Who is accountable for Darfur? An interview with Gareth Evans

openDemocracy: In June 2004, you and Stephen Ellis, the International Crisis Group’s (ICG) Africa programme director, made four key recommendations in openDemocracy on the crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan: preventing starvation, stopping the fighting and atrocities, pressing for a sustainable peace, and building support to make these objectives attainable. Has there been any progress on these?

Also in openDemocracy on the unfolding crisis in western Sudan:

• Gareth Evans, “Genocide in Sudan? An open letter to world leaders” (June 2004)
• Stephen Ellis, “Darfur: countdown to catastrophe” (June 2004)

Gareth Evans: On the first point, starvation, the humanitarian situation remains catastrophic. It’s not just a question of food supplies. People lack adequate shelter. They are malnourished and have insufficient medical support. The living conditions are appalling and disease is spreading.

The situation has worsened since the rains began in May. The government of Sudan has created the impression of being much more cooperative, but there are still real obstacles, not least continuing security problems which inhibit access for humanitarian relief in various parts of the country.

Unless there is an even more substantial effort than we’re seeing now, we face the prospect of 300,000 or more people being dead by the end of the year. And the death toll could go even higher.

The situation is quite alarming, and maximum pressure must be maintained on the government in Khartoum on this ground alone. It’s also the case that a number of external governments have been reluctant to make funds available.

openDemocracy: Which governments, specifically?

Gareth Evans: It took a long time for any kind of emergency relief funds to be granted out of the European Union budget. The United States and the United Kingdom remain well ahead in terms of the level of support being provided so far.

Another serious problem is that the relief agencies are facing difficulty in recruiting the necessary personnel and getting the necessary resources delivered. They have faced endless obstruction over the last few months, making it very hard for them to undertake advance planning and organisation.

So, even if there was dramatic improvement in terms of uninhibited access, getting supplies delivered to all parts of the country where the needs are great would take time.

The need for pressure

openDemocracy: How about your second point in June – the need for better security and protection for civilians from the fighting?

Gareth Evans: On 28 July the United States ambassador told the United Nations Security Council that the situation was deteriorating, that the failure to bring the Janjaweed under control meant that hundreds of people were still being killed every day, that the burning of villages is still occurring.

On 30 July, President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria announced that an African Union (AU) fact-finding mission had come to the same conclusion: the crisis in the region had intensified in the past few weeks.

I don’t think anyone can be precise about the figures, because there has been insufficient monitoring and access and only sporadic, anecdotal information. But there is certainly reasonable ground for concern about the inadequacy of Khartoum’s response.

openDemocracy: What has happened with the third issue you raised - movement towards comprehensive peace?

Gareth Evans: Again, very little is happening. Part of the problem here is that the Darfur rebels themselves are unwilling to act. They say they can hardly begin peace negotiations when the basic preconditions for such negotiations – a halt to the killing of civilians and a willingness to allow in humanitarian assistance – haven’t occurred. They have a point.

So maximum external pressure on the Khartoum government must continue. We’ve learnt from long experience of the war in southern Sudan that words don’t mean very much, and that deeds only come when there’s maximum exposure and sustained pressure.

What has changed since we first wrote about this situation and tried to generate international support is that there is now unquestionably a spotlight on Sudan, both in international organisations and in the world’s media. That still hasn’t translated into consistently responsive behaviour by the Sudanese government. So – and this is the fourth point – much more pressure needs to be sustained at a number of different levels, including via a really effective UN Security Council resolution.

The next resolution

openDemocracy: What is the significance of the resolution passed by the Security Council on 30 June?

Gareth Evans: It represents progress of a kind in that, after months of diplomatic manoeuvring, a resolution now exists condemning the horrors in Darfur, and demanding that Sudan’s government facilitates disaster relief, disarms the Janjaweed and brings its leaders to justice, endorses monitors on the ground, urges other international support, stops arms deliveries (but only to non-government actors), encourages political negotiations, and commits the Security Council to meeting again in thirty days to consider “measures under Article 41” if Khartoum fails to comply.

This last component of the resolution is notable for the fact that the “s” word – sanctions – was too hard to say.

