Abstract
The outrage over genocidal violence in Sudan provided impetus to “legalise” the concept of humanitarian intervention into a “responsibility to protect” (R2P). However, a decade on, the literature treats Darfur and R2P as coterminous with failure: continued inaction underscored its limitations in delivering protection to civilians. This article argues that this is an impoverished reading, which leaves out important dynamics. The legacy of Darfur is more usefully understood as a formative experience for further intervention, rather than as a benchmark of (non-)compliance with the specificities of an evolving R2P norm. We analyse an intensifying functional convergence between Western actors, the Chinese Communist Party and the African Union around the practice of intervention, with a view to creating political order and not to foster regime change, on the continent. Darfur, in this reading, was an indicator of the increasing tendency towards approaching Africa through an interventionist lens of stabilisation, more so than the premature abortion of a nascent norm.
Ten years after inter-communitarian violence and a government-orchestrated counter-insurgency attracted the world’s attention, the literature treats Darfur and the responsibility to protect (R2P) as almost coterminous with failure. Liberal solidarists, sovereigntist in China and Russia, the African Union (AU) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its supporters all have their reasons for being disappointed by the intractable nature of conflict and an international engagement with the crisis that is held co-responsible for the lack of progress on agendas of security, justice and international stability. The violence has dragged on, with millions of Darfurians insecure in squalid camps, peace negotiations avoiding accountability questions, and President Omar al-Bashir—indicted by the ICC for war crimes and crimes against humanity—not just in office, but still Sudan’s dominant political figure.
Through analysing years of debate by governments, international organisations and opinion leaders, this article provides a window on the trajectory of the norm and practice of intervention. It reviews arguments and counterarguments about the nature of violence in Darfur (and concomitant views on which policies would most effectively address the insecurity there), the question of legitimate authority (who should lead?) and on the relationship between international society and the host country of the crisis, Sudan. Subsequently, this article challenges some of the conventional conclusions put forward by an all too US-centric literature. Firstly, although there was no Kosovo-style coalition of the willing that forced the Sudanese regime to cede control of a rebellious part of its territory where foreign troops protected a local population against pro-government militias, many African voices reject the assertion that “If Darfur is the first ‘test case’ of the responsibility to protect, there is no point in denying that the world has failed the entry exam”.Footnote The combination of AU peacekeepers, political mediation and the world’s largest humanitarian operation may not fit the template R2P advocates have in mind, but Africa’s operationalisation of its “principle of non-indifference” did produce a plethora of interventionist activity. Secondly, while much of the debateFootnote is fixated on the tensions in the UN Security Council (UNSC) between the P3 on the one hand and Russia and China on the other—arguing that the inability of the R2P norm to be firmly established is a function of the clash between “interventionist” (the former camp) and “sovereigntist” views (the latter duo) of international relations—for Beijing in particular its experiences in Sudan have proven formative and have led to an increasing functional convergence with Western security agendas in Africa. Thirdly, rather than the “failure to act” prematurely aborting a robust interpretation of R2P,Footnote the decade subsequent to the onset of the Darfur controversy has seen an upsurge of African and non-African interventions on the continent—to enforce UNSC resolutions, to guarantee peace agreements and to protect civilians. Although the politico-legal terminology of R2P may not have gained as much traction as its proponents wish, the concept of intervention in domestic African affairs is supported by constituencies internal and external to the continent, as was already evident in Darfur and has become clearer since.
