Al Jazeera asked its readers quite a good question recently. One worth repeating here at PoliGazette:

Sudanese government troops have moved in to control rebel strongholds in North Darfur state after two days of heavy fighting. Assaults on rebels’ positions began on Saturday, fighters from the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) have said. How can further violence be avoided in Darfur? What should be done to ensure stability in Sudan’s troubled region? Is there hope for peace in Darfur?

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If you want to know just how well the left’s strategy of using criminal laws and international institutions to fight Islamism, look no farther than the world’s shameful inaction in the Sudan.
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In a move that is reminiscent of Darfur and the Congo the just “reelected” President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, has come up with a new tactic to assert the power he so blatantly stole:

Mugabe thugs raping teens: aid staff

DOZENS of teenage girls have been made pregnant after being taken into the bush and raped in torture camps by President Robert Mugabe’s youth militia operating near Mudzi, a town 160km northeast of Harare, human rights workers allege.

Read the rest on: Freedom’s Cost

The grinding genocidal conflict in Darfur appears to be spreading to neighboring Chad.  But why should we in the West care? Don’t we have problems of our own that take precedence?  And isn’t this horse race of an election far more exciting than yet another trip through the dreary, no-win environs of international ethnic politics? (more…)

Good news from Sudan:

After resisting for months, Sudan has agreed to a joint United Nations and African Union force of nearly 20,000 peacekeepers in Darfur, its western province and the site of one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, the African Union said Tuesday.

Of course, there is a ‘but’:

African Union officials hailed the announcement as a breakthrough, but others cautioned that the Sudanese government had made similar pledges only to reverse itself. Sudan has also set conditions for the deployment, including an insistence that a majority of the soldiers be African and that non-Africans be used only as a last resort, which may hamper efforts to raise the force to full strength.

The NYT’s Lydia Polgreen and Warren Hoge are still of the opinion, however, that the agreement offered “the clearest hope yet that an enlarged and strengthened peacekeeping force would be deployed in Darfur, where the conflict pitting the government and its allied militias against rebel groups has driven 2.5 million people from their homes and killed at least 200,000.”

Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to the UN: “If this is an unconditional acceptance, this would be a positive step that we would welcome, but if it is conditional, as we hear, that there will be only African troops involved and no non-Africans, that is putting a condition on the acceptance, and that would be unacceptable.”

John Prendergast, a Sudan expert who helps lead Enough Project shares Khalilzad’s concerns: “The gulf between the rhetoric of acceptance and the reality of deployment is huge,” he said, adding that haggling over the composition of the force “is putting a condition on the deployment which ensures its failure.”

This is taking far too long as it is. I am starting to believe that the international community should not ask Sudan for permission at all. Just strive to organize a sizeable force and go in. The people of Darfur have to be protected, against militias and, first and foremost, against the central government.

It is the Sudanese government that is responsible for a lot of the violence, and a lot of the deaths. I do not quite see why the international community needs Sudan’s permission to stop Sudan from killing civilians in Darfur.

The Times reports that the Sudanese government probably uses military planes and helicopters disguised as UN aircraft to attack villages in Darfur.

As a result, Britain and America threatened to impose new sanctions.
Blair: “What is happening is unacceptable. It is appalling. The international community will not allow the scandal that is Darfur to continue.”

Bush: “The time for promises is over, President Bashir must act. If President Bashir does not meet his obligations, the United States will act.”

So far, 200,000 - two hundred thousand - civilians in Darfur have been killed (since 2003). It seems to me that “the time to act” had arrived quite a while ago already, but because this is Africa, and not the Middle East, the world watched what happens but does nothing. I wonder when the West will finally truly realize that Africa’s fate is closely connected to ours.

The West cannot just stand by and let thousands and thousands of civilians be killed. We have to realize that ‘we’ were able to stop this, but that ‘we’ decided to conveniently ignore it and that… yes, ‘we’ could have prevented quite some of those 200,000 deaths. The Sudanese government should be given an ultimatum: deal with this now, or we will go in and you will be removed from power and you will be held accountable.