Darfur: An ongoing genocide

was the first "official" genocide of this blighted and desperate century. It began a decade ago and became a cause célèbre, not least because it coincided with the 10th

anniversary of the biggest genocide of the final years of the last century in Rwanda, where between 800,000 and one million people were killed in just one hundred days of ethnic slaughter.

"Something must be done" was the international cry - actually, mainly in the West - as some fine and passionate journalism from Darfur exposed the frenzy of mass-murder, rape and pillage. On the back of this reporting, and as the killing went on, the United Nations engaged in an arcane debate as to whether the mayhem should be termed "genocide" or "ethnic cleansing".

Well, the genocide in Darfur continues to this day, but the issue has dipped far below the radar of international attention and press coverage, partly as a result of travel bans on journalists by Sudan's dictator, President Omar al-Bashir, and also, let's be frank, because of boredom and world-weariness as new conflicts in the Middle East, North Africa and Ukraine erupted to dominate the media agenda.

By sad accident, the 20th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide and the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the Darfur genocide coincides with the current 20th anniversary of the July 1995 killing by Serb forces of more than 8,372 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, the worst massacre in Europe since the Second World War.

Bosnia Serb armed forces commander Ratko Mladic is currently on trial before the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. The entire region around Srebrenica and other centres where Muslims were murdered is dotted with mass graves. Reconciliation among Bosnia's Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks today, so many years after the Balkan War, still looks like a distant prospect. The massacre/genocide remains an explosive political issue, with many Serbs unwilling to accept the truth of what happened.

When, in 2004, then US Secretary of State Colin Powell labelled Darfur as this century's first genocide, it was seen as a key test of how well the world would unite to stop mass atrocities.

Last week Samantha Power, formerly a fine foreign correspondent based in Sudan who is now United States ambassador to the United Nations, lamented: "We have seen more violent displacement of people in Darfur this last year than in 10 years. Ten years ago, however, Darfur enjoyed a perch at the top of the international peace and security agenda. Today, the suffering of the people of Darfur has become less visible. Our attention has been diverted."

Focus on Darfur is maintained, nevertheless, by some human rights organisations and a handful of concerned academics. Human Rights Watch says at least half a million people have been displaced by the continuing Darfur conflict in the past 16 months.

Scores of villages across the territory have been burned and the Al-Bashir government has denied access to international aid agencies to areas worst affected by the fighting. Human Rights Watch documented a recent mass rape of at least 221 women and girls by Sudan government-backed militias in the northern Darfur town of Tabit.

Overall, some three million Darfurians have been internally displaced or become refugees in neighbouring Chad, says Eric Reeves, a professor of English at Smith College, Massachusetts, who has been a researcher and writer on Sudan for the past 20 years.

"Estimates vary, but we must speak of several hundred thousands of deaths - perhaps half a million - from violence and its consequences, and mortality rates are rising," says Reeves.

"To date, some 25 to 30 international relief organisations have been expelled by Khartoum or have withdrawn because of a lack of security. This has occurred against a backdrop of extreme malnutrition in many locations, a desperate lack of clean water and sanitation, and rapidly collapsing system for providing primary medical care."

The London-based intelligence report Africa Confidential said last week that conditions in Darfur are worse than ever, broadly agreeing with Professor Reeve's analysis, but adding that some 200,000 men, both government and opposition, are under arms and that 4.4 million of the region's 6.5 million people are in desperate need of humanitarian assistance.

Five years after the UN began debating whether to call the mass murder in Darfur "genocide" or "ethnic cleansing", the ICC in The Hague finally indicted Al-Bashir and issued a warrant for his arrest.

Al-Bashir was indicted on three counts of genocide and charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The ICC, under its first prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo and subsequently under Fatou Bensouda, a former Gambian lawyer who became prosecutor in 2012, accused the Arab-dominated Sudanese government of trying to exterminate the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa largely black African ethnic groups.

The court said president Al-Bashir was required to stand trial over the "essential role" he is alleged to have played in the "murder, rape, torture and displacement" of countless civilians.

"After driving civilians off their land and killing many of them, militias would rape and impregnate women who took refuge in camps," said the prosecutors.

The international warrant for Al-Bashir was the first in which the ICC, established in 2002, sought the arrest of a sitting head of state. It means he carries the modern equivalent of the mark of Cain.

