Interventions

by Kofi Annan

  While the Sudanese government’s response began in only the weeks and months after, Darfur’s population, in truth, had been in the grip of insecurity and violence for years. Hard-pressed communities had long faced sporadic attacks on their villages, livelihoods, and bodies. The absence of any rule of law or government sources of protection partly underpinned the rebellion that triggered the conflict. But what came in the months after February 26, 2003, was a torturously long, unfolding war that would bring violations of human rights on a colossal scale.

  Even before the raid in March 2003, the government of Sudan was already embroiled in several other violent conflicts within its borders, tying up most of its military resources. First, it was faced with a conflict in the east, near the border with Eritrea. More important, there was the issue of the south, where the government was still dealing with the remains of a twenty-year civil war with that region’s secessionist movement—a conflict in the final throes of an arduous and, until then, long-faltering peace process. On top of these wars, Khartoum now faced another, and highly potent, insurrection drawn from the non-Arab communities of Darfur. Under these circumstances, with stretched military resources, the government of Sudan, from mid-2003, began developing its counterinsurgency strategy for Darfur: a war by proxy and atrocity.

  To tackle the threat of the Darfur rebellion, the government unleashed a lawless coalition of proxy actors. It was a form of warfare waged through local militias, armed bands, and other tribal groups. It was fluid and shifting, but it came together to create a terrifying and devastating force against the people of Darfur in a process that became increasingly apparent to the international community by late 2003. It was at this time that my senior UN staff began to issue public warnings to the international community that something terrible was unfolding in Darfur.

  The core component of this marauding army of gangs and tribal fighters was the camel- and horse-mounted Janjaweed, armed herders from the Arab Baggara tribes. They were supplied with weapons by the Sudanese army and were allowed free rein to carry out raids on the non-Arab villages of Darfur. The previous pattern of sporadic raiding in the region was now replaced with an unrestrained and systematic assault on the lives and livelihoods of the non-Arab communities across the province. The brutal strategic logic underpinning this method was simple: if the population was driven from its places of refuge, then the rebels would be, too.

  With the Janjaweed supplied by Sudanese military intelligence, and closely supported by government military assets in the form of helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft loaded with rockets, bombs, and heavy machine guns, there was little Darfur’s people could do to protect themselves from this hybrid modern-medieval rampage of pillaging and mass rape. There could be no refined targeting with a force such as the Janjaweed. The government of Sudan had willfully unleashed and supported a process that would grow without restraint into an assault against an entire population. The choice for civilians, when faced with Janjaweed attacks, was to be raped, mutilated, and killed, or flee and take to the barely preferable desert landscape.

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  Early in the crisis, on March 29, 2004, in the midst of a series of telephone calls to other heads of state and actors engaged in the conflicts in Sudan, with knowledge of these terrible developments in Darfur heavy on my mind, I made a personal telephone call to the president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir. I was in Bürgenstock, Switzerland, involved in hard negotiations on the Cyprus peace process, which we were trying to herd into an endgame. Juggling multiple crises was our bread-and-butter by now, and I had been trying to reach Bashir for some time, so I broke from the proceedings when this opportunity finally arose.

  “I’m calling about the situation in Darfur, which I consider to be grave,” I said, pausing to allow the interpreter to convey my words. “The situation is very bad, indeed,” I continued. “I have received sustained and credible reports that Janjaweed fighters are continuing to rape, murder, and drive people off their lands. There are an estimated seven hundred thousand internally displaced persons, as well as large numbers of refugees in Chad. The people need protection from the Janjaweed. This is a situation that is urgent and, I must stress, unacceptable.”

  I saw no point in cloaking the purpose or tenor of my call, but I was acutely aware that my statements to Bashir were a slim recourse compared with the threats of force—whether implicit or explicit—that would surely be needed to have any hope of obtaining Khartoum’s full compliance with our demands. But with the Security Council taking little interest in its responsibilities for the plight of Darfur’s civilians, and without any member state with the resolve necessary to issue serious and credible threats of an intervention in Darfur, this was the only route I could take.

  Even so, in the face of my frank words, I was still amazed by the response from Bashir. Greased with easy diplomacy, he even thanked me for my concern. He waved away my worries with the claim that the situation was entirely overblown in the media. “The situation in Darfur is quiet,” he said. As far as he was concerned, the only problems in the province were those caused by the rebels, not the government-backed Janjaweed.

  He then evaded a question I put to him on his view of the feasibility of a cease-fire. He was not going to offer me, or anybody, a promise to soften his government’s counterinsurgency campaign. Without any Security Council resolve I knew, as he knew, that there was nothing I could do to push his government off a course it was determined to take.

  But I was able to try to pressure Bashir, at least, on the issue of access for humanitarian supplies and humanitarian workers. In our conversation, he repeatedly claimed that, given the “quiet” situation in Darfur, there was no obstacle to humanitarian supplies across the province.

