No peacekeepers, no peace

Did the peace agreement just end up providing cover for the Sudanese government?

It has done exactly that. The current offensive in North Darfur state is massive by all accounts.

The U.N.'s Integrated Regional Information Networks reported Monday an expanding bombing campaign by Khartoum's Antonovs, which are not bombers per se. They're cargo planes that are retrofitted. Crude barrel bombs are pushed out the back cargo bay, which means that they're useless for real military purposes. They can hit villages, but they can't be much more precise than that. They're exquisitely suited to civilian terror, but they have almost no true military purpose.

And these attacks are expanding with the effect of displacing more and more thousands of Darfuris. They're fleeing southward to the [refugee] camps in the El Fasher area. El Fasher is the capital of North Darfur. It's where the major air base for all of Darfur is for Khartoum's air force. And it's from there that the Antonovs and the helicopter gunships are taking off.

In the camps ... we're [also] seeing an increasing ethnic polarization. The Zaghawa and the Fur, in particular, have an extremely tense relationship. The camps themselves could become targets. There are weapons now in the camps. There is this increasing ethnic animosity. If the camps are attacked frontally, we will see massacres.

These camps are completely vulnerable. There is no way that the African Union can prevent a frontal assault if Khartoum [or its allies] decide to attack. And we've seen such attacks previously, but now we have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people, over 2 million people, displaced in the camps, and maybe a third of them in North Darfur, and they are extremely vulnerable.

The villages being targeted right now by Khartoum are primarily the surviving Fur villages. Estimates of the percentage of the non-Arab or African villages that have been destroyed are 80 or 90 percent. Perhaps somewhat less in North Darfur, but that is now changing very rapidly with the current military offensive.

Why did the situation get worse?

It's worsened because the peace agreement was overwhelming rejected by Darfuris on the ground. The agreement provides only $30 million in compensation for people who have lost everything. The wealth of generations in the form of cattle looted or killed or destroyed or lost, all the food stocks, all the seed stocks, all the agricultural implements, poisoned wells, burned villages, looted homes.

Four million people are being asked to accept $30 million in compensation. That works out to be about $8 dollars a person. There is simply no way that you begin your life again with $8 when you've lost everything. This compensation issue is hugely significant to Darfuris. They also saw clearly that the security arrangements were essentially left in Khartoum's hands, and they don't trust Khartoum.

It's clear that cataclysmic human destruction is in the works. These people, after three and a half years of conflict, have no resources other than those from the humanitarian community. When humanitarians withdraw, that means food doesn't get through. There are some 400,000 people in North Darfur who haven't had food for three months now. This is the height of the so-called hunger gap between nominal spring planting and fall harvest. There wasn't any spring planting, and there won't be any fall harvest, but this is the worst time of year for food. When humanitarians withdraw, so too do the resources by which water is purified, one of the only measures against a massive outbreak of cholera. It will claim tens of thousands of lives in camps that lose access to clean water.

The Sudanese government said it won't allow the U.N. peacekeeping forces into the country. Why?

Khartoum has been emboldened to the point of believing that they can stiff the international community by any number of actions, by the failure of the U.N. Security Council to make good on its 10 previous Security Council resolutions, by Khartoum's ability to thumb its nose without consequence at the international criminal court investigating crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and genocide in Darfur.

The Khartoum regime believes there is no will to deploy [troops] non-consensually, and U.N. Security Council resolution 1706 declares that nothing -- I'm paraphrasing -- nothing in this resolution will affect the government of Sudan's claim to national sovereignty. Khartoum has declared very bluntly that they regard any U.N. forces as precisely that -- an infringement upon their sovereignty.

So the resolution does in fact confer upon Khartoum the right to reject the force that might halt the genocide. This is an obscenity in the wake of the U.N. World Summit of 2005, which produced an outcome document, which says that the international community adopts a responsibility to protect civilians who are not protected by their own government, or who are the targets of their own government. That is exactly the situation we have in Darfur. It was framed so as to supersede claims of national sovereignty such as Khartoum is now making.

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