European Union battlegroups to Sudan?

The killing in Darfur has gone on for too long. There, more than two-hundred thousand ethnic Africans have been slaughtered by brutal Islamist Janjaweed bandits, who have driven a further two million people from their homes. Ghastly tales of torture and mutilation have steadily filtered out of Africa’s latest genocide; villages have been burned, women and children have been raped, and innocents have been hacked to death. The Islamist regime in Khartoum, which is reported to have supported the Janjaweed militia with helicopter gunships and Chinese-supplied bombers, is drenched in African blood. And behind this noxious regime sits China—with its vested oil interests in Sudan’s southern provinces, from where approximately eighty percent of the country’s African oil comes.

Today, the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the European Union high representative, Javier Solana, met to discuss the savagery in Darfur. For too long we in the European Union have turned a blind eye to the suffering of the Darfur people, offering only limited help in the form of €400 million in support of the African Union’s police mission. We are still waiting for sanctions to be placed on the members of the regime whom are implicated in the carnage. In the meantime, the mass killing has spread to Chad, as terrified refugees have fled for their lives. Janjaweed bandits have even followed them over the borders, harassing them all the way. So Mr. Sarkozy and Dr. Solana today threatened to send European Union armed forces to the Chad-Sudan boundary, so as to protect the refugees and re-assert order and some semblance of civilisation again.

We need more than threats though: A European Union battlegroup needs to be sent to Chad at once. Killing and chaos in Darfur is spreading and is a direct affront to our security, interests and values. Sanctions must be applied to the Islamist regime in Khartoum, and we need to assert authority over a geopolitical region within the wider European Neighbourhood. United Nations peacekeepers will soon be deployed in Darfur alongside the African Union forces. But should these measures fail, we should send further European armed forces not to Chad but directly to Darfur, with or without Khartoum’s consent. The European Union could then demonstrate three things: First, that we will not tolerate genocide in any country in the wider European Neighbourhood, thereby laying down a marker for potential ‘ethnic cleansers’ in the future; second, that we are willing and able to deploy military force in service of our interests and values; and finally, that we consider our interests to take precedence over those of countries like China.

The European Union in part emerged as a peace project to end the possibility of genocide and war on our continent. Now it must carry forward its mission abroad. The time for talking is over. Now we must see some firm and robust European action.