  “So, if my people have difficulties with humanitarian access or deliveries, they can come to you?” I inquired. Given his stance, I sensed that even a slight personal desire to maintain his credibility, if only on an amicable level with me, meant that he would have to agree to this suggestion. This would be a promise that I could then hold him to later. “OK,” Bashir affirmed, in an uncharacteristically curt response.

  Using his words to box him into this slight corner seemed to give us a small result. The one thing that did improve in the coming weeks was the increase in the accessibility of humanitarian supplies to certain parts of Darfur. This was barely a positive outcome, given the magnitude of the situation. But I thought it might at least do something to help some people in Darfur who otherwise would have suffered or died without this assistance.

  That phone call, and other conversations that followed regarding Darfur, happened in a dangerous vacuum—one of political pressure and political will among powerful states regarding Darfur, particularly on the Security Council. Over the coming months and years, as the conflict wore on, estimates suggested that upwards of a half million people would die as a result of the Sudanese government’s strategy in Darfur, alongside millions more who were forcibly displaced and their livelihoods destroyed. The government of Sudan was not willing or able to protect its population from mass violations of human rights—and it would prove this time and again over the weeks that became months that became years of crisis.

  The solution was clear, if difficult. Outside actors had a responsibility to protect civilians in Darfur, to step in and stop the assault—with or without the permission of the government of Sudan.

  By late 2003, different voices were calling for action, including our own at the UN. The international community had to do something. After Rwanda, the world had said “Never again.” But the Security Council refused to provide the leadership and resolve necessary to tackle the crisis in Darfur head-on. This reluctance appeared at the earlier stages to be motivated by well-meaning concern for the success of the Sudanese North-South peace process, which we all hoped was nearing an end in late 2003 and early 2004. The North-South civil war in Sudan had lasted over twenty years and had taken millio
ns of lives, hitherto proving impervious to any peaceful resolution. Ending this conflict was a huge prize for peace, which the parties to the negotiations—led by a troika of the United States, the UK, and Norway—were rightfully determined to see through. When the reports of violence against Darfur’s civilians began to accumulate in December 2003 and January 2004, it was explicitly recognized among all diplomatic parties to the negotiations that to hammer hard on the Darfur issue now could derail the entire North-South peace process—and with it the benefit to millions of Sudanese.

  In December 2003 and early January 2004, given the stakes in the conflict in the South, and with peace there within our grasp, I agreed with this analysis. I instructed my staff that if we were not to lose the North-South peace process, we would have to, for now, only subtly pursue the emerging Darfur issue, discussing it on the margins of other meetings, rather than allowing it to appear center stage in negotiations with the government. It was terrible to have to make such a choice. We could either pursue a condemnatory route, which could potentially then destroy the delicate peace processes in the south, in turn doing little for the west; or, continue on course to complete the peace process in the south while doing what we could to persuade the government to curtail and end the crisis in Darfur. At best, we hoped we might conclude the major steps of the North-South process quickly enough to then apply full and decisive diplomatic attention to Darfur.

  —

  Within two months, developments in Darfur rendered this approach irrelevant. The mass of evidence of gross violations of human rights in Darfur that emerged made it clear that to continue the North-South peace process without serious inclusion of the Darfur issue was unviable. Events in Darfur were entirely inconsistent for any supposed partner for peace. I began to issue warnings to the various negotiators and mediators to the conflict, including foreign ministers and heads of state and government, that the Darfur issue could not be considered separately from the south. But the lack of resolve to do anything now demonstrated a different logic in the Security Council to one dictated by a concern for the North-South peace process.

  As always, there were divisions on the Council. Pakistan, in particular, which held the presidency of the Council in early 2004, rejected requests to put Darfur on the Council agenda. In Darfur, Pakistan saw an issue that could lead to a campaign for intervention, and Pakistan stood in principle against what it saw as meddling in the affairs of sovereign states, particularly a fellow developing, and Muslim, country. China was another obstacle. With a skeptical attitude to humanitarian intervention not dissimilar to Pakistan’s, China had also wedded itself to the Khartoum regime with contracts for the supply of Sudanese oil to fuel China’s growing economy. China looked set throughout to obstruct any attempt to bring the more forceful options of the UN Charter to bear against Khartoum.

  But, in theory, there was scope for negotiation and the alteration of the Chinese and Pakistani positions, as well as those of other skeptical Council members. More concerted pressure and innovations in diplomatic dealings could have been tried. An obstinate Syria, for example, had been persuaded a few months previously to cast its vote on the Security Council in favor of a tough resolution on Iraq. In the run-up to the vote, many thought Syria’s representative would vote against the resolution. But in the end, after a sustained period of pressure from multiple parties, it voted for it. Furthermore, in Kosovo, NATO had proudly gone outside the mandate of the UN Charter, in response to the threat of a Russian veto at the Council, to conduct a forceful humanitarian intervention to protect the Kosovar Albanians. If there was another case for such a side step of international institutions in the face of enormous suffering, then Darfur was surely it.

