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NEWS & LETTERS, August-September 2004Our Life and Times by Kevin A. BarryGlobal failure in face of Darfur genocideThe past weeks have seen no letup in the horror unfolding in Darfur, the western region of Sudan whose non-Arabic-speaking Black population has been subjected to genocidal attacks. On July 18, Amnesty International documented what has been known for months from journalistic reports: Rape has been "used as a weapon of war ... a form of collective punishment of a population whose members have taken up arms against the central government." We know these facts because the courageous African women of Darfur have refused to remain silent. Defying both tradition and the murderous Janjaweed Arab militia, they have given their names and publicly recounted gang rapes by the Janjaweed to reporters and human rights groups. These women, from the Muslim but non-Arab Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa peoples, have also described the mass killings of adult males, the burning of villages, the destruction of mosques, and the poisoning of wells. Additionally, they report statements of genocidal intent by the Janjaweed, who declare openly that they plan to exterminate the Black males, enslave the Black women, and take over their land. (Sudan’s Arabic-speaking dominant group identifies itself as Arab rather than Black.) The next day Human Rights Watch weighed in, denouncing "the fiction maintained by Khartoum that there is a serious distinction between the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed militia that the government has sponsored." Far from reining them in, as the UN has demanded and the government has promised, the Janjaweed are being allowed to join the police and the military, which are supposedly restoring order in Darfur. Some 200,000 Blacks have fled into Chad, but at least one million of Darfur’s four million people are internally displaced, many of them living in towns or camps cut off from the outside and surrounded by the Janjaweed. All of these people face the threat of starvation and disease, with 350,000 deaths predicted by the end of 2004. Human rights groups estimate that the Janjaweed and the army have so far killed 30,000 people outright. As in Bosnia, the Western powers have deplored the atrocities, but taken no meaningful action to stop them. Currently, there are only efforts to bring relief supplies to some of the refugees. At the end of July, the UN gave Sudan 30 more days to rein in the Janjaweed, with an implied threat of some type of mild economic sanctions. Bush’s reckless invasion of Iraq has made an intervention in Darfur unlikely, especially since the Sudanese government has used the invasion of Iraq to rally support in the Muslim world. For all their talk of "values," it is notable that both Bush and Kerry have avoided mentioning Darfur in their speeches. THE NEW YORK TIMES, which has called for mild sanctions against Sudan’s leaders, has not noted this fact, nor have any of the major media. Evidently, Sudan is banking on the fact that its size, its strategic location along the Red Sea, its links to major Arab powers like Egypt and to Western ones like France, will forestall any serious action from the UN. It can claim to be reining in the Janjaweed, while allowing the violence to continue. The government, which claims to be Islamist, employed similar tactics over the past two decades in the war against Southern Sudan, at a cost of two million lives, almost all of them non-Muslim, non-Arab Blacks. No international court has ever charged a member of Sudan’s government with crimes against humanity or genocide. This time, it is non-Arab Muslims being targeted. |
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