Joseph Siegle, the Douglas Dillon fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has a must-read editorial in this morning’s (Wednesday, June 30) Christian Science Monitor. Excerpts:
As with the other instances of the
international community rolling back ethnic cleansing, decisive action
is required: Action from the US – and, indispensably, UN
Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the European Union, and the African Union
(AU). Politically, all of these actors must unambiguously and
forcefully condemn the ethnic cleansing in Darfur. Having violated the
terms of membership, Sudan should be prevented from voting in the UN.
And its leaders must be held personally accountable. International
travel by senior government officials and their families should be
barred, their personal assets frozen, and the prospect of war-crimes
charges against General Bashir and his ruling clique brandished.
..Economically, pending resolution of war-crimes charges,
claims can be made against Sudan’s oil exports for compensation to the
victims in Darfur – as well as to reimburse the international community
for the humanitarian resources expended to ameliorate this manufactured
crisis. Simultaneously, sanctions against Sudan’s oil exports can be
instituted. Shippers caught transporting Sudanese oil would lose their
tankers and cargo. The skyrocketing premiums on insurance and freight
charges would surely add pressure on Sudan’s primary customers – China,
Malaysia, and South Korea – to curtail these purchases even if moral
suasion alone would not...”Never again,” is the mandate forever etched into our
collective consciousness by the Holocaust. Yet, without an established
international protocol for responding to genocide, honoring this
mandate is never automatic – as we saw in Rwanda. Preventing it this
time depends on a quorum of global leaders acting in unison. By so
doing, they can prevent this disaster from becoming a catastrophe and
forever staining their places in history.
A problem, as I see it, is that the world does not have a single
body charged with monitoring for genocides and “certifying” those that
emerge. We have a treaty that requres intervention in the case of
genocide, but no way to trigger the application of the treaty. As a
result, we requre the “quorum of global leaders” that Seigle properly
asserts is necessary for action in Sudan. My observation is that we did
not get such a quorum in either Nazi Germany or in Rwanda, and we have
so far failed to get a quorum on Sudan. I pray we see a strong quorum
in the next few days.
