Support Jon Corzine's Campaign Against Genocide in Darfur

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.

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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.

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