Violence in Darfur and Responsibility to Protect

After hundreds of thousands of deaths and years of bloody conflict, the international community watched the final dust settle on the conflict in Darfur by the mid-2000s, but many of the important questions that were raised by this humanitarian disaster remain unanswered today. The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical review of selected resources concerning the genocidal conflict n Darfur to evaluate the international community’s response from 2003 onward from a responsibility to protect (R2P) perspective. In addition, a discussion to determine whether there reforms to R2P that could ameliorate any specific weaknesses or problems in the international response to the violence in Darfur is followed by a summary of the research and important findings concerning the above issues in the paper’s conclusion.
Review and Discussion
What does the international community’s response to the violence in Darfur (from 2003 onward) indicate about the strengths and limitations (or the promise and problems) in the doctrine of responsibility to protect (R2P)?
In many ways, the situation in Darfur resembles that in many other fragile African states where decades of corruption, poverty and civil conflict have exacted an enormous human and economic toll, leaving the majority of the population vulnerable to disease and displacement. Since the hostilities essentially peaked in 2004, the local governance situation in Darfur had disintegrated to the point where international intervention was desperately needed (De Waal, 2007). For instance, Henir and Murray (2017) advise that, “As the war raged in 2003-2004, the U.S. public discourse on Darfur was conducted in an informational near vacuum [but] the American movement for Darfur took off in mid-2004” (p. 306). This point is also made by Mandani (2009) who cites the grassroots initiatives that took place in the United States during the mid-2000s with the “Save Darfur” campaign characterizing the situation as a “continuing genocide” and was the “worst humanitarian disaster in the world” (p. 48).
Although this dire eventuality was predictable enough, the multiple antecedents to the violence were well documented and the genocide was played out in real time in the mainstream media, the international community was unwilling or unable to intervene before hundreds of thousands of people were murdered or displaced. In this regard, De Waal (2007) emphasizes that:
The basic pattern of grievances is shared by all the marginalized peoples: they were denied their share in political power and national wealth, and the government used divide-and-rule tactics to allow local militias to run amok and destroy their modest livelihoods. In retrospect, the mystery is not why the war in Darfur broke out, but why it took so long to do so” (p. 1040).
According to the analysis of the international community’s response to the humanitarian crisis in Dafur provided by Henir and Murray (2017), there were some pragmatic constraints and challenges that were involved that tilted the balance towards “unable” rather than “unwilling.” Based on the lessons learned from the humanitarian crises elsewhere in Africa, Henir and Murray (2017) maintain that the situation on the ground in Darfur was sufficiently hazardous due to the dynamics between rival forces combined with a dearth of real-time intelligence made the provision of humanitarian assistance especially complicated. In this regard, Henir and Murray (2017) point out that, “The operational humanitarians’ silence also reflected their awareness of the moral complexities of Darfur [and whether] the best way of resolving Sudan’s recurrent man-made famines is a political challenge to the government that has been responsible for them” (p. 307). These experiences provided a number of hard-earned and expensive lessons learned which are discussed below.
Are there reforms to R2P that could ameliorate any specific weaknesses or problems in the international response to the violence in Darfur?
In truth, the doctrine of R2P is relatively new and remains a work in progress at present. The experiences of the international community during the 1990s reinforced the need to identify an appropriate “Goldilocks” approach that avoided “too little, too late” or a “too much, too early” interventions (Weiss, 2016). These expensive lessons learned shaped the response to the genocide taking place in Darfur, but the R2P doctrine still lacked definitional clarity. For example, according to Thakur and Maley (2015), in 2004, the R2P was generally characterized by the UN as “an emerging norm” which assumed some additional definitional clarity by 2005 when the UN General Assembly’s World Summit “invoked [R2P] in the context of helping States build capacity to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and to assisting those which are under stress before crises and conflicts break out” (p. 305).
This expanded conceptualization of the R2P doctrine to include assisting populations prior to the onset of conflict and crises clearly amplifies the inherent challenges that are involved in the provision of timely humanitarian assistance where it is needed most at any given point in time. Moreover, the geopolitical sphere has changed in fundamental ways since the R2P doctrine first emerged a quarter century ago but many of the same challenges remain firmly in place. In this regard, Axworthy (2016) emphasizes that R2P “came about as a way to overcome barriers to a new global order that were entrenched in an outmoded security architecture and a realpolitik mindset that were hangovers from the Cold War [and] those barriers still exist [but] new challenges, such as Putin’s aggressive territorial conquest, have been added” (p. 1).
Beyond the foregoing, some of the other noteworthy issues to emerge from the research included the fact that there is far more involved in the provision of humanitarian assistance to violence-wracked regions of the world than just logistics. Indeed, Henir and Murray (2017) stress that international aid organizations have become increasingly wary of the being “protected” by foreign military forces during their humanitarian operations since the presence of these troops can actually exacerbate the dangers these aid workers and peacekeepers already face. In sum, intervening in any armed conflict carries numerous life-threatening dangers to even the most well-meaning and benevolent humanitarian organizations.
Furthermore, the veritable slow-motion manner in which the international community was finally compelled to act despite documented reports of the genocide taking place underscores the weaknesses of the international response to the violence in Darfur. In addition, the international response to this humanitarian crisis also made it clear that any reforms to R2P must taken into account the country- and region-specific challenges facing humanitarian organizations. This need was incorporated into an addendum to the R2P which is termed the “responsibility while protecting” concept which means that there must be enhanced protections as well as increased accountability for the actions of peacekeepers during R2P mission (Stuenkel, 2016).
Conclusion
Complex problems demand complex solutions and the research was consistent in showing that intervening in the violence that ravaged Darfur during the 2000s was certainly no exception. Despite the inexplicable delays that were involved, the international community did finally take action to ameliorate the suffering that was taking place in Sudan, but many observers claimed that this assistance was “too little, too late” to prevent the genocide that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. In the final analysis, it is reasonable to conclude that the responsibility to protect doctrine will continue to undergo reform in view of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and the realignment of the geopolitical landscape.
References
Axworthy, L. (2016, June). Resetting the narrative on peace and security: R2P in the next ten years. In the Oxford handbook of the responsibility to protect, 1-17.
De Wall, A. (2007). Darfur and the failure of the responsibility to protect. International Affairs, 83(6),1039-1054.
Henir, A. & Murray, R.W. (2017). Protecting human rights in the 21st century. Routeledge.
Mandani, M. (2009). Saviors and survivors: Darfur, politics and the war on terror. Doubleday.
Stuenkel, O. (2016, June). Responsibility while protecting. In the Oxford handbook of the responsibility to protect, 1-20.
Thakur, R. & Maley, W. (eds.) (2015). Theorizing the responsibility to protect. Cambridge.
Weiss, T. G. (2016). Humanitarian intervention. Polity.