Politics & Power Quote by Jan Egeland

“Secondly” is doing quiet but brutal work here: it frames mass atrocity as an item in a checklist, the way diplomacy is forced to translate human catastrophe into actionable bullet points. Jan Egeland, speaking as a senior humanitarian official, isn’t chasing eloquence; he’s trying to pin responsibility to a specific actor with no room for interpretive escape. The sentence names the Government of Sudan first, then pairs two verbs - “commit” and “ensure” - that turn moral outrage into administrative obligation. That’s the rhetorical trap: if you can “commit” to disarmament, you’ve implicitly admitted you have leverage over the Janjaweed. If you can “ensure” civilians aren’t targeted, you’ve conceded you can stop it.

The subtext is sharper than the formal tone suggests. “Disarmament and control” rejects the regime’s favorite alibi that the Janjaweed are merely unruly locals beyond state command. Egeland is insisting they are, functionally, an instrument of policy - and that the state’s failure is either complicity or a deliberate strategy of plausible deniability. “Targeting of civilians” is careful language, too: it avoids legal grandstanding while still pointing directly at a war crime.

Context matters: this comes out of the Darfur crisis-era playbook, when UN officials had to speak in terms that could survive political pushback from Khartoum, Security Council hesitations, and the fog of access restrictions. The demand that it “ceases immediately” is the only emotional punctuation, a compressed refusal to let bureaucracy stretch time while people are killed.