Darfur

From today's The Times:

"Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, delivered a degree-level lecture on the criminal nature of the Sudanese Government to the UN Security Council. With a professorial air and staccato-speaking style he laid out the charges against Sudan, one after the other, each one outrageous to anyone unfamiliar with the five-year history of the Darfur crisis.

The war criminals wanted by the ICC, such as Ahmed Haroun, the man responsible for co-ordinating the atrocities and wanted for more than 50 counts of crimes against humanity, have not been arrested. Instead he was promoted to Minister for Humanitarian Affairs, made a co-chair to a commission charged with investigating crimes in Darfur and then appointed to a committee responsible for co-operation with the UN peacekeeping force. Comparisons with Nazi Germany should be used sparingly; but his appointment is akin to proposing that Adolf Eichmann should co-ordinate the Red Cross aid efforts in postwar Europe and run the Nuremburg Tribunal in his spare time.

Mr Moreno-Ocampo is impatient with those who describe the situation in Darfur as the chaotic aftermath of a civil war: “Calling it chaos or sporadic violence or inter-tribal clashes is a cover up.” Instead, he described a situation where in the first phase of violence non-Arab tribes were murdered or deliberately herded into an archipelago of camps. In the second phase, these camps are surrounded, their inhabitants attacked, their food, water and security turned off and on at Haroun's whim, while their land and homes were resettled by Arab tribes from Chad and Darfur.

The ICC's new targets are those who protect Haroun: “Haroun is a key actor in the present crimes in Darfur, but he is not alone. I will investigate those who bear the greatest responsibility in present crimes, those who actively support him, those who instruct him.” This is significant, as Haroun reports to a small cabal surrounding President Omar al-Bashir. Since that clique came to power in a coup in 1989 it has become expert at preserving its power through patronage, coercion and atrocity.

They are the same men with whom the international community are seeking to make a peace deal. After indictments are issued, the international community faces the real risk of negotiating with individuals criminalised by the ICC, an alarming prospect to most diplomats, as the next two years contain the probability of both the north-south deal breaking down over aborted elections and fighting over oil fields, and slow-motion atrocities continuing in Darfur."

Do you think the UN should enforce mandatory intervention with real teeth to protect the peoples of Darfur?
or
Be seen to do the right thing and try a half hearted peacekeeping exercise that doesn't really solve anything?
or
Just standby and watch people murdered?, nothing we can do about it really, just look at what a mess Iraq turned out to be!
or
None of our business, what's it got to do with me?

I think this this is what the UN is for, but I'm afraid that because the US and UK (plus a few others) went illegally into Iraq without UN blessing, then such future interventions will not get any public support. You can only 'Cry Wolf' so many times!!