Is Darfur's Rescue At Hand?

The government of Sudan whose Arab-dominated administration has been accused of genocide against black African Darfurians has finally relented, assenting to the United Nations request that a UN peacekeeping group be permitted to assist troops of the African Union in bringing an end to the current impasse. Over a period of four years, the government of Sudan's military along with Arab militias, the Janjaweed, have succeeded in incurring violence on ethnic blacks on a horrendous scale.

The Sudanese government's refusal to admit a 'white' UN peacekeeping group into the country to assist the poorly equipped and badly trained African Union force of 3,000 has meant that the mass displacement of black farmers and villagers, the rape of women and children, the rampant murders have simply continued despite the horrified objections of a seemingly powerless world body.

That two hundred thousand people have been killed and two and a half million left homeless is an unspeakable travesty of the United Nations' pledge to observe the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect.

Black Darfurians held in refugee camps are still ongoing victims of murder and rape when they venture outside the confines of the camps for firewood or water. The camps themselves have been subject to helicopter gunship strafing and bombing. Sudan has been immune to the world's pleadings, comfortable with its newfound wealth in oil and gas, supplying clients such as China, buying back from China weapons and military aircraft, and taking in investment funds for infrastructure support of its energy industry.

The insurrection of the ethnic black Sudanese that resulted in the current conflict was a reaction to the unfair treatment they experienced by their government, the neglect of their needs in favour of the Arab population within the country. A traditional live-and-let-live situation whereby the sheep-herders and the agriculturalists accommodated one another had become imperilled as a result of drought now thought to have been occasioned by climate change. The government response to the uprising was a swift and brutal one.

The UN's projected peacekeeping force has yet to be assembled from among volunteer countries represented by the UN membership, and that can take months yet before they can be deployed. The government in Khartoum makes no secret of its expectation that the African Union will lead the mission in Darfur, while the understanding is that the UN mission will be more widespread throughout Sudan.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir insists his country as a sovereign state, has the right and the obligation to 'protect' all its citizens - at the same time that the state has been complicit in the murder of so many of its citizens. He objects to the very thought of foreign peacekeepers using force should the need arise, to protect civilians.

"It is our responsibility to protect the civilians; nobody can take it from us," declared Sudan's ambassador to the United Nations. "This is a sovereign right." The logic of which should escape anyone with a time-line and past exposure to the various media presenting news coverage of the events as they unfolded over the past four years detailing the total carnage in Darfur.

Which is when the Islamic government mounted its response to the unrest and dissatisfaction in Darfur and, with the enthusiastic assistance of the Janjaweed swept across the country, destroying hundreds of villages in their wake, killing all inhabitants suspected of being rebel sympathizers. Which needless to say would have been anyone at all among the ethnic black Sudanese.

We can only hope that this will be the final note to this grim disaster, but Sudan has changed its mind on other occasions and may find it expedient to do so again.