No peacekeepers, no peace

Sept. 15, 2006 | The clock is ticking in Darfur.

The African Union's monitoring mission in the west Sudan region is cash-poor, ineffective and undermanned at 7,000 soldiers. The United Nations wants to take over peacekeeping duties when the monitoring mission's mandate expires at the end of September. Yet Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, has threatened to send his army to fight any U.N. troops in Darfur. If the African Union pulls out in two weeks, and no blue helmets take their place, there won't be any outsiders to witness, much less prevent, what is happening in Darfur, where a massive military offensive against the civilian population is under way.

Despite a high-profile peace agreement signed in May by the government in Khartoum and one of the rebel groups, the situation on the ground in Darfur has grown more dire. Tuesday, Jan Egeland, the U.N. humanitarian chief, told reporters that "in many ways Darfur is in freefall at the moment," with some areas simply too dangerous for humanitarian aid workers to provide relief. Thirteen aid workers have been killed in Darfur since the peace agreement was signed.

Estimates of the number of people who have died so far in the 3-and-a-half-year-old crisis top half a million. American authorities have used the word "genocide" to describe what the Arab-dominated Sudanese government and its allies are doing to the region's black Muslim residents. Now, almost half a million refugees living in camps are cut off from all outside aid, according to the U.N. World Food Program.

This Sunday, Darfur activists will rally in New York's Central Park, wearing blue hats to symbolize the need for U.N. peacekeeping forces. Salon spoke by phone with Eric Reeves, an English professor at Smith College, who over the past eight years has become an expert on the Darfur region and the conflict. Speaking from his home in Northampton, Mass., Reeves explained what he believes the United Nations should do now to head off the deepening humanitarian crisis.

That peace agreement in the spring got a lot of international attention. Why isn't there peace?

The Darfur peace agreement had no chance from the beginning, precisely because it was signed by only one of the rebel parties.

Since May 5th, when this was signed, not a single deadline has been met, not a single obligation specified in terms of the security arrangements has been upheld by Khartoum. This was entirely predictable. With only the African Union as both guarantee and guarantor, this was an impossible situation. It was doomed from the beginning.

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