Speaking of Genocide... Why aren't we?

Democratic grass roots activists continue to care about events beyond America's borders. We watch closely what is happening in Venezuela. We react strongly to the huge number of Iraq innocents who have been killed there since Bush's invasion. We seldom mention Darfur though. Why not? Is it because the Sudan is not a clear enough victim of American foreign policy? Do we only care when hundreds of thousands die if we can blame it on Republicans?

Many facts are known about Darfur and all of them are ugly. More ugly than Rape, more ugly than murder, more ugly than torture. The facts say genocide, a word sometimes used loosely but in Darfur that word is literal. The facts in Darfur are as ugly as Pol Pot's Cambodia or the slaughter of Rwanda's Tutsi's by extremist Hutu militias; except in Darfur only a few hundred thousand are dead, not upward of a million. Does that explain our relative indifference? Or do we need to blame Bush first before we get angry enough to mobilize to end the killings? If that's the case there's some news that should interest us. Bush is finally conceding that his policies toward Darfur have been ineffective at stopping the slaughter there. A year and a half after then Secretary of State Colin Powell called Darfur a genocide, Bush is finally admitting that perhaps the United States has some moral responsibility to try harder to end it. Here's a Washington Post article about it that some of you may have missed this weekend:

Bush Calls For More Muscle In Darfur
U.S. Policy Shifts As Talks Stagnate

By Jim VandeHei and Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, February 18, 2006; Page A01

ORLANDO, Fla., Feb. 17 -- President Bush on Friday called for doubling the number of international troops in the war-ravaged Darfur region of Sudan and a bigger role for NATO in the peacekeeping effort.

Bush has concluded that peace talks will not halt the violence that has left tens of thousands dead and more than 2 million homeless in Darfur and that a more muscular military response is required, administration officials said...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/17/AR2006021701935.html?nav=rss_nation/special


I suggest you read it if you haven't already, it includes good background information. Personally I still hold George Bush accountable for heading an administration that acknowledged genocide was ongoing but barely lifted a pinkie to stop it. But I hold us accountable also, because George W. Bush is now a step ahead of many Democratic activists in finally facing this human tragedy AND showing some willingness to minimally do something to end it. There is no massive American commitment needed for Americans to make a real difference, operating under International auspices, in stopping the slaughter in Darfur. America's ultimate troop commitment will number in the hundreds, not tens of thousands. We will work with NATO, and we will work with African Peace Keeping Forces, and we will work with the United Nations. That is how the world should unite to stop the wanton slaughter of tens of thousands of innocents.

This is something General Wesley Clark has been calling on the United States to become more involved in since July of 2004, in a USA Today Op-Ed. His reiterated his call on NPR's Morning Edition in April of 2005, and he spoke to it again in an address to the United States Holocaust Museum in May of that year. Here is a link to Clark's collected commentary on Darfur:

http://securingamerica.com/taxonomy/term/59

If we are really lucky Bush will now steal from Clark's ideas, though of course Clark will never be credited for them. Does it matter? Probably not to Clark. What always mattered to him was having the genocide ended. Should it matter to us? Well it angers me that Bush acts so god damn proud about invading Iraq with nearly two hundred thousand troops because, this is after he had to abandon his "smoking gun" "justification", America "stopped the tyranny of a brutal dictator", while opposing until now sending 1000 American troops into Darfur to stop the internationally recognized genocide of Black Africans. It doesn't surprise me, it just angers me, like so many other things about Bush's Administration. There was no Oil in Sudan so Bush didn't care. But what about us? What's our excuse?

It's the media , who has a longstanding policy of pretending Africa is invisible or a set for the next Trazan movie.

Speaking of genocide, how about the deliberate contamination via DU of two sets of peoples , both Muslims while conducting war in those areas?

DU has cause a huge increase in major birth defects there (rates as high as 80%) , and those population groups will be decimated in a generation.

We are citizens of the world.

that what's going on in Darfur is the genocide of Christians by Muslims.

If this is true, then maybe if it were presented as Christians being killed by Muslims, then, maybe, the Christian-Fundy American people might be willing to do something about it.

