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U.N. Genocide Resolution Proving Inadequate In Darfur

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By WARREN HOGE, The New York Times

Published: January 20, 2008

Three years after the United Nations adopted a groundbreaking resolution to help it intervene to stop genocide, even longtime supporters of the rule acknowledge it has not helped the organization end the violence in the Darfur region of Sudan.

The General Assembly resolution, approved in 2005, held nations responsible for shielding their citizens from mass atrocities and established the right of international forces to step in if nations did not fulfill this new "responsibility to protect."

"It was the high-water mark when the General Assembly endorsed the concept; it was an incredible leap forward from the whole crippling debate over whether humanitarian intervention wasn't just a Trojan horse for neo-imperialism," said John Prendergast, co-chairman of the ENOUGH Project, a Washington-based group dedicated to preventing genocide.

"When it happened in 2005," he said, "you believed that potentially things could be different, but in the daily slugfest of international policy making, it hasn't survived the first test: Darfur."

The United Nations has tried to take the lead in Darfur, but it has been stymied by the failure of major member states to fulfill promises to support action and by the intransigence of the Sudanese government.

Sudan agreed last year to permit U.N. peacekeepers into Darfur but only as part of a joint mission with the African Union, whose own 7,000-member force had proved inadequate.

Since then, the government has thrown up so many bureaucratic and operational roadblocks that the force that took over Jan. 1 is only a third of its planned strength of 26,000.

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