Channels, Fall 2016

Channels • 2016 • Volume 1 • Number 1 Page 15 president, Omar al-Bashir, for genocide and crimes against humanity. Although the Sudanese government publicly denies that it supported the Janjaweed (a militia group that helped carry out the cleansing) evidence supports claims that it provided financial assistance, supplied weapons, and coordinated joint attacks, many against civilians. Mass displacements and coercive migrations forced millions into refugee camps or across the border, creating a humanitarian crisis. The Sudanese government and the JEM signed a ceasefire agreement in February 2010 with a tentative agreement to pursue peace. Following more attacks, however, a peace agreement has still not been signed. In recent years, talks have begun between the Sudanese government and an umbrella organization for rebel forces, the Liberation and Justice Movement (LJM). On July 14, 2011, Sudan and the LJM signed the Doha Document for Peace in Darfur (DDPD). The Agreement proposed power sharing, a more equal distribution of wealth, and it committed to the work of the Darfur Regional Authority. At the third meeting of the DDPD in February 2014, further discussions were held on the integration of LJM battalions into the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and police. Little progress was made, however, in implementing the deal. The main rebel groups, which refused to sign, joined the People’s Liberation Movement and formed a loose alliance known as the Sudan Revolutionary Front (SRF), created in November 2011 with a national agenda. This made it difficult to engage parties on the DDPD, which only focused on Darfur. In April of 2013, the JEM-Sudan/JEM-Bashar (splinter groups of JEM) signed the DDPD, and after a brief freeze in implementation, they resumed the process in January of 2014. More rebel groups signed the DDPD, which was the peace processes’ main achievement. However, the Darfur Regional Authority wound up in 2015 with modest accomplishments, giving the remaining rebels little incentive to invest in it. This has caused fighting in the region to continue, as evidenced by the surge in violence in 2013 and recent years. Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell described the situation as genocide, a view that the UN did not share. 41 Estimates of human casualties range up to several hundred thousand dead from either combat or starvation and disease. Ten years after the events that transpired in Rwanda, the tragedy in Darfur was still was facing the aftershock that the Battle of Mogadishu created. The Bush administration also treated it entirely differently. In Rwanda, Clinton and his staff refused to publicly address the killings as genocide (despite the region facing almost one million casualties) for fear of being forced into action as a result of the Genocide Convention. By Darfur, however, President Bush had a much better understanding of the convention and realized that labeling the events that transpired in Darfur as genocide did not necessarily require the 41 E Heinze, “ The Rhetoric of Genocide in U.S. Foreign Policy: Rwanda and Darfur Compared ,” Political Science Quarterly 122 (Fall, 2007): p. 361.