When the International Criminal Court issued its arrest warrant for Sudan’s president on Wednesday, an 8-year-old boy named Bakit Musa would have clapped — if only he still had hands.
Bakit had found a grenade, which when he played with it, exploded, costing his hands, an eye, and much of the skin on his face. This happened not in Darfur, but in Chad, a country whose Eastern border was violated by Sudnss Omar Hassan al-Bashir through the proxy forces.
In response to the arrest warrant issued by the ICC against Sudan's president, he has written A President, A Boy, and Genocide. In response to the same arrest warrant, Bashir became even more agressive, undertaking "another crime against humanity":
He expelled major international aid groups, including the International Rescue Committee and the Dutch section of Doctors Without Borders. In effect, he is now preparing to massacre the Darfuri people in still another way, for Darfuris are living in camps and depend on aid workers for food, water and health care — even as deadly meningitis has broken out in one of the camps.
I do not know why this column was not included in this morning's pundit roundup. And although the Obama administration has its hands very full, right now it has an opportunity to coordinate an international effort that MIGHT make a difference. The situation is dire, since the aid groups are in many cases all that is keeping hundreds of thousands alive, and manhy will die without intervention.
Kristof things Bashir is testing the international community. Perhaps if he can get away with this, he will not worry about conspiracies among his underlings. So what can be done?
The first step is to insist that aid groups be reinstated immediately to prevent this genocide in slow motion. A second step could be to destroy one of Mr. Bashir’s military planes with a warning that if he takes his genocide to a new level by depriving Darfuris of food and medical care, he will lose the rest of his air force.
Kristof is very blunt, arguing that the strafing and mass rapes perpetuated by the Sudanese forces under Bashir's control has been calculated and pragmatic, a deliberate method of depopulating rural areas as a means of depriving rebel forces of support. Kristof worries this, too is a tactic:
His aim in expelling aid groups is apparently to divide the international community and to try to force the United Nations Security Council to delay International Criminal Court proceedings.
Mr. Bashir assumes, not unreasonably, that he can get away with it. That culture of impunity is what the I.C.C. arrest warrant may begin to change. It is one way of attaching costs to systematic brutality, and thus to change the calculations of pragmatists like Mr. Bashir in Sudan and elsewhere.
There are Arab nations that want to assist (inportant if action is to be taken against another Muslim regime), Kristof naming Qatar as exemplar. We alos have the ability to pressure the main international supporter of the Government, China, which has trained Sudan's pilots (in returning for oil). Kristof notes that China withdrew its support of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and of Slobodan Milosevich when their genocides drew the bright glare of international attention.
Kristof thinks Obama should announce our intention to destroy a Sudanese military aircraft on the ground for each offensive military flight against Darfur and the refugees. There is risk in this - we would be seen as aggressive against another Muslim regime, but two things: 1. we would be helping to end/prevent more genocide
- A president named Barack Hussein Obama has more leverage to take such action, and I would suggest that he make it clear that the United States will not tolerate the flouting of international standards.
Of course, we are not subject to the ICC ourselves, which might cause some nations to accuse of of hypocrisy. Yet in an administration which has already indicated a willingness to roll back some of the worst of our own abuses of the past 8 years, and to engage internationally in a cooperative fashion, perhaps the signal this will send is that we will help the world in restoring order and sanity, even if the disruptions are not in the heart of Europe.
I am a Quaker. I am opposed to aggressive military actions. I am a human being. I cannot stand by when it is possible to save lives and avoid the destruction of cultures. I have never been a great believer in proportional responses per se, but what Kristof calls far - to begin destroying planes on the ground - seems like a minimal response, one that MIGHT have a salutary effect.
Kristof ends with two short paragraphs worth pondering:
I won’t pretend that we can end all genocides. But we can attach enough costs so that it is no longer in a leader’s interests to dispatch militias to throw babies into bonfires. The I.C.C. arrest warrant marks a wobbly step toward accountability and deterrence.
So let’s applaud the I.C.C.’s arrest warrant, on behalf of children like Bakit who can’t.
a wobbly step toward accountability and deterrence We have seen a lack of accountability both at home and abroad for 8 years. We need to reinstate in around the world, to the best of our ability.
And for the future of the world, for all of us, the idea that leaders can dispatch militias to throw babies into bonfires without consequences should scare the hell out of us.
We are now rightly consumed with our own problems. And as we try to right our own ship of state, we are confronted with the realization that the previous administration created a "legal" framework for operating as an unchecked dictatorship. As we rightly reject that for ourselves, when we do have the ability to prevent the wreckage and suffering that comes from its equivalent internationally, do we not also have a moral obligation to take the actions necessary to save the children?
Peace.