...while an important step toward ending the bloody conflict in Darfur, has not been signed by all factions to the conflict, is yet to be backed up by adequate force, and to date has had little or no effect on conditions on the ground. Thus, aside from the scarcely armed group of African Union (AU) monitors soon to be assisted by United Nations (UN) peacekeepers pursuant to the Abuja agreement, there has been little forceful action toward stopping the killings in Darfur. The United States, for its part, took the lead in condemning the Darfur atrocities as genocide, and in doing so, departed from the reasoning that informed the American diplomatic rhetorical response to Rwanda 10 years prior. That is, while the administration of Bill Clinton avoided the rhetoric of genocide in reference to the first unequivocal instance of genocide since the Holocaust, the administration of George W. Bush was quick to make this charge in Darfur amidst far more ambiguous circumstances. What accounts for this difference in rhetorical response? This article suggests that prevailing political realities, both domestic and international, account for this discrepancy, thus rendering it politically possible, and even expedient, for the Bush administration to use the rhetoric of genocide over Darfur.

Since the genocide in Rwanda of 1994, a voluminous literature has emerged seeking to explain the origins of that crisis, why the UN and its member states (especially the United States) did not intervene to stop the killing, and exactly when a situation of mass murder is rightly considered "genocide." (1) Owing to the declassification of numerous U.S. State Department memos, Central Intelligence Agency briefings, and other sensitive government materials, it is now well documented that the United States had considerable knowledge of what was happening to Rwandan Tutsis and moderate Hutus in April through June of 1994. There are nevertheless important reasons that the United States did not want to get involved in Rwanda, many of which are in no small part related to the public relations debacle only months prior in Somalia. Thus, when it comes to the political maneuvering involved in "naming the crime" during the Rwanda crisis, conventional wisdom now holds that Clinton administration officials avoided using the "g word" for fear that using it would have obliged the United States to take action under the terms of the 1948 Genocide Convention. (2) The United States did not, after all, want to admit that something was transpiring that would impose a moral, if not legal, obligation to intervene. As a result, U.S. officials did not publicly utter the word "genocide" until well after it had become radically apparent to most observers that genocide had taken place. While the case for classifying the killings in Rwanda as genocide was arguably the most unambiguous since the Holocaust, even in late May of 1994-over six weeks into the killings--U.S, rhetoric on genocide still remained diluted, referring only to "acts of genocide." (3)

Fast forward nearly 10 years to the Darfur region of western Sudan. Since February of 2003, when Darfurian rebels rose up against what they perceived as increasingly heavy-handed and oppressive rule from the Islamic government in Khartoum, a brutal counter-insurgency has been underway that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and millions more displaced. In this conflict, the specter of genocide was raised amidst findings that Khartoum's strategy in combating the insurgency was essentially to depopulate the countryside of "sympathetic" Darfurian civilians--mostly members of the Fur, Massaleit, and Zaghawa tribes--by arming and providing air support to Arab militias called Janjaweed, who would attack villages, kill, rape, and forcibly displace at will. (4) Many of the displaced would starve to death in flight or die slowly of disease and malnutrition in refugee and displacement camps.

By the summer of 2004, amidst utterances of an impending genocide in Darfur by American evangelicals, African American leaders, and human rights advocates, high-level U.S. officials began to openly refer to the situation as genocide--to the delight of humanitarian interventionists, but to the confusion of students of realpolitik who believed the United States did not have a dog in that fight. (5) The first official semantical leap was in July of 2004, when the U.S. Congress passed a concurrent, though nonbinding, resolution condemning the violence in Darfur as genocide. (6) Secretary of State Colin Powell followed suit in September of 2004, as did President Bush during an address to the UN General Assembly less than two weeks later. (7) What is remarkable about this willingness to employ the rhetoric of genocide is the extent to which it stands as a radical departure from the reasoning that led the Clinton administration to avoid using such language in 1994. Especially perplexing is that while the Clinton administration sought to deny what (they and) the international community knew about genocide in Rwanda, the Bush White House sought to brand the situation in Darfur as genocide despite significant uncertainty as to whether this was, in fact, the case. Bush continues to do so despite a UN inquiry in January of 2005 that concluded that genocide had not taken place. (8) With massive troop commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is no surprise that there would be little appetite in Washington for humanitarian intervention, nation building, or other military involvement in Darfur. (9) The Bush administration would thus seemingly be poorly served by openly referring to the Darfur crisis as genocide if doing so triggers an expectation and obligation to intervene to "prevent and punish" the crime--something the United States has not demonstrated the will to undertake. Why, then, were U.S. officials so quick to name the crime absent the political will to intervene to stop it?

