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WHEN GENOCIDAIRES TALK, THE RIGHT LISTENS. Understandably, everyone's attention is going to the Call to Escalation -- hey, we're inching toward a whole 'nother war with Iran! -- but it would be a shame to ignore Stephen Rademaker's Washington Post op-ed on Darfur. Rademaker, until recently an assistant secretary of state for destroying international institutions, blames the International Criminal Court for the genocide. Seriously!
The Sudanese government has no history of objecting to U.N. peacekeeping forces on its territory. It agreed as recently as January 2005 to the deployment of a 10,000-member U.N. peacekeeping force in southern Sudan to monitor implementation of a peace agreement with rebels there, and that force remains in Sudan. So what has led Khartoum to reject today what it was willing to accept just two years ago? According to Sudanese government spokesmen, it's the involvement of the ICC...But war crimes prosecutors didn't stop genocide in Yugoslavia, and they haven't stopped it in Darfur either. To the contrary, the example of the Balkans, where U.N. peacekeepers in Bosnia and Kosovo have tracked down and arrested war crimes indictees, appears to have hardened the opposition of Sudanese officials to a U.N. force. Quite predictably, those officials are saying they're not interested in a U.N. peacekeeping force in Darfur if, as in the Balkans, it would offer them a one-way trip in handcuffs to The Hague.I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Khartoum's commitment to ending a genocide that it's conducting is not as ironclad as Rademaker portrays. It's amazing that someone on the right would give Sudan the benefit of the doubt if it means penning a flimsy attack on the ICC. Either Rademaker is either a very cynical man or he's a useful idiot for genocidaires.
--Spencer Ackerman
