Before we get to Darfur, let's not let Congo, Burundi, and Uganda be forgotten or obscured.

Congo, Burundi, and Uganda. Here an excellent short write-up by Tapped's Mark Goldberg:

A collection of human rights and child welfare experts working with the UN’s peacekeeping mission in the Congo issued a scathing report yesterday that accused all armed groups in Congo’s troubled Ituri province of committing massive human rights abuses and war crimes. The 65-page report was based on some 1,600 interviews, including victims and eyewitnesses, and was presented to the Security Council. It claims that at least 8,000 civilians were deliberately killed or were victims of the indiscriminate use of force in Ituri province in 2002 and 2003,and more than 600,000 civilians were displaced. Perhaps most damning of all, the report accused both Rwandan and Ugandan government forces of having a hand in some civilian massacres. Though the report made no mention of it, the International Criminal Court is already investigating war crimes in Ituri as well as in a separate conflict in Northern Uganda. The report’s accusations of crimes committed by the Uganda People's Defense Forces (UPDF) in Congo actually throws a rather large kink in the ICC’s other investigation in Northern Uganda. Last February, when Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni requested that ICC investigate suspected war crimes of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Northern Uganda, he assured the Court that he would allow it to probe into suspected abuses on both sides of the conflict, and this, of course, includes the UDPF.

Uganda’s official response to yesterday’s report seems to suggest that this rhetoric of cooperation might not be backed up in policy. UPDF spokesman Maj. Shaban Bantariza told The Monitor in Uganda, "Saying that is one thing and providing credible evidence is another. What jurisdiction does [UN’s mission to the Congo have?"]

And, lo, today, on cue in Burundi:

Dozens of attackers raided a United Nations refugee camp in western Burundi, shooting and hacking to death at least 180 people, witnesses and officials said Saturday.

A Burundian Hutu rebel faction, the National Liberation Forces, claimed responsibility for the attack late Friday near the border with Congo, saying that its fighters were pursuing Burundian soldiers who fled to the camp from a nearby military position. The camp sheltered Congolese ethnic Tutsi refugees, known as the Banyamulenge, who had fled the fighting in Congo's troubled border province of South Kivu.

The attackers screamed war cries as they rushed into the camp and set it on fire, said Louis Niyonzima, a local official.

"What we have seen so far are many, many, many bodies of children, women and men," said Eliana Nabaa, spokeswoman for the United Nations mission in Congo. "People were sleeping when the attack happened. People were killed as they tried to escape."

"The scene is absolutely horrific," Ms. Nabaa said by telephone from Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu. "There are many people burnt." She described the attackers as well armed and organized.

Isabelle Abric, spokeswoman for the United Nations mission in Burundi, said 159 people were killed and 101 others were wounded in the attack on the camp in Gatumba, 12 miles from the Congolese border. At least 30 of the wounded died later in a hospital, she said.

The bloodshed came after gunmen attacked a Burundian Army position about a half-mile away.

"These guys were armed with grenades, machetes and automatic weapons," said Fernando del Mundo, a spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva. "While the attack was going on they were beating drums."

[...]

A renegade Congolese Army commander, whose troops briefly seized Bukavu in June over complaints that Banyamulenge kinsmen were singled out by Congolese authorities, said the attack in Burundi proved his charges. But he stopped short of threatening retaliation.

The commander, Brig. Gen. Laurent Nkunda, accused the Congolese Army of letting attackers of the Burundi operate in its zone unchallenged. "This event proves me right," he said by telephone. "This confirms that there's an extermination plan against the Banyamulenge."

President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, speaking in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, said the massacre "proves what we have been saying over time, that there have been incidents that are ignored by the international community and the U.N. where people are being killed in eastern Congo, being targeted for who they are."

United Nations officials were studying whether the attack was carried out with the help of Congolese tribal fighters known as the Mayi-Mayi or with Rwandan rebels based in eastern Congo, an official said.

Read The Rest Scale: 5 out of 5.

• Sudan.

Meanwhile, in Sudan, Sudan Accused of Arresting Those Who Disclose Dire Conditions:

A human rights group accused the Sudanese authorities on Tuesday of rounding up scores of people in the conflict-torn western Darfur region because they had spoken to visiting officials and journalists about the dire situation there.

