U.N. To Sudan: Continue Killing
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
As The New York Sun’s Dina Temple-Raston has been reporting in our pages, Arab militias sponsored by the government of Sudan are displacing and killing thousands of black African civilians in the Darfur region. More than a million have fled Darfur’s burning villages. A 45-day humanitarian cease-fire has been a cease-fire only in the sense that the Islamist government at Khartoum has had more time to carry out its extermination campaign.
Under pressure chiefly from America, Sudan this month admitted two United Nations teams to inspect the situation in Darfur. On Friday, the U.N. missions reported back to the Security Council members in a closed-door briefing that was attended by Secretary General Annan. The analysis was chilling. The acting High Commissioner for Human Rights, Bertrand Ramcharan, said that Darfur is in a “reign of terror” where Sudan’s government is committing crimes against humanity. “The current pattern of massive and gross human rights violations as reported by those displaced raises very serious concerns as to their survival, security and human dignity,” Mr. Ramcharan’s report said. He said, “I have placed above all other considerations the need to ensure that the suffering of the people of Darfur ends as quickly as possible, for the current situation cannot be permitted to continue.”
The Security Council’s response? It mulled over the matter and announced it would indeed take action — that action being that it would meet again in June. No troops, no statement of condemnation, no nothing. Shocking, but not surprising for the titans of Turtle Bay. Also last week, this same Sudan was re-elected to the so-called Commission on Human Rights, which also includes such stalwarts of civil liberties as Libya and Red China. At least America set the moral tone on that one. Its ambassador to the human rights commission, Sichan Siv, walked out rather than witness the U.N. embrace of Sudan.
A decade ago, in 1994, more than 500,000 were murdered during a three-month killing spree, as the U.N. stood by and watched. On April 7 — the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide — Kofi Annan compared the need to act in Sudan to the failure to have acted in Rwanda. Instead, the U.N. Security Council’s decision to wait until June to consider taking action in Darfur sends the strongest possible message to Khartoum: Continue the killing.