Framing Darfur: The Emergence and Contestation of a Responsibility to Protect
The history of Sudan, until July 2011 Africa’s largest country, is steeped in extreme levels of violence: the precolonial Sudanic Kingdoms were built through slavery; Egyptian colonisation—the birth of the modern Sudanese state—expanded slave-trading and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands owing to unforgiving labour practices; and civil wars killed more than two million people between independence in 1956 and the early 2000s.Footnote In a context of extremely antagonistic state–society relations, with political and economic power concentrated in the core riverine areas around the Nile, large-scale violence in Sudan is more usefully characterised as an integral part of how the country is governed, rather than as an exceptional crisis.Footnote The region of Darfur experienced famine between 1983 and 1985 and irregular outbursts of inter-communitarian conflict in the late 1980s and 1990s.Footnote Two rebel movements scaled up the violence from 2001–2002 onwards, just when the long-running civil war between the military-Islamist Al-Ingaz regime and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M) drew to a close. A rattled Al-Ingaz responded to the Darfur insurgency in the default way through which Sudanese governments wage war: scorched earth tactics by the regular army, with proxy militias of marginalised groups given carte blanche to kill, abduct and/or displace the communities from which the rebels hail. One prominent scholar characterised this as “genocide by force of habit”.Footnote
The initial reaction of the leading actors in international society was familiar: few paid particular attention to yet another African conflict, though diplomats were concerned the crisis risked derailing the peace negotiations between Al-Ingaz and the SPLA/M. This began to change when a handful of individuals dramatically raised Darfur’s profile. In March 2004, Mukesh Kapila, UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Sudan, denounced the Al-Ingaz counter-insurgency as a scorched earth policy comparable in character, if not in scale, to the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Kapila, who after his criticism of Al-Ingaz and of the silence of the Security Council would be expelled from Sudan, seized on the commemorations of the 10th anniversary of Rwanda’s tragedy: “I was present in Rwanda at the time of the genocide, and I’ve seen many other situations around the world and I am totally shocked at what is going on in Darfur … This is ethnic cleansing, this is the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis, and I don’t know why the world isn’t doing more about it”.Footnote Academics and policy-makers in the US media began linking 1994 with Darfur too. Exactly 10 years after the start of the Rwandan genocide, Samantha Power, whose monograph A Problem from Hell provided much of the intellectual ammunition underpinning the growing movement for responding to mass atrocities, wrote an op-ed that framed the debate in Washington. Tellingly, the piece, published on 6 April 2004, was entitled “Remember Rwanda, But Take Action in Sudan”.Footnote
Rwanda was also on the mind of Alpha Oumar Konaré and Kofi Annan, both of whom would work consistently towards getting the member states of the organisations they headed to take an interest. Konaré’s African Union was the first international body to tackle Darfur, spurred on by its newly inaugurated Peace and Security Council (PSC). The PSC is tasked with upholding the AU’s Constitutive Act which institutionalised the doctrine of humanitarian intervention in Clause 4(h): the right of the Union to intervene in a member state to arrest war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. As AU Commission Chair, Konaré helped negotiate the April 2004 Humanitarian Ceasefire Agreement in an attempt at stabilising Darfur and became a tireless advocate of the deployment and strengthening of the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS), after he spent a night in a camp for the Darfurian displaced who told stories reminiscent of Central Africa’s killing fields in the 1990s.
Rwanda also haunted Kofi Annan, who had been the head of peacekeeping operations at the time of the genocide and was criticised for failing to persuade the Security Council to act. The UN Secretary-General chose 7 April 2004, not coincidentally 10 years after the world woke up to the news of massacres against the Rwandese population and the killing of 10 UN peacekeepers, to speak out about Darfur before the UN Human Rights Commission. He linked the events in Sudan to 1994 and a broader agenda of protecting civilians, including through the appointment of a UN Special Advisor on Genocide Prevention:
Humanity must respond by taking action in its own defence … Whatever terms it uses to describe the situation, the international community cannot stand idle. At the invitation of the Sudanese Government, I propose to send a high-level team to Darfur to gain a fuller understanding of the extent and nature of this crisis, and to seek improved access to those in need of assistance and protection … If that is denied, the international community must be prepared to take swift and appropriate action. By “action” in such situations I mean a continuum of steps, which may include military action.Footnote
Annan and Konaré posited a right to intervene in the internal affairs of states in order to protect citizens. This idea, phrased by the AU Commission Chair as the principle of “non-indifference”, stemmed from their belief that conflict and bad governance are the root causes of Africa’s enduring poverty and marginalisation in the international system, and that Africans should take the lead in countering this.Footnote The coinciding of the Darfur conflict with the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide allowed Annan and Konaré—and other African leaders with interventionist views, such as Thabo Mbeki (South Africa), Olusegun Obasanjo (Nigeria) and Abdoulaye Wade (Senegal)—to raise the profile of their efforts. The shame surrounding Rwanda and replays of the images of the slaughter of unarmed civiliansFootnote provided a fertile context for “the case for action” in Darfur.Footnote Even in India, famously critical of Western-led humanitarian interventionism, the influential Economic Times editorialised that “Darfur is another Rwanda in the making. And not just in terms of the human atrocities but the apathetic reaction of the international community”.Footnote
If Annan and Konaré stopped short of formally describing the violence in Darfur as deliberate extermination of particular groups—tactically preferring to rally the broadest possible coalition for the protection of civilians under the banner of crimes against humanity—a well-organised activist movement had no such hesitations and pressured the US government to “call Darfur by its rightful name”: genocide. The Save Darfur Coalition (SDC) brought together an unlikely alliance of college students, Deep South churches, Holocaust survivors, African-American civil society, Hollywood grandees and former Clinton administration officials and argued that the corollary of identifying Darfur as the new Rwanda meant an obligation to end the conflict by all necessary means.Footnote For the SDC, there could be no peace and justice without security; it campaigned vigorously for military action to save as many lives as possible. Extrapolations of excess mortality figures were used by activists to argue that a threshold for military intervention had been crossed once the numbers reached the same order of magnitude as during other episodes of genocidal killing.
