Help Will Come Too Late for Western Sudan

Humanitarian aid agencies, analysts and U.S. officials all agree that no matter what the international community does to try to prevent the catastrophe unfolding in Darfur, western Sudan, it’s too late: Huge numbers of people will die there in coming months.

With the U.S. Agency for International Development conservatively predicting that 320,000 people will perish from disease and starvation in the Darfur region, U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan will fly to the region this week to press Sudan to remove barriers to humanitarian aid and stop Arab militias from attacking civilians in Darfur.

Condoleezza Rice, President Bush’s national security advisor, said in a television interview Sunday that the administration had enlisted the help of Libya in getting aid to Darfur.

“We now really have to turn our attention to Darfur,” Rice said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Powell acknowledged Friday, “The situation is so dire that if we were able to do everything we wanted to do tomorrow, there would still be loss of life because of the deprivation people there are under now.” Humanitarian agencies have seen the crisis coming for nearly a year. Many are asking why the world was so slow to act.

John Prendergast, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, said the catastrophe could have been avoided with early action, but powerful players such as the U.S. and Britain lacked the political will to do so.

Some say the international community was preoccupied with trying to resolve the 21-year civil war between Sudan’s southern rebels and the Khartoum government at the expense of the growing crisis in Darfur.

The Sudanese government is widely blamed for supporting the Arab militias that swooped down on tribal African farming villages in Darfur, looting, raping, burning villages and killing as many as 30,000 people.

But until now, there has been little international pressure on Khartoum.

Darfur is an enormous stretch of desert with a single rutted road. There, 1.2 million people who have fled their homes face severe food shortages and disease. The Arab militias known as janjaweed began their offensive 16 months ago after two Darfur rebel groups took up arms, seeking a greater share of the country’s wealth and resources. But militia attacks have primarily targeted civilians, and attacks on villages continued after the signing of a temporary cease-fire in April.

The janjaweed operate with what human rights organizations and analysts say is the direct and active support of senior figures in the Khartoum administration, including the interior and intelligence ministries. The militias got offices, vehicles and satellite phones from the government, and there is evidence of joint attacks on rebel areas by Sudanese and janjaweed forces, said Jemera Rone, a researcher with Human Rights Watch.

Khartoum has repeatedly denied the accusations.

As people die in Darfur, governments and nongovernmental organizations are debating whether to use the label “genocide” for what has been happening.

The semantic debate is significant because a declared genocide places heavy obligations on the international community to halt the killing and punish the attackers.

Last week in the U.S., the Congressional Black Caucus called on the Bush administration to declare the Darfur attacks a genocide, as did Republican Congress members who questioned Pierre-Richard Prosper, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes, in a hearing on Capitol Hill.

Prosper said there were “indicators of genocide” in Darfur but they could not be confirmed. He did say the government was “collecting all the information that we can to make a conclusive determination. So we’re prepared to call it as we see it.”

The debate over terminology has also been going on in the State Department. At a meeting on Darfur recently, lawyers were quizzed on whether the events constituted genocide, and their opinion was that they did, said Prendergast, a State Department official in the Clinton administration.

A senior State Department official confirmed that an interagency review was underway but said that “to suggest that conclusions have been arrived at is premature.” The decision will rest not just with lawyers but with policymakers, the official said.

Even if the U.S. were to find that genocide was occurring, the official said, it would be up to the international community to decide what action to take. “The U.S. is not going to establish and convene a war crimes tribunal on its own,” he said.

The organization Physicians for Human Rights recently described “a genocidal process” in Darfur. There are questions about whether the Khartoum authorities deliberately orchestrated the crisis or whether it was an unintended result of supporting the janjaweed. So rather than “genocide,” the term that the United Nations, humanitarian groups and others are using is “ethnic cleansing.”

Annan said Friday that “we don’t need a label to propel ourselves to act, and so I think we should act now and stop arguing about which label to put on it.”

