GLOBAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN SOCIAL SCIENCE
Volume 11 Issue 8 Version 1.0 November 2011
Type: Double Blind Peer Reviewed International Research Journal
Publisher: Global Journals Inc. (USA)
Online ISSN: 2249-460x & Print ISSN: 0975-587X
Humanitarian Intervention in Africa: A Re-Visit of the Darfur
Conflict
By Ezeabasili E. Ifeoma
University of Nigeria, Ogun State.
Abstract - This paper examines the apparent contradiction between the international
community’s advocacy on responsibility to protect and the unwillingness to take responsibility
based action in Darfur. The paper examines the factors responsible for international community’s
reluctance in intervening in the Darfur conflict and its implication on Darfurians and the future of
humanitarian intervention. We conclude that Darfur’s case shows that there is no correlation
between the West’s strategic interest and its humanitarian concerns. Strategic imperative created
perceived needs to appease Sudanese government as an important actor in the war of terrorism,
while humanitarian concerns suggest the need for greater level of pressure against that
government. This implies that we cannot assume that the West strategic interest in preventing
state failure; will improve the norm of humanitarian intervention in every case. In the case of
Darfur, perceived strategic interests reduced interventionist position.
Keywords : Humanitarian intervention, sovereignty, human rights, Darfur, genocide, refugee,
internally displaced persons.
GJHSS-C Classification : FOR Code : 220104, 160803, 180114 JEL Code : K10
Humanitarian Intervention in AfricaA Re-Visit of the Darfur Conflict
Strictly as per the compliance and regulations of:
© 2011. Ezeabasili E. Ifeoma. This is a research/review paper, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionNoncommercial 3.0 Unported License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use,
distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract - This paper examines the apparent contradiction
between the international community’s advocacy on
responsibility to protect and the unwillingness to take
responsibility based action in Darfur. The paper examines the
factors responsible for international community’s reluctance in
intervening in the Darfur conflict and its implication on
Darfurians and the future of humanitarian intervention. We
conclude that Darfur’s case shows that there is no correlation
between the West’s strategic interest and its humanitarian
concerns. Strategic imperative created perceived needs to
appease Sudanese government as an important actor in the
war of terrorism, while humanitarian concerns suggest the
need for greater level of pressure against that government.
This implies that we cannot assume that the West strategic
interest in preventing state failure; will improve the norm of
humanitarian intervention in every case. In the case of Darfur,
perceived strategic interests reduced interventionist position.
Keywords : Humanitarian intervention, sovereignty,
human rights, Darfur, genocide, refugee ,internally
displaced persons.
T
I.
INTRODUCTION
he United Nation’s (UN) Convention on Genocide
of 1948 (signed by over 100 nations in 1951)
defines genocide as a punishable crime. Article
Two of the Convention defines genocide as “any of the
following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in
whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious
groups, as such :
• Killing members of the group
• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members
of the group
• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life
calculated to bring about its physical destruction in
whole or in part
• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within
the group
• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another
group (United Nations, 1948).
Since the escalation of conflict in Darfur in
February 2003, Sudan has experienced violence that led
to an estimated death of about 750,000 people and
2.5million displacement, including refugees fleeing to
Chad and internally displaced persons (IDPs) in
settlement camps within Darfur (Sato & Stensen, 2007).
The affected populations are dying of starvation and
Author : Department of Political Science and Public Administration,
Redeemers’ University of Nigeria, Ogun State.
E-mail : [email protected]
widespread diseases; and due to the ongoing violence,
lack of security and access, humanitarian organizations
have been unable to serve in the region.
For this reason, the international community, led
by the United Nations, called for collective action to
eradicate sources of human insecurity, especially
conflicts. Among others, such efforts at the normative
level include global consensus on “embracing and
operationalising the key principles relating to the
‘responsibility to protect’, as the framework for collective
action against genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes
against humanity” (United Nations General Assembly,
2005:4). As part of the discourse around the
‘responsibility to protect’, it has been strongly argued
that sovereign states have a primary responsibility to
provide and secure peaceful living conditions for their
citizens.
