The Genocide Test
Surely China does not believe Sudan's brazen lies.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

THE NEXT FEW days will show whether China means to let Sudan's dictatorship get away with genocide. A series of meetings at the United Nations in New York offers the best and possibly the last chance to persuade the Sudanese to allow U.N. peacekeepers into Darfur. The deployment is required by a Security Council resolution passed last month. It is supported by nearly all the leading powers and even by factions within Sudan's government. But China has so far refused to tell Sudan's isolated leaders to drop their opposition to a U.N. contingent, even though its extensive investments in Sudan give it the power to do so. If it wants to be regarded as a responsible power, China should use its leverage.

Consider the arguments for not doing so, as presented by Sudan's spokesmen. Yesterday, Sudan's deputy ambassador to the United Nations protested that blaming hundreds of thousands of deaths on his government was unfair: "The armed groups in Darfur are the real culprits," he asserted. But China's leaders surely know this is absurd: The leading murderers in Darfur are the Janjaweed militia, which has been equipped by Sudan's government. Meanwhile, at the World Bank-International Monetary Fund meetings yesterday, Sudan's finance minister argued that "what Darfur needs is not peacekeepers. . . . What Darfur needs most is resources for water, resources for schools, for hospitals."

But Sudan's air force has strafed Darfur's hospitals and schools, and its Janjaweed allies have addressed the region's water scarcity by poisoning wells with corpses.

Sudan's president asserts that "the U.N. forces have a hidden agenda in Sudan because they are not coming for peace in Darfur. They want to recolonize Sudan." His henchmen have indicated that, in place of U.N. peacekeepers, they might be willing to extend the mandate of the African Union force, which is due to leave at the end of this month. Before China accepts this preposterous description of the United Nations and embraces the supposed concession of a renewed African Union mandate, it should read the recent dispatches from journalists inside Darfur. The Post's Craig Timberg reports that Sudan's government has seized A.U. jet fuel and used it to fill its own military aircraft; indeed, the airstrip used by the African Union in North Darfur is controlled by Sudanese government forces at night, so fuel is regularly looted. Meanwhile, Janjaweed fighters recently demonstrated their contempt for the A.U. forces by assaulting civilians who had gathered to speak to them.

In short, Sudan's government is presenting the extension of the African Union's mandate as a concession, even as it destroys the organization's ability to operate. The A.U. presence is not preventing the government from mounting bombing raids on civilians with a frequency not seen since the height of the genocide in 2003; nor is it preventing the obstruction of humanitarian efforts in North Darfur, where more than 300,000 people have been cut off from food aid. The African Union has become almost irrelevant, and no responsible government can accept an extension of its mandate as an alternative to a real peacekeeping force.

Is China's a responsible government?