Sing out against genocide

Dafur just another example of the continuance of genocide

By: Hank Kalet
   Never again apparently does not mean never again.
   Following each recent instance of genocide on the world stage — whether it be in Bosnia Herzegovina, Rwanda or now in Sudan, we hear the same promise made to the Jews and the rest of the world following the Nazi Holocaust: "Never again."
   Never again would we allow the systematic slaughter of a rational, ethnic, religious or national group.
   But, as Samantha Power of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University wrote in an essay for the PBS Frontline television series on Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic and his role in the Bosnian genocide, "Genocide has occurred so often and so uncontested in the last 50 years that an epithet more apt in describing recent events than the oft-chanted ‘Never Again’ is in fact ‘Again and Again.’"
   That was in 1998 and, yet, here we are again, watching passively as the government of Sudan and its allies, the Janjaweed militias, engage in what scholar Eric Reeves has called the "first great episode of genocidal destruction in the 21st century."
   Since 2003, according to The New York Times, an estimated 200,000-plus people have died in Darfur and another 2 million have been forced to flee — though some organizations cite higher figures.
   The genocide has made an impression on several local teens, spurring them to organize a benefit concert at Woodlot Park on Saturday. The concert— which is raising money for the nonprofit and student-run organization, Help Darfur Now, to offer aid to Sudanese refugees — will kick off at 5 p.m.
   Aaron Gittleman, a 17-year-old senior at South Brunswick High School, helped organize the Woodlot Park event. He told us earlier this year that "the international community is taking minimal amounts of action toward ending the violence in Sudan, and much of this lack of motivation is due to the lack of awareness that people, especially Americans, have toward the genocide."
   It’s hard to disagree.
   Both the United States and the international community have been slow to respond to the slaughter — a U.N. arms embargo is in place, but it applies only to rebel forces and the Janjaweed and not to the Sudanese government, and the African Union has sent some peace-keeping forces. Much of the violence has subsided, but the effects of the systematic slaughter continue as the Sudanese government continues its interference with humanitarian aid.
   "Sometime in summer 2004 — we’ll probably never know just when — human mortality in the Darfur genocide became more a function of malnutrition and disease than violent destruction," Mr. Reeves wrote in the New Republic Online. "What we must not lose sight of is that deaths from malnutrition and disease are no less the product of genocidal ambitions than violent killings: Having so comprehensively and deliberately destroyed the villages and livelihoods of the African tribal populations of Darfur, Khartoum and its Janjaweed allies bear full responsibility for the ongoing deadly consequences of these assaults on civilian targets."
   The relative silence of the international community — when compared, for instance, to the mobilization leading up to the Iraq War or the international condemnation and activity concerning Iran’s nuclear program — may be coming to an end. Both American and British officials are calling for more comprehensive sanctions, while a U.S. House of Representatives resolution called on China, which is one of Sudan’s primary economic sponsors (it buys much of Sudan’s oil), to use its influence to end the genocide.
   "The resolution," according to The New York Times, "urged China to stop selling Sudan arms and suspend economic cooperation with Sudan until Sudan ‘stops its attacks on civilians’ in Darfur and engages in negotiations with Darfur rebels to achieve a peace deal."
   All of this is well and good and may have some impact, but the reality is that the incremental approach they have taken may not be enough.
   The sad fact is that the international community has not shown the will to follow its own conventions on the prevention of genocide and has, in most cases, avoided designating conflicts like those in Bosnia, Rwanda and now Darfur as genocide until it was too late.
   It only has been because of people like Aaron Gittleman and others working at the grassroots level that the tragedy of Darfur is being addressed at all.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press. His e-mail is [email protected].