Managing Genocide

[msgadget]

What about the Dafur?

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?tntget=2005%2f03%2f02%2fopinion%2f02kristof%2ehtml&pagewanted=print&position=|The American Witness>

American soldiers are trained to shoot at the enemy. They're prepared to be shot at. But what young men like Brian Steidle are not equipped for is witnessing a genocide but being unable to protect the civilians pleading for help.

If President Bush wants to figure out whether the U.S. should stand more firmly against the genocide in Darfur, I suggest that he invite Mr. Steidle to the White House to give a briefing. Mr. Steidle, a 28-year-old former Marine captain, was one of just three American military advisers for the African Union monitoring team in Darfur - and he is bursting with frustration.

"Every single day you go out to see another burned village, and more dead bodies," he said. "And the children - you see 6-month-old babies that have been shot, and 3-year-old kids with their faces smashed in with rifle butts. And you just have to stand there and write your reports."

While journalists and aid workers are sharply limited in their movements in Darfur, Mr. Steidle and the monitors traveled around by truck and helicopter to investigate massacres by the Sudanese government and the janjaweed militia it sponsors. They have sometimes been shot at, and once his group was held hostage, but they have persisted and become witnesses to systematic crimes against humanity.

So is it really genocide?

"I have no doubt about that," Mr. Steidle said. "It's a systematic cleansing of peoples by the Arab chiefs there. And when you talk to them, that's what they tell you. They're very blunt about it. One day we met a janjaweed leader and he said, 'Unless you get back four camels that were stolen in 2003, then we're going to go to these four villages and burn the villages, rape the women, kill everyone.' And they did."

The African Union doesn't have the troops, firepower or mandate to actually stop the slaughter, just to monitor it. Mr. Steidle said his single most frustrating moment came in December when the Sudanese government and the janjaweed attacked the village of Labado, which had 25,000 inhabitants. Mr. Steidle and his unit flew to the area in helicopters, but a Sudanese general refused to let them enter the village - and also refused to stop the attack.

"It was extremely frustrating - seeing the village burn, hearing gunshots, not being able to do anything," Mr. Steidle said. "The entire village is now gone. It's a big black spot on the earth."

When Sudan's government is preparing to send bombers or helicopter gunships to attack an African village, it shuts down the cellphone system so no one can send out warnings. Thus the international monitors know when a massacre is about to unfold. But there's usually nothing they can do.

The West, led by the Bush administration, is providing food and medical care that is keeping hundreds of thousands of people alive. But we're managing the genocide, not halting it.

"The world is failing Darfur," said Jan Egeland, the U.N. under secretary general for humanitarian affairs. "We're only playing the humanitarian card, and we're just witnessing the massacres."

President Bush is pushing for sanctions, but European countries like France are disgracefully cool to the idea - and China is downright hostile, playing the same supportive role for the Darfur genocide that it did for the Khmer Rouge genocide.

if the above link doesn't work: http://query.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?tntget=2005%2f03%2f02%2fopinion%2f02kristof%2ehtml

[Karenina]

1. Reducing the "excess" population. n/t

[fortyfeetunder]

2. No oil, no problem

Those countries have no resources the US can plunder (such as oil & precious metals), therefore the lives there are expendable.

[Solly Mack]

3. There's oil in the Sudan...there's oil in the Darfur region as well

I think it was well explained in Hotel Rwanda why the world is sitting back and watching.

One character was talking to the main character and told him the world was abandoning the Rwandans because they were Africans...it wasn't that they were even black...but because they were Africans.

[msgadget]

4. I believe this as well

The world cluck clucks, sends some aid and fusses with the African organizations a little and that's about the extent of it. If this was England or Ireland or even Poland, I'm damned sure the response would be quite different.

[FrenchieCat]

5. Well, at least, if nothing else, Congress did pass

The Darfur Accountability Act.

What the Darfur Accountability Act Means
by Senator Jon Corzine
Fri Apr 22nd, 2005 at 12:32:34 PDT

I want to share with you an excellent piece of news. The Darfur Accountability Act has just passed the Senate as part of the supplemental appropriations bill. The act is a bipartisan piece of legislation designed to stop the genocide occurring in the Sudan. There is a larger significance attached to this bill, but first I want to talk a little about what this act does and how we might think about genocide.

Diaries :: Senator Jon Corzine's diary :: :: Trackback ::

Genocide is an inconceivable crime. You can try to wrap your head around it, but the sheer cruelty of exterminating a people and culture is so alien to what we know that it is nearly impossible to render it real. The struggle to even call the crime genocide shows this. Historically, the strategy of genocidal perpetrators is to deny the crime by ridiculing the idea of genocide itself. Surely no one would do this, they argue, and it's hard not to believe them. Who could be so cruel? Yet the logic of mass slaughter exists, and is aided by aparthy masquerading as disbelief. The act of the global community in naming the situation in the Sudan as genocide is therefore a large victory. Still, even when genocide is considered, the crime is so big, so morally horrific, that it seems unconquerable and unstoppable, looking like a tangle of warring parties instead of an assymetrical slaughter of the innocent. This bill - and the action of my Senate colleagues - is beginning to overcome this inexcusable attitude that has prevented effective action against genocide many times this century.

One big myth about genocide is that it is unstoppable. The reality is that those committing this genocide could be stopped with a relatively modest intervention, and deterred by the threat of real sanctions.

The Darfur Accountability Act provides this deterrent. The act provides for sanctions against those responsible for genocide, calls for a new UN Security Council resolution imposing sanctions against the Government of Sudan and a high-level U.S. diplomatic initiative to achieve that resolution, calls for a military no-fly zone over Darfur, calls for the extension of the arms embargo to cover the Government of Sudan, and calls for the expansion of the mandate of the African Union force in Darfur and UN troops to include the protection of civilians.

Our failure to intervene in Rwanda eleven years ago only taught warlords around the world that what they do to their own people may cause handwringing in the West, but nothing more. This act, if it is included in the final version of the supplemental appropriations bill, will begin to undo that morally perverse lesson.

At the same time, acting on this matter is good for our national security. Failed states are fertilizer for terrorism and instability, and can only be fixed with the type of global engagement and cooperation this act implies. Additionally, potentially catastrophic problems, such as global warming, new diseases of epidemic proportions, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, can only be addressed within a global context. Like the moral travesty of not acting to prevent genocide in Darfur, these problems are nonpartisan and affect every person on the planet. It is especially heartening therefore that there is bipartisan support for this bill - my cosponsor in passing this legislation was Senator Sam Brownback. President Bush's second term carries with it the opportunity for us to work with the international community on a range of critical issues, including the genocide in Darfur. Whether we as a global community can do so will determine whether this young century is one of prosperity or one where we seek to manage the horrific consequences of the global catastrophes that today we may be allowing to spiral out of control.

http://dailykos.com/story/2005/4/22/153235/245