US's Zoellick reluctant to describe Darfur violence as genocide

Well of course he is. It's only blacks in Africa, nobody important...The level of inherent racism against Africans in Western civilization is a blight on all things remotely considered progressive. This is only one example but there are plenty more. I guess the new policy toward Africa is wait it out long enough for AIDS, genocide and malaria to claim the whole population and then turn the newly emptied continent into Disneyland Africa for Western business investors.

This from the Sudan Tribune:

April 20, 2005 -- Comments made during a recent trip to Sudan by US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick suggest a significant effort is underway by the Bush administration to downplay the catastrophe in Darfur. Not only did Zoellick make a series of comments that fully justify the Financial Times headline of April 15, 2005 ("Zoellick reluctant to describe Darfur violence as genocide"), but he offered a disturbingly, indeed untenably low estimate of human mortality in Darfur over the past 26 months of conflict. Zoellick also endorsed a level of troop strength for intervention in Darfur that clearly cannot address in adequate fashion any of the security issues defining the crisis; nor has Zoellick or the US State Department explicitly called for a peacekeeping mandate for forces operating in Darfur.

The ultimate purpose of this statistical and semantic lowballing of Darfur's urgent requirements and brutal destruction is evidently to forestall any need for a US commitment to humanitarian intervention. Unable to fashion a policy that halts genocide in Darfur, the Bush administration has instead committed to a strategy of re-definition. The administration's previous genocide determination---formally rendered by former Secretary of State Colin Powell in Senate testimony of September 9, 2004---has devolved into a "former Secretary of State" simply "making a point" to Congress (Financial Times, April 15, 2005). "I don't want to get into a debate over terminology," [Zoellick] said, when asked if the US believed that genocide was still being committed in Darfur against the mostly African villagers by Arab militias and their government backers" (Financial Times, April 15, 2005).

A determination that the ultimate human crime is being committed, with hundreds of thousands of victims to date, has been rendered a mere "debate over terminology." No matter that the US is a contracting party to the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, with an explicit obligation to "prevent genocide" (Article 1). No matter that there hasn't been any change in the character of evidence making fully clear the genocidal nature of human destruction in Darfur. Indeed, current evidence continues to be of the same nature as that which justified Powell's fully researched genocide determination in September.

Given the rapid deterioration of security conditions in Darfur, and the likelihood of huge increases in human mortality in the coming months, the timing of Zoellick's backtracking remarks could hardly have been poorer, even as they are entirely consistent with the views implicit in recent remarks to the Washington Post (March 25, 2005) by current US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (see analysis of Rice's comments by this writer, March 31, 2005; sudanreeves.org/).

But reneging words on the part of the Bush administration cannot change Darfur's ghastly realities. All indications are that insecurity for humanitarian operations in Darfur is accelerating, with armed attacks increasingly directed at humanitarian personnel (see below). The crisis is still defined by huge and increasing numbers of displaced persons, a decline in nutritional health in many quarters, the collapse of Darfur's agricultural economy (with attendant food inflation), a failure to pre-position adequate quantities of food prior to the approaching rainy season, and famine conditions that are already evident in many rural areas.

All of these reflect the ghastly success of Khartoum's National Islamic Front regime, and its Janjaweed militia proxies, in "deliberately inflicting on the [African tribal populations of Darfur] conditions of life calculated to bring about [their] physical destruction in whole or in part" (Article 2, clause [c] of the 1948 Genocide Convention). To date, approximately 400,000 human beings have died in the course of conflict (sudanreeves.org). Given the extreme vulnerability of Darfur's civilian populations, this number could double in coming months if insecurity forces the suspension of humanitarian operations.

What is especially disturbing about the weakening US moral and diplomatic commitment to halting genocide in Darfur is that it occurs amidst broad, bipartisan support for a stronger, more decisive US policy. The Congress declared last July---in a unanimous, bipartisan, bicameral vote---that Khartoum and its Janjaweed allies are guilty of genocide in Darfur. There are in the House of Representatives sponsors on both sides of the aisle for the Darfur Accountability Act. Senators Corzine (Democrat) and Brownback (Republican) were original sponsors of the Senate version of the bill. Republican and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist recently "urged the United Nations to recognize the killings in Darfur as genocide" (Associated Press, April 15, 2005):

"'The Khartoum government will not stop this killing until it is faced with stiff international pressure, Frist said on the Senate floor Friday. 'Every day the world fails to act, Khartoum gets closer to its genocidal goal, and every day the world fails to act it compounds its shame.'" (Associated Press, April 15, 2005)

But the Bush administration refuses to accept this fundamental truth about Darfur, and refuses to fashion or advocate an international, multilateral policy that reflects the urgency of ongoing genocidal destruction.

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