U.S. and European media

November 17, 2022

Associated Press: Darfur refugees seek justice over peace. Refugees in this crowded camp - where mass graves hold the victims of one of the bloodiest Sudanese government attacks against them - see little hope in a new drive for peace aimed at ending the nearly six-year war in Darfur. What they want is justice. For many of the refugees, that means putting Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir on trial for genocide. Next week, ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo is to present details to the Hague-based court outlining what he says is al-Bashir's role in overseeing the systematic targeting of Darfur's main Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa tribes. Based on that, the judges are to make a final decision on the indictment and on issuing an arrest warrant.

Associated Press: Sudan and Rebels Trade Accusation Over Violence. Sudanese and rebel forces traded accusations Sunday that the other is initiating a new wave of fighting in the ravaged Darfur region just days after the government had offered a cease-fire. Several Darfur rebel factions described government attacks, including aerial bombardments and militia raids in different locations, while the government said rebels had just attacked a government convoy.

Reuters: Sudan journalists detained at censorship protest. More than 60 Sudanese journalists and newspaper staff were detained on Monday at a rare public protest against media censorship. A Reuters witness saw riot police armed with canes and shields round up protesters as they stood opposite the parliament buildings holding banners with the message "We need our rights". Police said 63 people were detained. Sudanese newspapers say they receive nightly visits from security officers who read through the next day's edition and instruct editors to remove sensitive articles.

Agence France-Presse: Sudan: Russian Fighter Jets Purchased. Russia has sold 12 MiG-29 fighter jets to Sudan, the Sudanese defense minister, Abdel Rahim Mohammed Hussein, said during a visit to Moscow on Friday, according to Russian news agencies. Last year, Russia was accused by Amnesty International of violating a United Nations resolution by supplying weapons to Sudan that were used in Darfur, a charge the Russian Foreign Ministry rejected. The United Nations imposed an embargo on the sale and delivery of arms to Darfur in 2004. In Washington, the State Department deputy spokesman, Robert Wood, said the sale was "the last thing that country needs."

Reuters: Chad and Sudan plan deployment to secure border. Chad and Sudan plan to deploy troops at observation points along their common border in a joint bid to prevent rebel incursions that have often damaged their relations, African officials said. A meeting of ministers from a contact group of African governments set up to improve ties between the oil-producing neighbours announced the initiative at the weekend after meeting on Saturday in the Chadian capital N'Djamena.

The following are excerpts from a New York Times interview with Condoleezza Rice, Christopher Hill, Daniel Fried and Gen. James L. Jones that appeared in the Times Magazine yesterday.

Welcome to My World, Barack

On Jan. 20,  Barack Obama will inherit a world very different from the one his predecessor found in January 2001. Over the past eight years, the Bush administration has faced great challenges and nurtured grand ambitions; it has tried hard to remake the world. Condoleezza Rice has been a central player in that effort since becoming the candidate Bush's chief foreign-policy adviser in 2000, so we arranged to interview her at the State Department late last month. The interview turned into a wide-ranging discussion of where this government has taken the United States and what sort of world it will leave for the next president. The editors have culled the highlights of her remarks in the text that follows. We also spoke with other administration foreign-policy makers -- Christopher Hill and Daniel Fried of the State Department and Gen. James L. Jones, former supreme allied commander, Europe -- whose remarks supplement and illuminate those of Rice.

II. HOW WE USE POWER

WHERE "NEVER AGAIN" NEVER QUITE GOT DONE.
I have regrets about Darfur, real regrets. I don't know that there were other answers. The president considered trying to do something unilaterally -- very difficult to do.

V. TWILIGHT OF THE INSTITUTIONS?

DISCOVERING WHETHER THE "RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT" MEANS ANYTHING.
I think we thought the Responsibility to Protect meant something. I remember when the responsibility-to-protect language came up at the 2006 United Nations General Assembly, and I remember thinking at the time: If this turns out to be nothing but words, the Security Council is going to have a real black eye, and in the Darfur case it has turned out to be nothing but words. I think it has been an enormous embarrassment for the Security Council and for multilateral diplomacy.

DON'T PREACH TO THE CHINESE.
I think if we do find a solution to the problem of Darfur, it will be because we worked with China. If we find a solution to the problem of Iran, it will be because we worked well with China. Similarly, if we close this deal with North Korea, it will be because of our efforts with China. So I think China has emerged as a country with whom we have to work globally on security challenges. There are increasing signs that we can do that. China suffers at times to an extent, I think, from a caricature of what it is. It's a really complex society. I don't think it should be defined by one dimension, its economics, or security, or human rights. We need to look at all the issues. CHRISTOPHER HILL

WHY THE SECURITY COUNCIL NEGLECTED DARFUR.
We worked day in and day out. Almost not a day passes in this office that we're not trying to find some way to get more forces into Darfur. To make the Sudanese government live up to the multiple agreements that it has made and then walked away from. We go to the Security Council, and nobody wants there to be consequences, well, not nobody, sorry, some don't wish there to be consequences. And so we end up sanctioning again, unilaterally. The Europeans do some things but other interests seem to then trump the responsibility to protect.

Helene Cooper is diplomatic correspondent for The Times and author of "The House on Sugar Beach." Scott L. Malcomson is an editor of the magazine and author, most recently, of "One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race." Interviews with Christopher Hill and Daniel Fried were done by Helene Cooper; the interviews with Condoleezza Rice and James L. Jones were done by Cooper and Malcomson. All the interviews took place in late October in Washington.

