Not on Our Watch (24 page)

‘Hey. Just got back. You sitting down? Minni Minnawi and his people are now basically acting as one of the wings of the Sudanese army. They’re preparing to mount an offensive at the end of this month. Tell you more about it when I see you.’

And the hits just keep on coming.

9

Stop Mass Atrocities Now: An Agenda for Change

In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time, no one was left to speak up.

Pastor Martin Niemoller

Darfur and other crises marked by mass atrocities can seem overwhelmingly complex and insoluble. But the truth is that they can be ended. If governments—working directly and through the United Nations—have sufficient political will, they can work with concerned African governments to make a difference in conflict-plagued countries. How we influence political will was the subject of Chapters 6, 7, and 8. What needs to happen once we have the political will to act is the subject of this chapter.

It is not an exaggeration to say that a modern-day holocaust is well under way in Congo, northern Uganda, Somalia, and Sudan, with well over 6 million freshly dug graves over the last two decades. Unless the world responds more urgently, the death toll will continue to mount.

These four cases represent the four deadliest, most brutal conflicts in Africa, and arguably the world, over the last decade or so. They certainly represent some of the most heinous atrocities seen during the last century of warfare. They are also the biggest generators of human displacement globally.

We’ve already covered Darfur in detail. The following is a short introduction to what at the time of writing are the other three most destructive conflicts in Africa: Congo, northern Uganda, and Somalia. None of them can be defined as genocidal, but the crimes against humanity committed are at times just as deadly as Darfur’s violence has been. We provide more information in the ENOUGH Project website (www.enoughproject.org) for those of you who want to learn—or do—more about these crises. We hope that will include YOU!

Congo, 1996–Present

Imagine if the entire population of the city of Los Angeles, or of Sydney, or Johannesburg, or the entire population of Ireland was slowly wiped out, community by community. Imagine each and every person being dragged out of their homes, murdered, systematically raped and brutalised. The media would be transfixed, and we would all surely know who was suffering, where it was happening, and why. Yet since 1996 some 4 million people have lost their lives in the lush rain-forest landscapes of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and how many of us have heard of places like Goma, Bukavu, or Bunia?

The current conflict in the Congo has many of its roots in the rolling hills of neighbouring Rwanda, where hundreds of thousands of souls are laid to rest. Just 11 years after genocide tore through Rwanda, many of those killers washed up in neighbouring Congo, where the blood still flows. When Rwanda and Uganda invaded the Congo for the second time in 1998 (having done so in 1996 to overthrow the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko), the assault sparked a regional conflict that many people dubbed Africa’s First World War. Men and children with guns flooded into Congo, and militia thugs killed and displaced civilians on a massive scale.

A peace deal was struck in 2003 that established a power-sharing arrangement between rival warring factions, but the violence in eastern Congo continued. Levels of sexual assault in eastern Congo rival any in the world. Amid increased reports of kidnappings and sexual slavery, soldiers and other armed men continue to tax, harass, loot, and rape local populations. Humanitarian-aid delivery is a monumental challenge. The constant cycles of displacement experienced by Congolese civilians have left most communities on the knife edge of survival, and the predatory presence of the armed groups ensures that unacceptable mortality rates, with people denied the medical help they need, will remain among the highest in the world.

Northern Uganda, 1986–Present

In early 2005, we travelled together to northern Uganda with a television crew from ABC’s
Nightline
. Around the world, children face all manner of depredations, but the stories we heard in northern Uganda may be among the most horrific ever told.

For nearly 20 years, the Ugandan government has been involved in armed conflict with the rebel group called the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). As we discussed in Chapter 3, the LRA, which is on the US government’s list of terrorist organisations, was primarily supported for over a decade by the Sudanese government, to terrorise the southern Sudanese. The LRA’s pattern of widespread atrocities sparked the first investigation into crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC). In July 2005, the ICC issued warrants for the arrest of LRA leader Joseph Kony and four of his top lieutenants.

