The world can't continue to ignore Sudan

We have a responsibility to protect Sudanese civilians from the campaign of ethnic hatred and violence coordinated by their government

May 30, 2004|By Jonathan F. Fanton. Jonathan F. Fanton is president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.


Today, I am troubled by the idea that the international community is better at commemorating genocides than stopping crimes against humanity. Even as we remember Rwanda, the world's reticence to take decisive steps in Sudan risks another moral catastrophe, and thousands of avoidable deaths in another remote African nation.

I visited Rwanda in 2002, where I spent time at a genocide memorial located in the small town of Gikongoro. In July 1994, as many as 50,000 Tutsis sought refuge at a boarding school there; almost all of them met a violent death during a two-night rampage.

I saw rooms that now house 27,000 skeletons exhumed from a mass grave, skeletons that reveal where a machete had cut a throat or sliced a skull, skeletons with clenched teeth showing the anguish of a painful death. In one room, a tarpaulin bearing the United Nations insignia covered an open window, shielding their bones from rain. One could not escape the irony of the UN providing protection in death, but not in life.

It is against that sad history that we confront Sudan's fate.



The unfolding tragedy need not end this way. Having studied the lessons of our collective failure in Rwanda, the world is much better equipped to take concrete, preventive measures to avert humanitarian disasters in places like Sudan. But in order to avoid greater devastation, the international community--especially the UN's Security Council--must act quickly to apply the principles articulated in an important UN document, "The Responsibility to Protect."

Following the Rwandan genocide and at the encouragement of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Canada, with support from a group of major foundations, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, established the International Commission on State Sovereignty and Humanitarian Intervention. The commission asked the simple but profound question: When a state fails to protect its own people--or worse, assaults them--what is the international community's obligation to act, even intervene; what steps, including intervention, are justified; and how should these actions be conducted and coordinated?

"The Responsibility to Protect," lays the intellectual foundation for changing assumptions about the world's obligations. It articulates a primary duty for the international community: to prevent such crises, using evidence of egregious human rights abuses as an early warning. A patient set of non-military steps is identified--fact-finding missions, international appeals, political and economic sanctions, arms embargoes, seizure of assets--giving the world community options it must exhaust before reacting with appropriate military means. Many of these options still exist in Sudan, but the window of opportunity is quickly closing.

Sudan represents a test of how committed the world really is to these evolving norms and of how deeply they are taking hold, because the case for applying them is clear. Despite recent expressions of outrage over Sudan's preposterous election to the UN Human Rights Commission, the international community is once again woefully derelict in its duty to act.