Muslims are also killing Muslims in Darfur. The slaughter has far more to do with oil, tribal relations and ethnic ties than it has to do with religion.

Here is a good overview of what is happening that WesDem pointed to in a blog she did on another site. This is from a book review in the Washington Post:

Darfur: Origins of a Catastrophe
Sunday, February 19, 2006; Page BW04

"...The real trigger for the conflict was manufactured by Sudan's government, with an assist from Libya's Moammar Gaddafi. For nearly all of its known history, Darfur had not been a binary society of African versus Arab: Its people belonged to a mosaic of tribes, all of them Muslim and all of them black. But in 1985, Libyan forces arrived in Darfur to deliver food aid and set about arming some nomadic tribes, who then became identified as "Arabs." The following year, Sudan's newly elected leader, Sadiq al-Mahdi, embarked on his plan to forge an "Arab and Islamic Union." By emphasizing the new central government's Arab identity, this policy led the government's provincial allies to be dubbed "Arabs," too. Thus was racial polarity constructed where none had previously existed.

The trigger still needed to be pulled, however. In 2003, two insurgencies that had risen out of many "African" agriculturalists' resentment of the Khartoum-backed "Arabs" reached critical mass, killing several hundred government troops in a series of raids and skirmishes. For a regime that had fought a civil war with Sudan's south for more than 20 years, this hardly counted as a major loss, but the reaction was ferocious. Precisely because the rebels were Muslim, they were more threatening to Sudan's rulers than their Christian and animist opponents: So long as the nation divided along religious lines, the Muslims would retain control, but a split within Muslim ranks could spell the end of the Khartoum elite's dominance. So the government responded by unleashing its Arab militia allies -- not only against Darfur's rebels but also against the tribes from which the rebels drew support. The result was the butchering of fathers and the rape of mothers, the tossing of children into fires, the torching of villages and the poisoning of wells: this century's first genocide."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/16/AR2006021601898.html

Iraq, Iran (Bush plans to make it a disaster zone),Afganistan, Nigeria, Columbia etc.

The situation in Sudan is pretty complicated, and there are two such campaigns proceeding.

One, in the southeast of the country, is against non-Muslim peoples, both Christian and, for lack of a better term, Pagan. These peoples have been engaged in a secessionist struggle for many years against the Arabized Moslem north, and the fracture long predates modern times, for slave raiding into this region was long a staple of the region's economy.

The second is in Darfur, in the southwest of the country. The people of Darfur are Moslem, and mostly settled subsistence farmers. The implement of the government in plaguing them is a militia drawn from nomad clans. these have traditinally raidedd the farmers, of course, and there are semi-drought conditions currently that add some pressure to the nomads' activities.

Underlying the matter is the structrure of oil deposits and their transport in the country. Sudan has appreciable petroleum, but it is located in the southern reaches of the country. It is the areas where the oil is pumped out and through which it is piped to Khartoum and the chief port neaby that are being assailed by the Islamic fundamentalist government. Sudan, like many places, is not really a country but a colonial district, and there is no natural reason Khartoum should rule the areas containing the oil; it was simply all grouped together by the Mamalukes of Egypt and subsequently by the English for their administrative convenience.

All involved are Muslims. Since the 1980s there was a deliberate "Arabization" campaign introduced into Sudan to bring in an Islamo-Fscist government, which succeeded. Those Darfuris who supported this became sort of honorary "Arabs" - those who didn't are the genocide victims. They are Muslims who did not adopt the form of Islam being imposed and kept their own traditions. The political point of the massive scale of the raping is that children of the rapes become automatically Arabs, because their rapist fathers are Arabs. It's race, not religion. And it's economic. The land, livestock, etc., becomes the property of the "Arab" child rather than the black natural father who is most likely dead anyway.



Edit: thought I recognized the lipstick :dunce:

was worked out between North & South after years. American xtians involved in that process. Then oil was discouvered in the East and the ethnic cleansing of muslim on muslim, arab on african, started. It is a separate conflict and it is the one that has the genocide.

Some say Bush was hesitant to get involved because the Xtians (his base) had worked out a peace and didn't want to see it fall apart.

