New York Times Columnist Nicholas Kristof's op-ed today revisits Darfur and the death sentences that Sudan's government has imposed on thousands of black Africans. He notes that the Khartoum government and their proxies, the janjaweed militias, have crossed the border into Chad and begun razing the ad hoc villages that the refugees have created for themselves. This is horrible not just on the sheer level of how it affects these people, but in that may also tigger an actual war between Sudan and Chad. Currently, each government is backing the rebels in their neighbor's country. The whole thing is a mess.
Two years ago, I argued in a college newsppaer that the world must start paying attention to Darfur before it was two late. I wrote than over 100,000 refugees had to flee their villages to flee violence and at least 10,000 had died. Today, we can multiply these figures by at least 10, maybe more. No, in two years little has been done.
In the summer of 2004, I felt some degree of hope that Darfur would not become another Rwanda (as some people were saying around that time, the 10th anniversary of that previous genocide). The U.S. House and Senate declared the situation there to be a genocide and the president said the same thing. Surely, with such recognition – using the g-word that Clinton officials would not mention in 1994 – someone would have to be done. Would could not idly sit by and watch during a declared genocide, could we? We have.
I still remember talking with the editor of an alternative newspaper and asking him why he had not paid more attention to Darfur in print. I pledged an article about the crisis. He told me, “Why is it that we pay so much attention to Darfur and not other problems in Africa?” He cited examples like the warfare that’s ongoing in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as Uganda’s LRA, which kidnaps children. Implicit in what he was saying was this: Darfur is only an issue because evangelical Christians in the U.S. think Arab Muslims in Sudan are killing black Christians. Somehow, if evangelicals were attached to an issue, it was of lesser importance. Yes, the DRC and Uganda have seriously problems and thousands may have died. But Darfur is a little bit different. For one, nearly 2 million people have been displaced to neighboring Chad. Estimates from 2004 suggested that a million people could eventually die if resources (military and food) were not used to help these Darfurians. Some groups have helped, but the government-backed Janjaweed militia continues to hunt civilians.
One of the common myths is that Darfur is somehow a pure civil war, two factions fighting against each other with some unseemly tactics. But no, this is not case. Instead, the government of Sudan has launched an ethnic cleansing campaign in order to keep control of a region that not too large ago was largely populated by black Africa, who didn’t always agree with their policies and resource exploitation. The concessions that Khartoum granted to the Southern rebels (separate from those in Darfur) only came after years of negotiations and pressure from the U.S. Sudan’s government did not want to be in that position again and, in Darfur, they saw a problem forthcoming. An obvious solution was to eliminate the possible rebel population, to systematically cleanse them from the reason.
Even in terms of the agreement with the Southern rebels, the compromise leader selected from the South—an Ivy-league educated man—died in mysterious circumstances only a couple months after his entry into the government. This again shows that Khartoum does not play fair. They have no interest in doing so.
What’s stopping intervention? China has a very close relationship with Sudan, and France and Russia also have some significant interests in the country. In a globalized world, economic ties prevent us from adequately pressuring criminal government who massacre civilians. The other reason is that is allowed to occur is as a result of the U.S.’s involvement in Iraq. The war there to oust a dictator that systematically killed around 100,000 (most before 1993) or so people may cost the world a million or more Darfurians.
As a result of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the U.S. now lacks legimacy to do anything in any other bastion of the Islamic world. It would be construed as tantamount to Iraq; another unilateral action to interfere with an Arab country. Not what it really is, an effort to stop an enormous calamity sponspered by an Arab government. And it’s not only a question of legitimacy. The United States has also overextending its human resources (troops, as in those we should be supporting) in Iraq and, thus, they are not available for other police actions. And, books like George Packer’s explain, the neo-con patrons of this administration have no interest in police actions or nation-building. The people of Darfur will just have to die because of our mistakes.
Some will argue that the same logic and role that brought us into Iraq—that of the benevolent hegemon protecting the world—would be at play in any Darfur intervention. But it’s not just us, many countries have also condemned this action, and the African Union—a local body—has already sent peacekeepers to the region. We just have to provide them with ample support. But for the reasons that I have outlined, we are not doing so. Some may say that France or some other nation should take up the cause, and maybe that is the case. But Bush has placed us as the protector of freedom on the international stage and what greater freedom is there than freedom to live once born. The right in the U.S. cares so dearly for the un-aborted fetuses, but we don’t see quite the righteous indignation toward those living meek lives in the U.S. or abroad. Over a million Darfurians are homeless, without proper health care or sufficient food, and they are constantly raided by camel-riding militias who rape them, machine-gun them, and burned their ad hoc villages to the ground.
It’s too late, we’ve screwed up. The world has watched while a hundred thousand die. But there’s no reason to turn away forever from our moral lapse. Instead, we can save the millions of others clinging to life, hoping for some miraculous help from abroad. It’s damn time that, as I said two years ago, we give it to them.
