Time to protect Darfur from Bashir terror

President Jacob Zuma and Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir. The very crime the International Criminal Court charged Bashir with in 2009 are crimes he has never stopped committing, says the writer.

President Jacob Zuma and Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir. The very crime the International Criminal Court charged Bashir with in 2009 are crimes he has never stopped committing, says the writer.

Published Sep 25, 2015

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In the process of being against what the West wants, we turned a blind eye to his continuing war crimes, writes Shannon Ebrahim.

 Will he come, won’t he come? South Africans are keen to know whether Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir will attend the Forum on China-Africa Co-operation in December, despite the rulings of our courts.

But the legal wrangling has not done justice to the real issue. While some of us have critiqued the International Criminal Court (ICC) for its uneven dispensation of justice, the issue we have failed to properly address is the need for Sudan’s leader to account for his brutal treatment of his citizens.

We have been so caught up in trying to teach the West a lesson about its double standards, that we forgot the burnt villages that litter Darfur and the Nuba mountains, and the countless women who continue to be raped by Sudanese government forces.

Many of us smirked when AU chairwoman Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma singled out Bashir at the AU Summit in June, warmly welcoming him to the gathering of African leaders. We may have even wanted to applaud her defiance of the West – for welcoming an African whom the West wants to see behind bars for his crimes against humanity.

But in the process of being so ardently against what the former colonial powers want, we may have forgotten our own humanity. Our compassion for the voiceless and our need to fight for the rights of the victims seems to have fallen by the wayside, as we know that no African Court of Justice is going to prosecute Bashir any time soon.

While I may have written in June about the moral bankruptcy of the ICC in many instances, I feel compelled to point out that the very crimes the ICC charged Bashir with in 2009, are crimes he never stopped committing. The citizens of Darfur never got a reprieve from the government-orchestrated violence, not in 2010 and not this year. In actual fact it only got worse.

The Janjaweed was no longer enough to exact the scorched-earth policy Khartoum intended to exact on the civilian villages of Darfur. In 2013 Bashir created an even more diabolical force whose mission was to wipe out any dissent anywhere across the country. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) were created to operate alongside the Janjaweed, under the command of the national intelligence and security services.

Their brief? According to first-hand accounts from defectors interviewed by Human Rights Watch, commanding officers ordered units to carry out atrocities against civilians.

The definition of crimes against humanity are serious offences (including murder, torture and rape) that are committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack on a civilian population.

There is ample evidence to suggest the mass rape and killings of the RSF over the past two years in numerous towns in Darfur over an extended period has been widespread and systematic. The commander and chief of all Sudanese government forces, including the RSF, is Bashir.

Let us not gloss over the gruesome nature of what the civilians of these villages are going through. Evidence from survivors who managed to flee the orchestrated attacks have testified some women were raped last month by eight to 10 men, and there have been cases of 17 women being raped together. Witnesses have testified that community members were forced to watch mass rape, and those who protested were killed on the spot.

When the M23 rebels behave like this in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), what is our response? We send in soldiers to target the perpetrators, with a view to ending the carnage of militias who use rape as a weapon of war.

This begs the question: Why are we not being even-handed in our own perception of justice? Are the women and children of the Eastern DRC who are being brutalised by the M23 any different from the women of Jebel Marra in central Darfur who are going through exactly the same terror?

It is true our soldiers in the Eastern DRC are fighting there for larger geo-political reasons, not simply to protect civilians. The M23 is destabilising the Great Lakes region, and the militias need to be neutralised. The carnage in Darfur is contained within the borders of Sudan, but surely that cannot be enough of a reason to turn a blind eye.

What we should be insisting on is that the hybrid UN-AU force on the ground in Darfur be given the necessary capability to protect civilians. Unlike in Rwanda in 1994, the UN-AU Mission in Darfur (Unamid) has a mandate to protect civilians but it is not doing it. If Unamid cannot fulfil its mandate, then an effective AU rapid response force should.

Herein lies the difficulty – if the AU were to send into Darfur a newly created African standby force to protect civilians from the crimes against humanity being wrought on them by Sudanese government forces, how would the AU then hold a summit at which it would warmly welcome the Sudanese leader?

* Shannon Ebrahim is Independent Media’s Foreign Editor.

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