Further to yesterday's post on monitoring genocide without trying to prevent it, see the piece in G2 about former US marine Brian Steidle, who became an activist over Darfur on account of what he witnessed there.
Which raises the question of whether there is any point in using unarmed observers to monitor ceasefires. Undermanned and underfunded, the African Union's Darfur mission is a case in point, as the Security Council's belated establishment of a fully fledged mission seems to recognise.Steidle writes that even when the African Union monitors knew the location and timing of impending attacks, no action was taken. Instead, bureaucratic processes prevailed: incidents were logged, reports filed, suppers eaten. He tells the story of how his warnings of an imminent attack by the government-sponsored Janjaweed militia on the village of Hamada were dismissed by one of his commanding officers with the words: "How is it you think you can predict what the Janjaweed will do?" A few days later 107 of the 450 villagers, he writes, were "tortured and murdered. Bodies were strewn along blood-soaked village paths. Infants had been crushed."