The European Union said on Monday there was widespread violence in the Darfur region of Sudan but the killings were not genocidal, a potentially crucial distinction which underlined its reluctance to intervene.
”We are not in the situation of genocide there,” Pieter Feith, an adviser to the EU’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, said in Brussels after returning from a fact-finding visit to Sudan.
”But it is clear there is widespread, silent and slow killing and village burning of a fairly large scale. There are considerable doubts as to the willingness of Sudan’s government to assume its duty to protect its civilian population against attacks.”
He said in the absence of willingness to send a significant military force, the EU and others had little choice but to cooperate with Khartoum.
The announcement is bound to anger those impatient for stronger international pressure on Sudan.
Last month the United States House of Representatives voted by 422 votes to nil to describe Khartoum’s actions as genocide, a conclusion shared by several analysts who say there is no other term for the systematic slaughter, rape and expulsions.
But the White House, the African Union and groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have so far avoided using the g-word. At least 30 000 people are thought to have died and one-million displaced in what the UN has called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Genocide is defined as a calculated effort to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, but the debate over its meaning is political, not semantic.
The genocide convention, adopted by the UN in 1948, calls on signatories to ”prevent” and ”punish” genocide. If governments accept events in Darfur amount to genocide they would be obliged to intervene.
Given the risk of such a logistical and military challenge, that is something few governments are willing to contemplate.
Instead of sending troops the EU and US have called for support from the African Union, a pan-African body which Khartoum could not so easily brand imperialist.
Documents from the Clinton administration show that soon after Rwanda’s slaughter started in 1994, officials were privately calling it genocide but refrained from doing so publicly lest pressure grow for a US deployment which the administration did not want.
In a separate development on Monday, Mustafa Osman Ismail, Sudan’s foreign minister, said his government would take part in peace talks in Nigeria this month.
”We open the door wide to reach an agreement on the agenda and issues,” he said.
”We don’t have conditions and we won’t accept prior conditions.”
Sudan expected to meet a UN deadline to improve security and human rights by the end of the month, the minister added.
As the current chairperson of the African Union, Nigeria’s president, Olusegun Obasanjo, has invited Sudan and rebel negotiators to meet for talks on August 23.
Fighting flared in Darfur last year after local people rebelled against Khartoum, claiming discrimination and repression. Both sides are Muslim but they are ethnically divided. – Guardian Unlimited Â