Darfur : Grantham Journal article 8 June 2007

Mostly in the House of Commons, we debate things that are close to our constituents’ lives, the N.H.S., tax rates, crime prevention, education etc.

On Tuesday we debated something immensely important, but remote and certainly beyond our national control – Darfur.

The issue of principle is very simple in theory, but very difficult in practice. What are the limits to national sovereignty? Should governments be allowed to get away with massacring their own population as long as no-one outside their borders is threatened?

So far humanity has never answered that question. None of the great slaughters or genocides of the twentieth century – the Turks in Armenia, the Nazis, Stalin and the purges, Mao Tse Tung in China (who tops the bill with 60 million deaths) or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (who probably killed a third of their own people) - ever brought on any international intervention.

The United Nations Charter provides for sanctions or military action only in cases of a “threat to the peace, breach of the peace or act of aggression”. That is at best ambiguous where the killing is confined to one country.

Should we now open a new phase in the history of international law and change the U.N. Charter to provide some protection for people against their own governments? Should we simply continue to respond on a case-by-case basis?

In either event, how would you define the threshold for intervention? Our forces are already stretched in Iraq and Afghanistan. Should they be deployed as well – or instead – in Zimbabwe, in Somalia and in the Sudan? Should we, or the E.U. as a whole, or the U.S., become the policeman of the world?

We need coherent answers to these questions. Darfur – a province of Sudan which I visited last year – forces us to face them.

300,000 people have been killed over the past five years, and over 2 million are displaced (out of a total population of 6 million). The killing continues – organised by the government of the Sudan intent on ethnically cleansing a part of its own country. The African Union peacekeeping force cannot cope, and is made a daily fool of by the government.