Twelve years after the Rwanda genocide, nations still seem unwilling to commit the troops and money that would be needed to stop other mass slaughters of civilians, a top United Nations envoy said on Friday.
Governments have repeatedly promised ”never again” in the years since the Holocaust and the 1994 Rwanda killings. They have gotten better at nurturing peace processes, but are still reluctant to do much more, said Juan Mendez, the UN special adviser on prevention of genocide.
”My sense is there’s the same kind of wariness,” Mendez told a news conference.
”’Let somebody else do it’ is still very much in place.”
Mendez pointed to the continued violence in Sudan’s western Darfur region, labelled by the United Nations as the world’s worst humanitarian disaster.
The Darfur conflict started in 2003 and has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people, mainly through famine and disease.
Several million more have either fled into neighbouring Chad or been displaced inside Sudan.
Mendez said estimates of the number killed range from 100 000 to 400 000.
The international community and the Sudanese government share blame for the continued unrest, which is only getting worse, Mendez said.
Foreign powers have not followed through on his recommendations to protect civilians properly and fund African Union troops, while Sudan has not broken the ”cycle of impunity” that perpetuates the killings.
”In effect, for the last two years we have engaged in half measures, and those half measures, one, have not been sufficient to protect and, two, they’re showing signs of unravelling,” Mendez said.
He spoke on the 12th anniversary of the start of the Rwanda genocide, when the former majority Hutu-dominated extremist government unleashed a 100-day campaign of slaughter that left at least half a million people. Those killed were mostly the ethnic Tutsi minority and moderate Hutus.
The United States and several other nations have said genocide occurred in Darfur.
A UN investigative commission has concluded that crimes against humanity — but not genocide — had occurred in Darfur, and the Security Council referred the Darfur case to the Hague-based International Criminal Court last March.
The resolution required Sudan’s government and all other parties in the conflict to cooperate, but they have not done so fully, Mendez said.
Mendez said that if he thought it was necessary, he would not hesitate to tell the international community that it needed to send more troops to Darfur.
Mendez drew connections between Rwanda and Darfur, where the UN Security Council has agreed to begin preparing to transfer authority for the peacekeeping force in Darfur from the African Union to the UN.
”Debates about troop strength on the ground and about mandates of the troops on the ground are very eerily reminiscent of what happened then” in Rwanda, Mendez said. – Sapa-AP