All 123 members of the ICC, including 34 African states, who signed the Rome Statute that ratified the ICC in 2002, are obliged to arrest Al-Bashir whenever they get the opportunity and deliver him to The Hague.

The decision by the government of South Africa, one of the first 10 signatories of the Rome Statute under President Nelson Mandela, to let Al-Bashir visit the country for a conference last month and defy a domestic court instruction to arrest him, has triggered outrage, some of it genuine but much of it manufactured.

On June 14, the High Court in Johannesburg ordered president Jacob Zuma to prevent Al-Bashir from leaving South Africa and detain him under the ICC arrest warrant.

Zuma chose to override both domestic and international law and allowed Al-Bashir to slip out of the country aboard a private jet before the High Court order came into effect and thus escape justice. A year earlier Zuma, in order to avoid upsetting China, refused to grant a visa to the Dalai Lama so that the Tibetan spiritual leader could accept an invitation from Nobel Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu to visit him in Johannesburg.

"Mr Zuma has reached the extraordinary position where he will betray the ideals of the new South Africa by spurning a Nobel Laureate but welcome a tyrannical dictator wanted for the worst of all crimes," wrote one shocked commentator.

Another said Zuma's violation of the High Court order was clearly unconstitutional and made clear that he puts solidarity with the African Union's "big men and petty dictators" over South Africa's responsibilities to the terrorised people of Darfur and to the international community.

Zuma's failure to arrest Al-Bashir is a blow to the ICC. But ultimately the development may be worse for South Africa and its fast-fading post-Mandela reputation than for the ICC.

"Criminal justice, good governance and the rule of law in South Africa have been systematically eroded in recent years under President Zuma," said Anton du Plessis, managing director of South Africa's Institute for Security Studies. "We shouldn't be surprised that this now extends to the international level."

The full-scale eruption of the Darfur conflict began a decade ago when Al-Bashir authorised traditional Arab janjaweed militias to burn African villages and loot livestock and food on a grand scale. They were also authorised by president A-Bashir to rape with impunity, according to human rights groups, and settle in cleared African villages.

The roots of the janjaweed, an Arabic popular expression which translates as "a djinn [devil] on horseback with a gun", can be traced back 1,200 years, when Arab and African cultures began meeting, mixing and clashing along a great human fault line that runs east-west for thousands of miles across Africa on the southern margins of the Sahara Desert.

During those centuries the Arabs have largely Islamicised the Africans, taking countless hundreds of thousands of them as slaves, a trade that continues to this day. While there has been much miscegenation, those who class themselves as "Arabs" consider themselves racially and culturally superior to the "Africans".

The Arab janjaweed militiamen are largely descended from nomadic tribes accounting for only 15 per cent of the Darfur population, but as population has grown, putting pressure on water resources, they have coveted the lands of settled African farmers and enjoyed the support of the Al-Bashir government.

Amid the general turmoil, with more than a dozen organisations and splinter groups involved in the warfare, the Africans have successfully defended the best agricultural land in the Jebel Marra, an 8,000 square mile area rising to more than 10,000 feet above the surrounding semi-desert plains and which few aid organisations or journalists have penetrated. The Jebel Marra has a cool climate and high rainfall supporting springs and streams and lush pastures that the janjaweed crave for their camel herds and horses.

Al-Bashir enlisted the help of the janjaweed not just because of Arab kinship but because they are exceptionally hard men.

"It is far better to have them on your side than against you," said Shaun O'Fahey, who lived among the Darfur Arab nomads before becoming Professor of African History at the University of Bergen, Norway.

There has been a joint United Nations-African Union peacekeeping Mission (UNAMID) in Darfur since 2007.

It is only 15,000-strong to cover a vast area, and its mandate is limited to protecting civilians and trying to ensure aid delivery. Although UNAMID, made up of soldiers from Burkina Faso, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt and Ethiopia, has been widely branded the world's most dysfunctional peacekeeping force, the UN Security Council last month renewed its mandate for another year despite a demand by Al-Bashir for its withdrawal.

The Sudan president has successfully put up many obstacles as to where and how UNAMID is able to operate. "But now is not the time to cut and run," the British ambassador to the United Nations, Matthew Rycroft, told reporters after the vote.