  But no real attempt to help the people of Darfur materialized. The province was the size of France; it was in an Arab-ruled country, with a government quick to point out that if Western forces intervened, they would be the third Muslim country in a row to be invaded after Afghanistan and Iraq, and one rich in oil and gas at that. As Bashir reportedly put it privately on occasion: “If they want jihad, let them come.” The situation on the ground was enormously complex, too—not one like Rwanda, where there was a centrally organized and deliberate attempt to wipe out a clearly identified ethnic group. Instead, the divisions were unclear, fractured, and shifting, and who controlled which faction and when was blurred to a similar measure. In some ways, in terms of the level of disorganization and confusion, the war in Darfur was a situation better resembling Somalia or Congo than Rwanda. All this enhanced the preference for inaction among the members of the Security Council.

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  In the midst of the dithering, we made an official visit to Sudan, arriving on July 1, 2004. It was to include a visit to some of the refugee camps in Darfur and neighboring Chad. The state of the Darfuris was a terrible thing to witness—something which the Sudanese government made more difficult for us to achieve by physically moving a refugee camp, practically overnight, so that it would not be there for us to examine upon our arrival. This was a government with something terrible to hide. From the refugees we were able to meet came endless stories that only gave face to the other countless stories we had already heard—stories of horrific suffering across the province at the hands of viciously unrelenting, marauding forces.

  On July 2, we held meetings with President Bashir and other senior members of his government. As I had found when meeting leaders responsible for the most terrible of atrocities, it was remarkable how genteel he was. One always imagines that those responsible for great evil should exude it from their very pores. But as with Saddam Hussein—whom I met with on a special visit to Iraq in 1998 in order to attempt to broker a deal that would stop a war—this was a man who seemed cool, polite, and friendly. It seems paradoxical, but this is often the way with those responsible for massive bloodshed.

  Bashir had been in power since 1989, a degree of longevity in power that takes cunning and ruthlessness. As we sat down to our discussion in the presidential palace in Khartoum, Bashir opened by thanking me for the visit and expressing his eagerness to hear my views. I responded in kind, thanking him for his hospitality and then quickly moved on to Darfur.

  “The international community wants comprehensive peace in Sudan,” I said. “I have discussed this issue with the U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell and ministers of other members of the Security Council many times, who all want Sudan to take rapid and effective action.” Bashir did not seem too impressed or concerned by this and repeatedly knocked back my extensive comments on the plight of Darfuri civilians and the ongoing violence against them, including my reference to particular incidents in Darfur during the previous two days. Bashir seemed keen to emphasize in response that the conflict had been started by the rebels—a typical argument of governments responsible for atrocities—and that this had created the security vacuum that they were now trying to rectify.

  “The world firmly believes that the government of Sudan has control of the Janjaweed, including providing them with aerial support,” I said. “Specific action to protect vulnerable people needs to be taken immediately.” Bashir waved off this demand with a comment indicative of his scornful attitude toward the mass of people in Darfur, and a callous lack of concern for any individual suffering:

  “We have bombed the Janjaweed attacking villages. If the villages were more honest, they would admit that our planes also bomb the Janjaweed.”

  I have been asked by some journalists, privately, why I did not fire a threat of military intervention at Bashir during this meeting. In answer: This would have been the worst thing to do. If I had stood up and threatened him with the prospect of looming military intervention, knowing full well the Council was far from approving any kind of action, it would have undermined the credibility of the Council further. The inevitable lack of follow-through would then have made the Sudanese even bolder. Furthermore, the key to action on the part of the Council was unity betwee
n its members. A secretary-general making threats on the Council’s behalf, on an issue that was deeply divisive for its members, would only have enhanced those divisions. The fallout would only have been to make the Sudanese even more certain that there was no international military action over the horizon.

  It was clear from my discussions with Bashir and other Sudanese leaders that they were confident that there was no threat from the Security Council or any of its members. With the size of the province of Darfur, the complications of its geography, and the nature of the conflict, and the fact that the insurgency and sectarian war in Iraq was scaling up and consuming the endeavors of the U.S. and UK troops there, they were sure no one in the international community was coming for them. Their calculation proved entirely correct.

  We left Sudan with what we could: a negotiated joint communiqué between the UN and the Sudanese government. In this document they pledged to disarm the Janjaweed, to pursue rapidly a comprehensive and peaceful settlement for the province, and to bring to justice all those accused of human rights violations “without delay.” Unsurprisingly, these proved to be entirely empty promises.

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  The question on many people’s minds at this time was: Is Darfur a genocide? The reason for this emerging obsession in the debates was the mistaken assumption that this question was effectively synonymous with “Should the world take action against Sudan?” Yes to one of these questions, it was believed, meant yes to both. But this was a mistake. NGOs and human rights groups had led a huge global campaign for international action on Darfur. Previous great events of suffering that all agreed should have compelled international military intervention—the Holocaust in Europe and the massacre of Tutsis in Rwanda—had clearly been genocide. The mistake was to believe that for intervention in Darfur to be considered legitimate, it had to be labeled “genocide,” just like those previous disasters. The campaign became, in part, to push governments to recognize Darfur as a genocide.