The combined pressure of Kofi Annan’s policy entrepreneurship, the sense that AU efforts were insufficient to arrest the massacres and, above all, the soaring appeal of the SDC in North America impelled Washington to engage. After Congress adopted a bipartisan resolution labelling the atrocities genocide, Secretary of State Colin Powell did the same on 9 September 2004, the first time in history a US government had taken such a step. The Bush administration, however, refused to accept that identifying Darfur as “genocide” entailed an open-ended commitment that might include American-led intervention to protect civilians.Footnote Preoccupied with worsening insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan and poor relations with the UN, it opted for a policy that adopted the “rhetoric of genocide … as a substitute for more forceful action”.Footnote Instead of operationalising the violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention by the Sudanese government in terms of an obligation to intervene itself, Washington combined supporting “African solutions to African problems” with the pursuit of sanctions against Al-Ingaz chieftains orchestrating the most egregious violence.Footnote As the US and its European allies became disillusioned with AMIS in 2005 and 2006—journalists produced a torrent of tragicomic anecdotes that emphasised the inadequacy of AU peacekeeping and the hesitation of African heads of state to confront Sudanese President Bashir—they shifted their interpretation of a duty to safeguard human rights and insisted that a better resourced UN mission replace the AU force, if necessary against the objection of Khartoum.Footnote
Not all concurred with the genocide lens of framing Darfur—and an associated responsibility to protect. In the wake of America’s unipolar moment of the 1990s, the bombing campaign over Serbia during the 1999 Kosovo crisis and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, public opinion in Russia was fiercely sceptical of anything that reeked of interventionism by another name;Footnote this applied elsewhere across Asia, Latin America and the Arab world too, as exemplified by an op-ed in Pakistan’s Daily Times which criticised Security Council Resolution 1556, claiming that yet another pretext for regime change was sought: “How do we explain the tight timeframe pushed by the US–EU combine for conflict resolution in Darfur? The explanation is perhaps to be found in … the hidden agenda that the US is intent upon promoting through the Darfur resolution”.Footnote The dominant concern for such voices was not another Rwanda, but another Iraq: the selective application of concerns for human rights, which are waived for allied governments yet prompt the punishment of pariah states that choose a path that does not accept Western hegemony.Footnote For sovereigntists in the G77, Darfur was a question of internal order for which the overarching principle of sacrosanct state sovereignty should not be overridden—the very absence of intervention in 2003–2004 was a de facto victory, as the sovereign equality of nations in an unequal world is an anchor of international stability. This line of argument drew on warnings about a responsibility to protect emboldening rebel movements (cf. the Kosovo Liberation Army [KLA] in Kosovo), which in turn worsens the (potential for) atrocities (“the moral hazard of humanitarian intervention”Footnote).
Broader resistance to humanitarian intervention in almost any form was reflected in the contestation of the nature of the crisis by China, the Arab League and the Russian Federation. They argued that the violence was more complex than a narrative of the Sudanese regime and auxiliary “Arab” militias in the roles of perpetrators and “African” ethno-regional groups and rebels as victims. Darfur was more aptly characterised as “civil war” in which many actors were both victims and perpetrators and related to underdevelopment and climate change.Footnote Addressing this conflict therefore required not R2P but rather a peace process, or even peace-building/development assistance to the Sudanese government, to solve this internal affair. In this reading, which was largely shared by Brazilian and Indian diplomats, thresholds/casualty rates were not a useful way of thinking about the violence. The best way of protecting civilians was argued to be a settlement between the Sudanese government and rebel movements. In other words: peace as a precondition for security.Footnote
Normative conflict between various actors revolved not just around the nature of violence in Darfur and the requisite recipes to deal with atrocities, but also around the question of authority and subsidiarity: who has the legal right or duty to take initiative and at which institutional level could the most effective response to the crisis be provided? These debates did not neatly map onto the controversy over the characterisation of the conflict. While African policy-makers, both those sceptical of the genocide label and those clamouring for a tough response to Khartoum’s counter-insurgency, by and large wanted the African Union to take (and maintain) the initiative throughout the crisis—seeing it as a litmus test for the AU to provide African solutions to African problems—most major governmental and non-governmental players outside the continent preferred the UN. For the US and EU—pressured by the SDC, op-eds in the New York Times and think-tanks like the International Crisis Group—the AU was entitled to its initiatives, but in practice failed to provide a meaningful responsibility to protect: while thanking the AU for its (Western funded) efforts, decision-making should be shifted to the UN Security Council to take the necessary measures (and provide enforcement and funding) to deal with the crisis.Footnote