The resolution on Darfur would have been fine if it had been passed six months ago. But it’s hardly a sharp enough response now for a catastrophe in which tens of thousands are already dead and up to 1,000 more dying every day, more than a million displaced and homeless, ugly violence continuing, and not enough aid reaching those who need it.

This resolution doesn’t put troops on the ground to protect those at risk and guarantee aid delivery; doesn’t impose a no-fly zone; doesn’t do more than hint at the possible application of effective sanctions; and doesn’t seriously threaten anyone with international criminal accountability.

Sudan wants and needs relations with the external world; it wants recognition and international investment. That’s been the primary motivator for moving close to a final peace settlement in the conflict with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in the south. It’s not like the generals in Burma (Myanmar) who seem quite content with ongoing isolation. Bearing that comparison in mind, it is possible to put real pressure upon Khartoum.

Such pressure can come at a number of different levels – first, naming and shaming; second, targeted sanctions or the prospect thereof; third, more generally applicable sanctions. At the moment nobody’s gone much further than the first, and even that has not gone as far as it could. A promising development is that African nations, through the African Union, are becoming more vocal in this respect; and UN officials have spoken out too.

There is a fourth form of pressure on which we can and should be doing much more: threatening real criminal accountability for all those involved - both directly and indirectly – for the violations of international humanitarian law that have occurred in the past and are still occurring. And the fifth, ultimate level is to threaten, and then if need be apply, military force to achieve the necessary protection objectives.

Ideally the UN resolution would have covered all this ground – making very clear the international community’s willingness to rapidly escalate its response if the situation does not dramatically improve.

A matter of accountability

openDemocracy: Should a process start now to establish a commission of enquiry to gather evidence for criminal prosecutions, or should this UN resolution be given time to work?

Gareth Evans: In relation to coercive measures short of military force, we at ICG believe that we should not focus only on sanctions – whether targeted toward the finances and travel of individuals, or of a more general (and probably less effective) economic kind. A more immediately useful measure would be the credible threat of individual accountability, through the international or domestic judicial system, for the crimes against humanity that have occurred: and not just for the immediate perpetrators but those who have encouraged them.

Work does need to begin now on setting up an international commission of enquiry, endorsed by the Security Council. It would start gathering evidence immediately, placing in front of those responsible for crimes against humanity the real prospect of being held accountable. It’s probably too early for the International Criminal Court (ICC) to work on this issue, as it is preoccupied in trying to start investigations in the Congo and Uganda. But a commission of enquiry would need endorsement by the United Nations.

openDemocracy: Who would make it happen in practice? Could the African Union, which already has observers on the ground, start documentation?

Gareth Evans: There are different exercises involved here. The AU is engaged in monitoring and verification of the ceasefire and the violations of it. This is important work. It is also important to assess the need for and the delivery of humanitarian assistance. That’s been a very imperfect exercise so far because only very small numbers of people have been assigned this task and they have had very poor logistical support.

The AU’s heart is in the right place but it doesn’t have adequate capacity to deliver and it has not had sufficient logistic support from developed countries.

openDemocracy: But could the AU get that support and expand its mission to include the kind of commission of enquiry you’ve talked about?

Gareth Evans: No, this would be a new and different exercise: a sharply focused commission of enquiry with real evidence-gathering capacity that would target key officials and key leaders.

There are precedents in the Balkans and Rwanda; in this case, it could be the prelude either to an ICC investigation and prosecution or to a specific tribunal of the kind created for Yugoslavia or Rwanda.

Evidence will come from a variety of sources, including NGOs working on the ground gathering witness material. Some of it may come from the verification and monitoring people as an incidental part of their activities.

openDemocracy: Where should the initiative for this commission come from?

Gareth Evans: From the Security Council. The point I’m making is that more important than the issue of sanctions – which are, at best, always an imperfect tool – is the issue of accountability. Sanctions are particularly imperfect against the Janjaweed. Stopping a camel drive with an AK47 from shopping at Harrods is not a huge constraint.

Targeted sanctions against Khartoum officials are not misconceived. They are useful. They can be an important part of the repertoire. But we need a bigger focus on the criminal accountability issue.