This article begins by establishing the Rwandan crisis of 1994 as the paradigmatic example of the crime of genocide since the Holocaust and examining the U.S. response to it. There are, of course, important differences between Rwanda and Darfur, though it is evident in both cases that the United States was not and has not been prepared to put its troops in harm's way to stop the brutality. This begs the question as to what differences between Rwanda and Darfur account for the Bush administration's use of the rhetoric of genocide without an expectation of intervention in Darfur, as contrasted to the Clinton administration's conscious avoidance of such language so as not to impose upon itself this unwanted obligation in Rwanda. Examining events between the spring of 2004 and late 2005, I thus investigate the factors in U.S. politics that led to the official characterization of the Darfur crisis as genocide. Here I highlight the influence of Congress's concern over Khartoum's "other" civil war against rebels in southern Sudan, the roles of the evangelical Christian lobby and the Black Congressional Caucus, and the coinciding of these events with the 10-year anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. Finally, I explore what factors account for the general lack of domestic and international pressure on the U.S. government to follow up its finding of genocide in Darfur by taking forceful action to put an end to it, as the Clinton administration reasoned would be expected of it had it concluded that genocide was occurring in Rwanda. Here I point to the understanding of the obligations under the Genocide Convention, the influence of the Iraq war and the broader war on terrorism, and the desire to not disrupt the peace process in Sudan's North-South civil conflict. I ultimately conclude that once domestic constituencies began pressuring the Bush administration to take action over Darfur, the rhetoric of genocide was pursued as a substitute for more forceful action, for which there became less of an expectation because of competing imperatives in the Sudan as well as a general international uneasiness about American military interventionism.

RWANDA AS THE GENOCIDE PARADIGM

Since the story of the Rwandan genocide has been recounted in numerous studies and academic and journalistic accounts, (10) I will not recount that story in detail here, but, rather, briefly outline the politics surrounding U.S. policy. It should be noted, however, that the crisis in Rwanda stands as the first unequivocal case of genocide since the Holocaust. The crime of genocide has a precise legal definition, the use of which requires that the victims be members of a "national, ethnical, racial or religious group," and that the relevant acts be committed with the "intent to destroy [the group] in whole or in part." (11) It is now generally accepted in the international legal community that the horrors of Rwanda met this definition. (12) As early as 19 April 1994--just over two weeks into the crisis--non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the popular press, and the commander of the UN peacekeepers in Rwanda, Romeo Dallaire, began using the term "genocide" to describe what was happening in Rwanda. (13) The evidence seemed sufficient to warrant its use: using the radio waves to incite and recruit killers and an anachronistic identity card system to identify ethnic Tutsis, a well-executed plan involving the Hutu-dominated army, civil service, Gendarmerie, and Interahamwe (a Hutu militia) was initiated to destroy Rwanda's Tutsis. (14) In the words of one radio broadcast intended to incite murder, "We have to act ... wipe them all out." (15) The use of the "g word" to describe the crisis in Rwanda, however, triggered a firestorm of controversy at the UN and in world capitals.

With the failure of Somalia in such recent memory, the Clinton administration had no desire to get bogged down in another conflict in Africa. The doctrinal lynchpin for this policy was presidential decision directive 25 (PDD-25), developed against the backdrop of the Somalia meltdown, that severely circumscribed the conditions under which the United States would participate in peacekeeping. Among other things, PDD-25 required that U.S. participation in any UN operation must "advance US interests," while also limiting U.S. participation in UN missions, as well as U.S. support for other states that intend to carry out UN-sanctioned missions. (16) Though not officially implemented until 4 May, this directive was used as an informal guide for U.S. policy toward Rwanda and was augmented by a general indifference regarding Rwandan affairs. Some months prior, in response to requests by the African Affairs Bureau in the Pentagon to consider Rwanda a potential trouble spot, high-level administration officials are reported to have responded, "Take [Rwanda] off the list ... US national interest is not involved ... just make it go away." (17) It is thus no surprise that a matter of days after the genocide began, the response of the United States and other Western states was to evacuate their nationals from embassies and diplomatic missions. U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher commented that evacuating U.S. nationals was "the prudent thing to do" (18)--a general sentiment of...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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