Permit me to repeat some points that were made about Darfur at the recent Health and Human Rights Conference at Queen's University by Sgt Debbie Bodkin, who is also speaking at this conference. A police detective with the Waterloo Police, Bodkin has investigated victims in former Yugoslavia in 2000, Chad in 2004, and for the UN Commission of Inquiry on Darfur in 2004-2005.

She described some of what she heard during her victim interviews during the UN inquiry, including testimony from a 10-year-old Darfuri girl who was gang raped by the Janjaweed. One especially brave woman came forward and told her that approximately fifty African Darfuri girls and women in her refugee camp alone had been raped. One of the racist insults used by the perpetrators was, "Slave, get out of my country". Bodkin told us that she continues to suffer post-traumatic stress in part because the "killers are still running rampant".

The UN Commission later found despite such evidence that there was no genocide, but only crimes against humanity. This essentially political rather than judicial finding meant in practice that nothing needed to be done by the UN Security Council under the Genocide Convention of 1948.

Government of Sudan Current Roles

Even as the new peace negotiations have been in effect postponed in Libya, the situation on the ground across Darfur continues to deteriorate. The diplomats involved with the catastrophe from normally responsible governments have failed the African residents of Darfur egregiously, including the estimated 400,000-450,000 of them who are now dead from bullets, bombs, burning and related causes, such as starvation. I simply don't know how many of the diplomats involved can sleep nights.

This week the Sudanese authorities expelled a senior UN staff member from Darfur for opposing the Sudanese Government dismantling of displaced persons camps and forced relocation of their inhabitants. Such relocation of people goes against the UN Guiding Principles on Internally Displaced People, contravening international humanitarian law.

Sudan has a history of expelling humanitarians from Darfur. This includes the high profile expulsion of UN envoy to Sudan, Jan Pronk, in October last year, and of Paul Barker, the head of aid agency CARE, earlier this year, along with diplomats from both Canada and the European Union .

UN Under-Secretary-General John Holmes has previously criticized the Bashir government for clearly undermining both the letter and the spirit of the joint communiqué he signed earlier this year with the Government of Sudan. Holmes said after signing the joint communiqué that it was intended to relieve the bureaucratic impediments hindering the humanitarian community in Darfur.

The government of Sudan does not assist in facilitating the aid effort. It purposefully hinders the work of the humanitarian community, harassing, threatening and expelling staff of aid agencies and the UN.

The latest expulsion comes at a tense time in which the UN is trying to mediate peace talks between rebel groups and the Government of Sudan. The embryonic UN/AU mission also faces many start-up problems, including delayed deployment and the absence to date of a commitment from any government of desperately needed helicopters.

The forced removal of the senior UN officer is a devastating blow from the Sudanese authorities to the humanitarian work of the UN and international aid agencies in Darfur, said James Smith, Chief Executive of the Aegis Trust for genocide prevention. He was forced out essentially because he did his job properly. He was resisting a policy that amounts to further ethnic cleansing of Darfur’s African population. With no security to allow them to return home and rebuild, forced removal of the displaced Darfuris from the camps gives them no choice but to leave the region or perish.

To paraphrase something I heard recently, if the UN Security Council were capable of dying of shame, it would have perished during both the Rwandan and Darfuri genocides, but of course it just carries on as if its reputation across the world was still a good one. Both catastrophes shriek for many things, but high on any list is reform of the Council itself, particularly in respect of the grossly irresponsible use of the veto by some of the five members having permanent vetoes during catastrophes.

Government of China Roles

The government of China since 1997 has been the largest supplier of arms to the government in Khartoum. Tanks, fighter planes, bombers, helicopters, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades- all were paid for from oil revenues generated mostly by the China National Petroleum Cooperation. The deputy foreign minister of China, Zhou Wenzhong, even insisted during 2004, "Business is business. We try to separate politics from business".

The Chinese diplomats at the UN Security Council and elsewhere have in fact mixed business and politics in respect to Sudan continuously from at least 1997 until the present. Mia Farrow is absolutely correct when she refers to the government of China's active and continuous role in Sudan's ongoing catastrophe. "Genocide Olympics" is her memorable and still fully applicable phrase.

Steven Spielberg should resign as artistic consultant to the Beijing Olympics unless the Government of China does far more than it’s doing now to stop the killing, raping and bombing in Darfur and elsewhere.

There is little doubt that the government of China's recent interest in stopping the unspeakably cruel violence against villages, which continues against communities deemed 'African' in Darfur, is related to offsetting for public relations purposes the "Genocide Olympics" charge about which Darfur supporters like Mia Farrow continue to raise public awareness.