Beijing and Moscow concurred that the UN was the right forum to handle the Darfur conflict in case the Sudanese government and the AU indicated being overwhelmed by the challenge. However, what the UN should do with that authority was envisaged in a radically different manner by Chinese, Russian, Algerian and Pakistani representatives on the Council to the UN-sanctioned NATO intervention (e.g. “No-Fly Zone”), which liberal interventionists like former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan Rice proposed. Meanwhile, European countries pushed for a third institution to adopt a major role, alongside the AU and UN: the International Criminal Court. Unsure of the success of a military intervention or a classic UN/AU peacekeeping mission and keen to have a previously fiercely hostile US involved with the Court for reasons that had little to do with R2P per se, EU countries argued publicly that the ICC could fulfil both a retributive and preventive role in Darfur. This approach was bolstered by the findings of the International Commission of Inquiry, created by Security Council Resolution 1564, which noted the massacres and mass displacement constituted war crimes and crimes against humanity rather than genocide. The Commission recommended investigations by the ICC as the best instrument to bring justice and accountability to Darfur.Footnote Nimble EU diplomacy in 2005 saw the Security Council adopt Resolution 1593 which granted the ICC Prosecutor the authority to initiate inquiries, culminating in the 2008–2009 arrest warrant against Omar al-Bashir.Footnote
The final set of debates that produced normative conflict in the case of Darfur revolved around the relationship between the international community and the host country of the crisis. These arguments went to the core of what later, at the 2005 World Summit, became officially known as R2P. For those who identified the violence in Darfur as genocide, the Sudanese government had ceased to be an actor to be consulted in policy discussions; an effective solution required a robust protection effort that would create safe havens and a no-fly zone, with international peacekeepers confronting the Sudanese armed forces and their allies should they attempt to continue their extermination of Darfur’s “African” population.Footnote Others, particularly those US policy-makers in Congress and key think-tankers who had been involved with Sudan since the 1990s (John Prendergast, Gayle Smith, Frank Wolf and so on), argued that such a passive-defensive interpretation of the responsibility to end genocide would not suffice: diplomatic, financial and commercial sanctions would need to be further expanded (preferably by the UN, if necessary by America alone) and military action carried out with a view to containing Khartoum. Leading US National Security Council veterans proposed a Kosovo-style scenario: “We Saved Europeans. Why Not Africans?”Footnote Hawkish policy entrepreneurs—USAID administrator Roger Winter and Smith College’s Eric Reeves, for instance—even advocated regime change as the only possible measure to come to grips with genocide.Footnote
This confrontationist approach clashed radically with two other clusters of arguments pertaining to the host government’s relationship with the international community. Activists were criticised for rendering an already fiendish political process more difficult.Footnote African decision-makers such as Mbeki and Obasanjo, and engaged scholars (such as Alex De Waal) identified the state as the main culprit of the violence in Darfur, but they did not believe in a solution that involved coercing the Sudanese government. For them, Khartoum was a problematic but ultimately necessary and still legitimate actor. Their efforts sought to engage moderates in Bashir’s regime and to pull it in through a peace deal that would buttress a more effective AU peacekeeping effort.Footnote AU diplomacy, technical assistance for rebel delegations and a firm line vis-à-vis Khartoum’s demands were identified as the way forward. This approach to the crisis was eventually endorsed by China, whose partnership with Khartoum led activists to dub the 2008 Beijing Games the “Genocide Olympics”.Footnote The Chinese Communist Party initially argued that only a domestic solution, with a limited role for non-African parties, could provide security. In Beijing’s reading, the Sudanese government was neither to be ignored, nor pressurised, nor confronted, but rather to be put in the driver’s seat and to be assisted in fulfilling its obligation to protect its citizens.Footnote
Beyond Darfur: Momentum for More Intervention, Not Less
After years of intense disagreements about the nature of violence in Darfur, the question of legitimate authority and the relationship between international society and the host country of the crisis, a profound “Darfur fatigue” is unmistakeable. More than a decade after the worst massacres and with millions still in camps and no protagonists judged by domestic or international tribunals for their role in the conflict, the cost of what was the world’s biggest humanitarian operation and its largest peacekeeping mission is counted in billions of dollars, with disheartening results: violence in Western Sudan persists—if not at the extreme levels of 2003–2004—and a peace settlement has proven elusive, while dozens of peacekeepers have been killed by criminals, rebels and pro-government militia. For many, Darfur is coterminous with failure—of the international community to intervene in bloody, faraway wars and fulfil its responsibility to protect; of the African Union to bring African solutions to African conflicts; of the Western powers to persuade China to buttress international norms and a liberal global order.Footnote
The dominant narrative of disappointment and non-intervention distributes blame widely. The United States especially is the object of criticism, torn as it was between the Global War on Terror (which required the CIA to cooperate with the Al-Ingaz regimeFootnote), managing the Save Darfur Coalition for internal political reasons and salvaging the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement which dealt with the calamitous war in Central, Eastern and Southern Sudan and in which the Bush administration invested substantial political capital.Footnote The remainder of the article focuses on two other protagonists whose crucial role is often misread. A reinterpretation of the AU’s and China’s dynamic involvement with Sudan during and after the conflict allows a different, more ambivalent legacy to emerge. Too much of the literature frames Darfur as risking leaving R2P stillborn, an impoverished reading of subsequent dynamics. Empirically it is undeniable that intervention in mid-2004 came too late to save tens of thousands of Darfurians. Intriguingly, however, it was not a sovereigntist decade that ensued on the continent, but, to the contrary, one in which Chinese and African constituencies would prove crucial in mainstreaming intervention, on their terms, as a legitimate instrument in dealing with Africa’s conflicts.