It would not take much. A single US jet could stop the attacks. People are being genocided by men on horseback & camels - with the odd government helicopter being thrown in.

Thank you for this post. I will have more to say as others weigh in, but wanted to express my gratitude now for the chance that this subject may yet get a decent discussion here at DU.

TC

One was endorsed by Bette Middlar who was quoted as saying that "Dufar is a genocide WE CAN DO SOMETHING ABOUT." clearly in reference to the genocide in Iraq. There were also some good videos on this site focusing on people's experiences with this horror.

http://savedarfur.org /
Violence and Suffering in Sudan's Darfur Region
The Crisis in Darfur

NO MORE RWANDAS The Darfur Genocide
Enough excuses. The time to act is now.
BY DON CHEADLE AND JOHN PRENDERGAST
Thursday, March 24, 2005
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=506795
Harvard Divests

WHAT IS HAPPENING, HAPPENED BEFORE....AND, HERE, ON DU, WE SHOULD
BE TALKING ABOUT THIS MUCH MORE.

WE CAN FUSS AND FIGHT ALL WE WANT ABOUT THE 2004 ELECTIONS, ELECTIONS 2006 & 2008, DE LAY, SOCIAL SECURITY, IRAQ, HILLARY, THE NUCLEAR OPTION, IRAN AND NORTH KOREA....BUT SOME PEOPLE ARE TOO BUSY DYING IN DARFUR TO GIVE A SHIT ABOUT ALL OF THAT. WE NEED TO UNDERSTAND WHAT WE, LIBERALS ARE REALLY SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT.......! WHAT YOU CAN DO...NOW!

Write To your local newspaper and to Congress. Urge increased international aid and attention to Darfur. Keep this issue alive.

Write A letter of protest to Ambassador Khidir Haroun Ahmed, Embassy of Sudan, 2210 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington DC 20008.

http://hcs.harvard.edu/~hcdag /
How do I get Involved?

SIGN THE PETITION, IF YOU HAVEN'T....
http://www.darfurgenocide.org/darfurIntervention.php

AND DONATE
http://www.darfurgenocide.org/donate.php

DARFUR: A GENOCIDE WE CAN STOP 600,000 LIVES ARE DEPENDING ON OUR ACTIONS

I signed some petitions also a while back, and I talked with people and wrote about it but sometimes it is hard to know what else we can do.

This is a window of opportunity though to make a difference in Darfur. It's not like I think George W Bush deserves tons of credit for acknowledging the failure of his prior policy (though it is a rare moment when this President does that)but it gives us an opening to press Republican and Democratic members of Congress in to act now. This will never be a front burner issue to the Bush Administration, but now he is on record considering further American involvement in an international context. Republicans are less likely to hide from Darfur now, and Democrats never should have.

"In September 2004, former Secretary of State Colin Powell announced that genocide had been perpetrated against the people of Sudan's Darfur region. The United Nations has released a report that, while acknowledging widespread, targeted violence, nevertheless concludes that a genocide had not occurred. NPR's Ed Gordon explores the contradiction." http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=7&q=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php%3FstoryId%3D4475226&e=9797

Summer 2004 lots of folks were talking about genocide in Darfur. Clark wasn't the first, and certainly not the last. The UN ruled against it; that many of the countries on the panel and on the security council are sympathetic to Sudan, for one reason or another, surely can't have anything to do with it. :sarcasm:

With troops in Iraq and stationed elsewhere, and no clear way to get troops into Sudan without violating airspace and triggering a non-Sudanese international incident, there's little the US could do by itself. One of the neighboring countries with access to international waters/airspace would have to be involved. It's not happening. The best that could be arranged was African Union troops, which is better than nothing, but only marginally so.

We also don't want nice white American boys in there shooting dark-skinned non-uniform-wearing Muslims in another invasion, especially w/o UN Security Council permission.

Don't get me started on the Xian/animist ~ Khartoum business. I followed it for years; pretty much only Xians in the US cared, and they were truly pissed off when Kosovar Muslims and then Darfurian Muslims became a dem cause celebre, while the slaughter of Xians was no big deal. Not all dems ignored it; but it created little stir, unlike Kosovo or Darfur. But it played right into Xian themes of victimization, and became a standing slur in some sectors against the left.

