On May 20, 2006, Ibrahim Gambari, the gregarious UN under-secretary general for political affairs, met with leaders of Burma’s military junta and their most famous political prisoner, Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. It was Gambari’s first trip to Burma, and the first time in two years that the country’s secretive rulers had granted a UN official such high-level access. Gambari’s optimism was palpable: “They want to open up another chapter of relationship with the international community,” the seasoned Nigerian diplomat said in a press conference on May 24. But three days later, only a week after meeting with Gambari, the junta extended Suu Kyi’s house arrest by a year. Suddenly, Gambari’s optimism was his humiliation. “People thought he had fallen for their line,” says Mark Farmaner, director of Campaign for Burma UK. “He was completely suckered.”
Maybe President Obama has not really heard that there is another war brewing in Sudan. But TIME Magazine has already published an article by Alex Perry asking, “Is Sudan Moving Back to the Brink of War?” And, judging by the desperation of the aid groups and of many serious political analysts, the answer is most certainly “yes.”
Well, a very funny thing happens.
Or at least a very funny thing happened when the Sudanese delegate to the United Nations climate talks in Copenhagen conceded the reality of the Holocaust. And, no, he wasn't even talking about the "holocaust" visited by the Jews on the Palestinians.
According to a Reuters dispatch he was talking about the real Holocaust.
President Obama gave a pretty good speech when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe it was a little too eloquent. I don’t much like soaring rhetoric; I know there are times to soar, but Obama does it, or tries to do it, every time. Plain speech is also useful, and there was some plain speech in Norway—particularly the reiterated insistence, directed, I think, to our European friends, that sometimes making war is the only way to a just peace.
Yesterday, Obama's Sudan envoy Scott Gration testified before a House foreign affairs subcommittee. They were not happy with him.
Unlike Gration's last appearance before Congress—in which Senate committee chairman John Kerry made it clear that he supported the envoy—today's firing line of seven or eight House Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health members was almost uniformly hostile. Planted in his seat, arms frozen uncomfortably at chest level, Gration listened as one after another took issue with our lax enforcement of sanctions, escalating proxy violence by Khartoum, and our approach to human rights offenders.
Chairman Donald Payne, who originally convinced Congress to declare the situation in Darfur a "genocide," said that "for some, our policy is too focused on punitive measures. I beg to differ." He complained that Gration has repeatedly put off appearing before the subcommittee and took the unusual step of inviting Senator Sam Brownback to bounce Gration off the walls. Brownback, who doesn't seem keen on any type of negotiation with Sudan's government at all, spent much of his time forcing Gration to admit that he's been engaging with the perpetrator of an ongoing genocide. (During the Obama administration's policy review, Gration opposed calling the situation in Darfur an "ongoing genocide," but he lost that battle. The official U.S. policy now is that there is a genocide ongoing—even though that's not literally true anymore—and Gration is stuck mouthing a formula he doesn't buy.) So Brownback interrogated Gration like a pissed-off parent, sinking the entire chamber into a pained silence with the following exchange (at 47:50):
In late February 2004, Janjaweed militias and Sudanese government forces waged a three-day, coordinated assault on Tawila, a village in northern Darfur. Government aircrafts destroyed buildings, while the Janjaweed broke into a girls’ boarding school, forced the students to strip naked at gunpoint, and then gang-raped and abducted many of them. Video footage shows fly-covered corpses strewn among the village's smoldering ruins. And giving orders and distributing weapons during the siege, eyewitnesses say, was Sheikh Musa Hilal.
For years, advocates of climate-change legislation have struggled to find a sales pitch that will sway even the most hardened of skeptics. Polar bears, green jobs, urgent pleas to think of the grandkids … none of them have quite done the trick. But recently, a new argument has come to the fore: the national security case for cutting carbon emissions.
Scott Gration is an embarrassment. As Barack Obama's special envoy to Sudan, Gration has a dual mission: to help win justice and peace for the nearly three million Darfuris who currently live in camps after being subjected to genocide by Sudan's government; and to prevent that same odious government from initiating another slaughter in southern Sudan, where a 2005 peace agreement is looking more tenuous by the day.
In an editorial, TNR calls on Barack Obama to fire his Sudan envoy, Scott Gration:
Michael Capuano is my congressman. He does not make me yearn for Joe Kennedy to return. That's the plus side.
