The Fanonite

So China is indirectly responsible for human rights abuses in Darfur by virtue of its business links with Sudan, and Steven Spielberg pulls support for the Beijing Olympics. Israel on the other hand is directly responsible for the creeping genocide of Palestinians, and what does he do? Make propaganda films to deflect attention from its crimes.

‘It’s gratifying to have a new focus on Darfur but China’s role in halting the country’s conflict is no bigger than anyone else’s’, writes Jonathan Steele

The excitement over Steven Spielberg’s withdrawal of support for the Beijing Olympics has helped to re-focus attention on Darfur. That is all to the good, especially if it leads his fellow-protesters to look more clearly at what is actually happening there and what moral responsibility China really has in allegedly failing to stop the war in Darfur. Brian Brivati wrote on this blog yesterday that “China is the key“, but is that really the case?

Wars always have at least two sides, and in the Darfur case that is an underestimate. There are around a dozen different rebel groups currently fighting the government. To put the blame on only one party makes no moral or political sense. The best way to stop the fighting and the humanitarian emergency that flows from it is to have an organised ceasefire and hold talks. This is what the Sudanese government did last October on the eve of the peace conference that the UN and the African Union held in Libya. Only a minority of the rebel groups reciprocated the ceasefire offer or attended the conference. They preferred to go on fighting, in part because they feel the one-sided approach of much of the outside world, with its exclusive pressure on the Khartoum government, helps their cause.

The point is slowly being accepted by many of the so-called Darfur support groups. Compared with three years ago, when the campaign started, their statements now show a greater willingness to recognise the rebels’ negative role in attacking aid workers, stealing humanitarian supplies, and raiding government-held villages and towns. The latest atrocity in early February when Khartoum-backed militias burnt down two towns in Western Darfur was provoked by attacks by the Justice and Equality Movement, one of the main groups which rejects peace talks. The pattern is depressingly familiar from almost every counterinsurgency campaign in history - rebel raids, which produce a government over-reaction. But who is to blame? If the rebels went to the peace table, there would have been no impulse for the government to respond with force.

The support groups still seem not to appreciate that the humanitarian situation has changed. Claims of genocide were never accepted by the UN, but the events that gave rise to them occurred in 2003 and 2004. Today’s Darfur is still appalling but not so bloody a place. In any case, the death rates of those years are heavily disputed, as is their cause. The victims of hunger and disease exacerbated by forced displacement are one-sidedly, and often deliberately, described by lobby groups as having been killed by government forces or their militias, as though they were executed.

Subsequent years have seen a huge deployment to Darfur of UN and other international aid agencies. They eliminated starvation and massively reduced death from disease. Displacement in overcrowded camps is no longterm solution and people need confidence and security to go home. But the need to bring in a more powerful UN peacekeeping force to help to ensure that should not obscure the fact that the humanitarian effort has already been one of the UN’s most successful interventions anywhere.

Getting governments to fulfil their promises of troops for the new hybrid UN/AU force in Darfur, trying to obtain more helicopters, and building the peacekeepers’ bases more quickly are important tasks. But, however well-equipped its force is, the UN cannot impose peace. That can only be done through a ceasefire and political talks. As Ban Ki-moon rightly said last week, “the deployment of Unamid will only be as effective as the political process it is mandated to support“.

How does China relate to this? It helped to pass the UN resolution to set up Unamid. It has contributed several hundred military engineers to Unamid. What more can it realistically do? The idea that it can pressure Khartoum “to stop the killing”, as Brivati wrote yesterday, is too simple. The killing is more likely to stop when the rebels come to the peace table that the AU and the UN (with China’s help) have laid out for them.