Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The situation in Darfur is and has been appalling since 2003, when the government of Sudan began its counterinsurgency campaign against the newly active rebel groups in Darfur. Hundreds of thousands have been killed, more than a million people have been displaced and the atrocities, the indiscriminate slaughter, the gruesome injuries and the sexual violence perpetrated, in many cases against women and children, are from the very deepest sump of human behaviour.

Sadly, the Darfur peace agreement signed in May 2006 by the Sudanese government and one of the main rebel groups has long since broken down. The African Union Mission in Sudan, AMIS, which performed quite effectively in the early days of its operation, has proved unable to deal with the scale of the disaster and was supplanted late last year by the United Nations African Union Mission in Darfur, UNAMID, effectively a hybrid UN-AU force under UN control. This is a new development and it goes without saying that the success of the UN-AU operation cannot be judged now. In fact, it is critical at this point that member states, including Australia, renew their financial and practical support for the UN efforts in Darfur.

The UN Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, Jean-Marie Guehenno, visited the new operation in January this year and reported to the UN Security Council on 8 February. He noted that the number of troops and police and their enabling capabilities currently in the mission area were simply not sufficient to provide protection for Darfur’s civilians in the current hostile environment. He also noted that continuing hostilities were evidence that parties to the conflict on all sides were simply not prepared to put aside violence in favour of dialogue.

The tensions that work to resist a political process upon which a lasting ceasefire could be based are numerous, but they certainly include insufficient commitment by the Sudanese government to such a process and a similar lack of commitment by some rebel groups, in addition to the splintering of those groups into subgroups whose political objectives often present new obstacles or demands as conditions precedent to negotiation. While the focus in Darfur is understandably on bringing the armed groups to the table, it is important to remember that the armed groups themselves, whether it be the government and the Janjaweed militias on the one side or the rebel armies on the other, are not natural or complete representatives of the people in Sudan. For there to be effective peacekeeping there needs to be, firstly, a basis for that peace even if it is limited to a program of negotiations. Otherwise, in the absence of that political foundation for peace, or its imminent prospect, the only way to stop the violence in Darfur would be through the military imposition of that oxymoron, the ‘enforced peace’. History shows that an enforced peace is often just a pause in the carnage, especially when the enforcement is supplied from the outside.

The situation in Darfur has been given many names. It is without doubt a humanitarian crisis or tragedy, as the member for McMillan has described it in his notice of motion. It has also been described variously as a civil war, a conflict between insurgents and counterinsurgents, a case of ethnic cleansing or even as genocide. These descriptions involve a degree of simplification. Several commentators have chosen to characterise Darfur as a conflict between Arab perpetrators and African victims, partly at least because this fits into a larger geopolitical template and its related agenda. The UN Security Council’s Commission of Inquiry on Darfur report, released in February 2005, declared that violence perpetrated by the Sudanese government against civilians, either directly or through the Janjaweed militias, amounted to crimes against humanity. But it also found that sections of the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement were responsible for serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law which may amount to war crimes. I do not make that point in order to move from a position in which Darfur is seen in the black-and-white terms of a perpetrator and a victim to a position in which Darfur is hopelessly complex and everyone or else no-one is to blame. I make the point in order to reiterate the essence of the problem: that without acknowledging that the violence in Darfur arises from underlying political and material conditions there can be no progress towards a stable peace.

The issue that the member for McMillan puts quite plainly in his notice of motion is about what action should be taken by the Australian government. It needs to be recognised that Australia has been directly and significantly involved in supporting international efforts in Darfur. The Australian government has strongly supported the action taken by the UN Security Council and has fully implemented all operative sanctions into domestic law. Furthermore, the previous and current governments are to be commended for practical contributions which include more than $71 million in humanitarian aid to Sudan since 2004; approximately $11 million to cope with the spillover effects in neighbouring countries; contributions to the World Food Program that made Australia the fourth largest bilateral donor to the WFP’s emergency operation in Sudan in 2006; and the provision of 15 ADF personnel and 10 AFP personnel to the UN mission in Sudan. (Time expired)

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