In this regard, the conflict in Darfur has raised
fundamental strategic and operational level challenges
in the translation of the emerging notions of global
action against states that fail to assume primary
responsibility for the protection of civilian populations.
The government of Sudan (GoS) is alleged to be
complicit in serious human rights abuses, war crimes
and crimes against humanity in a conflict that has
claimed (and continues to claim) thousands of lives and
left several million others as internally displaced persons
(IDPs) and refugees. The scale of the humanitarian
catastrophe in the Darfur and the alleged complicity of
the government of Sudan thus compelled the United
Nations to galvanize international consensus that the
Khartoum administration was failing in its responsibility
to protect its citizens in Darfur. As the scene of the
atrocities continues, Darfur’s situation has called for
intervention in the light of responsibility to protect (R2P)
framework. Inspite of all these, even the strong
advocates of sovereignty as responsibility the NATO,
United States and European Union (EU) States have
seriously declined to contemplate military actions. This
study therefore explores the factors that are responsible
for the unwillingness of NATO, United States and the
European Union from intervening in Darfur.
II.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
This study is situated within responsibility to
protect framework (R2P). Responsibility to protect takes
a comprehensive approach to humanitarian crises,
framing intervention as a continuum from diplomatic and
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Ezeabasili E. Ifeoma
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the Darfur Conflict
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economic sanctions through to military intervention as
last resort. Furthermore, it incorporates “responsibility to
prevent” and responsibility to rebuild” as essential
elements to either side of intervention (ICISS, Supra
Note 12, Article XI). The report establishes six principles
that must be satisfied before military intervention takes
place:
• Just Cause
Before military intervention take place, there
must be extraordinary level of human suffering, as
evidenced by either large-scale loss of life, which can be
“actual or anticipated, with genocidal intent or not”,
(ICISS, Supra Note 12, Article 32) or by large-scale
ethnic cleansing “actual or anticipated, whether carried
out by killing, forced expulsion, acts of terror or rape”.
• Right Intention
The primary purpose must be to prevent or stop
human suffering.
• Proportional Means
• Last Resort
Military intervention can only be employed if all
non-military options have been considered.
• Reasonable Prospects
Military intervention should not go forward
unless there is a reasonable likelihood of success.
• Right Authority
Security Council authorization should be sought
prior to military intervention, either by raising the matter
directly with the security council or by requesting that
the secretary-general exercise his powers under Article
99 of the United Nations Charter. If authorization fails in
compelling case, then there are two alternatives. The
first is for the United Nations General Assembly to hold
an emergency session under a “unity for peace”
procedure, under which a decision to intervene can be
made by a two-thirds majority of General Assembly
(ICISS, Supra Note 12:36). The second is for regional
organizations to gain Security Council authorization
under chapter VIII of the United Nations Charter.
Between 1990 and 1994, the United Nations
Security Council passed twice as many resolution as
had been passed in the entire history of the United
Nations (“U.N”), (Weiss, 2004), as the notion of what
constituted a “threat to international peace and security”
under Chapter VII of the United Nations charter was
expanded to include humanitarian concerns (Bellamy,
2005:34). The decade following the end of the cold war
saw security council resolutions authorizing Chapter VII
intervention in Somalia, (security council resolution,
751:1992).Liberia(S.C.Res.788,U.N.Doc.S/RES/788:199
2) Rwanda,(S.C.Res.929/3,U.N.Doc.S/RES/929:1994).
Haiti, S.C.Res.940/4,U.N.Doc.S/RES/940:1994). Sierra
Leone, (S.C.Res.1181,U.N. Doc.S/RES/1181: 1998), and
Kosovo, (S.C.Res.1244/9,U.N.Doc.S/ RES/1244: 1999).
This led Abiew (1999) to posit the emergence of a
challenge to the presumed inviolability of state
sovereignty.
