All for Darfur

3/2/06

As American people, we're sort of uncomfortable with genocide. While we recognize the horrendous nature of the crime, it's too big for us to get our minds around. Except for the Holocaust; that one we get, but I wonder how much of that is honest outrage and how much is the attention that particularly huge extermination has received. It seems that aside from the atrocities of WWII, we're sort of fine with countries killing their own people. Maybe that's unfair; we're not fine with it, per se, but we don't seem to know what to do about it. I don't put the blame squarely on America's shoulders here; there aren't any countries that seem to know what to do when dealing with the big "G." But as the world's only remaining superpower (China's giving us a run for our money on that one) I think we can do better.

Africa has never been known as the mellowest place on the planet, second only to the Middle East. The popularity of films such as Sometimes in April and Hotel Rwanda, both very well done dramatizations of the massacre of nearly a million Tutsis and sympathetic Hutus in Rwanda by Hutu militias during 100 days from April 6th through July 1994, show that Americans are capable of understanding genocide, but only sort of after-the-fact. Our outrage is best expressed through a bizarre mutation of armchair activism where we watch Hollywood pictures and talk about "wasn't that just awful? Why didn't the government do anything to help them?" Put simply, because there was no support for such an action from the people of this country.

Darfur is a region in western Sudan bordered by Chad and Libya. Since February 2003 there has been an ongoing conflict between the Arabs and Africans of the region for what little resources the country can provide. And that conflict has blossomed into genocide.

The whole powder keg exploded when rebel African Muslims, frustrated with inequalities between Africans and the ruling Arab Muslims, struck out against the Khartoum (the capital of Sudan) government. Government militias, called "Janjaweed," retaliated against the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa groups in the country, killing men, stealing food and raping the women in some patently insane attempt to "breed out" their bloodlines. Since then it has been an on-again, off-again blood-letting with several cease-fires declared only to be broken. Both sides of the conflict have been accused of human rights violations.

The UN, which has taken its own sweet time in dealing with the problem, estimates some 180,000 dead, mostly due to starvation and the blockation of what little international aid has been thrown at the problem. Nearly 1.8 million people have been displaced from their homes, 200,000 of those fleeing to neighboring Chad, which is now being drawn into the conflict because of attacks on towns near their border.

The African Union (a baby, African version of the UN) has 7,000 troops in the area but staggeringly few resources and not enough manpower to even begin to quell the conflict. And…that's about all that's been done. The UN has looked at the problem, and on Christmas Eve Condie Rice requested Congress restore the $50 million in aid to the AU cut from the budget since November, but she was rejected. The United States took over the presidency of the United Nations Security Council for one month in February, putting forth a motion to send 12,000-20,000 more UN "peacekeepers" (soldiers) to Darfur, but those troops might not be in place for another year. By that time there might not be a reason to send them.

Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland was part of an eleven member, bipartisan congressional group (that is way too many words) who visited the region last month. The group is calling for sanctions against Sudan, cuts on diplomatic ties and freezing certain assets of the Sudan in this country. It's called "The Darfur Peace and Accountability Act," and it's a pretty good idea. It would have been a good idea 2 ½ years ago. But the White House is in a tough spot with Sudan, since the government has an intelligence sharing program with them in the war on terror. In short, they're a friendly. With friends like these…

So the UN and the US has been pussy-footing around this problem for three years while people systematically starve to death. It was the same thing in Rwanda, only we only had to look the other way for three months instead of years. The United States and the United Nations as a whole keeps "dealing" with these affronts to humanity in the same way and then acts surprised whenever nothing gets done. But organizations have a hard time rallying support whenever nobody in their respective countries seems to give a shit about brown people dying in a country they've never hear of…unless it has oil, of course. We can all do better.

If your liberal guilt is panging you, or you'd like to help or just want to know more please visit:

Save Darfur.org

Darfur: A Genocide We can Stop


Thank you for your kind attention, ladies and gentlemen.