John has travelled many times to northern Uganda and spoken directly with LRA commanders. They tell John that Joseph Kony is rooted in a grotesquely distorted view of the Old Testament. He thinks of himself as a modern-day Moses, imposing the Ten Commandments on people who refuse to obey him. Kony’s ‘philosophy’—if you can call it that, is eye-for-an-eye. In seeking revenge against the Ugandan government for past transgressions against northerners, Kony believes that he is instructed by God to attack and punish civilians who collaborate with the government.

The LRA’s extreme brutality has displaced 1.6 million Ugandans, and its attacks on civilians continue. As Don told
Nightline
, ‘The LRA has a particularly ugly way of replenishing its ranks, kidnapping. Their targets are children between the ages of eight and 14. Rebels raid villages, stealing what they need and burning the rest. According to UN estimates, more than 30,000 children have been forced into the service of the LRA since 1994.’

In 2005, the LRA expanded into eastern Congo, further adding to that tortured country’s many problems. Without more international support for a credible peace process and a mechanism to effectively protect civilians from the predators that lurk in the night, the children of northern Uganda, eastern Congo, and southern Sudan will be condemned to a living nightmare of abduction, torture, rape, and murder.

A renewed peace process that began in July 2006 offers a glimmer of hope for long-suffering northern Ugandans, but the most powerful and influential nations of the world have been absent from the negotiating table. The government of southern Sudan, a semi-autonomous entity created by the north-south peace deal in Sudan, is leading the mediation efforts, but the mediators need support from the international community. Western governments could have demonstrated their commitment to end this conflict by sending senior diplomats to support the process. If the talks don’t succeed, these governments will regret not having made the effort to bring this nightmare to a peaceful end.

Somalia, 1991–Present

John has travelled to Somalia regularly for the past two decades and witnessed that country’s free fall into anarchy and human suffering. His first trip was in the 1980s, before the disastrous military intervention that led to the infamous ‘Black Hawk Down’ battle in 1993 in which 18 American servicemen were killed. Back then, the US government was still propping up a warlord dictator to support Cold War interests and ignoring widespread human rights abuses. As a young activist, John was appalled that his government would allow defenceless Somali civilians to be cannon fodder in a strategic battle with the Soviets.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Somali government imploded in 1991, and efforts to create a new government have consistently collapsed into new bouts of bloodletting. After the Black Hawk Down battle, the US and UN troops withdrew over the following year, and largely absented themselves from concerted efforts at rebuilding a functioning central authority. Somalia is the very definition of a failed state, the only country in the world without a government, and millions of Somalis deal with chronic drought and hunger without the safety net of a functioning polity.

After the terrorist attacks on the US on 11 September 2001, the US government feared that this failed state would become a safe haven for al-Qaeda terrorists, and there are some terror suspects living in Somalia. Al-Qaeda operatives have used Somalia as a base from which to plan and launch devastating terrorist attacks in the Horn of Africa. These attacks include the bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the bombing of a hotel on the Kenya coast, an attempt to shoot down an Israeli passenger jet with a surface-to-air missile in Kenya, and a foiled attempt to crash a plane into the new US embassy in Kenya.

Somalis have appealed to the US government for assistance in building a functioning state, but US policy has focused exclusively on capturing or killing terrorists. During John’s most recent trips to Somalia, he saw evidence of covert US support for warlords—some of the same warlords responsible for killing US Army Rangers in 1993—in hopes that they will capture terrorist suspects. Unfortunately for Somalis, the United States and its allies in the global war on terror have not even tried to develop solutions to the statelessness, poverty, and despair that have allowed violent extremism to take root. The alliance of Western nations should be doing everything in its power to crack down on terrorist networks in Somalia, but the current policy approach has turned ordinary Somalis against the United States and increased the power of Islamic extremists.