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However, the interventions of the 1990s, were
inconsistent, lacking any coherent theory with which to
justify the infringement of sovereignty in each case
(Abiew, 1999). Kofi Annan in his Millennium Report
issued a challenge: “if humanitarian intervention is,
indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how
should we respond to Rwanda, to a Srebrenica – to
gross and systematic violations of human rights that
offend every precept of our common humanity” (Sec.
Gen, U.N. Doc. 2000:54). In December 2001, the
International Commission on Intervention and State
Sovereignty (“ICISS”) published its response in a report
titled The Responsibility to Protect (“R2P”) (International
commission on intervention of state sovereignty, 2001).
The core tenant of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is
that sovereignty entails responsibility (Deng, 1996).
Each state has a responsibility to protect its citizens, if a
state is unable or unwilling to carry out that function, the
state abrogates its sovereignty, at which point both the
right and the responsibility to remedy the situation falls
on the international community. This proposal refutes
the long standing assumption enshrined in Article 2(7) of
the 1945 United Nations charter that there is no right to
“intervene in matters which are essentially within the
domestic jurisdiction of any state”. (United Nations
Charter, 1945: Article 2[7]). The government of Sudan
has failed in its responsibility to protect its citizenry,
hence, the responsibility falls on the international
community to protect the Darfurians.
Darfur conflict in the context of the discourse on the
‘Responsibility to Protect’
Darfur conflict provides an important test case
of the international society’s commitment to an
emerging norm of humanitarian intervention and the
idea set out in ‘the Responsibility to Protect’ report. The
deployment of African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS)
was part of the African Union’s efforts to eliminate mass
human suffering. African Mission in Sudan formed a
critical component of international efforts to restore
human dignity and peace in Sudan and dovetailed with
the International Commission on Intervention for State
Sovereignty (ICISS) report emphasized the “right of
humanitarian intervention”. However, unlike some other
mandates, African Union Mission in Sudan mandate did
not allow the use of coercive measures to deal with
atrocities against the vulnerable population. That
weakness in the mandate was further exacerbated by
the insufficiency of its forces.
The International Commission and Intervention
for State Sovereignty (ICISS) report emphasized the right
of intervention during severe humanitarian crises, and its
intention to implement constructive and, where
necessary, coercive intervention. According to the
International Commission and Intervention for State
Sovereignty (ICISS) report, coercion would be
applicable if a sovereign state was unable to protect its
III.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Evans (2004) stated that there must be grievous
harm to human beings: either in large-scale loss of life
due to deliberate state action, inaction or inability to act,
or large-scale ethnic cleansing carried out not only by
killing, but forced expulsion, acts of terror or rape,before
humanitarian intervention can take place. While Reeves
(2004:6) further argued that if the current situation in
Darfur, characterized by massive deliberate human
destruction, animated by ethnic/racial hatred, does not
make a compelling case for intervention, "then it is
impossible to imagine a future galvanizing development
in Darfur that might be the final spur to action." Dallaire
(2004) agreed with this assessment and recalls the
quibbling on the definition of the events in Rwanda and
finds this situation in which there is reluctance to label
the events as genocide reminiscent of that travesty.
Regardless of the label, de Waal (2004) states that
prediction of up to 300,000 famine deaths alone should
be sufficient to spur the world to concrete action.
However, Evans (2004:6) posits that "resorting
to collective military action, overruling the basic norm of
non-intervention," is not an easy decision to make,
neither "is it easy to justify standing by when action is
possible in practice and defensible in principle."
Intervention, as a reflection of the international
responsibility to protect, is particularly justified; he
opined that when there is failure on the part of the state
to halt the crisis. Ignatieff (2004:11) affirmed this in his
exploration of the idea of "lesser evils," acts that stray
from national and international law, which can be
justified only because they prevent the greater evil.
Although his discussion is within the context of the War
on Terror, much of his thesis is applicable to intervention
in Darfur. Here, too, intervention can possibly stray from
international law, since it involves assuming
responsibility for the protection of a civilian population
from its government.
