An estimated 1.8 million people, most of them poor black farmers, have been forced to flee their homes by government-backed armed militias in the Darfur area of Sudan since a rebellion broke out there in March 2003. Some 70,000 of them have died and many more have suffered injury, rape and the destruction of their belongings. Most of them are now in refugee camps in the south of the province, some in neighbouring Chad.
There, they are short of food, despite heroic aid efforts by international agencies, and they are still subject to attack, because they are quite inadequately protected by a weak African Union force. The planting season has been missed, meaning they will remain highly vulnerable into the medium term.
This is a major human disaster and a culpable one arising from a deliberate scorched earth policy of ethnic- cleansing. A United Nations report has now concluded that it was not genocide, because these actions were not intended to destroy an entire people; but serious war crimes have been committed, and probably crimes against humanity, which should be brought before the International Criminal Court. The five-member panel has provided a confidential list of leading Sudanese believed to be responsible as an annex to their report.
It is surely better to concentrate on the substance of this disaster than to quarrel at length about the moral and legal issues involved in describing it as a genocide or a crime against humanity. The attacks must be stopped, the refugees must get proper relief and be enabled to return safely to their homes over the next year. Peace talks between the state and rebels must be pressed to conclusion as part of the wider peace process agreed last month.
Existing efforts fall far short of these ambitious and pressing needs. They are made more difficult to achieve by political jockeying in which the United States has categorised the Darfur events as genocide requiring UN action, whereas this report wants it referred to the International Criminal Court, which the US rejects, because it could be used against its own troops. Sudan's growing oil resources are a political factor inhibiting any effective action, since the Chinese now draw one-tenth of their supplies from there and will veto punitive action by the Security Council.
Sudan's destructive civil conflicts and immense human rights violations have been a barometer for international concern about African events since the country became independent from British rule in 1956. The vast country of some 32 million people has suffered from civil war between the Arab and Islamic peoples in the north and the African and Christian peoples in the south for all but 11 of these 49 years. Some two million people have died and at least a million have been displaced. The Darfur crisis is related to that civil war, but is not covered by the recent peace terms. The Security Council must now act firmly on this report and must not be deflected by unnecessary argument and political competition from dealing with the dreadful human suffering involved.