In its emphasis on the failure of peacekeeping and the AU-led process to negotiate a political settlement, the Union’s critics are selectively blind to important historical facts. The argument of an Africa both unable and unwilling to do enough has circulated since the crisis’ emerged on the international agenda in 2004 and was put at the service of various proposed scenarios: a NATO-supervised no-fly zone for instance, as argued in Susan Rice’s op-ed, “Why Darfur Can’t Be Left to Africa”.Footnote The AU was also blamed for failing to muster the courage to step aside and let others solve Darfur: “Among other things, the AU’s position made it very difficult for non-African states to argue for humanitarian intervention in Darfur. The AU presence became, in effect, a stumbling block to move robust external interventions—a fact that the GoS [Government of Sudan] used adroitly”.Footnote Although the Bush administration and other Western governments shelved the humanitarian intervention desired by activists, they conveniently adopted their AU-directed criticism. US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton fought vociferously for a “rehatting” of the African Union Mission in Sudan into a UN operation, arguing that this would augment the resources, logistical efficiency and military firepower available and hence reduce levels of violence considerably.Footnote
An examination of the empirical record, however, shows a rather different picture. Earlier, we highlighted the crucial role played by Kofi Annan and Alpha Oumar Konaré in mobilising the world to engage with Darfur. Both were key drivers of the idea of legitimate intervention to arrest large-scale human rights violations; the development and implementation of the AU’s principle of non-indifference is considerably indebted to Annan and Konaré. At a time when the AU had, by its own admission, nowhere near the resources that peacekeeping operations require to achieve a modicum of success, Africa’s head of states mustered the political will to sidestep the Sudanese government’s objections to intervention in Darfur. Funding for AMIS was slow to arrive and backing from the P5 of the Security Council for the AU mediation amounted to a trickle. Nevertheless, the AU sent thousands of soldiers into harm’s way, hoping to create facts on the ground that would compel leading actors in international society to expand assistance.
AMIS was certainly plagued by the deficiencies reported on by the international press and think-tanks: inter alia, late payment of salaries; tiny air component and transport capacity; fuel shortages; poor intelligence gathering.Footnote But the deployment of Nigerian, South African and Rwandese peacekeepers did help change on-the-ground dynamics. Although correlation does not equal causation, the dramatic fall in deaths and violent incidents subsequent to the AU deployment remains remarkable: if tens of thousands are thought to have perished in 2003–2004, estimated averages by UN sources for the 2005–2007 timeframe (the period that coincided with the expansion of AMIS and the debates in the Security Council over the inadequacy of AU peacekeeping and the need to “rehat”) are around 100 to 300 deaths per month.Footnote
Despite the post-deployment improvements, the amount of time and energy spent in New York in 2006–2007 bickering bore little relation to the security situation:
With few exceptions, humanitarians did not want tens of thousands more armed men and, if they had to have them, wanted to know how exactly they intended to “protect”. A confidential NGO report of April 2006 included the following: “A kind of propaganda is going on, with Egeland [UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator] stating the UN agencies are ‘paralysed’ in Darfur due to insecurity and that there is therefore a need for a strong UN force to be deployed. For sure parts of Darfur are inaccessible for the time being, but it is quite an overstatement to declare that UN agencies are paralysed and I don’t see how the deployment of UN troops could improve access … ”. For MSF [Médecins Sans Frontières], “a non-consensual intervention would inevitably result in the collapse of ongoing aid programmes … one of the most effective aid operations of the last twenty years”.Footnote
The scepticism among the P3 regarding African solutions to African problems was ironic, given that this was a trope they had themselves encouraged for years as a means of offloading responsibilities in the maintenance of international security. The Bush administration remained torn between its competing priorities regarding Sudan and wanted, on the one hand, to let others handle the dossier but, on the other, faced vociferous calls by activists and Congress to “do more” faced with its “policy adrift”.Footnote It was this double-edged mindset that led it to call Darfur “genocide”, but to rule out NATO operations; similarly, it meant that Washington kept urging the AU to lead, but simultaneously criticised African initiatives and rushed the negotiations of the doomed 2006 Darfur Peace Agreement, with Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick stopping at nothing to obtain rebel signatures at almost any cost.Footnote
Washington locked itself into a draining tussle with the Security Council and the Sudanese government over the AU–UN rehatting.Footnote With the violence nowhere near emergency levels but with the political track dead in the water, this was a dangerous conflation of priorities. Darfur’s rebels splintered and the war morphed in nature and scale, festering below the waterline before re-escalating in recent years.Footnote The “African Union/United Nations hybrid operation in Darfur” (UNAMID) proved staggeringly costly, with the highest number of killed peacekeepers anywhere in the world, and with little impact on the multiplication of micro and regional conflicts across Western Sudan. Poor leadership, under-equipment and disagreements between the UN, African states and the dominant Security Council players have continuously undermined the mission and allowed rebels and government forces to kill UNAMID personnel with impunity and to terrorise communities across Darfur.Footnote Perhaps most fatally, the mission never built trust with Khartoum, nor did it develop a strategy to confront the Al-Ingaz regime over the innumerable violations committed by government forces and their auxiliaries: the worst of both worlds, which helps explain the absence of a credible, inclusive and comprehensive political process with willing partners.