According to Gberie (2004), Darfur presents an
ideal case for intervention, in which consent of the
Sudanese government has become insignificant due to
its failure to protect its population. Since such
intervention occurred in Kosovo in 1999 in response to
the deaths of some 2,000 people and Rwanda in 1994.
He further stressed that inaction in Darfur will lead to the
international community being accused of insincerity
and catalyzing the culture of impunity on the African
continent. Reeves (2004) further argued that "the refusal
of the international community to save hundreds of
thousands of lives in Darfur shows how the lives of
African Muslim are geopolitically inconsequential. From
these arguments the case for intervention in Darfur
appears to be compelling. In September 2000, the
Canadian government commissioned the International
Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty
(ICISS) to examine the relationship between sovereignty,
human rights and intervention. The following year, the
ICISS report set out guidelines to govern international
interventions in supreme humanitarian emergencies and
recommended that the language of the debate should
be changed from ‘the right to intervene’ to ‘the
responsibility to protect’. According to the Commission,
‘the responsibility to protect’ looks at the issue from the
point of view of those needing help; it acknowledges
the fact that the host state has primary responsibility for
the welfare of its citizens and that intervention can only
be contemplated if the state is either unwilling or unable
to fulfill its responsibilities to its citizens; finally, it means
that intervention (‘the responsibility to react’) should be
situated alongside prevention and post-conflict
rebuilding (ICISS, 2001: 17). The report’s approach built
upon the idea of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ outlined
earlier by Deng (1995) and his collaborators (Deng et
al., 1996). According to this view, ‘sovereignty carries
with it certain responsibilities for which governments
must be held accountable. And they are accountable
not only to their national constituencies but ultimately to
the international community. . . . By effectively
discharging its responsibilities for good governance, a
state can legitimately claim protection for its national
sovereignty’ (Deng et al., 1996: 1). Although the United
States of America has distanced itself from the ICISS
findings, the White House has also articulated a form of
‘sovereignty as responsibility’ in the shape of its policy
on ‘rogue states’. In addition to proliferating weapons of
mass destruction (WMDs) and harbouring terrorists,
rogue states are defined by the US government as those
that ‘brutalize their own people and squander their
natural resources for the personal gain of their rulers’.
Such ‘rogues’, the current National Security Strategy
bluntly points out, must be ‘stopped’ (White House,
2002: 14).
This doctrine, further identified a state’s
responsibility to desist from attacking its citizens as one
component of US strategic policy. It is therefore
possible to identify a weak norm of ‘sovereignty as
responsibility’ in international society, though, this falls
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civilians from avoidable disasters, as it is in the case of
Darfur. In such cases, the international community (of
states and other actors) should be given the
responsibility to intervene and restore the human dignity
and socio-economic wellbeing of the affected civilians
through the application of coercive measures, including
the international trials of perpetrators (for atrocities
committed against the civilians) and the use of force to
deter civilian insecurity.
Against this background, it was observed that
civilian insecurity in African peace missions, (such as
AMIS in Darfur) illustrates the reluctance of the
international community to effectively apply coercive
measures that would provide civilian safety, as
entrenched by the International Commission and
Intervention for State Sovereignty (ICISS) report.
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far short of the type of ‘operational doctrine’ envisaged
by the ICISS commissioners. The contradiction between
the concept of sovereignty and the views put forward in
the Security Council by the Philippines and the UK in
relations to Darfur are glaring. During the first half of
2004, the situation in Darfur was repeatedly described
as representing a ‘supreme humanitarian emergency’,
that is, a situation where ‘the only hope of saving lives
depends on outsiders coming to the rescue’ (Wheeler,
2000: 34). According to the ICISS, there are two
threshold criteria – ‘large scale loss of life’ and ‘large
scale ethnic cleansing’ – that must be met before the
‘responsibility to protect’ can be invoked to override
state sovereignty (ICISS, 2001: 14). According to
Gberie(2004) in the case of Darfur, these threshold
conditions were met and yet, international society failed
to even seriously contemplate military intervention.