He is now running for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senator, that is, for Teddy's seat. He is not the favorite. But neither is my candidate, Alan Khazei, an honest-to-God community organizer who co-founded City Year.
A few things stand out upon a first reading of Obama's official Sudan policy announcement, TNR's copy of which is pasted below.
One is the stark language it uses regarding President Omar Al Bashir's indictment by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The policy explicitly states that the United States will support "international efforts to bring those responsible for genocide and war crimes in Darfur to justice" and says that "accountability for genocide and atrocities is necessary for reconciliation and lasting peace." Until now, the United States has been extremely cagey about the ICC indictment, to the point where our Sudan envoy, Scott Gration, has made it sound like we're interested in deferring accountability indefinitely in order to improve relations with Khartoum. I've heard that Hillary Clinton's deputy, James Steinberg, was pushing to ensure that our policy didn't undermine the ICC ruling during the policy review process. The change is a good thing: International justice continues to be imperfect, but one should not be allowed to commit the worst crimes in the world and get away scot free.
The second interesting thing is the role that counter-terrorism plays in the policy. During the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Sudan hearings last summer, Gration and Senator Russ Feingold got into an fairly hostile dispute over the value of Sudanese cooperation on intelligence and counterterrorism issues--with Feingold arguing that the value of Khartoum's intel cooperation is vastly overblown, and that the issue had often been raised as a way for Sudan's government to avoid accountability for human rights violations. Since all of the data on such cooperation is secret, the two ended the exchange by vowing to discuss the matter further in a "secure" setting.
For months, the White House has been saying that President Obama would personally roll out the results of his administration's long-delayed Sudan Policy Review, which will officially set the direction of U.S. policy for Darfur and South Sudan, a region that will soon decide whether to become an independent country. (Update: Click here to read the text of the actual policy and my analysis.)
Now, the review is finally here. It will be announced by Hillary Clinton, UN Ambassador Susan Rice, and the U.S. envoy to Sudan, General Scott Gration. Obama does not plan to attend, most likely because the president's political handlers don't want to further associate him with a policy that has been an ongoing public-relations disaster. That's a shame, because it signals to the world and the government of Sudan that Obama himself is not particularly engaged on the issue, and it's a sad contrast to the deeply concerned speeches Obama gave in front of Save Darfur groups before he became president. (He even co-wrote an introduction to Not on Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond, by Don Cheadle and John Prendergast.)
While we won't know the exact contents of the review until we hear today's announcement, the initial press leaks make it sound like a consensus document. It does not include many of the most dramatic policy prescriptions advocated by Scott Gration, who has often spoken about lifting sanctions as soon as possible and otherwise incentivizing Khartoum without applying much in the way of pressure. (He has described his preferences thusly: "We've got to think about giving out cookies. … Kids, countries--they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes, agreements, talk, engagement.") For instance, the review does not provide for Sudan's removal from the list of designated State Sponsors of Terrorism, it does not call for an immediate lifting of sanctions without a quid pro quo from Khartoum, and it does not authorize Gration to negotiate directly with Sudan's president, who has been indicted of war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The review also does not adopt Gration's preferred description of the violence in Darfur—he wants to call it "the remnants of genocide," but the policy review is said to maintain that genocide "is taking place" in Darfur.
NYALA, Darfur -- When Sudanese President Omar Al Bashir was indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in March, he responded by expelling 13 international aid agencies from Darfur and disbanding three other domestic relief groups.
Genocide is much discussed and poorly understood. It is regularly decried, yet little is done to prevent it. It is seen to be one of the most intractable of modern phenomena, a periodic cataclysm that erupts seemingly out of nowhere, often in distant places--Indonesia, Guatemala, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur--where ethnic conflict or hatred is said to have spun out of control. So we can do little about it. Bill Clinton said as much while Serbs were slaughtering Bosnians: "Until these folks get tired of killing each other, bad things will continue to happen."
While Scott Gration's appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in August was deeply uninspiring, in the weeks that followed, the U.S. special envoy to Sudan did manage to make some fitful progress. He prevented a violent resolution to the issue of territorial rights in the oil-rich region of Abyei, and he at least tried to get Khartoum into talks with resistance and civil society groups from Darfur. It seemed that his efforts to engage Khartoum were falling short of total disaster.
