Failure to Prevent Genocide in Sudan and the Consequences of Impunity: Darfur as Precedent for Abyei, South Kordofan, and Blue Nile

Abstract

The responsibility to protect, adopted with such enthusiastic fanfare at the September 2005 UN World Summit, has proved an abject failure in defining international policy in Sudan. On the contrary, impunity continues to be afforded to even the most egregious atrocity crimes committed by Khartoum’s National Islamic Front/National Congress Party regime, which has been waging a genocidal counterinsurgency campaign in Darfur since early 2003. This impunity extends to the world’s refusal to respond meaningfully to the regime’s military seizure of the contested Abyei region—displacing more than 100,000 of the indigenous Dinka Ngok—and the subsequent genocidal campaign against the people of South Kordofan and Blue Nile. Sudan loomed as the test case for the responsibility to protect doctrine as defined by paragraphs 138 and 139 of the World Summit’s Outcome Document. In the assessment of this essay, its failure has been complete.