IU community examines Sudan crisis

In the first visit by a U.S. secretary of state since 1978, Colin Powell, accompanied by U.N. \nSecretary General Kofi Annan, traveled to Sudan last week to plead with the country's government to curtail violence in the country's western province of Darfur.\nHuman Rights Watch in May of 2004 published a scathing report titled "Darfur Destroyed" in which it accused the Sudanese government of participating in the ethnic cleansing of members of the Fur, Msalit, Zaghawa ethnic groups who live in Darfur.\nMaria Grosz-Ngate, associate director of the IU African Studies Program, said high profile visits by world leaders and international attention on the Sudanese government may pressurize the government to rein in on the violence in Darfur.\n"It is important that attention be given to (the situation) so that we don't get to where we were with Rwanda 10 years ago," Grosz-Ngate said.\nA U.N. report titled "Report of the Independent Inquiry into the actions of the United Nations during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda" estimated 800,000 Tutsis were killed in Rwanda in a genocide incited by the country's Hutu government. The report lamented the lack of international political will to intervene in the genocide.\nAccording to the report, "The international community did not prevent the genocide, nor did it stop the killing once the genocide had begun."\nHRW approximates that more than 1 million people have been displaced and 10,000 people have been killed in the violence in Darfur. \nA rebellion led by two organizations, the Sudan Liberation Movement and the Justice Equality Movement, began in February 2003 to challenge the Sudanese government's alleged marginalization of African farmers in the Darfur region. To quell the rebellion the government financed and armed a militia of Arab nomads known as the Janjaweed.\nAccording to HRW the Janjaweed have pillaged, burned and looted several villages in Darfur, often in cooperation with Sudanese authorities and at times in coordination with the Sudanese air force, which HRW claims has bombed several villages in Darfur.\nGracia Clark, acting director of the IU African Studies Program, said if the Sudanese government is unable or unwilling to rein in the Janjaweed, then international intervention in Sudan may be necessary to protect the civilian population of the Darfur region.\n"The international intervention in Sierra Leone has been surprisingly effective in a situation that also includes armed gangs of rebels only loosely under central control," Clark said. "Maybe it is time to organize something similar for Sudan. Certainly, it needs to be done soon, before the efforts to exterminate the Darfur through killing and deliberate starvation succeed."\nMember states of the African Union are sending 300 soldiers to protect 40 international observers currently in Sudan monitoring a cease-fire that was signed between the Sudanese government and rebel groups in Darfur in April. The mandate of these soldiers does not include peacekeeping operations in Darfur. \nEric McLaughlin, a political science graduate student, said direct foreign intervention in the conflict was unlikely.\n"When you get into more proactive measures of intervention, issues of sovereignty come up." McLaughlin said. "The U.S. could go in and make life a lot better for some of these people, but unfortunately it is not as simple as that." \n-- Contact Nation & World Editor Rami Chami at rchami@indiana.edu