The failure of UNAMID in making progress on questions of peace, stability and/or justice since the UNSC overpowered the AU in 2007 has not led Union member states to question the usefulness of African intervention; quite the contrary. For El-Ghassim Wane, the director of the AU’s Peace and Security Department, Darfur was not an illustration of the reluctance or inability of African states to intervene collectively in domestic affairs; instead it was a learning experience during which both persisting lacunae were uncovered and comparative advantages vis-à-vis other actors in crisis situations were identified.Footnote Apart from Darfur, the Union has intervened militarily in Burundi, the Central African Republic and Somalia in the decade since its Peace and Security Council was inaugurated; through sanctions and suspensions, it has taken on (and in several instances reversed) unconstitutional takeovers of power in Burkina Faso, Comoros, Egypt, Mauritania, Madagascar and Togo; and it sanctioned outside intervention to deal with political crises and protection questions in Congo, Côte d’Ivoire and Mali. The AU may not use verbatim R2P language because of its connotations with Western imperialism—a worry strengthened by the politics and fallout of the 2011 NATO airstrikes on Libya—but the practice of intervention as a legitimate instrument in Africa’s international relations to arrest bloody conflicts or prevent violence from escalating further is here to stay. Darfur was a crucial experience, representative of, and catalytic for, growing momentum to operationalise the AU’s principle of non-indifference.
Another crucial actor for whom the relationship between Darfur and its own trajectory on the idea and practice of intervention has been frequently misunderstood is China. Conventional wisdom, in its attempts at explaining “non-intervention”, has it that “Beijing and Moscow have diluted international efforts to pressure the government in Sudan to end its war in Darfur”.Footnote Activist/liberal-humanitarian circles focus on Chinese oil imports from Sudan, its shielding of the Al-Ingaz regime from military intervention through obstructionist diplomacy in the Security Council and its arms deliveries to the Sudan armed forces, making it complicit in genocide.Footnote The orthodox rebuttal of such framing of China’s involvement has been to stress Beijing’s principle of non-interference in domestic affairs and its positive contribution to peace and stability in Sudan through economic partnerships, as the violence in Darfur is attributed to underdevelopment and climate change, worsened by external meddling.Footnote
What both these perspectives understate is the dynamic character of Beijing’s behaviour vis-à-vis Sudan and the broader geopolitical consequences its Sudanese experiences have produced for its thinking about R2P specifically and intervention more broadly. When Darfur grabbed international attention in 2003–2004, China’s official position was almost diametrically opposed to Washington’s, but in subsequent years the backroom diplomacy practised by Chinese diplomats was pragmatic. The Chinese position took time to change from unfailing support for Khartoum to a more engaged role, but once it became clear that regime change was not an option for the White House, Beijing began shifting in 2005. Darfur became an embarrassment, showing the Chinese Communist Party the limited ability of sovereigntist language in shielding it from fallout of close relations with states regarded by the West as pariahs.Footnote What seemed like a remote overseas business relation threatened to derail the 2008 Beijing Olympics and cast doubt over the carefully constructed image of “Responsible China”, a re-emerging power ready to partake in maintaining international order as a good global citizen.
Not only was China key in ultimately getting Sudan to accept the AMIS-UNAMID “rehatting”,Footnote it did not use its veto against Resolution 1593 which referred the Darfur dossier to the ICC in March 2005. It also appointed, for the first time, a Special Envoy for African Affairs to deal with the international fallout of China’s perceived protection of a genocidal state and to push the Sudanese government to engage more seriously in peace talks. All of these manoeuvres were deeply unpopular in Khartoum and while falling short of strategically shifting the balance of forces diplomatically or in Darfur itself, this constrained the Al-Ingaz regime’s counter-insurgency. According to one senior Sudanese hardliner, who tried to account for the continuing security headache that is Darfur for Bashir and his generals: “If China had not played politics, there would be no more Darfur rebels”.Footnote While clearly an exaggeration, it underlines the extent of mutual inconvenience and constraint that came with the petro-alliance between Khartoum and Beijing.
