Have we really made any progress in stopping genocide?

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, inspired by the Holocaust, has made little difference since its adoption by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. Nor has the Responsibility to Protect, a Canadian-sponsored report in 2000 that was adopted at a UN summit in 2005.

To assess the degree of progress in fighting genocide - or lack of it - the Canadian Jewish Congress decided to highlight Darfur during Holocaust Education Week.

According to the UN, Darfur is finally on the road to peace. The Sudanese government has agreed to allow into that region a "hybrid force" of 26,000 peacekeepers wearing UN blue helmets but commanded by officers of the repeatedly discredited and Darfuri-detested African Union, an organization dominated by the Sudanese regime.

The UN Security Council fell into a carefully laid trap when it passed Resolution 1769 authorizing the deployment of this bizarrely structured force. Like the funnel-shaped fences with corrals at the end used to trap wild horses, the Sudanese government's conditional "acceptance" will pull in would-be Darfur rescuers until they cannot turn back to adopt more effective policies. Calls for targeted sanctions, no-fly zones, criminal trials, high-level shaming and intervention by combat-ready and equipped ground forces will now be silenced by those seduced by the risk-minimal "peacekeeping" rituals of endless meetings and monitoring, incident investigations producing ignored reports and avoidance of confrontation with the core of the continuing violence.

The resolution's promise to respect Sudanese sovereignty translates into Sudanese control. The troops can go only where the Sudanese government permits. They are forbidden to seize the weapons of the brutal janjaweed militias or of regular army units even if those weapons were transported to Darfur in violation of previous UN resolutions.

The resolution spells out no consequences if the Khartoum regime fails to stop the janjaweed attacks or continues bombing civilians: no trade sanctions, no no-fly zone, no blockades, no use of force to stop the aerial attacks.

If the Darfuri victims, no longer able to tolerate the cultural and social desolation of the refugee camps, decide to return to their destroyed villages, they will encounter the same janjaweed militias that originally expelled them. The Sudanese government has offered the militias the full use of these "cleansed" areas.

Moreover, the Bashir regime has been actively recruiting other Arabs from Egypt, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria and Cameroon to settle in purged areas. Currently at least 42,000 are said to be living in Darfur.

It is inconceivable that the hybrid force, known as UNAMID, would allow the refugees to return to their homelands to confront these new settlers, much less provide them security once they arrive. The principal function of UNAMID, as Khartoum knows, will be to freeze the situation, not change it in the direction of the revival of the crippled cultures.

Nor does Resolution 1769 mention bringing the perpetrators of Darfur atrocities to justice. By such exclusion, the resolution weakens the hand of those who would bring the sanctions of international criminal law to bear on the culture of impunity that rules Sudan. Yet concepts and institutions of justice are a central part of any culture. They are a cementing force without which a reversal of the general diminishing cannot take place, whatever the degree of "stabilization" achieved by forces implementing a "peace process."

By far the best hope to reverse the injury to the people of Darfur is to restore their control over their own destiny. They must be given an effective measure of autonomy from the Sudanese regime and a means to enforce their own decisions about such matters as living together with the new Arab settlers as well as their old Arab neighbours (mostly neutral in the regime-rebel conflict), sharing the wealth of a huge newly discovered underground lake (of which UNAMID will be unable to prevent the Khartoum elite from reaping 99 per cent of the benefit), or delivering justice.

It will take a willingness of outsiders to risk political and human assets to accomplish this shift of power to the Darfuri people. So far not a single country has shown an interest in taking such a risk. The enthusiasts of the hybrid-force solution might have already gone too far down the wild-horse trap to think about turning instead to measures that, by genuinely empowering the Darfuris themselves, might actually end the genocide.

John Weiss is a history professor at Cornell University. He will speak at 7:30 tonight at the Gelber Centre, 5151 Côte Ste.Catherine St. ONLINE EXTRA: The Gazette editorial board met yesterday with two Mideast experts, both professors at Tel Aviv University who are in Montreal for a conference at McGill University. Eyal Zisser is one of Israel's leading analysts on Syria, Lebanon and Hezbollah. David Menashri directs his university's Centre for the Study of Iran. Hear their analysis at: montrealgazette.com

© The Gazette (Montreal) 2007