Ever Again, Until the Next Time

More than two thousand miles away and a decade apart, two governments persecuted a campaign of systematic violence, rape, destruction and mass murder against its' own citizens. In the early 1990s the world struggled with the concept of sovereignty and the appropriateness of intervening when a conflict is contained within a single country's own borders. In the end, the international community intervened on behalf of the Bosnian Muslims, but not before more than 200,000 people died and 2.7 million were displaced. As a result of this conflict and the Rwandan conflict, the UN developed and implemented the Responsibility to Protect Resolution in 2005. Despite this, the world is standing by, watching an eerily similar situation unfold in the western region of Sudan known as Darfur. Four years into that "internal conflict", as many as 500 thousand people have died and 2.5 million have been displaced. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the similarities between the conflicts of Bosnia and Darfur in regards to situation and world reaction. It strives to show that despite years of rhetoric and incremental actions by the international community, it was the outright use of force by the US and NATO that brought the Bosnian conflict to an end. The international community is following the same template with regards to the situation in Darfur and this paper proposes that in the end, as in the Balkans, it will be diplomatic actions coupled with military force that solves the conflict in Sudan.