Unfortunately, the very real forces of the Janjaweed are moving much faster than that. They've now extended their attacks on Darfur Africans across the border into Chad, striking at refugees who had fled from their earlier butchery.
The time has come to think outside the box on what can be done now to halt the genocide in Darfur. One option that needs to be seriously considered, is sending the government of Chad more than merely humanitarian assistance.
In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Stephen Biddle, addressing the rapdily worsening sectarian conflict in Iraq offers some valuable insights into conflicts similar the ongoing conflict in Darfur.
Communal civil wars, in contrast, feature opposing subnational groups divided along ethnic or sectarian lines; they are not about universal class interests or nationalist passions. In such situations, even the government is typically an instrument of one communal group, and its opponents champion the rights of their subgroup over those of others. These conflicts do not revolve around ideas, because no pool of uncommitted citizens is waiting to be swayed by ideology. (Albanian Kosovars, Bosnian Muslims, and Rwandan Tutsis knew whose side they were on.) The fight is about group survival, not about the superiority of one party's ideology or one side's ability to deliver better governance......
Darfur is clearly best understood as a communal war. The original insurgency in Darfur was by black African tribes against the Arab-dominated Sudanese regime. The Sudanese government chose to respond by backing the Janjanweed's genocidal attacks on black African civilians. Similarly, the insurgents seeking to topple the Chad government, who the Sudanese government also supports, are disgruntled from being frozen out of power by the current dominant tribe in Chad.
Biddle offers the following advice regarding what the US should do in Iraq
The only way to break the logjam is to change the parties' relative comfort with the status quo by drastically raising the costs of their failure to negotiate. The U.S. presence now caps the war's intensity, and U.S. aid could give any side an enormous military advantage. Thus Washington should threaten to use its influence to alter the balance of power depending on the parties' behavior. By doing so, it could make stubbornness look worse than cooperation and compel all sides to compromise.
Clearly we have far less power and consequently far less influence in the Darfur conflict. But the basic principles set out by Biddle remain the same. It may very well be that cold, hard, realpolitik tactics are the only way to accomplish a humanitarian objective.
The government of Chad is by no means deserving of military support. It is a corrupt, unrepresenative regime that has been a long-time proxy state of Libya' Ghadaffi. Most recently, it breached an agreement with the World Bank to use revenues from a World Bank funded gas field for solely civilian development purposes, tapping into the funds for military uses. But it is also clearly the lesser of two evils.
However, it is a cold fact that most genocides in the past 50 years have been ended by forces that were all things considered were unworthy of support - the Croat army pursuing a pan-Croat agenda in Bosnia, the Tutsi insurgency that ultimately conducted reprisal attacks against Hutus in Rwanda, and the army of communist Vietnam in Cambodia
The Sudanese government made the decision to use genocide in its proxy war against the current Chad regime. Ringing declarations and limited boycotts have done little to convince the Sudanese government that its tactics are counter-productive. US military aid to Chad (or first the threat of such aid) may be precisely the blunt instrument needed to get their attention and send the message that genocide doesn't pay.
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