Although Resolution 1556 was passed under Chapter VII
of the UN Charter, the Security Council chose not to
assume responsibility for alleviating human suffering in
Darfur by authorizing a humanitarian intervention.
Darfur Crisis and International response
The first Security Council resolution mentioning
Darfur was Resolution 1547 on 11 June 2004. This set
out the Council’s position on the Machakos/Naivasha
peace process (concerning the war between the
government of Sudan and the Sudan People’s
Liberation
Movement/Army,
SPLM/A).
However,
Paragraph 6 of the resolution also called upon the
parties involved ‘to bring an immediate halt to the
fighting in Darfur’ and elsewhere, and to ‘conclude a
political agreement without delay’. On 30 July, acting
under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, the Council
authorized Resolution 1556, which, among other things,
imposed an arms embargo on the region, supported the
deployment of the African Union Protection Force and
gave the Sudanese government 30 days to disarm the
Janjaweed or face sanctions. The wording of Resolution
1556 was changed during the negotiation phase from
explicitly referring to sanctions to the broader notion of
‘measures as provided for in Article 41’ of the UN
Charter. It also firmly placed responsibility to protect the
suffering Darfurians in the hands of the Sudanese
government. This was in spite of the fact that most
experts agreed that the government of Sudan lacked the
capability and will to quickly stop or disarm the
Janjaweed by force (de Waal, 2004b).
Amnesty International (2004b), suggests that
although Resolution 1556 ensured the continued
monitoring of the crisis, it ‘failed to adopt measures that
are urgent and essential to address the appalling
human rights situation’. Resolution 1556 represents ‘the
abandonment of the people of Darfur and an abdication
of the Security Council’s role as a human rights
enforcing agent’ (Aaronovitch, 2004). Accordingly, the
United State ambassador to the United Nations
observed that ‘many people who are concerned about
© 2011 Global Journals Inc. (US)
Darfur would say that Resolution 1556 does not go far
enough. . . . Perhaps they are right’ (United Nations,
2004b: 4). Other contending views argues that the
resolution went too far in threatening economic and
diplomatic sanctions against Sudan. China and
Pakistan, for instance, explained their abstentions in the
Security Council vote by their refusal on ‘mandatory
measures’ against Sudan (United Nations, 2004b: 4,
10).
Russia’s opposition to intervention is arguably
connected to concerns about Chechnya, but the country
also has substantial commercial interests in the region,
especially since it has sold around $150 million worth of
military equipment to Sudan, and in 2002 a $200 million
oil deal with the Sudanese government sailed through.
Ruslan Pukhov, a Moscow-based defense analyst, has
suggested that Russia fears that sanctions could
provide a loophole for the Sudanese government to
default on its payments to Russia (Peterson, 2004). The
Sudanese representative at the Council also rejected the
resolution as ‘an unfair and unjust policy of double
standards’ that was ‘the result of a domineering, colonial
mindset’ (United Nations, 2004b: 14). Instead, the
Sudanese government declared it would work towards
the 90-day schedule previously agreed on 3 July in its
joint communiqué with the UN Secretary-General. This
further exacerbated the problem with the formulation of
Resolution 1556, inasmuch as it left out the progress the
Sudanese government needed to make in Darfur in
order to avert UN sanctions after the 30-day deadline
had expired. Consequently, within a week of Resolution
1556, a 12-point Darfur Action Plan was agreed upon
between the government of Sudan and Jan Pronk. This
clarified the practical steps necessary for Sudan to avert
sanctions.