In 2006, the weakness of US strategy was exposed when militias loyal to a loose network of Islamic courts routed the warlord allies of the Bush administration. The Islamists, some of them associated with al-Qaeda, captured control of much of southern Somalia and threatened a holy war against Somalia’s neighbour, and long-time enemy, Ethiopia, which in turn invaded and overthrew the Islamist authority. Catastrophic conflict looms, violent ideology spreads, and terrorist networks infiltrate Somalia, where men and boys with guns act as judges, juries, and executioners for ordinary Somalis trying to survive.

Root Causes

The roots of these four conflicts (Sudan, Congo, northern Uganda, and Somalia) are similar to those of other wars all over the world, whether in Chechnya, the former Yugoslavia, Colombia, Cambodia, or the Middle East.

The first reason for violent conflict is political exclusion. Wars don’t usually start without a cause. That cause is usually rooted in a particular ethnic, regional, religious, or political group that feels excluded or marginalised from power. For example, Darfurians and southern Sudanese certainly rebelled because of deep-seated grievances that drove thousands of people in both these places to pick up a gun and fight for their rights.

The second reason for violent conflict is greed. In conflicts around the world, those in power control the access to resources—whether natural or state—and they are often not inclined to share. It should come as no surprise then that these economic disparities are a driver for conflict. In some cases, wars begin for bigger principles but slowly transform into predatory warlordism, where armed groups take advantage of conflict and chaos as much as they possibly can. Some of the greatest predators in the world in the last century hail from this region: the Janjaweed militias in Darfur, other militias in eastern Congo and Somalia, and the Lord’s Resistance Army rebels from northern Uganda.

The third reason for violent conflict is impunity. In so many countries stricken by conflict, there is no accountability, no rule of law. Governments or rebels, or even militias, without a cause commit unspeakable crimes against humanity, with no penalty, no sanction. The message is clear: you can kill as many people as you want, and there will be no consequence.

The Three Ps of Confronting Mass Atrocities

Earlier in the book we talked about the haunting similarities in how and why genocides and mass atrocities are committed and what the international community does (or does not do) in response. However, there is one critical difference between past genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia and the crises unfolding today in Sudan, Congo, northern Uganda, and Somalia: THERE IS STILL TIME TO ACT TO END THE SUFFERING.

Despite the almost ritualistic pledge of ‘Never Again’, no coherent international system or process is in place for responding to genocide and other atrocities. What does exist is chaotic and marked by futile finger-pointing, while the slaughter continues. Passing resolutions in the UN Security Council that have no teeth (e.g., no punitive measures focused on accountability for the commission of mass atrocities) will certainly not influence the calculations of mass murderers. Left uninfluenced, the Sudanese government’s killing will not end in Darfur, and any African Union troops that might remain there will continue to have front-row seats for the slaughter.

The real lesson of the past decade and a half dealing with the regime in Khartoum is that trying to gently persuade and offer incentives to mass murderers doesn’t work. It is a pragmatic government; it will do what it must in order to survive. Only when Sudan has been the target of serious punitive pressure aimed at stopping the atrocities will the regime modify its behaviour. UN Security Council sanctions led by the United States in the 1990s proved that; Khartoum renounced its ties with al-Qaeda and other terrorist organisations as a direct result. The lesson couldn’t be clearer, but it has been completely ignored in the context of Darfur.

Ultimately, those committing mass atrocities must understand that punitive action will be avoided or removed only if they stop killing people and obstructing peace.

As the ENOUGH Project has stressed, we need to
make them pay
for their crimes.

The genocide in Rwanda took 100 days to exterminate 800,000 lives. Darfur and these other cases are Rwandas in slow motion. In Darfur, up to 400,000 lives have been extinguished in three years. There is a clear path out of this quagmire of death and destruction. The killing could stop tomorrow if the world pressed forward the agenda encapsulated in the Three Ps of genocide prevention: Protection, Punishment, and Peacemaking. Western countries have the ability and capacity to lead the world in responding in these three arenas. It is only a question of political will as to whether that will happen. We the people have a say in this. The Three Ps: