Responsibility to Protect Or Trojan Horse? the Crisis in Darfur and Humanitarian Intervention After Iraq‪.‬

The world's failure to prevent or halt the Rwandan genocide was described as a sin of omission by UN secretary-general Kofi Annan. (1) British prime minister Tony Blair promised that "if Rwanda happens again we would not walk away as the outside has done many times before," and insisted that international society had a "moral duty" to provide military and humanitarian assistance to Africa whenever it was needed. (2) The United States labeled as "rogues" states that "brutalize their own people and squander their natural resources for the personal gain of their rulers." (3) Since 2003, the Sudanese government and its notorious Janjaweed militia have conducted a brutal campaign of mass killing and ethnic cleansing in response to an uprising by the Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement, who have themselves attacked civilians in the Darfur region, though on a much smaller scale. (4) Recent surveys place the number of deaths caused by direct violence between 73,700 and 172,154. (5) Deaths from malnutrition and preventable disease in internally displaced persons camps stood at 108,588 in January 2005, with approximately 25,000 more having died in inaccessible regions. (6) The British Parliament's International Development Committee put the total casualty figure at around 300,000. (7) At least 1.8 million more had been forced to flee their homes. (8) Following a unanimous vote by the U.S. Congress in July 2004, Colin Powell took the unprecedented step of labeling the violence "genocide." Despite professed commitments to prevent future man-made humanitarian catastrophes, the world's response to the Darfur crisis has been muted. At the time of writing, a small, underfunded and understaffed African Union mission (AMIS) is deployed in Darfur. Although it has a mandated size of approximately 3,300, there are fewer than 1,500 AMIS peacekeepers on the ground. The force has proven unable to halt sporadic escalations of violence or prevent the humanitarian situation from deteriorating. (9) The UN Security Council has taken an ambivalent position. On the one hand, it has to date failed to impose serious sanctions on Sudanese officials and has not contemplated using force to protect civilians or humanitarian aid. On the other hand, while it has yet to decide whether the UN Mission to Sudan (UNMIS), created recently to support, monitor, and verify the comprehensive peace agreement between the government of Sudan and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) in the south, will play an active role in Darfur, there is a distinct possibility that it could. (10) Moreover, on March 31, 2005, the council took the momentous step of referring the Darfur case to the International Criminal Court (ICC). (11)