This week's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine contains an interesting article By Jennifer Leaning, MD, SMH, on the Darfur crisis. The Journal is subscription only, and is not one most Kossaks have access to, so I thought I might highlight some of it here.
The basic gist of the article is a short primer on the crisis itself, followed by a discussion of how this particular event does fit the 'diagnosis' of genocide.
First, the primer:
What makes this crisis different from many of the dire episodes of drought, famine, and population dislocation that have occurred in the Horn of Africa is that this one appears to be designed and directed by the central government. This crisis comes in the waning days of a 21-year civil war between northern and southern Sudan and is reaching public attention just as a cease-fire in this civil war is about to be implemented. Two rebel groups in the Darfur region of western Sudan, claiming that they have been marginalized in the north-south peace process, took up arms about 18 months ago. Since February 2003, under the pretext of thwarting this rebellion, the Sudanese government has used militia forces called Janjaweed in a sweeping campaign of attack against the non-Arab civilian population of Darfur. The attackers refer to members of this population in derogatory terms in Arabic as "black" or "slave" and have joined with government forces to systematically block efforts by the humanitarian community to reach them. Analysts who have experience with humanitarian crises fear that as many as 300,000 of the 1.3 million people who remain displaced within Darfur will die by the end of the year unless relief can be delivered to them now, before the full onset of the rains.
The author goes on to detail the methods of data collection and some of the actual events that are going on:
The refugees we spoke with, most of them from the Masalit and Fur tribes, described the same pattern of attack: the militia and government forces rush into the villages at dawn, on horseback or camelback or in vehicles, rousing families from sleep or early prayer. Sometimes a government plane drops a bomb, or government helicopters buzz the area. The attackers rapidly kill the men who resist, rape the women, carry off valuable camels and cattle, burn the homes and grain stores, rip up irrigation structures, uproot trees, and spoil or destroy the wells. They chase those who flee into the bush or low hills, then return to complete the destruction of the village site. Depending on where they are, survivors head toward whatever appears to be the closest safe area -- either another village deeper in Darfur or the Chad border. Villages along the path of flight are also attacked, driving people from the countryside into the larger towns or across the border into Chad. Everyone we spoke to had traveled for 3 to 10 days with minimal food and water to reach the Chad border, and virtually everyone recounted having lost between one and five extended-family members in the attack that forced them to flee. Relief workers we spoke to in the field offered similar accounts.
What follows is a definition of genocide and why the designation of a given crisis as a genocide is important.
The people being attacked are members of identifiable ethnic and linguistic groups, targeted by an organized state authority representing other ethnic and linguistic groups...The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, developed in the wake of mass communal atrocities committed during World War II, has been signed and ratified by 135 countries. Sudan has not signed it but has signed the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which defines the crime of genocide in exactly the same language as the convention. The Genocide Convention characterizes genocide as a crime that signatory nations must prevent and punish. If a signatory nation determines that a genocide is under way, that nation is obliged, either by itself or through a multilateral arrangement, to intervene in some way to prevent that genocide from taking place. In other words, when we attest that an assault on a given population is in fact genocide, the nations of the world must do something to stop it.
Unfortunately, there is no simple and foolproof way to apply the definition to a series of events. Most genocides are 'diagnosed' after the fact because witnesses may be questioned, evidence collected, and graves uncovered. In other words, transparency is not one of the hallmarks of genocide. The author makes the case that this is best done by healthcare and public health professionals. These are the people who are accustomed to data collection in terms of mortality, nutrition, etc.
With practice and hindsight, the humanitarian community has developed some very reliable and rapid public health-assessment tools that permit the derivation of good estimates of crude mortality and nutritional status and then, on the basis of accumulated knowledge of how populations fare in harsh environments and famine settings, allow the projection of death rates. There is not yet such practical certainty regarding methods and projections for the assessment of genocide, particularly when the process is ongoing. Yet the approach required is very similar. The data-related tasks are still acquisition, aggregation, and finally, interpretation -- bringing in other information related to pace, scope, extent, and political context -- to map out patterns of action from which to make inferences about intent.
Politicians, by their nature, are not well suited to the task as the application of the term 'genocide' may be used as a threat or bargaining chip in negotiations. Meanwhile, people are dying. We have all heard the horrible statistics: up to a million may die, and many more be displaced. In Darfur, it is 9/11 every day.
Dr Leaning ends with a warning for the future:
Darfur also raises the spectre of slow-motion genocide, malignantly engineered by a totalitarian state, crafted to appear to have arisen as the result of a failure of humanitarian assistance.
There has been a failure indeed.
In any case, I thought this was an interesting article that most here would not get a chance to see. If anyone here is interested in the whole article, contact me.