Compliance with Resolution 1556 was patchy
after the resolution’s passage, the Sudanese
government relaxed visa controls for foreign aid workers
but provided support for humanitarian agencies. The
United Nations compliance report released in
September 2004 noted that the Khartoum government
had failed to meet ‘some of the core commitments’
(United Nations News, 2004a). For instance, it was
reported that the Sudanese government was
incorporating the militia into regular military and police
forces instead of demobilizing them. Furthermore, Jan
Pronk informed the Security Council that there had been
‘no systematic improvement of people’s security and no
progress on ending impunity’. He concluded, ‘by saying
that increasing numbers of the population of Darfur are
exposed, without any protection from their government,
to hunger, fear and violence. The numbers affected by
the conflict are growing and their suffering is being
prolonged by inaction’ (United Nations News,
2004b).When the Council reconvened on 4 November to
hear Pronk’s assessment of the situation. When he
noted some progress in the political negotiations, he
While the UN could not find troops and deploy
them to Rwanda, the international community was more
than willing to send troops to the Balkans region in
Eastern Europe. On 27 April 1994, only six days after the
reduction of the UN mission in Rwanda to 270 soldiers,
the UN Security Council authorized an increase of
international presence in Bosnia, adding 6,550 troops to
about 24,000 UN troops already there (Melvern 2000). In
Bosnia, Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, different ethnic and
religious groups, fought a civil war from 1992 to 1995.
While opposed to any kind of intervention in Rwanda in
the summer of 1994, US President, Bill Clinton, saw
American self-interest in Bosnia. According to Joseph
Biden, one of the most important foreign policy issues
facing the United States Congress in the 1990s was the
American involvement in Bosnia. “Helping Bosnia to
create a viable multi-ethnic, free-market democracy
sends a critical message to other would-be ‘ethnic
cleansers’ that a repeat of such carnage will not be
tolerated elsewhere in Europe” (Biden 1998: 1). In
December 1994, Clinton offered 20,000 US soldiers as
ground troops in Bosnia to help evacuate the UN
peacekeepers that were under threat (Los Angeles
Times, 9 December 1994). While the PDD prevented the
US administration from intervening in Rwanda or
allowing other countries to do so, it did not prevent the
deployment of thousands of American and European
soldiers into the brutal war in the Balkans.
IV.
FACTORS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE
INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY’S
UNWILLINGNESS IN INTERVENING IN
DARFUR
The
international
community
became
increasingly suspicious about the humanitarian
justification since September 11, 2001 and the US-led
interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, many states have
become increasingly suspicious that the West’s
humanitarian justifications mask neo-imperial ambitions.
This has impeded The Responsibility to Protect project;
for this reason, Ignatieff (2003), was a vocal supporter of
the case for war in Iraq, albeit in order to prevent WMD
proliferation within ‘rogue states’ rather than on
humanitarian grounds. Sudan voiced this suspicion in
the UN Security Council when its representative asked
whether the Council’s ‘lofty humanitarian objective’ in
Darfur was an uphill task, embraced by other people
who are advocating a different agenda’ (United Nations,
2004). The accusations that the USA and the UK’s
attempt to legitimize the war in Iraq on humanitarian
grounds has increased the level of doubts about the
West’s professed humanitarianism. (Deng and Steven,
2001).
Although most states have not gone as far as
Sudan, in this case the general contention about
humanitarian justifications acting as a façade for neo
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observed ‘regression’ on the ground. In particular, Pronk
pointed to the return of large-scale militia violence
(which had ceased at the time of Resolution 1556) as
indicative of a worsening situation in Darfur (United
Nations, 2004d). Council members chose not to
respond to the report and retreated into informal
consultations.
However, realism is seen as the primary reason
for the lack of interest for the recent African conflicts in
the Western world. When a conflict in Africa does not
affect the strategic, security, or economic interests of the
powerful Western countries, the international community
will not do much, to intervene and end that conflict. At
the same time, the international community will be
preoccupied with Middle Eastern or European conflicts.
A good example of this lack of interest in African
conflicts as compared to the conflict in the Balkans was
the 1994 genocide in Rwanda that was happening at the
same time. When the Rwandan genocide began in April
1994, the international community simply turned away
and disregarded the reports of unthinkable brutality. The
Western governments ignored the killings of more than
800,000 people in only 100 days because they saw no
economic and national security interest in saving
Africans (Berry and Berry 1999: 6). The United Nations
(UN), depending on the member states and their
contributions in money, equipment, and personnel, had
no means to intervene (Polman 2004).
