If you’re a reader of the New York Times, you’ll have to get out your magnifying glass today to find out. A small box containing a 150-word Reuters report tells us the latest doings of the controversial new U.S. ambassador to the international body: “John Bolton … blocked a United Nations envoy on Monday from briefing the Security Council on rights violations in the Darfur region of the Sudan, saying the council had to act against atrocities not just talk about them.”
A Washington Post article goes into a bit more detail about the dust-up. Bolton didn’t want to hear the first-hand report from Juan Mendez, special adviser to Kofi Annan, explaining that the situation had gotten much worse in Darfur, with government forces now attacking refugee camps. “I found the situation much more dangerous and worrisome than I expected it to be,” Mendez later told reporters.
In order to block the briefing from taking place, Bolton joined forces with some unlikely bedfellows: Russia, China and Algeria. These are Sudan’s closest allies on the Council who, according to an Agence France-Presse, have “blocked all council attempts to impose effective sanctions either against the Khartoum government or against the Khartoum-backed proxy Arab militia Janjaweed.” Bolton then followed this up with his characteristically diplomatic language: “We should talk about next steps, not about how to arrange the furniture in the Security Council,” he said. He also told Agence France-Presse: “I think we have to consider whether the sanctions that are in place are working or whether there are other steps that the council should take, steps I should say, other than talking.”
Great. Did Bolton offer any specifics for how to handle the crisis in Darfur more effectively? Nope.
It’s possible to glean, however, even from these skimpy reports, what might be the real reason for his opposition to hearing Mendez’s briefing. One of the accusations Mendez was going to make before the council — and then made only to reporters — was that the Sudanese government was not cooperating with the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court looking into alleged war crimes in Darfur. In April, the U.S., by abstaining from a Security Council vote, gave the ICC jurisdiction over crimes committed in Darfur, and in today’s Post article, a “senior U.S. official” said that Bolton’s actions yesterday had nothing to do with his opposition to the tribunal. But Bolton has been a fierce critic of the ICC, trying to drown it whenever he can.
Meanwhile, things are truly degenerating in Darfur. The African Union, which was supposed to take charge of the situation, has been largely ineffective. Government-backed militias have been raiding refugee camps, often disguised as African Union soldiers. On Saturday, rebels killed two African Union troops and two contractors and a day later kidnapped 38 other peacekeepers.
The press has largely covered these events at an arm’s length, through the wires. The only vigorous attempts at examining the situation have appeared, periodically, on the op-ed pages. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times has kept up his steady but lonely drumbeat for a long time now. There was also this editorial in the Washington Post last Sunday that refreshingly offered some concrete ideas:
“The administration’s long-term desire for a negotiated peace and for African self-reliance in peacekeeping is laudable. But it needs a more muscular short-term strategy. What about punishing the government for its recent massacres by destroying the participating helicopters? What about supplementing African Union troops with NATO ones? To be sure, NATO resources are stretched thin by Iraq and Afghanistan, and Western leaders are tempted to regard Sudan as marginal to their interests. But NATO was born — indeed, the idea of ‘the West’ was born — out of the ashes of Hitler’s genocide. If it refuses to fight the modern echoes of that barbarism, what does the West stand for?”
And we might add: the press has a responsibility to start paying attention to what our representative to the United Nations is up to.
–Gal Beckerman
Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.