“Jimmy Carter’s Shamefully Ignorant Statement On Darfur”

Eric Reeves takes aim at President Carter’s shameful statement that genocide has not taken place in Darfur. Here’s a taste:

Carter got one thing right–that there is a legal definition of genocide, embodied in the 1948 U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide–but that’s it. The “atrocities” Carter refers to have included, over the past four and a half years, the deliberate, ethnically targeted destruction of not only African tribal populations, but their villages, homes, food- and seed-stocks, agricultural implements, and water sources. People die now in Darfur primarily because of this antecedent violence, directed against not only lives but livelihoods. Here, the Genocide Convention is explicit: You can commit genocide not only by “[k]illing members of [a] group” but also by “[d]eliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” The destruction in Darfur clearly meets that test.

Then there is the use of rape as a weapon of war by Arab militias in Darfur. The racial component of rape in Darfur has been well-documented at this point . . . . Can there be any denying that such ethnically targeted rapes fall under the Genocide Convention’s admonition that “[c]ausing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group” constitutes genocide? Moreover, because of the stigma that attaches to raped women, marriage and thus child-bearing becomes impossible for many. And, for some victims, especially younger girls, ensuing medical complications make child-bearing physically impossible. Which means that these rapes clearly meet yet another definition of genocide contained in the U.N. convention: “[i]mposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

In addition, children, as well as women, are continually abducted by the Janjaweed. This, too, is a genocidal act under the convention, which prohibits “[f]orcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

None of this should be controversial at this late date. Numerous human rights organizations have, over the past four years, collected unambiguous evidence of genocide. The examples could fill books.

. . . .

But Carter isn’t just wrong on the facts. His prescriptive point–that it is unhelpful to label Darfur a genocide–is foolish as well. No doubt Carter’s statement was the quid in some ghastly quid pro quo he hopes to arrange with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. But Sudan’s leaders are realists, and our only hope of changing their behavior is to credibly threaten them. The calculus is simple: If they believe the west–the United States, Europe, human-rights activists–now see the Darfur conflict as a chaotic civil war, not a genocide, they will feel less threatened. Which means they are more likely to dig in their heels on the diplomatic front–refusing to negotiate a political solution to the crisis–while waiting for the final cleansing of Darfur to run its course. The upshot is that Carter, a man who is so fond of lecturing others about the need for diplomacy, has managed to make a diplomatic solution to Darfur’s bloodletting less likely. Great wisdom, indeed.