Not committed to preventing genocide
The Howard government has reportedly rejected the UN request to contribute troops to an international force for Darfur. Since February 2003 the genocidal conflict in Sudan has claimed as many as 450,000 lives (although the figure of 200,000 is often utilised) and created some 2.5 million refugees.
One might question the adequacy of the UN and international community response to the conflict as well as the adequacy of UN response to genocide generally (the genocide in Rwanda being the prime example). However, the Austrian government has not claimed that the proposed UN peacekeeping mission is likely to be ineffective or is too little too late - it rejected the request for troops because Australian Defence Force (ADF) has other commitments.
According to Howard, contributing to the UN force to stop genocide would require pulling ADF personnel from their other engagements. These "commitments" reportedly include: 1100 troops in East Timor, 970 in Afghanistan, 1575 in Iraq and 450 "monitoring Australia's maritime approaches".
The government previously described the genocide in Darfur as "one of the world's worst humanitarian disasters" and in 2004 Downer stated that "We shouldn't just turn our backs and say that doesn't matter", but talk it easy, action on the other hand requires true commitment.
The government prefers to have 450 troops making sure that no refugees from Sudan arrive on the Australian mainland (that's what "monitoring Australia's maritime approaches" means) rather than help put an end to the crisis that is forcing people to seek refuge. It prefers to contribute over one and a half thousand troops to a war that was based on lies and has already claimed hundreds of thousands of civilian lives in Iraq, rather than help to put an end to genocide which may have claimed as many as half a million lives.
If the refusal of the UN request is motivated by doubts as to the efficacy of the proposed UN action or by an Australian equivalent of the Mogadishu factor (ie not willing to risk Australian lives in an oversees conflict), then it should say so. If it is a question of priorities - what can be more important than putting a stop to the ultimate evil of genocide?
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