Seen from Beijing, Sudan is not just a success story or a traumatic episode: it is a site where the next, more complicated phase of China’s “Go Out” strategy is being operationalised through ad hoc decisions and pragmatic responses to changing circumstances. Chinese diplomats who weathered the Darfur media storm have had their careers boosted. Similarly, it was in Sudan that China built its biggest overseas dam project ever, the Merowe Dam, which was heavily opposed by civil society. It was also in Sudan that Chinese companies helped erect an oil industry from scratch, building a pipeline in areas that were under governmental bombardment to ethnically cleanse them. These feats carry huge prestige inside the Party and the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC): “[of all] Chinese investment overseas, CNPC’s Sudan operation represents the single most outstanding success”.Footnote
Sudan has been a formative experience in altering Beijing’s approach to Africa and how it thinks about intervening in what it previously considered as strictly internal affairs: it is where China has begun to abandon its sacrosanct principle of non-interference.Footnote Darfur constituted a key part of the steep learning curve regarding foreign policy, commercial diplomacy and intervention more broadly that China has followed over the last 20 years.Footnote The lesson that staying out of domestic politics is no longer an option was underlined in the wake of the calamitous separation between Sudan and South Sudan after 9 July 2011. The assumption among Chinese bankers, diplomats and oil executives was that the economic rationale of cooperation (Khartoum and Juba need each other to benefit from the declining oil wealth) would trump the emotional dimensions and power politics of the South’s secession: surely elites in both countries would find a mutually beneficial agreement to share the petro-rents, allowing them to entrench their authority for years to come? The brutal wake-up call when this did not materialise—instead of cooperating with one another, a border war and oil production shutdown claimed the lives of thousands and cost Chinese enterprises hundreds of millions of dollars—forced China to dramatically scale up its political involvement, particularly after the abduction of Chinese citizens in South Kordofan and the eruption of a vicious civil war in South Sudan in December 2013 which killed thousands and threatened Chinese investments in the oil industry.
For the first time, the Party explicitly backed sanctions against war criminals in South Sudan on human rights grounds, working closely with the American and Ethiopian mediation efforts to stop the fighting, including by taking the for China unprecedented step of talking to those who rebelled against the government, inviting them to Beijing and by deploying 700 combat troops to the UN mission there. South Sudan’s crude represented almost 5% of the oil imports of the People’s Republic prior to the crisis and African and Western pressures to leverage Chinese influence combined with China Inc.’s demands to the Party to de facto abandon the non-interference principle. Officially, China remains wedded to its cardinal diplomatic axiom, but just how much the Sudanese experiences—with Darfur at their core—have changed is clear from the words of its Special Envoy for Africa, Zhong Jianhua:
We have serious interests in these countries [Sudan and South Sudan]—billions of dollars of investment … Of course we had to get involved … We are left with the choice of either paying for the cure or paying for the funeral … South Sudan was a big change of our previous policy—big pressure coming from our oil industry … We had to talk to rebels for the first time as well. This was new for us.Footnote
Conclusion: Darfur, Norm Evolution and Interventionism in Africa
The outrage over genocidal violence in Darfur provided impetus to a push to “legalise” the concept of humanitarian intervention into a universal “responsibility to protect” at the UN. It was in its deliberations over Darfur that the Security Council, for the first time, referred to R2P in its resolutions (respectively in Resolutions 1706, 1755, 1769 and 1778). Moreover, Darfur has been—and still is—a rallying cry and reference point for global civil society and activism surrounding massive violations of human rights. However, “continued inaction” after 2005 also demonstrated the limitations of such an institutionalisation in delivering both short-term protection to civilians and durable solutions to the conflict’s root causes.Footnote The fact that internecine killing in Western Sudan mobilised thousands of activists, compelled Security Council diplomats to spend years arguing and threatened to derail the Beijing Olympics was testament to the potency of the ideas that framed the Darfur crisis. Simultaneously though, the ability of a weak “pariah” state like Sudan to preserve for itself vital policy space by bogging down the UN and frustrating initiatives to bolster peacekeeping, formulate a political solution and punish the recalcitrant regime raises questions about the extent of the commitment of North American and European governments to liberal interventionism.Footnote
This article has argued that the fact that Darfur emerged on the global agenda at a politico-historical moment of barely challenged liberal dominance and at a time of commemorating the Rwandan genocide has skewed much of the analysis regarding the (non-)responses to the violence and its consequences. For many the central puzzle/outrage has been that if the West failed to intervene in Sudan at the height of its power, with the doctrine of humanitarian interventionism about to be legalised as R2P, what future could there then be for the concept of intervening at times of mass human rights violations in Africa in the unfolding age of multipolarity? This article has suggested that this lens of contextualising Darfur misses important dynamics.