The uses of fear

openDemocracy: The Security Council resolution, as you emphasise, halts arms supplies only to non-governmental actors. The Janjaweed have the light weapons and ammunition they need to continue their campaign – but what of the Khartoum government?

Gareth Evans: There are aircraft and other weapons systems that the Khartoum government would like to acquire and which may or may not be relevant to the conduct of this particular conflict. In any event, preventing them from acquiring these systems could be a useful form of pressure.

openDemocracy: Could a no-fly zone help?

Gareth Evans: That could be endorsed and applied by the Security Council, and to the extent that the use of air power in Darfur still causes concern on occasion there could be some real utility in that.

openDemocracy: So are you disappointed that the Security Council has chosen not to move on economic sanctions?

Gareth Evans: The critical issue now is accountability. We need to start creating a sense of fear among these people that they won’t be immune from prosecution.

This needs to be accompanied by a whole range of other measures that sustain pressure on the Sudanese government and address the security needs of the civilian population, but what’s likely to be least useful are generalised sanctions on trade, investment and economic links. We’ve had long experience of those being applied elsewhere with minimum effectiveness in most contexts. South Africa was an exception, at least so far as the investment and sports sanctions were concerned – the trade ones were much less effective. Most of the time in recent years they have done more harm than good to populations that were already suffering.

Everyone’s trying to wrestle with what the best combination of responses should be. But it’s certainly some variation on the combination I have mentioned.

The responsibility to protect

openDemocracy: The International Crisis Group is a “western” NGO. openDemocracy is a London-based website. The countries that have expressed most willingness to send troops to Sudan to stop the continued killing of civilians are Britain, Australia and New Zealand, which were part of the coalition that invaded Iraq. Britain has a colonial record in Sudan.

Many people think there is a problem of legitimacy in the eyes of world public opinion, and especially in Muslim countries and the Arab world, which doesn’t want western powers intervening in their internal affairs. How is that kind of concern best addressed?

Gareth Evans: By saying that there is a common responsibility that every government has to protect its own people from direct assault by the government itself, or by persons working to the government, or by others whom it is the responsibility of government to deal with. The “responsibility to protect” is essential to the very notion of what it is to be a sovereign government.

But if a government abdicates that responsibility, either through malice or incapacity, then that responsibility shifts to the wider international community. Somebody somewhere has to pick up the pieces when people are catastrophically at risk as a result of the kind of man-made disasters we’re seeing unfold in Darfur. That’s what the responsibility to protect is all about.

The notion that there is a larger responsibility on the part of the international community when governments fail is pretty well accepted by the African Union. The Arab League and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, and countries elsewhere, have been less prepared to accept this. But frankly it’s nonsense to talk about the western response being “illegitimate” here: there is a critical necessity for everyone to act, and for Sudan’s neighbours in particular to add their weight to the pressure on the Sudanese government.

openDemocracy: How does this play on al-Jazeera?

Gareth Evans: I don’t know what al-Jazeera is saying about this. But it’s time people moved past reflex responses. When the evidence is as compelling as it now is in Sudan it’s utterly unpersuasive and indeed irresponsible to reject intervention if intervention is the only thing that will ultimately make a difference.

Nobody wants military action as any kind of first resort. It’s hugely important to try and resolve these issues by non-aggressive means if that’s humanly possible. But when the numbers of people at risk, the lack of cooperation and the overt misbehaviour reach such a scale, there comes a point when there is no alternative.

I’m not saying we’re at that point yet with Sudan. But we are certainly close to it, and unless there is a dramatic improvement in the situation the option of Chapter VII enforcement under the UN charter will have to be seriously considered.

I think the African Union understands this but doesn’t itself have the capacity to deliver. It has the personnel but not the lift and other logistic support capability. So it would need developing countries which do have that capacity.

This prospect is far from being an untoward exercise in intervention, rather it is the exercise of a shared responsibility of the international community as a whole. The responsibility falls in the first instance on the Sudanese government, but ultimately on the international community. This is as applicable in Sudan as it was in Rwanda.