[Peace-discuss] Liberal advice: "pull a Kosovo in Darfur"

[C. G. Estabrook]

[This is from the weblog of The American Prospect, probably
the leading liberal journal in the US at the moment.  It
unashamedly advises ignoring international law just the way
the Clinton administration did in 1999, when they attacked
Kosovo.  The Clintonians said publicly that they were doing
it to stop a humanitarian crisis.  They were lying, and they
admitted it: they said they knew that the ethnic horrors would
get worse under NATO bombing.  Their goal was to establish US
"credibility" -- i.e., bring acquiescence to US interests
throughout out the Balkans and eastern Europe.  Shouldn't we
be skeptical when the same people begin saying the same things
about Darfur? --CGE]   


...Khartoum’s main power broker, Vice President Ali Osman Taha
... told a US congressional delegation yesterday that Sudan
will not let UN troops in[to] Darfur. Right now, there are
about 7,000 African Union monitors in Darfur who remain in the
region only at the invitation of Khartoum. The AU troops only
have a mandate to monitor a cease fire, which is laughable
because no discernable cease fire exists. Given the failure of
the paltry and feckless AU force, the US is now pressing the
Security Council to quickly prepare to send a U.N.
peace-keeping force to Darfur.

There is great potential, however, that China will
deliberately delay this process, or even block the deployment
of peace-keepers. Should that happen, I think it’s time to
start considering the consequences of pulling a Kosovo -- that
is, NATO should not be required to obtain a permission slip
from the UN. If the Security Council drags its feet, NATO
should think about acting unilaterally from the UN [this
ungrammatical phrase means "ignoring the UN charter" --CGE],
but in conjunction with the African Union (which would need to
invite a more robust NATO force to the region.) Darfur is a
house on fire. We needn’t seek UN approval to send in the fire
brigades.

To be sure, arguing that a situation is sufficiently dire to
require the circumvention of the Security Council may ring
hollow after the debacle of Iraq. But I’d caution weary
liberals disillusioned by the way the Bush administration
abused the international system in the run-up to Iraq from
objecting to intervention on those grounds. This is not the
Iraq war, which despite what the liberal hawks may have liked
to believe, was never about humanitarian intervention. Darfur
is more like Kurdistan circa 1988. It is the site of an
ongoing genocide in which simple measures, like a no-fly zone,
can go a long way. Doing that, and backing up AU troops with
some heavy fire-power, may be all the deterrent we need to
convince Khartoum that their campaign in Darfur is not worth
it.  --Mark Leon Goldberg 

<http://www.prospect.org/weblog/>