DISASTER IN DARFUR - UCSB Department of History - University of ...

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government forces against non-Arab villagers." ["Written Remarks (by Secretary of State
Colin Powell) Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Washington D. C., 9
September 2004]
By February 2004 the ethnic devastation by the janjaweed razzias was so
widespread and consistent that the humanitarian agencies began to declare genocide in
Darfur. Much of the dialogue about genocide soon became focused on the sterile and
legal definitions as to what actually constitutes "genocide." The 1948 UN Convention on
the Prevention and Punishment of the Crimes of Genocide (Article 1) requires its
signatories to intervene if the Security Council determines that, indeed, genocide is taking
place in Darfur. By the summer the issue of genocide had to be addressed, and after the
visit of Colin Powell at the end of June an Atrocities Documentation Team from the US
Department of State was, rather belatedly, organized and conducted over a thousand
interviews with Sudanese refugees who had crossed the border into Chad. Despite the
rising demands from humanitarian agencies for the US government to declare genocide,
particularly after the United States Congress passed a unanimous resolution in July
declaring the carnage in Darfur as "genocide," officials in the Bush administration, the
UN, the EU, and the AU were more restrained. After their visit to Darfur at the end of
June both Colin Powell and Kofi Anan were reluctant to declare the situation in Darfur
"genocide." In July the heads of the AU concluded there was no genocide in Darfur. Not
surprisingly, the Arab League and the influential Organization of the Islamic Conference
reached the same conclusion. The personal representative of Kofi Annan in the Sudan,
Jan Egeland, used the more sanitary "ethnic cleansing" that soon became fashionable.
The reaction of the GoS was complete denial.