According to the rights group, Amnesty International, the detainees included 15 men arrested in the Abushouk camp near El Fasher after a visit to Darfur by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on June 30, and 5 people taken after a visit on July 27 to the same camp by the French foreign minister, Michel Barnier.

Six men were arrested from July 15 to July 17 in Abu Jereda, a village near El Fasher, after they had spoken to members of the cease-fire commission run by the African Union, according to a report by Amnesty International, which is based in London.

This should be a good thing, but it's not going to help anyone in the short term, if ever: Sudan and 2 Rebel Groups Agree to Peace Talks:

The Sudanese government and two rebel groups fighting in western Sudan have agreed to peace talks in Abuja, Nigeria, on Aug. 23, the African Union said Sunday. A spokesman for the African Union, Adam Thiam, said the group's chairman, President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, would mediate discussions between the Sudanese government and the Justice and Equality Movement and Sudan Liberation Army in the Nigerian capital. Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail of Sudan said the government would take part in the talks without conditions. The leader of the Liberation Army, Abdel Wahed Muhammad Ahmed al-Nur, said from the Darfur region of Sudan that his rebel movement would send a high-level delegation to the talks and that he welcomed Nigeria as a neutral site and Mr. Obasanjo and the African Union as neutral mediators.

At best this might affect things in the long run.

The horrors of Sudan's war on the young. Read The Rest Scale: 5 out of 5; I can't bear to quote it. Fortunately, Sudan is taking steps:

Sudanese police officers sent to restore security in troubled Darfur are sexually exploiting refugee women, according to a U.N. report.

Khartoum says it has sent10,000 police to the western region, and has only about two weeks to convince the U.N. Security Council it is serious about improving the plight of people in Darfur or face unspecified sanctions.

``IDPs (Internally Displaced People) report increasing incidents of sexual abuse and exploitation in Abu Shouk Camp near el-Fasher committed by police officers,'' said the U.N. humanitarian situation report, received by Reuters Saturday.

Read The Rest Scale: 2 out of 5. But Khartoum says just give us time:

President Omar el-Bashir pledged to end violence in Sudan's western Darfur region in comments aired Saturday, but his vice president said it was not practical to disarm within 30 days the Arab militias responsible for the killings of some 30,000 people. El-Bashir blamed ``plotters'' and ``enemies'' for the violence in Darfur in remarks apparently aimed at defending his government's claims that rebel groups were behind the conflict.

Read The Rest Scale: 2 out of 5. This is a micro-step that also won't do much for now:

A contingent of Rwandan troops heads to Darfur this weekend -- the first foreign soldiers to deploy in western Sudan, where thousands have been killed in communal strife that some are calling genocide.

Their main mission is to protect 80 African Union truce observers already there. But with a somewhat vague mandate, and Arabic nomads still attacking African farm villages, the 154 Rwandans could easily find themselves defending civilians and getting drawn into the conflict.

[...]

On Friday, Sudan announced that President Omar el-Bashir ordered tribal leaders in Darfur to form security forces to disarm the Arab militias blamed for the killings of 30,000 people over the past 18 months.

But human rights groups and aid workers say earlier Sudanese pledges to improve security in Darfur have not been fulfilled and attacks on civilians continue unabated.

In Geneva, meanwhile, the United Nations' World Food Program said it had reached a deal with rebel groups in Darfur to allow the agency to truck in food supplies from Libya. The aid agency hoped to begin the shipments over the weekend.

The Rwandan troops will leave Sunday for al-Fasher, Darfur's main city, in an operation that will be a major test for the African Union. The union was established two years ago to replace the Organization of African Unity, which over the years failed to intervene effectively in the continent's wars and insurrections.

The Rwandans' mandate is ``filled with creative ambiguity,'' said David Mozersky, an analyst at the International Crisis Group in Brussels, Belgium. ``How proactive (the soldiers) will be about protecting civilians is entirely up in the air.''

Can the Rwandan troops only step in if they witness a raid in progress? Can they set up a defensive perimeter around a village facing imminent attack? Can they launch a pre-emptive strike on Arab militiamen?

While the mandate is to protect the truce observers, African Union spokesman Desmond Orjiako said Friday: ``I'm not saying they cannot defend civilians.'' He would not elaborate.

