The "responsibility to protect" is the doctrine that the victims of civil war or humanitarian disaster have a right to foreign succour and, in extremis, the protection of international troops, should their own government, either from incapacity or malice, fail to do the job. The principle of the responsibility to protect—"R2P" in diplomatic shorthand—was adopted unanimously by the UN general assembly in September 2005. It was a mantra for Blair's personal foreign policy. The R2P is a noble concept, an example of progress in global moral standards. But it is impractical except in the tiniest of dysfunctional nations, such as Sierra Leone, Kosovo and East Timor, and even then at great difficulty. In a middle-sized country, the burdens and risks would tax the capability of a superpower.
Since early 2004, columnists and advocates have called for armed intervention to "save" Darfur from "genocide." Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister and president of the International Crisis Group (ICG), heralded Darfur as the test case for R2P. While flirting with outright military intervention, Evans's focus has been on what is known in the trade as "coercive protection"—a UN peacekeeping force that can enforce its will by UN mandate and sufficient firepower. This tries to split the difference between traditional peacekeeping and outright intervention, but as Evans and his comrades-in-rhetoric have rattled their sabres over Darfur, it has become clear that the sober advice of professional peacekeepers was right all along: there is no middle way.
International policies towards Darfur have failed. The world didn't stop the immense army-Janjaweed offensives of 2003 and 2004, which killed tens of thousands, plus perhaps a further 150,000 through starvation and disease, and displaced 2m. There's no working peace agreement, and a few hundred people are killed each month in local conflicts. A UN force of 26,000 with a limited protection mandate (it is allowed to use force to protect civilians) is only now on its way and will be operational early next year. The accepted script is: blame world leaders' lack of political will for their failure to stand up to Khartoum's evil designs.
There is an alternative view and it is this. Darfur is a typical, complex African civil war and can be resolved, given the right political alignments and good diplomacy, with a peace agreement that can allow in a peacekeeping force. Negotiations to end the war are messy and involve unsavoury compromises with leaders who have blood on their hands. But the R2P has ruled out these least-bad options in favour of a fantastical ideal.
Since the Darfur crisis erupted, international attention has focused overwhelmingly on the dispatch of military forces rather than peace negotiations. Every seasoned official in the UN department of peacekeeping operations and every British or American diplomat who had been involved in the successful negotiations to end Sudan's separate north-south war advised against this reprioritisation. At the critical juncture of the Darfur peace talks in March 2006, the ICG published a report, "To Save Darfur," which had seven times as much space devoted to UN troops as to the peace process. The key Sudan policymakers in Washington DC and New York report that their time was divided in about the same ratio. Peacemaking was driven by the needs of peacekeeping, not vice versa. Unsurprisingly, both failed.
Ironically, Sudan had already accepted international troops, from the African Union, in 2004. More progressive than the UN charter, the AU's Constitutive Act contains the principle of intervention in the case of humanitarian emergency or gross human rights abuses. The AU's first force commander in Darfur interpreted his mandate creatively—he was far more energetic than his UN counterpart stationed to keep the peace in the next-door region of Kordofan. But the Darfur campaign insisted on the UN. In reality, a UN force will at best be a bigger version of the AU force, with many of the same African soldiers. It's called "re-hatting" in the business: Bush, Blair and thousands of protesters in New York's Central park on the world's first "Day for Darfur" on 17th September 2006 were campaigning to get Nigerian and Senegalese troops to change green AU helmets for blue UN ones. Already suffering from logistics and corruption problems, once the AU soldiers realised the world regarded them as second best, their morale plummeted. Today the AU operation is almost at a standstill—the need for the UN became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Darfur's rebel leaders are a disorganised bunch whose miscalculations, political recklessness and opportunistic alliances have impeded the search for solutions. Abdel Wahid al-Nur, founding chairman of the largest group, the Sudan Liberation Movement, is a political ingénue, catapulted into the international spotlight and flattered by his instant celebrity status. Uniquely among liberation front leaders, he put international intervention at the top of his political agenda. In the final session of the peace talks in May 2006, Abdel Wahid demanded that the US provide guarantees "like in Bosnia." He wanted an intervention and wouldn't sign without one. I was there, and my heart sank as I realised that international Darfur activists were not only refusing to make the case for the peace deal that was on the table, but some were actually phoning to tell Abdel Wahid and his colleagues not to sign—because of those missing "guarantees." It was an imperfect agreement, but with Abdel Wahid's signature it represented the beginning of a solution. When Abdel Wahid refused to sign, the agreement was doomed and the conflict resumed.
Khartoum's moderates and pragmatists, meanwhile, were losing their modicum of confidence in Washington. The 2005 north-south peace deal had been possible because the US promised to normalise diplomatic relations and lift sanctions once peace was achieved. Sudan's leaders understood that these carrots remained in the freezer until there was peace in Darfur. But the new-found focus on troops aroused the old suspicions that Washington was really after regime change. When leading Democrats—including former national security adviser Anthony Lake and former assistant secretary of state for Africa Susan Rice—called for Kosovo-style military action in Darfur in an opinion column in the Washington Post in October 2006, fears deepened. Is not the ultimate outcome of Nato's "humanitarian" air campaign the likely independence of Kosovo from Serbia? The Sudan government has a terrible record not only of war crimes, but also for perfidy. That's why it is so important for international goals to be clear and constant, rather than the escalator of demands and threats that has become America's Sudan policy.
Gareth Evans is a smart enough politician to know making Darfur the laboratory for R2P was a damaging overreach. In recent months, the ICG has been quietly scaling back its recommendations, reversing its policy so it now opposes a no-fly zone and (perhaps too late) stresses the need for old-fashioned negotiations. When peace and security return to Darfur, it will be because of old-fashioned diplomacy and a peacekeeping operation in support of a well-crafted deal. Credit will be due to some seasoned diplomats who manage to talk Darfur's rebels into compromising with a hated adversary, and who press Khartoum to implement the promise of free elections. If Gordon Brown can ensure that these talks are protected from the ardour of activist celebrities who demand instant solutions, he will have done a true service to the long-suffering people of Darfur.