The Sudanese humanitarian affairs minister, Yousif Abdalla, on Friday downplayed the crisis in Darfur and denied that genocide had occurred. He said the government would disarm the janjaweed.

“The situation, according to international parameters, is not at a catastrophic level, as some are suggesting,” he said at a news conference in Paris.

Part of the reason things got so bad in Darfur, analysts believe, was the anxiety of the Bush administration and others to push for an end to two decades of war between the Khartoum government and southern rebels known as the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army. By late last year, a deal on the north-south conflict seemed just days away. But peace talks in the Kenyan town of Naivasha dragged on, and the protocols were not signed until last month.

“Once Khartoum realized countries like Britain, America, Norway and the U.N. Security Council wanted to get Naivasha done first, they just started stringing out the Naivasha process,” Prendergast said. “They realized as long as the process was going on, they would have a cover for their activities in Darfur.”

In a telephone interview, Greg Elder, head of mission for Doctors Without Borders in Darfur, also said that the Khartoum government “recognized they could get away with something and that no one was prepared to take them on.”

One senior U.S. State Department official forcefully denied that the Bush administration had waited too long to take action, or had been diverted from focusing attention on Darfur by the Naivasha negotiations.

“We’ve been calling attention to Darfur for a long time,” the official said. He added that the administration made it clear to the Sudanese government months ago that even if a north-south peace accord was achieved, “our relations cannot be normalized if Darfur remains the way it is.”

Aside from backing the janjaweed, Khartoum authorities concealed the extent of the Darfur crisis from the international community for months by blocking access to the region, according to many humanitarian agencies. Some barriers have been loosened in recent weeks, as international pressure began to mount.

The United States is preparing a U.N. Security Council resolution that may be presented while Powell and Annan are in Darfur, to compel the Sudanese government to curb the militias and open access to international aid workers.

Rep. Edward R. Royce (R-Fullerton), chairman of the Africa subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee, said in an interview that the consequences would be grave for the Sudanese government if it failed to respond to Powell and Annan’s demands.

Annan -- still haunted by charges that he allowed genocide to occur under his watch in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina -- said he hoped that the government would respond to international pressure and correct its course before international troops had to be sent. But the sending of troops is an unlikely prospect at this point.

“I don’t think we are ready to send in the cavalry,” he said, “and I am not sure I have that many countries ready to go.”

The violence in the area was another factor that prevented humanitarian groups from realizing the extent of the crisis until after the cease-fire in April.

“The camps are grossly insecure,” said Elder of Doctors Without Borders. “Beyond the camps it’s a wasteland. It’s quite haunting to see these burnt-out shells of villages without a single person walking around.”

Marcus Prior, spokesman for the World Food Program in Darfur, said the organization would reach 800,000 people this month -- leaving a gap of 400,000 people without aid.

“It’s a vast region, incredibly difficult to access. The logistics of reaching these people are completely complex,” he said.

That is one reason U.S. officials have turned to Libya for help, because they believe a route through that nation would be less dangerous and difficult than through landlocked Chad or Khartoum.

“We are working with others, with the Libyans, to try to get a third route for supplies to get in to Darfur,” Rice said in the television interview. “And we have been putting a lot of pressure on the Sudanese government to stop the janjaweed militia from doing the horrible things that they’re doing in that region.”

The World Food Program is planning extensive food drops -- a measure whose efficacy is questioned by some other agencies, given the risk that the food could be looted by janjaweed or others. But during the rainy season, there will be no other way to distribute food.

On Thursday, the U.S. Senate approved a $95-million aid package for Darfur.

Prior said that by October, 2 million people would need aid because no crops had been planted.

Since the April cease-fire, said Rone of Human Rights Watch, there have been fewer joint attacks by government and militia forces.

“But frankly, the job is just about done. They have ethnically cleansed a million people from their homes.”

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Dixon reported from Johannesburg and Curtius from Washington. Times staff writers Maggie Farley at the United Nations and Janet Hook in Washington contributed to this report.