Darfur Again
by Dong He
In 2004, the President of the United States, George W. Bush, along with the entire Congress, declared the killings in the Darfur region of Sudan as genocide. In June 2005, President Bush reiterated his declaration. And yet, what is still happening in Darfur? Even after the warnings from the United States and the United Nations, economics sanctions, and the seizing of Sudanese accounts, hundreds of thousands of people still died in the past few years, and over 2 million were left homeless. The people of Darfur desperately cry out for help, but international players would rather see them dead them jump over political and bureaucratic roadblocks and risk image disaster.
No one is sure exactly how many have been killed, because the Khartoum government has made it very difficult for foreigners to go into Darfur. The Sudanese government acknowledges a minor conflict in the region, one it claims has left only 10,000 people dead, and it has made it clear that it will not tolerate any foreigners in the region. Paul Salopek, for example, was working as a journalist on assignment with National Geographic when he illegally crossed the Chad-Sudan border and was promptly arrested.
The situation in Darfur is rapidly destabilizing. After months of negotiations, the United Nations reached a deal in June 2007 to deploy 23,000 peacekeeping troops. But recently, the Khartoum government has begun stalling the deployment with its insistence that the majority of peacekeeping troops be African and that the African Union, rather than the United Nations, play the larger role in the process. These demands have angered many on the international stage and make finding the necessary troops even more difficult.
The current conflict in Darfur in many ways resembles the Rwanda genocide of 1994. In about 100 days, over 800,000 people were killed in Rwanda. The world watched and diffused the blame. The small UN mission in Rwanda, bogged down by the rules of engagement, its mission mandate and a lack of troops was unable to stop the massacres. Similarly besieged in this role are the 7,000 African Union peacekeepers and observers currently in Darfur, responsible for monitoring an area the size of France. Also like in Rwanda, the government supports and supplies the killers carrying out the genocide. But the Khartoum government doesn’t stop there; observers have reported attacks on villages by the Sudanese military. Men in army uniforms loot, burn and massacre innocent civilians, while helicopters firebomb the remote villages.
The violence is beginning to spread into Eastern Chad, home to over 200,000 Sudanese refugees. The militiamen sponsored by the Khartoum government, known as the Janjaweed, routinely chase their victims into Chad and have even been known to attack refugee camps inside the Chadian border. The Chadian government has called on all its citizens to mobilize against the greater enemy: the Sudanese government. To make matters worse, 40,000 refugees from the Central African Republic are also in Southern Chad escaping the ongoing civil war in that nation. The escalating violence could destabilize the entire region and surpass the body count in Rwanda.
The conflict has raged for over four years with hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths.
Just as in Rwanda, the political blame game is in full force. Everyone on the international stage, from the United Nations to China, is looking to shift the blame. Many criticize the United Nations, sometimes legitimately, but is it entirely their fault? If the blame is on the UN, then shouldn't it also be on all member states within the UN, especially the Security Council. After all, the UN is only a collection of nations. President Bush did not wait for UN authorization before invading Iraq, and there was no UN authorization needed to seize North Korean bank accounts or Saddam Hussein's assets. So why is it stopping efforts now? We should adopt the "never again" slogan used after the Holocaust, because even after watching genocide unfold in Rwanda and Bosnia, it is happening all over again in Darfur.
Sources:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/01/AR2005060101725.html
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/09/20040909-10.html
http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAFR200052007?open&of=ENG-SDN
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/su.html