"Where there is no will there is no way".


(Ooops, typo edit)

I have a similar diary up at kos now and some folks with good info joined in and pointed out that yes, Oil is at play in the Sudan also. So I stand corrected on that. It is all part of the murky mix, but that doesn't change the essential fact. Genocide is ongoing and it can be stopped with a minimal amount of international cooperation, resolve, and resources. Bush may no longer be standing in the way. Now is the time to push for action to stop the deaths of thousands, and the rape and torture of thousands more.

I am very glad that they are. Hell, I'm even glad that Bush is talking about it now. Many lives can be saved with a minimal effort in Darfur, it is only a matter of mobilizing the will to act. I wonder if Bush was floating a trial balloon with his comments over the weekend on Darfur, it seemingly took some of his aids off guard that he talked about it before a policy review was complete. Maybe he wanted to see if his base would accept U.S. involvement, or if Democrats would back him on it. I don't know, but right now I am willing to suspend politics on this one, as long as something gets done.

Really we should be starting up an email and phone campaign to Congress, the White House, and the Press on this, to drive support for more direct U.S. involvement in an international intervention in Darfur, before the initiative gets stalled again for eight more months of "study".

"Wes Clark and the DLC have been calling for Darfur action for months" make sit sound like Wes is affiliated in some way with the DLC.

Perhaps you could change it to "Wes Clark as well as the DLC have been calling for Darfur action for months", if there is time to edit? Every time I read it my head feels like it is gonna explode.

Thanks.

TC

I know about your feelings about the DLC in general, and I see how the word association you note could be implied from reading that title, but misleading is perhaps too strong a word. The title is open to some interpretation, but it is a true statement on it's face.

However YOUR post now served the function of clearing up any confusion someone might otherwise have had about it.

I think a fair comment is that both Wes Clark and the DLC are calling for action, as are others not directly connected to either and/or both Wes Clark or the DLC.

I think the DLC is basically right on this one and I don't mind giving them credit that they deserve for that.

self delete

"Wes Clark and the DLC have been calling for Darfur action for months" make sit sound like Wes is affiliated in some way with the DLC.

Perhaps you could change it to "Wes Clark as well as the DLC have been calling for Darfur action for months", if there is time to edit? Every time I read it my head feels like it is gonna explode.

Thanks.

TC

Some people can take anything and make into an anti-DLC thing.

aimed at keeping Darfur threads on the front pages of GD.

It faded because such threads would invariable sink to inane shit like Bush falling off his bike threads or threads where people argue that ownership of a Saturday Night Special is an effective enough deterrent against the government's use of force that it protects civil liberties.

Issues like this, that truly transcend politics although there is always a political dimension involved, usually take a back seat on DU to a discussion about some comment Tweety made on his show the night before.

At DU's very best we can mobilize to force a filibuster in the Senate, but we can't make a sustained effort to stop actual genocide from continuing in a third world country. I understand this to an extent, I actually do, but not to the extent where we are at now, when hardly anyone even seems to care. If we put one fourth of the effort into stopping the genocide in Darfur that we put into trying to stop Alito in the Senate, especially now that Bush floated a trial balloon about possible U.S. intervention, we can make it happen. I'm sure of it, and we can save tens of thousands of lives by doing so.

That mini-movement to which I refer actually did keep at least one Darfur thread on the front page of GD for a couple of weeks at least, if memory serves correct.

Also, the flip side of the non-partisan nature of this is that something might actually get done if enough pressure is applied to elected officials. It's the sort of issue that gets play on both sides of the aisle, so between the two parties there might be enough warm bodies to take action.

(By the way, I'm not too hip to the idea of a U.S. led military intervention, if for no other reason than Bush and his crew of incompetent fools would find a way to make the situation worse. I would like to see heavy financial and logistical support for a multinational peacekeeping force, perhaps spearheaded by the AU.)

And you are right. The relatively non partisan nature of this issue can make it easier to actually achieve something that really matters. We can call Republican Senators and be taken seriously just as easily as we can call Democratic Senators.