But things have since gone downhill: Gration's attempts to jump-start the Darfur peace process have sputtered. Even as Gration has called for the U.S. to lift sanctions against Sudan, Khartoum has reneged on much of the previous progress made in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), and it is again sponsoring violence against Southern Sudan, using armed militias. Meanwhile, Khartoum is taking advantage of Gration's goodwill and demanding rule changes that will undermine the crucial popular referendum and the election mandated by the CPA. No wonder that Gration is losing the trust of leaders in Darfur and South Sudan—even as he seems to have convinced Khartoum that he is on its side.
Now, in a mind-blowing statement in today's Washington Post, Gration seems to dispense with the idea that pressures of any sort can influence Khartoum: "We've got to think about giving out cookies," he explains. "Kids, countries--they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes, agreements, talk, engagement."* It's unclear where all of Gration's goodwill toward Khartoum is meant to lead. Few people believe his strategy is going to work--common sense suggests that it won't--and now, it looks like few of his initiatives have produced anything resembling sustainable success.
Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror
By Mahmood Mamdani
(Pantheon, 398 pp., $26.95)
The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All
By Gareth Evans
(Brookings, 349 pp., $24.95)
I.
In the summer of 2007 , Mahmood Mamdani found himself at a meeting of activists and politicians, listening to sentiments that had by then become quite common among a certain class of politically active Americans. The speakers were calling on the United Nations to send peacekeepers to Darfur. Fed up with the inability of African Union troops--who were already on the ground in western Sudan--to stop the ongoing bloodshed, they insisted that U.N. forces could do better. The United Nations, explained one politician, echoing a view you could have heard on any number of college campuses at the time, would grant "mercy" to the people of Darfur.
This was a matter of American interest. More than that: it was actually an American matter. And the contempt that Great Britain, particularly Scotland, and Libya have shown the United States in it is a fact with which we must conjure, lest this drama in four parts otherwise define, delimit and demean our very position in world affairs. This is a choice that neither Russia nor China ever seem to face. That is, they never stand down (or seem even to contemplate standing down) from what they deem to be core. Take, for example, Georgia or Darfur, which on any reasonable reading would be far from core.
This was a matter of American interest. More than that: it was actually an American matter. And the contempt that Great Britain, particularly Scotland, and Libya have shown the United States in it is a fact with which we must conjure, lest this drama in four parts otherwise define, delimit and demean our very position in world affairs. This is a choice that neither Russia nor China ever seem to face. That is, they never stand down (or seem even to contemplate standing down) from what they deem to be core. Take, for example, Georgia or Darfur, which on any reasonable reading would be far from core.
Our centrality in this case, however, should be self-evident. Pan American 103 was an American carrier, "Clipper Maid of the Seas," on its way on December 21, 1988 from Heathrow Airport, London to J.F.K. in New York. Of the 270 dead, fully 189 were Americans, two were infants at two months, and one was an elderly gentleman of 82. There were 66 students on board, plus 17 men in the U.S. defense and security services. Ah, maybe one or a few of these folks were the targets of the bombing, you might be saying to yourself suspiciously. But then this would truly be an act of outright war against the United States.
It took eleven years before a trial was held, much of this time spent in odious negotiations with Moammar Gadhafi over a venue. Even Nelson Mandela was brought into the act, as he often is to rescue from justice some miscreant who happened be an ally of the "revolution." In the end, a new facility was actually built for the Scottish High Court of Justiciary on a former American military base in the Netherlands. I kid you not. There, one of the defendants was found not guilty and Abdel Baset al-Megrahi was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment. Ruth Wedgwood, professor of international law at Johns Hopkins University, has written an eye-opening article for Forbes.com on the legalities and illegalities of the process. Read it, please.
It seems clear that Barack Obama doesn't consider Darfur a priority. Then again, with so many domestic and foreign policy crises looming, one might ask: Why should he care?
There was something surreal about General Scott Gration's testimony at Thursday's congressional hearings on Darfur. "We are aiming high and we are thinking big. Failure cannot be an option," the broad-faced Air Force general intoned, his tinny voice making him sound like a distant air-traffic controller. "We must proceed with boldness, with hard work to make this proactive and preventative approach work."
At today's Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on Sudan, questions came up about an open disagreement between General Scott Gration, Obama's Darfur envoy, and Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, over whether Sudan is currently committing genocide.