A Rwandan army spokesman, Col. Patrick Karegeya, said the troops will defend civilians if they are attacked.

``But it's not that they are going out to hunt for'' Arab militiamen, he added.

Sudanese officials, who deny charges they have provided military support to the rampage by Arab militias, are not happy about having foreign troops come to Darfur, an expanse of desert roughly the size of Iraq.

The government gave in to pressure from African leaders last month and agreed to allow the protection unit, but it appears to be dragging its feet on whether the African Union can send in a full-fledged peacekeeping force. And when the idea of Western intervention was recently floated, Sudanese officials said they would forcibly resist such a move.

[...]

The Rwandans represent the first contingent of what is to be a 300-soldier force to protect African Union monitors observing a little-respected cease-fire agreed to in April. Nigeria and other African countries are expected to contribute the rest of the force, though no date has been set for the additional troops to go.

Finally, the Guardian is moved to comment, although with an idiotic solution.

Today marks the halfway point in the UN security council's 30-day ultimatum to the government of Sudan to disarm the Janjaweed militias, responsible for what is commonly described as the world's worst humanitarian disaster. Already it is apparent that the response of the Islamist regime will be to continue bluffing it out with protests of injured innocence in the hope that the international community eventually gives up and loses interest.

Daily reports of attacks against civilians continue to come in from across Darfur; 30,000 people are said to have fled in the latest round of violence. But far from restraining the militias, the government is providing continued military support for their campaign of ethnic terror. In the past week the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that helicopter gunships had again been used in attacks; and the traumatised victims of earlier atrocities, crammed into refugee camps, continue to suffer violent assaults by the Janjaweed, often under the nose of Sudanese troops supposed to protect them. This is not a little local difficulty; it is a war waged by the government against its people.

To the extent that the authorities have acted at all, it has been to cover up evidence of what is happening. Instead of being disarmed and disbanded, the militias are being integrated into the security forces where they will be less conspicuous. Refugees are being pressured to return to their villages with threats of violence or offers of desperately needed food, only to become victims once again. Those who speak to international observers are being rounded up and imprisoned, according to Amnesty International. And aid workers attempting to get supplies to those most at risk from malnutrition and disease are reporting new government-imposed restrictions on their operations. Everything that is being done is a calculated play for time.

The reaction of the Khartoum regime is scarcely surprising. Little of what the international community has done suggests that the political will exists for any meaningful intervention. The watering down of security council resolution 1556, as a result of pressure from several states, will not have been lost on Sudan's rulers. While the original draft contained an explicit threat of sanctions, the final version did little more than vaguely promise to "consider further actions" in the event of non-compliance. This will have been interpreted, correctly, as a sign of weakness and an indication that little is likely to be done when the UN deadline expires.

Those of the "nothing must be done" persuasion dismiss outside intervention as irresponsible or malevolent, and probably both. Not one of them has suggested a credible way for this hopelessly one-sided conflict to be resolved except for it to run its bloody course. They are entitled to their position, but they are not entitled to deny its human consequences.

Splitting hairs over the definition of genocide or quibbling over how many thousands have been killed doesn't alter the fact that serious crimes against humanity are being committed with every passing day. Nor does the argument that the militias are beyond Khartoum's control. Disputes about whether the regime is orchestrating the violence or has simply lost control of events are unimportant when set against the suffering in Darfur. States that fail to protect the human rights of their own citizens forfeit the sovereign right to non-interference in their internal affairs. Without that principle, the universal declaration of human rights isn't worth the paper it's written on.

Excellent up to there, it's at this point that the piece went off the rails in proclaiming that the problem was the lack of primacy of international law (hinting that Britain was a major cause of injustice in the world because of lack of upholding this principal), and the cure is:

If he really wanted to push a radical agenda, he could do worse than propose that the power to impose sanctions and authorise the use of military force should be exercised by the UN membership as a whole. The general assembly has its problems, but is a far more representative body than the security council and is becoming more so with the passage of time. The days when its membership consisted largely of the representatives of military juntas and one-party states are long gone.

This is a notion that is, shall we say, premature. Read The Rest Scale: 1 out of 5.

Gary Farber's home blog is Amygdala.