For those that hear a little about the conflict but are confused, read this article. It's long, but incredibly eye opening. It may even make you question your beliefs on intervention. It probably should. I don't understand how we can watch genocide happen and just ignore it. Ultimately it's a scathing indictment of the entire world at large. While world leaders twiddle their thumbs or worse yet support the murderers, thousands have died and are continuing to die.
http://tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=36975a7c-224c-438a-9538-130b9e5cdd91&p=1"I.
In July 2004, a colleague beckoned Brian Steidle into his office and took out a laptop. "As he handed me his computer," writes Steidle in The Devil Came on Horseback, his memoir about Darfur, "a series of the most disturbing images I had ever seen came across the screen"--photographs of young girls who had been handcuffed and burned to death outside their school. Steidle, a former U.S. marine, was working as a peacekeeper in southern Sudan. His job was to monitor a cease-fire between the country's government and the rebels in the south--a cease-fire that had ended a decades-long civil war in which some two million people had died. But just as a tenuous peace was finally taking hold in the south, violence had broken out in Sudan's western corner--a dusty, impoverished region called Darfur. That was where the unbearable pictures had been taken. Steidle was stunned by what he saw on the laptop, and he assumed that others would be stunned, too. "If these photos were released to the public," he e-mailed home, "there would be troops in here in no time."
Four years later, the sentiment seems quaint. For we are awash in information about Darfur. Disturbing photos--now ubiquitous--of torture, death, and starvation are just the beginning of it. There are the regular dispatches of wire service reporters, the drumbeat of opinion columns, and the images beamed home by television cameras. There are more websites maintained by activists and human rights groups than anyone can count. And now there is something else, too: a substantial body of literature, academic and popular, about western Sudan. This was not always the case. Africa may be a continent full of forgotten corners, but until a few years ago not many were quite as forgotten as Darfur. I took an African history course in college, and when, in early 2006, I dug out my textbook (which carries the authoritative-sounding title Africans: The History of a Continent) and looked in the index, I found just four isolated mentions of Darfur. The region's colonial history merited less than a sentence: "Darfur in the Sudan and Ovamboland in northern Namibia were conquered during the First World War, the interior of British Somaliland in 1920." That was the extent of it.
I was, at the time, reading the first two books to trace the historical roots of the crisis--Gerard Prunier's Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide and Alex de Waal and Julie Flint's Darfur: A Short History of a Long War. Searching for something to which I might compare them, I visited the libraries of two large research universities. There I found many books about Sudan, but relatively few about Darfur. The Sudan books contained plenty of detail on the colonial-era exploits of British military men such as Charles Gordon and Horatio Kitchener, the political intrigue that had unfolded in Khartoum in the years since independence, and the decades of civil war between Sudan's northern and southern halves. But in many of those books, Darfur--which contains approximately 15 percent of Sudan's population and about 20 percent of its land mass--was mentioned only as an afterthought.
Today, by contrast, anybody going to a university library--or, for that matter, a Barnes & Noble--in search of information about Darfur would not have a hard time finding it. On the heels of those first two books has come an avalanche of published material about western Sudan--memoirs, journalistic accounts, histories. There is a book by a survivor of the genocide; memoirs by a nurse working for Doctors Without Borders, a top-ranking U.N. official, and an African Union peacekeeper; two collections of essays that narrate the events of the past few years--particularly the failed international effort to stop the killing--in painstaking detail; a book by three activists who snuck into Darfur in November 2004; an account that patiently traces the history of the region; a book that links the Darfur genocide to the decades-long war between Libya and Chad; and even a book--easily the oddest entry in this grim genre--co-authored by the actor Don Cheadle. (About his visit to a camp for Darfuri refugees, Cheadle writes: "Just then, I catch the eye of a little boy, no more than ten or eleven, staring at me tripping. I hope he didn't vibe my slippery state." As if evil will be defeated by cool.) And there are also the movies: documentaries that focus on the experiences of aid workers, activists, and of course the victims themselves--men and women whose faces and voices are captured in hour after hour of stomach-churning interviews, whose children have been murdered and communities destroyed, whose existence is now confined to squalid refugee camps from which they will probably never go home.
All this gives Darfur a morbid sort of distinction. No genocide has ever been so thoroughly documented while it was taking place. There were certainly no independent film-makers in Auschwitz in 1942, and the best-known Holocaust memoirs did not achieve a wide audience until years after the war. The world more or less looked the other way as genocide unfolded in Cambodia during the 1970s, and the slaughter in Rwanda happened so quickly--a mere hundred days--that by the time the public grasped the extent of the horror, the killing was done. But here is Darfur, whose torments are known to all. The sheer volume of historical, anthropological, and narrative detail available to the public about the genocide is staggering. In the case of the genocide in Darfur, ignorance has never been possible. But the genocide continues. We document what we do not stop. The truth does not set anybody free."
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