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Sudan Calamity: Glen Ford and Peter Gamble have a strong piece in TomPaine, on the Bush administration's failure to take a more aggressive stance against what they call a genocide-in-progress in the Sudan.
"At what point do we ask this uncomfortable question: Why does the United States seem to consider it acceptable for such genocidal acts to occur in Africa?" It was a rhetorical question, posed by Africa Action Executive Director Salih Booker on April 7 as the world marked the 10th anniversary of the genocide that left at least 800,000 Rwandans dead. Two weeks later, President George Bush answered Booker’s question in the usual manner: the United States has more pressing business at hand than ending a genocide-in-progress, this time in the western region of Sudan.
While U.S. diplomats feigned outrage at the UN Human Rights Commission's weak response ("grave concern") to massive ethnic cleansing of black Africans in Darfur—the committee could not bring itself to even whisper the terms "rape" or "forced removals"—Bush last week vouched for the Khartoum government’s good faith in ending a much longer campaign of genocide against blacks. As Newsweek reported:
President George W. Bush certified, as required every six months under the 2002 Sudan Peace Act, that the Islamist regime in Khartoum is negotiating in good faith for an end to Sudan's other civil war: the decades-old rebellion in southern Sudan. If the president had withheld his signature, he could have unleashed severe economic sanctions against Khartoum. But a southern peace framework seems tantalizingly close, so policymakers faced a tough choice. "It's frustrating," says a senior State Department official, "but given all the progress, we couldn't say they weren't cooperating."
This is all too familiar - a US administration that sees no vital interests at stake in a third world conflict, Europeans doing nothing, a UN commission that brings no relief. As Ford and Gamble write:
The Europeans issued a statement on the crisis that scrupulously avoids asking anyone in particular to stop killing anybody:
The European Commission today launched a strong appeal to warring parties in the Darfur region of Western Sudan to secure "safe humanitarian access" so that the enormous needs of the population can be properly addressed....Speaking at the launch of the European Commission's Humanitarian Aid Office Annual Review ("ECHO 2003"), Poul Nielson, Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, highlighted the "tragic situation" in Darfur. Threats to the "humanitarian space" is the central theme of ECHO's Annual Review this year.
Having done their bit to save humanitarian "space," if not the human beings themselves, the EU got on with the business of... business.
The whole cri-du-coeur is here and well worth reading.
Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch's Carroll Bogert writes in the Los Angeles Times asking, where is the media on the Sudan calamity?
The international media don't send reporters to cover genocides, it seems. They cover genocide anniversaries.
We've just finished a spate of front-page stories, television docu-histories and somber panel discussions on "Why the Media Missed the Story" in Rwanda, pegged to the 10th anniversary of one of the most shocking tragedies of last century, or any century. More than 500,000 people were killed in a small African country in only 100 days, and the world turned away.
But even as the ink was drying on the latest round of mea culpas, another colossal disaster in Africa was already going uncovered.
Nearly a million people have been displaced from their homes in western Sudan; many have fled into neighboring Chad. They report that militias working with the Sudanese government have been attacking villages, ransacking and torching homes, killing and raping civilians. These armed forces are supposedly cracking down on rebel groups based in the Darfur region, but in fact they are targeting the population...
Reporters have begun trickling to the scene. The Los Angeles Times has a correspondent en route to Darfur, as does the New York Times. But the fact is, with or without a war in Iraq, American journalists are generally slower to cover mass death if the victims are not white. The Rwandan genocide is a case in point.
The tragedy in Darfur may not cross the genocide threshold, but should that really make a difference? Thousands of civilians have been killed, and the pattern and intent behind these massive crimes must be carefully mapped and loudly broadcast around the world if there is to be any hope of stopping them.
We need more information and more firsthand reporting. We need reporters at the scene, making this disaster real to their audience by telling the stories of individual victims.
It's the media's job to inform us. They should do it, and quickly — because 10 years from now there won't be any excuse for another round of hand-wringing.