2.25.2004

 

Under Our Noses
I confess to being underinformed about what's been going on in Sudan. This forwarded message from Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College, has helped dispell some of my ignorance. I haven't seen this piece posted online, so I'll excerpt parts of it. To hear Reeves tell it, another African genocide has started while the world sits on its hands. An all too familiar scenario.

The international community has already waited far too long to plan the humanitarian intervention that is now necessary to halt massive and growing genocidal destruction in Darfur province, far western Sudan. Appallingly, there is still no sign that such an intervention is being planned, or even contemplated. Though we can be morally certain that more than 1,000 people are now dying every week, they will continue to die at such a rate for the foreseeable future. Though the distinguished humanitarian medical relief organization Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has declared that Darfur is the scene of "catastrophic mortality rates" (MSF Press Release [New York], February 17, 2004), there is no response in sight that will change this terrible reality. And the fully devastating effects of displacement, food insecurity, a breakdown in agricultural production, disease, and exposure are still to come.

Khartoum and its Arab militia allies, in refusing to enter into meaningful peace talks that might secure a humanitarian cease-fire, bear overwhelming responsibility for the insecurity that makes humanitarian operations largely impossible outside areas the regime wishes to be served. Large concentration camps are the de facto and deliberate result of highly restricted humanitarian access, which now extends only to the larger towns under Khartoum's control. The vast majority of Darfur's immense population of displaced persons has no access to humanitarian aid, nor is there any real prospect of such access. Many humanitarian organizations continue to report privately on Khartoum's denial of travel permits (and thus access) for reasons related not to security but to military purposes.

Though the UN's World Food Program (WFP) and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) recently declared that war in Darfur "has led to the displacement of about 1.2 million people" (Media Advisory [Rome], February 11, 2004), the scale of the catastrophe has yet to register with too many governments. Though the UN Special Envoy for Humanitarian Affairs in Sudan, Tom Eric Vraalsen, declared on February 18, 2004---following a trip to Darfur---that "aid workers are unable to reach the vast majority [of the displaced]," that fighting had not stopped (despite Khartoum's claims), and that the UN and aid organizations "don't have the access, and the corridors, which [the Khartoum regime] has referred to---as of today these are not open" (Reuters, February 18, 2004), there is no imminent response that begins to address these massive and deeply threatening realities. [...]

Khartoum's deliberate and ongoing destruction of these peoples, animated by an indisputable racism, is genocide-- and on a scale that is without parallel in the world today. Darfur is not only very likely the world's greatest humanitarian catastrophe, as the UN Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland has declared, but represents the world's greatest moral failure. It is a species of moral failure that was painfully in evidence again and again throughout the terrible 20th-century history of genocide, all too ably chronicled by Samantha Power in her Pulitzer Prize-winning "'A Problem from Hell': America and the Age of Genocide." [...]

What has been the US response to this incident? What has been said about such provocative arrests in the immediate wake of an official US fact-finding trip to Darfur? Nothing. Not a word has been uttered publicly by the State Department about concern for the lives and well-being of these men, whose only "crime" was to meet with a US official. This silence not only puts the lives of these men in greater danger, but sends a perverse signal of irresolution to Khartoum, one the regime has duly noted. [...]

If we await full resolution of the picture from Darfur, we may be sure only that the numbers of dead, and unfathomable human suffering, will be vastly greater than in this hideous twilight.

posted by daudi • link: Wednesday, February 25, 2004