From this article’s perspective, the legacy of Darfur is more usefully understood in terms of being a formative experience for further intervention, rather than as a benchmark of (non-)compliance with the specificities of an evolving R2P norm. China’s “African” shift away from the logic of non-intervention and the AU’s willingness to intervene in matters at the heart of the sovereignty of major member states like Sudan point to a longer-term trend towards more intervention in Africa. In that sense, “[p]erhaps the crisis in Darfur says less about the overarching differences between Western governments and those in the Horn than it does about the underlying commonalities”.Footnote If divisions in the Security Council and the presumed inability/unwillingness of the AU led some to suspect that Darfur presaged enduring stand-offs between the Western P3 and the sovereigntist China–Russia camp—and thus that R2P would in effect promote non-interventionFootnote—then the reality of the post-Darfur decade has been characterised by a remarkable increase in military interventions on the African continent, even if the R2P discourse was mostly absent. These interventions by the AU and Western powers (with increasing Chinese support and participation) in the Central African Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Libya and elsewhere have in the overwhelming majority of cases been approved by the UN Security Council, drawing on a mixture of arguments about international security, protection and conflict prevention. What merits our attention is not a “New Scramble for Africa” between Beijing and Washington, but the degree to which intervention as a legitimate instrument in Africa’s international relations can draw on a Great Power and African consensus.
The adoption of R2P at the World Summit—a process backed by most African states—was not a cause of the growing interventionist mood on the continent, but rather a relatively inconsequential effect of a nascent thrust. The discourse of R2P did little to shape the nature of the AU’s involvement in Darfur—or African interventionism generally: the failure to mainstream/implement R2P in Africa more broadly since 2005 has been largely disconnected from growing intervention on the ground. If, in the perspective of many African incumbents, R2P has undertones of regime change, the practice of cross-border, military intervention is now entirely mainstream in African politics. The observation that it is not the practice of intervention that changes over time but the rationales provided to legitimise it,Footnote is certainly borne out on the continent. African elites have learned, after a period of hostility or hesitation vis-à-vis the Western discourse of liberal norms and protection of populations, how to put such narratives at the service of projects of regime stabilisation. Because most interventions tend to freeze battle-lines between sitting governments and advancing insurgents (e.g. Chad, Côte d’Ivoire) or to reverse major gains of a rebellion (e.g. Congo, Mali, Somalia), they combine a conservative bias of enhancing order with a concomitant agenda of power-sharing to freeze elite conflict (a practice that has become exceedingly popular on the continent, with its own logic of reproducing violenceFootnote).Footnote As such, whereas R2P remains divisive and connotes anti-incumbency, the practice of intervention as stabilisation actually serves to unite very different constituencies.Footnote
The AU operation came too late to prevent the killing of tens of thousands and the displacement of more than two million people, but this failure was not caused by an African reluctance to intervene in conflicts that produce mass human rights violations. Nor did the difficult experiences of AMIS in Western Sudan render the Union, its member states or the Great Powers—and Beijing in particular—any less interventionist. Because of the corrective effect Sudan has had on the most important rising geopolitical factor on the continent, China, the Darfur “big let-down”Footnote has actually spurred an increased tendency to approach Africa through a security lens. In other words, focusing too much on the evolution of what some hoped would be an emerging R2P norm detracts from the important fact that Darfur was an expression of, and acted as a catalyst for, the growing entrenchment of the norm of intervention, however defined, on African soil.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding
All authors in this special issue gratefully acknowledge generous support from the Volkswagen Foundation through its programme “Europe and Global Challenges”, which provided the funding for their project on “Global Norm Evolution and the Responsibility to Protect” [Grant no. 86 917].About the Authors
Harry Verhoeven is an Assistant Professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service in Qatar, Georgetown University and the Convenor of the Oxford University China-Africa Network (OUCAN). He is the author of Water, Civilisation and Power in Sudan. The Political Economy of Military-Islamist State-Building (2015) and Why Comrades Go to War (2016, with Philip Roessler).
Ricardo Soares de Oliveira is Associate Professor of Comparative Politics, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Official Fellow of St Peter’s College, Oxford, and Fellow of the Global Public Policy Institute, Berlin. He is the author of Magnificent and Beggar Land: Angola since the Civil War (2015) and Oil and Politics in the Gulf of Guinea (2007), and the co-editor of China Returns to Africa (2008, with Chris Alden and Daniel Large) and The New Protectorates: International Tutelage and the Making of Liberal States (2012, with James Mayall).
Madhan Mohan Jaganathan is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for International Politics, Organisation and Disarmament, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He has an MSc and MA from Madras Christian College, Chennai and an MPhil and PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Notes
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