USA/Africa Dialogue, No 350: Genocide in Sudan

There are many ways of determining intent and lawyering over the intent clause is nothing but a product of international politics. If you know that the "powers that are" are not really interested in spending their resources, risking their young to save some groups of people in some remote place not of interest to them, you might as well conclude that nothing serious has happened.

Genocide involves the killing of human beings egregiously. It is human beings who determine that genocide has occurred somewhere. And when they do, Article VIII of the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948 requires "any contracting party" to the Genocide Convention to "call upon the competent organs of the United nations to take actionŠas they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocideŠ." In this case that competent organ is the Security Council. Who sits on it and what are their interests and preoccupations?

Genocide is defined by the same United Nations, in Article II of its 1948 Convention as "any of the following acts committed with INTENT [caps mine] to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such." Any of the following five actions, when committed with INTENT to destroy a group, could be deemed as genocide:

Here, the numbers do not matter. Genocide is not reduced to mortality statistics. Even if 3 people belonging to a protected ethnic or religious group are destroyed through the above processes as part of a larger plan by the perpetrator to destroy the group of which the dead 3 are a part, genocide has occurred. In the same way, if 6 million of the group are killed as part of a systematic, calculated and willful process of destruction of the target group of which the dead 6 million are a part, genocide has occurred.

Since all perpetrators of genocide commit one or more of the above crimes, but hardly document their intent to destroy, annihilate or exterminate the target group through their commission of one or more of the above acts, the INTENT has to be inferred from the EXTENT of the perpetrators' actions. The INTENT of a wife to kill or destroy a husband----even if that intent or motive cannot be determined, in the absence of concrete evidence---has to be inferred from the wife's decision to run the husband over and over and over with her articulator truck. Shakespeare said there is no art to find the mind's construction in the face. But Jimmy Cliff made it clear that action speaks louder than words. The intentionality clause in the UN Genocide Convention was the foster child of excessive lawyering over the Convention in 1948 amid the Cold War. But there is plenty of case law since Nuremberg to determine intent in the absence of documentation. On the politics of intent in the Sudan case, the United Nations has once again erred and proved how expendable it feels African life is. REMEMBER RWANDA?

Sadly, determining the occurrence of genocide, in the face of the legal provision that when such a determination is made action ought to be taken to stop it, has become a prisoner of international politics. Where nations in the UN system do not consider the locale of genocide as strategically important, they equivocate by throwing up euphemisms that water down the gravity of the situation. They did the same about Rwanda. Or they can proclaim loudly that genocide has taken place when they know they can seek comfort in the ruling of the United Nations that such a crime has not been deemed to have occurred. They know that no action will be taken beyond "sanctions" that can be flouted anyway.

When the locale of genocide is geographically remote from the capitals where "international policy decisions" are made, the lives at stake do not seem to pass the "sanctity" test. And when the target group has no ethnic, racial, national or religious affinity with the people in the international system who determine that genocide has occurred and who move international bodies to intervene, that target group has no protection under international law. This happened to the Herero of Namibia in 1904, the Armenians in the Ottoman Turkish Empire 1915, the Jews in nazi Germany 1945, Western-educated Khmers and Cham Muslims in Pol Pot's Cambodia in 1975, the Tutsi in Rwanda under extreme Hutu nationalists in 1994 and today the Fur and other groups in Darfur, Sudan. But Bosnia was in the heart of Europe and intervening made for good television and self-aggrandizing humanitarianism.

Today, determining when and where genocide has occurred is a function of politics. Morality has taken a back seat to realpolitik. And for as long as African scholars themselves are dismissive of their own people and they make forceful arguments for the denial to Africa and Africans any form of aid or help, African lives would continue to be deemed expendable. So those of us who study genocide are not surprised about the UN report. It is part of a pattern and its root causes can be studied through social science research. I have done my part in studying and documenting them. We need to look at the politics of genocide to draw our own conclusions. Someday, some scholar would unearth some concrete evidence and offer some better analysis and the UN would drop a tear for not doing much for Sudan. Afropessimism has gained taproots in the halls of the UN about Sudan. One more example of how Africa and Africans are viewed in the world today. This is a far deeper phenomenon that cannot be reduced to the simple binaries of Us and Them. It transcends Black(ism) and White(ism). It highlights how we view the world and its many inhabitants. How some of the world's inhabitants view themselves; how we construct our ethical values and the circumstances under which we feel empathetic to the plight of others beyond our doors; how we structure national interests and how we think about human life.

In my view, genocide has occurred in the Sudan. What has happened there bears all the hallmarks of the Genocide Convention. One needs to look the pattern of the conduct of the Sudanese state. The target group is a vulnerable and defenseless group. The state has killed members of the target group. It has imposed conditions on the group aimed at killing its members in whole or in part. The extent of the state's actions betrays its intent to destroy the group. If the state did not have the intent to destroy the group, it will act to protect the group from being killed. It will stop arming the Janjaweed. That the actions leading to death and displacement continue suggest a clear case of "willful neglect" on the part of the Sudan government which in itself has the requisite intent to overlook genocide while it continues. It purports complicity. One can be legalistic about the intent provision in the international law of genocide. But genocide is more than a legal concept or a crime in international law. It is also a social and political phenomenon. It is an annihilatory process or murderous instrument used against a group that the perpetrator {the government of Sudan] intends to destroy.

It is odd to sit close to the window of a law library, looking down and seeing your wife, cousin, husband, brother (one of your own) being hacked to death by someone while you sit contented with your law book widely opened trying to find out if what is going on in front of you is "premeditated murder" or the unintended actions of a lunatic. If it is your wife or husband or one of your own, conscience, morality and the human instinct in you would cause you to climb down and save your own. Might we look at what is happening in the Sudan from this context?