by Kallie Szczepanski

Created on: April 16, 2008

The U.S. government, spurred by public outrage over the atrocities taking place in the Darfur region of Sudan, passed the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act (DPAA) in October of 2006.

By that time, the conflict in Darfur, which President Bush and other top U.S. officials have termed "genocide," had been on-going for more than three years. Unfortunately, it continues a year and a half later; the rape and killings have slowed, but only because most of the victimized tribes have been driven out of the area.

The conflict started in 2003, pitting villagers in the Darfur region of western Sudan against government-supported "janjaweed" militias in a series of bitter battles for scarce arable land and water. Since then, an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 civilians have been slaughtered, and 2.5 million people have been displaced. Widespread rape, torture, and mutilation have also been inflicted on the victims, mostly Bantu language-speaking Africans.

Although the conflict is often portrayed as an ethnic-cleansing by "Arab" janjaweeds against these "Africans," it seems that environmental pressure is the true motivating force. In recent months, the different janjaweed militia groups have begun to attack one another, fighting over the spoils of land and freshwater wells from their successful campaign to drive the African population away.

Goaded by public outcry and the lingering memory of world inaction in the face of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the U.S. government finally began to take action in 2005, two years into the crisis. The Darfur Peace and Accountability Act was originally introduced in June of 2005 in the House of Representatives, and in July of that year in the Senate. It would be more than a year before the Act was signed into law. The House voted unanimously to approve the bill on September 25, 2006. The Senate passed it, also unanimously, on September 21, 2006.

Provisions of the DPAA include:

1) A freeze on the U.S. assets of any individual who is determined by the president to be complicit in the Darfur conflict, and a ban on travel to the U.S. by such individuals,

2) A statement urging the Bush administration to deny port entry to ships carrying Sudanese oil, thus cutting off a source of oil revenue,

3) A pledge of U.S. aid to strengthen and expand the 7,000-member African Union Mission in Sudan [Incidentally, this Mission has been completely ineffectual, and was replaced on Dec. 31, 2007 by the United Nations / African Union Mission in Darfur, made up of a coalition of African Union and UN peacekeeping forces],

4) A statement urging the Bush administration to press NATO for reinforcements for AMIS,

5) Benchmarks that the government of Sudan must meet in order for the U.S. to lift any of the economic and military sanctions it has imposed.

Tragically for the people of Darfur, none of these (rather weak) measures had been fully implemented even a year after the DPAA was signed into law. Potentially stronger acts, such as Senate Bill 2271, the Sudan Accountability and Divestment Act, have never been made into law.

Meanwhile, the janjaweed's work of ethnic cleansing is just about finished. While the world has dithered and blustered from the sidelines, another African genocide has ground on to its horrific conclusion. We had five years to take decisive action... But we have failed to act.

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