The following op-ed by David Scheffer appeared in Thursday's Los Angeles Times. 

Rape as genocide in Darfur

People hear the word "genocide" and think of 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust or the estimated 800,000 mostly Tutsis slaughtered in Rwanda. They do not imagine that rape can be so well planned and done on such a mass scale as to wipe out much of an ethnic group just as thoroughly, if more slowly, than large-scale murder.

Sudan's president, Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, stands accused of -- among other horrible crimes -- masterminding the use of rape as a form of genocide against several ethnic groups in Darfur. In the coming weeks, three judges of the International Criminal Court in The Hague will decide whether that controversial charge will be included in the likely arrest warrant against him. Hanging in the balance is whether the heinous modern warfare strategy of mass rape will be condemned and prosecuted for what it truly is: genocide.

The court's prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, has filed other charges as well, including war crimes, crimes against humanity and "mass murder as genocide." But the groundbreaking charge is rape as genocide, which relies on two lesser-known ways of destroying a people: "causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group" or "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part."

Prosecuting the crime of rape under these particular formulations is unprecedented for the International Criminal Court. There were mass rapes in Rwanda in 1994, for instance, but many of the victims were quickly killed as part of the overall genocide. In Darfur, many rape victims survive, but they suffer grievous harm to their bodies, minds and ethnic identities that can lead to a genocidal result.

Despite rulings from earlier Rwanda and Bosnia war crimes tribunals that offer guidance, the relative novelty and complexity of rape-as-genocide cases may impel the judges to stick to more familiar war crimes terrain. But the judges only have to find reasonable grounds to include the rape-as-genocide charges on the Bashir warrant. They need not establish proof beyond a reasonable doubt, the standard applied at trial.

The evidence presented by Moreno-Ocampo appears compelling. The prosecutor's investigation reveals that, since 2003, Bashir's forces and agents have driven about 2.5 million Sudanese, including substantial numbers of the Fur, Massalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups, into camps of internally displaced persons. They then raped and inflicted other forms of severe sexual violence on thousands, and continue to do so. A common tactic is for the janjaweed militia and Sudan's armed forces and security agents to lie in wait outside the camps to rape -- or often gang-rape -- the women and girls who come out to collect firewood, grass or water in order to survive.

"Maybe around 20 men rape one woman," said one victim in a report cited by the prosecutor. "These things are normal for us here in Darfur. ... They rape women in front of their mothers and fathers."

"Janjaweed babies" born of the rapes rarely have a future in the mother's ethnic group. Infanticide and abandonment are common. Another victim explained: "They kill our males and dilute our blood with rape. [They] ... want to finish us as a people, end our history."

Imagine the collective horror if men and boys in these ethnic groups were raped and then castrated. Would anyone doubt that genocidal impulses were at work by depriving men of their ability to father children? In Darfur, raped women and girls are similarly crippled.

In the 1990s, when I was the U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes issues, I met scores of women who had been raped during the atrocities in the Balkans, Sierra Leone, Uganda and the eastern Congo. In most cases, the experience was devastating to their character, their ethnic bonds and often to their physical health. Even if they were still physically able to bear children, these women typically were ostracized from their communities and could not marry their ethnic men. Confronted with these stories, I recognized that mass rape can destroy a substantial part of a group and thus constitute genocide.

Prosecuting the rapes in Darfur as a crime against humanity would get at the crime's seriousness. But genocide is another order of destruction altogether. Elevating the mass-rape charges to that level indicates that Bashir intended not only to terrorize women or force a population out of a particular region but to end -- or substantially imperil -- the very existence of the three ethnic groups that dared to challenge his power.

Between September 2003 and January 2005, Sudanese military and janjaweed militia slaughtered an estimated 35,000 civilians in Darfur. Since the onset of the violence, an additional 265,000 civilians have suffered slow deaths caused by injury, starvation, lack of water or other conditions of deprivation in the camps. The evidence shows a highly sophisticated strategy at work: scorched-earth assaults on ethnic villages followed by isolation in displacement camps where starvation, illness and rape take a gruesome toll.

Indeed, it would be easier for the court to focus on these almost undeniable crimes against humanity. But here the judges confront a harder task: to find reasonable grounds that Bashir had the "specific criminal intent" to use rape as a genocidal tool.

Genocide cases prosecuted before other war crimes tribunals have found that specific intent can be inferred from the factual circumstances of the crime. In Darfur, clearly, there is no shortage of actions, including repeated mass rapes, that point to Bashir's aim to destroy substantial parts of the Fur, Massalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups.

The wild card remains the U.N. Security Council. Under the treaty that governs the International Criminal Court, the council can suspend any prosecution for a year. China, Russia and even the African Union are pressuring the council to invoke that right. They claim that Bashir will unleash hell on U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur if he is charged and destroy hope for any peace settlement in Sudan. So far, the United States has signaled it will oppose any such efforts to stall the case -- as well it should.

The judges of the International Criminal Court must be afforded the opportunity to continue reviewing the evidence without interference by the Security Council. If they find reasonable grounds to charge Bashir with rape as genocide, thousands of women and girls attacked by rapists as a means of destroying their ethnic groups will share a small measure of justice and peace.

David Scheffer, the U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes issues from 1997 to 2001, is a law professor and director of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University School of Law.

The Darfur Daily News is a service of the Save Darfur Coalition. To subscribe to the Daily News, please email [email protected]. For media inquiries, please contact Ashley Roberts at (202) 478-6181, or [email protected].