"...credible and considerable progress in helping resolve this Darfur situation"---Assessment by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, July 2, 2007

Eric Reeves

The UN Secretary-General has apparently assumed as his primary responsibilities in responding to the Darfur crisis a contrivance of meaningless optimism, a whitewashing of deteriorating security conditions in the greater humanitarian theater, and a purveying of absurd faith in the genocidal regime in Khartoum. Ban Ki-moon now counsels a “patience” that does nothing so much as encourage the génocidaires of the National Islamic Front to believe that they may “run out the clock” in their ethnically-targeted human destruction in Darfur, and as much of eastern Chad as necessary. At the same time, Ban---and his economic advisor Jeffrey Sachs---now indulge a preposterous account of the origins of the Darfur crisis, one that elides all political history and substitutes instead meteorological explanation (see http://www.sudanreeves.org/Article174.html). The ambitions of self-exculpation are disgracefully in evidence.

Any reasonable overview of humanitarian indicators and human security in Darfur and eastern Chad reveals a crisis of incomprehensible, but still growing dimensions. It is not a “situation,” as Ban Ki-moon would have it: it is a catastrophe. Indeed, eastern Chad appears to be in the throes of violence as great as the most violent phase of the Darfur genocide (2003-2004). But Darfur itself, and its relentlessly growing population of conflict-affected persons, makes a mockery of Ban Ki-moon’s fatuous optimism about “credible and considerable progress” in halting massive human suffering and destruction. At the same time, there is no progress in negotiating a cease-fire, in advancing an inclusive peace process---or in deploying meaningful security forces to Darfur. Read more >>>>