(Chicago Sun-Times) How many black Africans must die at the hands of Muslim Arabs and Afro-Arabs in the Sudan’s Darfur region before the international community takes preventive action? If recent experiences in Rwanda, Congo-Zaire, Liberia and Sierra Leone are indicators, several hundred thousand black Africans in Sudan will be annihilated before the situation warrants international intervention. The rationale is simple: racism and geo-political bias.
Since independence from British rule in 1956, Sudan has been ruled by northern Arabs to the utter dismay of the black southern majority, leading to an insurrection against Arab domination in the 1980s. Since then, Sudan has been immersed in an internal war between the fundamentalist Islamic government in the north and the predominantly Christian or traditionally religious black peoples of the south. What makes the crises in Darfur so unique is that the black Africans in Darfur are Muslim, as are the Sudan government-backed Arab and Afro-Arab Janjaweed militias killing them. While racism, religion and natural resources, namely oil, are the major causes of the war between northern and southern Sudan, the crises in the west in Darfur is fueled by a legacy of racial (not simply based on color but ethnicity, heritage, tradition and culture) hatred and a perceived Arab need for arable land inhabited by the blacks of Darfur.
Why have the great powers of the West allowed the cycle of genocide and mass human suffering to continue, but been anxious to quell far less severe conflicts in Europe? The robust military action by the United Nations and North Atlantic Treaty Organization led by the United States in Kosovo is a case in point. The humanitarian crisis in Kosovo was not nearly as catastrophic as the genocide unfolding in Darfur, where more than 30,000 people have been killed and more than 1 million displaced, scores being kidnapped and enslaved by Sudanese government-backed Arab Janjaweed militias. Are the lives of Africans less valuable than Europeans to decision-makers in the West?
The situation in Darfur is beyond horrific. Unless the genocide is stopped and humanitarian relief agencies are properly supported and given unfettered access to the people of Darfur, hundreds of thousands of black Sudanese will die from starvation and disease over the next several months.
Recent visits to Darfur by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan — the two most influential diplomats in the world who happen to be black — brought international attention to the genocide in Darfur and perhaps temporarily slowed Khartoum’s killing in the region. However, the unwillingness of the United States and the United Nations to declare the situation in Darfur a genocide is unforgivable, reckless and reminiscent of Rwanda.
The Genocide Convention defines genocide as “acts of bodily injury or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life intended to cause physical destruction, imposing measures intended to prevent births or forcibly transferring children.” The Sudanese government appears to have conspired with and supported the Janjaweed militias to commit genocide and in doing so has violated basic human rights law, humanitarian law, and international criminal law norms. From this background, why are the United States and other nations reluctant to categorize the situation in Darfur as genocide? Under the Genocide Convention and international law, states have a positive duty to “prevent and punish” acts of genocide. Even the African Union, Africa’s foremost regional political body, is reluctant to pronounce the crisis in Darfur as genocide.
That said, the reluctance of the United States to take unilateral action is in some ways rational for four reasons: (1) a lack of strategic interests in the Sudan outside of the war on terrorism; (2) humanitarian intervention in Africa has been an unpopular policy option since the Somalia debacle in 1991; (3) a lack of political will, given the Bush administration cannot afford to have American troops killed in another “Arabized state” in an election year, and (4) a seemingly consistent global bias against saving African lives (e.g., Rwanda and Liberia). To its credit, the United States and allies were able to muster a U.N. Security Council resolution, albeit weak, condemning the violence in Darfur and calling on all U.N. member states to support the protection force being established by the African Union. While the powers that be debate over how to define the crisis in Darfur (“genocide” or not) and what language to include in U.N. resolutions (“sanctions” or not), the people of Darfur continue to suffer and die.
Since the calamity in Sudan is far worse than the 1999 Kosovo crisis or the circumstances that prevailed in Iraq before U.S. occupation in 2003, why don’t we “free the people” of Darfur from the tyrannical and genocidal Sudanese regime? Why don’t we arrest President Omar Bashir and try him for war crimes like other heads of state such as Slobodan Milosevic, Charles Taylor and Saddam Hussein? Remember, the Sudan was the original safe haven for Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network. Racism against blacks in Sudan is not only a core root cause of the genocide but also the source of international inaction in the country. I hasten to believe that America’s response would not be as slipshod if whites in Zimbabwe or South Africa were facing a similar tragedy.
