U.S. Force Needed To Stop Sudan's Genocide in Darfur

Despite public vigils and petitions, diplomacy and new agreements, the Sudanese government keeps annihilating civilians in Darfur and neighboring Chad. At least the Bush administration finally has set a deadline for action.

The deadline, unveiled last week by U.S. special envoy Andrew Natsios, is Jan. 1. If Sudan does not agree to allow in an expanded international peacekeeping force, he said, the administration will implement "Plan B."

What is Plan B? At a pre-Thanksgiving State Department briefing, Natsios wouldn't say. But unless it involves the threat of U.S.-led military force against Sudan, the slaughter of innocents will continue.

It is continuing despite Sudan's agreement "in principle" to the terms of a Nov. 16 United Nations proposal for a force larger than the current, ill-equipped 7,000-man African Union contingent that has been unable to stop the violence.

However, the Sudanese government won't agree to the recommended size -- 17,000 troops and 3,000 police, down from a previously recommended 22,500 -- or a U.N. command structure for the force.

At another briefing last Monday at the Brookings Institution, a Sudanese embassy official tried to blame "broken promises" by the United States for the fact that his government is "suspicious" of proposals to resolve the Darfur crisis.

Natsios shot back that "we are suspicious, too. We suspect there are people in [your] regime who believe a military solution is necessary." He cited incidents in the past three weeks in which "a lot of noncombatants have been deliberately attacked," including one in which 200 were killed, mainly women and children.

On a visit to Darfur, Jan Egeland, the U.N.'s undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, said violence in the region was reaching its worst levels since fighting began in 2003.

"The government is arming Arab militias more than ever before," he said, and they are "conducting inexplicable terror against civilians."

Ostensibly to put down a rebellion in the western province of Darfur, the Sudanese government and allied Arab militias, the Janjaweed, have engaged in genocide against the black African Muslim population, killing up to 450,000 people, systematically raping women and destroying villages and rendering 2.2 million homeless.

The campaign has spread to neighboring Chad, where Arab militias are carrying out similar attacks against Africans, killing several hundred in the past 10 days alone and driving 10,000 people from their homes.

Even though the world -- and the Bush administration -- vowed that it would not tolerate mass murder like the 1994 Rwandan genocide, it has.

Fortunately, human rights and citizen groups are keeping pressure on the administration. In 2004, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum helped organize the Save Darfur Coalition, which now numbers more than 160 faith-based and humanitarian groups and has taken out vivid newspaper and television ads dramatizing the crisis.

The Holocaust Museum sponsored an outdoor (and Internet) showing of haunting photographs from the region last week, titled "Our Walls Bear Witness," although it edited out the most gruesome pictures of brutalized murder victims.

After considerable dithering and then a months-long investigation, the Bush administration declared in 2004 that "genocide" indeed was taking place in Darfur. However, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell added that no new action was necessary because the administration was doing all it could to get Sudan to "act responsibly."

In 2006, Congress passed the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act, designed to freeze the assets and deny travel visas to Sudanese officials believed responsible for the genocide.

A key target was Sudanese intelligence chief Salah Abdallah Gosh, who's alleged by administration critics to be protected from sanction because he's cooperating with the CIA on terrorism issues. At the State Department, Natsios dismissed this as "Beltway chatter."

On Sept. 27, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called on the Sudanese to "immediately and unconditionally" accept a U.N. peacekeeping force or face "a choice between cooperation and confrontation."

Sudan has refused the force.

Last week, Natsios said that by "January 1st either we see change or we go to Plan B." He added that "making threats is not a wise thing to do."

But that's exactly what the United States needs to do. The best formulation I've seen was outlined on Nov. 17 by former President Bill Clinton's top Africa specialist, Susan Rice, on PBS' "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer."

If the Sudanese keep rejecting a robust U.N. force, she said, "then the international community should say to the Sudanese, 'You have a very short period of time, perhaps two weeks at most, to accept this force or face the threat of the use of military force.'

"And that would entail the United States, with backing from European partners and, hopefully, African governments, bombing Sudanese targets -- air fields, air assets, command and control installations -- that have been instrumental in the perpetration of the genocide."

If that didn't work, she said, the U.S. could consider a naval blockade of Port Sudan, the key shipping point for Sudanese oil. The purpose would be to compel Sudanese compliance with the U.N.'s resolution for a Darfur peacekeeping force.

She said she'd prefer a new U.N. resolution authorizing force, but she noted that the U.S. and its allies have carried out bombings before without U.N. permission, in 1999 raids on Yugoslavia, which led to an end to ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and ultimately to the downfall of Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic.

Fewer than 10,000 Kosovars had been killed when NATO launched its airstrikes, she observed. "We now have perhaps 450,000 Africans that have died in Darfur, and the government is in the midst of stepping up its killing spree."

Rice asked, "How many more Africans have to die before we're prepared to even contemplate the same sort of action as we took in Kosovo?" Good question. Let us not wait until the toll reaches the Rwanda "Never Again" number of 937,000.