Consider:

• Over the past decade, the government of China has provided the Bashir government with more than $US ten billion in commercial and capital investment, mostly for oil investments, with crude oil comprising virtually all of Sudan's exports and much of it going to China. Approximately seven percent of China's oil imports currently now come from Sudan.
• According to one source within Sudan, up to seventy percent of the Sudanese government's revenues from oil are spent on arms, a good deal of them coming from China. Nick Kristof of the New York Times has reported that the government of China has built four small arms factories in Sudan.
• The most valuable service President Hu of China has provided to Bashir's government is using China's permanent veto at the UN Security Council to protect the Sudanese regime from any robust peacemaking initiatives while the slaughter in Darfur continued. Only following Mia Farrow's op-ed piece in March, 2007, which accused the government of China of assisting in genocide, did China's UN representative join in the recent unanimous Security Council vote to send 26,000 civilian police and peacemakers to Darfur.
• The problems already evident with this latest in a long series of ineffective Security Council initiatives on Darfur include:

  Will a good faith peace process begin for Darfur and continue in South Sudan, where there are good indications that the peace agreement has recently broken down in part because the Bashir government refuses to withdraw its army from the South as required by the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA)?
  
  Will Chinese, Russian and other arms exports to Khartoum continue?
  
  Will Beijing pressure Bashir to honour his previous ceasefire agreements and get him to disarm the janjaweed militias, which have caused so much human suffering, murder and destruction?
  
  Will Hu help UN Secretary General Ban to persuade Khartoum to stop bombing civilian targets in Darfur?
  
  Will the Sudanese government permit humanitarian agencies badly needed unfettered access to all regions of Darfur?

Resolution 1769



• The specifics of UN SC resolution 1769 passed at the end of July in reality demonstrate how well Beijing continues to protect Khartoum:

  The hybrid UN/African Union force will have no authority to seize weapons from belligerents, thus probably making it impossible to control the janjaweed and other murdering militias,
  
  The watered down command-and-control provisions will inevitably create problems between the African Union commander on the ground in Darfur and the UN Department of Peacekeeping in New York,
  
  Nothing is specified about containing the violence that has spread into Chad, where China is looking for oil, and the Central African Republic,
  
  Not a word is said about halting aerial assaults by Khartoum's helicopter gunships and Antonov bombers,
  
  Tragically, the deployment of the peacekeepers is still to be very slow, with December 31, 2007 being the deadline for the transfer of authority from the AU to the AU/UN hybrid, although this is merely symbolic and unlikely in practice to save civilian lives in the meantime or quite probably for a considerable period thereafter, and
  
  The inability of the AU to solicit enough trained troops and civilian police for the hybrid force remains unaddressed. The AU Commission chair Alpha Konare indicated quite recently after a meeting with president Bashir that he wants only Africans to be deployed and that they must be under African command.

Almost 100 days after the authorization of the hybrid UN/AU force authorized by Resolution 1769, the Sudan government continues to resist. Militarily capable Western governments, including the UK, France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries, are failing to provide essential force elements, to provide tactical and transport helicopters, as well as significant ground transport resources. The designated UNAMID force commander recently noted that "there would be at most 8000 troops in Darfur by January (2008)--only 1000 more than the current force."

We all know that full deployment of UNAMID will not end the genocide for various reasons, including the fact that it cannot arrest the Janjaweed and will be unable to go anywhere the government of Sudan objects to. In terms of returning Darfuri victims to their villages, some 40-60,000 settlers from Mauritania, Mali and Niger have moved into African Darfuri farms with the encouragement of Khartoum.

Shaming Genocidaires

In my view, shaming the government of China over its partnership roles in Sudan currently offers the best hope to save civilian lives in Darfur. How to proceed? The key task is to transfer knowledge to those presently unaware of China's role in Sudan generally and Darfur specifically.

What happens, for example, if students and others demonstrate in front of the Chinese embassy in Ottawa or the consulates elsewhere, declaring with banners and placards that China’s government must be held accountable for its complicity in the Darfur genocide? What if such demonstrations are continuous, and grow, and take place outside China's embassies in other countries? What happens if everywhere Chinese diplomats, politicians and business people travel they are confronted by those who insist on making it an occasion for highlighting China's destructive role in Darfur?

To succeed, the campaign must be creative and focused. It must take advantage of every means offered by electronic communications. The government of China must be forced to see that there is a stark choice before it: either it uses its leverage effectively with Khartoum to improve and speed up the UN/AU deployment discussed above or it will be the target of the most powerful international shaming campaign in history.

The lack of effective advocacy initiatives to date has not been lost on Khartoum's génocidaires. Despite the enormous successes of the American-led divestment campaign, pressure must be ratcheted up even higher. Other European companies should follow the lead of Germany's Siemens and Switzerland's ABB Ltd: both have suspended operations in Sudan. Such ongoing loss of European commercial and capital investment certainly has the full attention of the Bashir regime.

The task is daunting but fully achievable, given the moral passion and creative energies of the Darfur advocacy communities.

Conclusion

In summary, the Bashir regime will be convinced that the international community is serious only if deployment of the force authorized by Resolution 1769 is under UN command and that obstructionism will be met with harshly punishing sanctions.

Second, the government of China must be convinced to stop protecting its client government in Khartoum from real diplomatic pressure. Advocacy focusing on Beijing's hosting of the 2008 Summer Olympics has been much more effective to date than Western governments.

All principled governments must be prepared to suspend diplomatic relations in the event that Bashir holds to his obstructionist ways. They should all be prepared to impose robust sanctions on Bashir's government.

Thank you.