In May 1994, the then United States president,
Bill Clinton, signed the Presidential Decision Directive 25
(PDD). The PDD’s purpose was to reform multilateral
peace operations in order to make “disciplined and
coherent choices about which peace operations to
support, both when voting in the UN Security Council for
the United Nations peace operations and when
participating in such operations with US troops” (White
House Press Statement, 6 May 1994). From then on, the
United Stated would officially o intervene in places
where they had economic or national security interest.
Moreover, the PDD was also used to persuade other
countries not to intervene in places the United States
government did not want to get involved (Gourevitch
1998). The United Nations could not act on its own and
intervene in Rwanda since it does not have an army, but
depends on the member countries to send troops and
pay for the peacekeeping operations. Waltz (as quoted
in Crawford 2000: 103), one of the leading realist
theorists, writes that the international organizations such
as the United Nations are not capable of acting in
“important ways except with the support, or at least the
acquiescence, of the principal states concerned with the
matters at hand.” Hough (2004:3) opined that powerful
countries see organizations such as the United Nations
as mere “alliances of convenience between states.” The
most powerful states create international institutions to
maintain or increase their share of world power. These
institutions are fundamentally “arenas for acting out
power relationships” (Mearsheimer 1995: 340).
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imperial ambitions revolves around two factors:
terrorism and oil. Prior to 9/11, the US government
consistently identified Sudan as a key state in its
counter-terrorism policies in Africa. Moreover, since
Sudan began exporting oil in 1998, the USA has viewed
it as a potential alternative, non-Middle Eastern, source
of oil (along with other African states such as Nigeria,
Angola and those along the Gulf of Guinea). However,because the USA’s strategic concerns dictated its
commercial stance, United States firms have not been
at the forefront of extracting Sudan’s oil. Instead, a wide
variety of firms from states including China, Malaysia,
France, Qatar, Russia, Canada and Sweden have taken
the lead (Human Rights Watch, 2003). Deng (2004)
argued that any so-called humanitarian intervention in
Darfur would be under the pretense for gaining access
to Sudan’s oil
In the case of Iraq, the major troop-contributing
states (USA, UK and Australia) gave solid backings to
the humanitarian justification for war, particularly as
justifications based on Weapons of Mass Destruction
and self-defence floundered. Of all the different cases
argued in respect to the war in Iraq, the humanitarian
case against Hussein’s regime has proven more
persuasive within international and world society than
any other. However, most states and non-state actors
refuted the idea that the Iraq war counted as a
humanitarian intervention, this is because humanitarian
purpose was not the primary objective (Deng et al,
1996). Whereas in the Kosovo case there was significant
international acceptance of NATO’s claim that it was
acting to avert a humanitarian crisis, in the Iraq case
most actors in international and world society believed
that humanitarian justifications were used to mask the
exercise of hegemonic power.
while a norm of
humanitarian intervention may be emerging, the
coalition’s ‘abuse’ of humanitarian justifications in Iraq
has raised the level of ideological and material
resources that Western states must invest in order to
persuade others of their case.
a) Darfur is not as important as the ‘War on Terrorism’
Another factor adduced for the reluctance of
Western military intervention in Darfur is Sudan’s
position in the ‘war on terrorism’. Since September 11,
2001, US government has mounted pressure on
Bashir’s government to be in support rather than
‘against’ it. For the doubt that groups at the radical end
of Khartoum’s political spectrum could succeed in
representing any Western intervention in Darfur as a
‘crusader’ plot against Muslims and use this to improve
their stance within Sudanese politics (The Economist,
2004). As the Darfur’s conflict unfolds, the US
government suspected that Saudi Arabian terrorist
groups were using northeast Sudan for training
purposes (McElroy, 2004). The anti-UN demonstrations
in Khartoum that followed Resolution 1556 was evidence
of the depth of anti-Western sentiment within sections of
© 2011 Global Journals Inc. (US)
Sudanese public opinion who believe that their
government was engaged in legitimate counter
insurgency operations in Darfur. The challenges facing
Western states in particular was how to fashion out ways
of responding to Darfur’s crisis that highlighted their
commitment to the idea of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’
without instigating Islamic radicalism and encourage
Sudan to become a haven for anti-Western terrorist
groups as it had been in the early 1990s. This thought
informed the basis for allowing regional body (AU) to
take the lead in the international response.
