The EU's announcement that no evidence of genocide exists in Darfur will baffle and frustrate aid workers in the field, a human rights worker in Sudan told ireland.comthis afternoon.
Muireann Kirrane, Trócaire's Emergency Officer in Darfur
Trócaire's Emergency Officer in Darfur, Ms Muireann Kirrane, said 300,000 people were "going to die within the year whether the EU calls the crisis genocide or not."
"To local Africans on the ground, it seems like genocide," she added. " They say they are being wiped out. To those of us here, [the violence] smacks of ethnic cleansing."
Ms Kirrane said international arguments over appropriate vocabulary "angers those of us who have to watch people die everyday."
According to the genocide convention adopted by the UN in 1948, signatories are obliged to "prevent" and "punish" genocide.
Governments who accepted that the violence in Sudan was genocide would be required to intervene. US Congress has already agreed that the situation there warrants the term.
The real issue, she said, was the 30-day resolution imposed by the UN, requiring the Sudanese government to disarm the Janjaweed Arab militias or face intervention.
The EU said yesterday that a fact-finding mission to Sudan had found no evidence of genocide in Darfur.
However, the mission did concede the existence "widespread, silent and slow, killing going on, and village-burning on a fairly large scale."
Rebels claim the government armed Janjaweed to carry out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against African farming villages in the region.
The government denies this, and says the Janjaweed are outlaws.
Meanwhile, GOAL spokesperson Mr John O'Shea said the failure of the fact-finding mission to find evidence of genocide is "irrelevant and should not deter the EU from responding."
"The incontrovertible fact of the matter is that thousands of people have already been killed and hundreds more are dying each day," he said.
"Whether this is called genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity or whatever is beside the point. Vulnerable people are badly in need of protection and it is being denied them."
"Between 30,000 and 50,000 have died in this well orchestrated terror campaign and the international community, to its shame, has failed utterly to respond. The UN has proved itself to be totally ineffective and everyone else is also shirking their responsibility."