Burnt Orange Report

More from Sudan

By Zach Neumann

The U.N. has reached definite conclusions about the violence in Sudan. The NY Times reported today that:

A United Nations commission investigating violence in the Darfur region of Sudan reported Monday that it had found a pattern of mass killings and forced displacement of civilians that did not constitute genocide but that represented crimes of similar gravity that should be sent to the International Criminal Court for prosecution.

In a 176-page report, the five-member panel said that its finding that genocide had not been committed "should not be taken in any way as detracting from the gravity of the crimes perpetrated in that region," and that "international offenses such as the crimes against humanity and war crimes that have been committed in Darfur may be no less serious and heinous than genocide."

The commission was appointed by Secretary General Kofi Annan in October to determine whether genocide had occurred in Darfur, in Western Sudan, where about 70,000 villagers have been killed and 1.8 million driven from their land.

It was also asked to determine how anyone convicted should be punished, and it answered by saying it "strongly" recommended that the Security Council refer the Darfur crimes to the international court in The Hague. It said the crimes in Darfur met the jurisdictional terms of the 1998 treaty creating the court.
That course of action is favored by most members of the 15-member Council, but the United States has said it will vigorously resist because it objects to the court.

The panel said the Sudanese justice system had proved unwilling or unable to pursue the crimes in what it described as a "climate of almost total impunity for human rights violations."
While the commission said that no evidence of an organized governmental act of genocide existed, it suggested that there might have been government officials and other people who acted "with genocidal intent." Only a court could make that determination, it said.

Many prominent politicians and academics have condemned the U.N. commission for its refusal to brand the tragic events in Sudan as constituting genocide. Though I can understand their dismay, I feel that the U.N. commission made a wise, if not popular, decision.

The term genocide was devised by Samuel Lemkin in the 1940’s to describe “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.” In creating the word genocide, Lemkin was attempting to give a specific label to the phenomenal crimes of the Holocaust. By all accounts, he was successful. Genocide was quickly adapted into popular usage and came to describe the routinized destruction of specific national and ethnic groups.

In recent years, Lemkin’s “word” has taken on unintended meanings as it has been used by policymakers to describe widespread violence against civilian populations. While I think it is of the utmost importance to capture the horrors that occur when a state makes war against its people (or against those of another state), such descriptions must be distinguished from act of genocide. In my mind, genocide is a crime that’s magnitude far exceeds that of massive slaughter. Tainted by fanatical racism, genocide represents the potential elimination of entire cultural and language groups—a loss to human civilization that has implications that extend far beyond physical death.

Getting back to Sudan, I do not think that the atrocities in Darfur constituted genocide. While I agree (with the U.N. commission) that the actions of Bashir et al. entailed violence on par with genocide, I think they took a bold step in making a distinction between tremendous slaughter and the systematic extermination of an entire national/cultural group.

Samantha Power’s book, “A Problem From Hell” influenced this post. I would recommend it to anyone interested in genocide.