b) Military Intervention Would impede the Naivasha
Agreement
Thirdly, Western leaders also raised concerns
over what the potential impact of intervening in Darfur
might have on Sudan’s other civil wars, especially the
government–Sudanese
People
Liberation
Movement/Army (SPLM/A) conflict. As US Secretary of
State Colin Powell put it, ‘There is a concern that we
don’t want to put so much on the Sudanese government
that causes internal problems that might make the
situation worse. . . . At the same time, everybody
recognizes that pressure is needed we would not get
any action at all’ (Hoge, 2004:1). After investing
considerable diplomatic capital in pushing the
Machakos/Naivasha process forward, the troika and the
other participants in the Intergovernmental Authority on
Development (IGAD) process were keen to see the
agreement implemented. These powers saw the
Naivasha agreement as potentially ending Africa’s
longest running civil war and providing a framework
within which the grievances of other regions within
Sudan could be addressed. Within this framework,
Darfur and Sudan’s other conflict-ridden regions would
have to be integrated into the overall settlement during
the envisaged transitional period. In the light of these
developments, Darfur’s crisis was considered
secondary to securing an agreement between the
government and the SPLM/A, as well as on the country’s
other contested regions, such as Abyei, the Nuba
Mountains and the southern Blue Nile. (Mans, 2004:
293; Power, 2004).
Western states were concerned that an
intervention in Darfur could trigger a multiple effects
wherein other Sudanese groups, disgruntled at their
marginalization from the Machakos/ Naivasha process –
such as the Beja of eastern Sudan – would pursue the
SLA/JEM route of armed insurgency just as the process
was starting to make real progress. The fact that the
SLA had publicly announced a merger with the easternbased Beja Congress only served to heighten such
concerns (Mans, 2004). de Waal (2004a), for instance,
argued that bringing the SPLA leader John Garang to
Khartoum as vice president as envisaged in the
Naivasha agreement would help stop the war in Darfur,
because Garang’s desire to represent all of Sudan’s
non-Arab peoples, including Darfurians, would make it
Humanitarian Intervention in Africa: A Re-Visit of the Darfur Conflict
Darfur, as in Chechnya, perceived strategic interests
mitigated against interventionist position. (MacFarlane,
2000)
CONCLUSION
Realism is seen as the primary reason for the
lack of interest in recent African conflicts in the Western
world. When a conflict in Africa does not affect the
strategic, security, or economic interests of the powerful
Western countries, the international community will not
do much, to intervene and end that conflict. The
implications of these trends for both Darfur and the
future of humanitarian intervention are as follows: first,
the scene from Darfur suggests that Western states are
not ready to invest the necessary political resources in
order to undertake effective humanitarian interventions
and match their words about the responsibility to protect
with attendant actions. Though, it is imperative to
acknowledge the fact that in some cases, such as
Chechnya, strategic concerns render intervention
reckless. However, Western states have always been
reluctant to expose their forces to danger all for
humanitarian reasons, Darfur’s demography and the low
level nature of the militias involved show that the West
has the capacity of containing the violence effectively.
Secondly, the gap between words and actions are not
irreversible, advocates of responsibility to protect
(NATO, United States and European Union)should find
ways to convince Western states to live up to their
statements of intent and to take risks in order to save
other lives. They should also prepare the Western
societies to accept the necessary costs. Unfortunately
for the Darfurians, the political and material costs of
taking the responsibility to protect actions is inversely
proportional to the West’s willingness to pay the cost.
The international community should match their words
with actions.
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