And of course I do not trust Bush to run anything correctly, but this potential mission is not a large one. We have skilled people at the operational level. I think the U.S. can fill in gaps as needed, whatever turn out to be most pressing that we are well equipped to handle. It is not something I think our military should spearhead, but I don't think a complete U.S. military hands off policy has worked either.

"Emma Ellis is an eighth grade student at the Elisabeth Morrow School in Englewood. She wrote this essay with the editing and research support of her classmates. For more information on these students' project to raise awareness of Darfur, contact them at darfurpostcards@yahoo.com"



"On the continuing misery in Darfur

Sunday, February 19, 2006

By EMMA ELLIS



"The Holocaust. Rwanda. The Armenian genocide. These words evoke thoughts of ineffable death and suffering. After these tragedies, the world vowed "never again." Genocide is a problem of the past, right? But what about Darfur? Do you even know where it is?


In Darfur people are being systematically eliminated. However, only a fraction of what could be done to help has been done. The general public is not demanding further action, but we are the very group that could make the difference...


... As Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said, "The opposite of love is not hate. It's indifference."

It seems ridiculous that in an era where news is transmitted in an instant via the Internet, more people aren't aware of the circumstances in Darfur. I am currently in the eighth grade and didn't learn about it until about two months ago. We had just finished reading Weisel's Holocaust memoir "Night," and I saw the horrifying similarity between the two. All I could ask was: How could the people of today's world allow genocide to happen?"


There's more, she's pretty amazing:

http://www.northjersey.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjczN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk0MDYmZmdiZWw3Zjd2cWVlRUV5eTY4ODE0NDcmeXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXky

this administration would say that it was partially because of Saddam's Human Rights violations (reason #5) in the gassing of the Kurds.....

But when Genocide is actually in the process of being committed and could be stopped, we do nothing about it!

Shows the deep hypocracy of this administration clearer than just about anything else!

The left hasn't been exactly too swift about this issue either. Activists claim that because of the issue of Oil....best we not get involved.

So for the Right....it's ok to butcher folks for oil
and for the left, it's also ok to allow the butchering of folks because there is oil involved. So we end up with the same result--lotsa dead innocent people.

This fucking world and our Foreign policy positions are so confused, it ain't even funny--

General Clark has been calling attention to this Genocide since it started....although the Corporate Media has made certain that we don't know this.

Well done Tom! I'd like to mention, that if we are lucky enough for Bush to steal Clark's ideas on the matter, it will only be for putting into speeches. He won't actually do all that much with those ideas but try to cover his nakedness.

Julie

and the same holds true for most subsequent updates. Bush only moves a little (sometimes) toward a more reasonable position when the extreme consequences of his prior dogmatic driven initiatives are fully exposed.

Bush finally did agree to let American troops take part helping end the chaos in Liberia, after trying to avoid that commitment for a year or more. Because of America's history with Liberia, he was getting heat from a lot of nations for wanting to duck any responsibility there. Now Liberia has Africa's first female elected president.

If Bush does use Clark's ideas it will be to cover his nakedness, I don't doubt that at all, but for whatever reason, if the United States would now make Darfur a legitimate concern, many many lives can be saved.

Thanks Julie.

Keeping Darfur in the Public Eye
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=481945&mesg_id=481945

TC

The AU mandate ends on March 31, btw. Time is that short.

It's considered too inconvenient to actually get involved in preventing one, and the Pentagon is terrified of things escalating, so the usual policy in the past has been to obfuscate by refusing to use the "G word" until after things are over, so there's no risk of involvement. In terms of actual boots on the ground, official policy has been to not only refuse to participate, but to prevent other countries from doing so because, once again, it might escalate into something which involves the US. The Pentagon's said, on an official level, that it won't support involvement of US soldiers in any genocide situation until they can get perfect certainty that 80,000 civilians will be saved for every soldier killed or injured. Since perfect certainty's a pipe dream, that means never.

A country could actually be performing a mechanized holocaust, lampshades, furnaces and everything, and the administration - not just this one, but the past one, several before that, and any future ones I can think of - wouldn't dare lift a finger. The country's top levels are pretty hardwired that way.

(ObBookPlugs: Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide; Romeo Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda.)