south, in turn doing little for the west; or, continue on course to complete the peace process in the south while doing what we could to persuade the government to curtail and end the crisis in Darfur. At best, we hoped we might conclude the major steps of the North-South process quickly enough to then apply full and decisive diplomatic attention to Darfur.