Hypocritical Arab Genorosity For Darfur

[NATO AIR]

Julie Flint reveals how they've seized the moral low ground... again!

http://www.passionofthepresent.org/
Hypocritical Arab generosity on Darfur (by Julie Flint)
Her latest commentary for Lebanon's "Daily Star"; thanks to both Save Darfur and the AlertNet "In the Press / Today on the Web" section...

It would be comical if it were not so cynical; cruel even. Arabs leaders meeting at the Arab League summit in Khartoum earlier this week offered to fund the African Union (AU) peacekeeping force in Darfur to the tune of some $150 million, starting on October 1 of this year. However, the AU has been on the ground in Darfur since 2004, and in all that time the Arab League has invested $200,000 [...] in it - the equivalent, at the present rate of expenditure, of less than one day's running costs.

But there is less to the Arabs' new generosity than meets the eye. Much less. The AU's present mandate expires on September 30. That's either a big saving or a very nasty piece of politicking.

Winston Churchill once said of the Americans that "America will always do the right thing, after exhausting all other possibilities." When it comes to Darfur, the Arabs have pretty much exhausted all the possibilities within their range - from minimizing the unspeakably brutal, wholly man-made tragedy, to turning two blind eyes to it - and are now doing the wrong thing. The AU needs strengthening now, today, while it is in Darfur; not in six months' time, when it may not be. As Baba Gana Kingibe, the head of the AU mission in Sudan, said on hearing of the Arab decision: "This is medicine after death. We need the assistance now in order to be able to resolve the crisis."

The Arabs' sudden readiness to invest in the AU, comes as Khartoum discovers a new enthusiasm for a force that it has until now relentlessly obstructed. Sudanese diplomats have toured the continent lobbying African leaders and looking for the funds required to keep the mission going. They have even threatened to quit the AU if things did not go their way.

Their fear is not that Darfur will go to hell in a hand basket if the AU packs its bags; the government-supported Janjaweed are taking care of that. It is that the AU will be replaced by a United Nations force with teeth, which could act as a police force for the International Criminal Court. As international pressure to pull the AU out grows, so too does Khartoum's insistence on keeping it in. Anti-UN propaganda in the Sudanese press compares the threatened introduction of "foreign forces" into Darfur to the United States' invasion of Iraq, ignoring that some 10,000 peacekeepers are being deployed to Southern and Eastern Sudan and that the AU already has scores of international advisers in Darfur.

Khartoum was not a popular venue for the Arab League summit. Almost one in every three heads of state stayed away, including Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who blames the Sudanese government for an attempt on his life in Addis Ababa in June 1995, and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who has not forgotten that the National Islamic Front hosted the kingdom's arch-enemy, Osama bin Laden, and his terrorist network only a decade ago. But Khartoum will not have been unhappy with the Arabs' performance:

Although they stopped short of an outright rejection of wider international intervention in the conflict, they said there should be no UN deployment without Khartoum's approval. They not only remained silent about government atrocities in Darfur; they gave the victimizer the right to decide who may, or may not, act on the victims' behalf.

Although the Darfur conflict is often simplified to an Arab versus non-Arab struggle, with the Arabs cast as the villains, Darfur's Arab population is no less desperate for a solution to the conflict than the non-Arabs, namely the Fur, Zaghawa and Masalit who form the backbone of the rebel movements. Most Arab tribes have resisted government blandishments to join the war and are attempting, for the fourth straight year, to maintain a position of neutrality between the government and the rebel forces. Those that have accepted Khartoum's shilling, primarily the northern Rizeigat camel herding tribes, are among the poorest people in Darfur, victims both of the capital's historic neglect of the peripheries and of the gradual death by drought and desertification of their old, pastoral way of life. The vast majority know their future lies not with a government 1,000 miles away that has never shown the slightest concern for them, but with their Darfurian neighbors - no matter what their ethnicity.

In the next six months - months that Khartoum's Arab accomplices have chosen to ignore - many people will die in Darfur. Because of growing insecurity, both in Darfur and across the border in Chad, more than half a million displaced and conflict-affected civilians are beyond the reach of relief. The UN has raised only $130 million of the $650 million it needs for 2006. The UN children's agency, UNICEF, has received just a tenth of the funding that it needs. International pressure on the Sudanese government and its murderous proxies is a sometime, and supremely unconvincing, thing. The UN's humanitarian chief, Jan Egeland, says he fears that Darfur is returning to the "abyss" of early 2004 when the region was "the killing fields of this world." He predicts that those who cannot be reached "will soon get massively increased mortality."

But of that there was not a whisper in Khartoum this week. With unerring instinct, the leaders of the Arab world have once again seized the low moral ground.

Julie Flint has written extensively on Sudan. She is the author, with Alex de Waal, of "Darfur: A Short History of a Long War." She wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.