People who fled the Zamzam camp for the internally displaced after it fell under RSF control queue for food rations in a makeshift encampment in an open field near the town of Tawila in war-torn Sudan's western Darfur region on April 13.-/AFP/Getty Images
Robert R. Fowler is a retired Canadian diplomat who served as the foreign policy adviser to three prime ministers between 1980 and 1986, the deputy minister of National Defence from 1989 to 1995, and the last Canadian ambassador to the United Nations to win election to the Security Council, on which he represented Canada in 1999 and 2000.
In August, the estimable Anne Applebaum published a moving article in The Atlantic about the horrors of the civil war in Sudan. It prompted me to reflect upon the limits of my own efforts and those of the UN to mitigate such suffering.
In early 2005, I was asked to lead prime minister Paul Martin’s “Special Advisory Team on Sudan,” which included then-senators Roméo Dallaire and Mobina Jaffer. Essentially, we were given $200-million and told to quickly solve the Darfur conflict. It was, of course, a preposterous mandate.
Here’s what you need to know about the war in Sudan, including how the conflict started, and its human toll so far.
The UN’s Security Council had already begun grappling with the ever-worsening plight of the Darfuris at the hands of the Janjaweed militias, but the Americans were loath to agree to a UN peacekeeping force, as Washington was opposed to such a force having a mandate to enforce International Criminal Court (ICC) judgments against senior Sudanese individuals. Finally, after two visits to the three Darfuri states in the spring and fall of 2005, Mr. Dallaire, Ms. Jaffer and I arranged for a UN-supported, 7,000-troop African Union peacekeeping force destined for Darfur, to be equipped with repurposed Canadian armed and armoured vehicles. That improved the security situation in the west of Sudan.
Then on Aug. 31, 2006, the Security Council finally passed a resolution creating a new full-fledged UN peacekeeping force, named the “UN – African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID),” which supplanted the less-than-perfect African Union force and maintained some semblance of peace in western Sudan until 2020.
Opinion: In Sudan’s war, civilians – and democracy at large – are under siege
Today, a civil war is again wreaking havoc throughout that country. “The liberal world order has already ended in Sudan,” Ms. Applebaum writes, “and there isn’t anything to replace it.”
In the early 1970s, Sudan was poised to become the breadbasket of Africa, but that promise, like so many of Africa’s promises, never came close to being realized. Forty years later, we in the righteous West urged the ICC to prosecute then-president Omar al-Bashir and Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi. Then we assisted in the overthrow of each of them in the name of peace and democracy, paying little attention to the aftermath. The result has been an unmitigated disaster across the widest part of Africa, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea.
The West has not been very successful in managing African turmoil – but to be fair, our failures have not been limited to Africa. Indeed, in almost every instance, we have made matters worse. It is no wonder that there is little international enthusiasm for efforts to stem the horrific misery and slaughter currently devastating Sudan, not to mention the underreported human tragedies playing out to the west in the Central African Republic, Chad, Northern Nigeria, Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali.
There is, however, no acceptable excuse for our collective withdrawal of humanitarian assistance to those beleaguered people in such dire need. Sure, the principal culprit is U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration’s wanton disregard for human suffering throughout the world, but Canada and the rest of the West haven’t shown much interest in stepping up to fill the void created by the implosion of Pax Americana. Yes, the rich Arab states are there with money and arms, but, as Ms. Applebaum reports, it is principally to pour their abundant oil on the fire.
Trump-backed peace plan in Sudan faces opposition from army-controlled government
While Canada focuses quasi-exclusively on surviving our neighbour, we’ve looked away from Africa’s plight. Twenty years ago, we were instrumental in winning UN General Assembly endorsement of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) – a political commitment aimed at preventing genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Some celebrated the advent of what they insisted was a new norm in international behaviour. Since then, however, few countries have stepped up to offer their protection to people facing the kind of calamities R2P was supposed to protect – Canada not among them.
Indeed, within the institution designed 80 years ago to solve or at least mitigate such threats, the permanent members of the UN Security Council have deployed their veto powers hundreds of times, in the main to block initiatives aimed at offering such protection. Russia/the Soviet Union has done so 129 times, the United States 88 times (50 times to protect Israel), the United Kingdom 29 times, China 19 times and France 16 times. This tally does not reflect the more numerous occasions when the very threat of a veto by a permanent member has stopped in their tracks initiatives to alleviate suffering and enhance security from even coming to a vote. The Security Council has made R2P a dead letter.
Most international observers were all too aware of the emptiness of R2P’s promise at the time of its adoption. Today, the invocation of such an ineffectual “norm” makes a mockery of credible diplomacy. Yet too many leaders continue to resort to empty verbiage in the face of such calamities. Brave words, empty commitments and fulsome emoting, without concrete action, cannot be part of the foreign policy of any serious country.