“Genocide” in Darfur
You see it everywhere: programs, commercials, fliers, events, fundraisers, 
post cards, Ads in the New York Times, all centered around the slogan, “Save Darfur”. But who knows what’s really going on in Darfur? Who or what are we saving Darfur from? If you google, “Save Darfur,” you’ll get several links to pages which describe what’s going on in Sudan as ethnic cleansing. They call it genocide.
The refugees now face starvation, disease, and rape, while those who remain in Darfur risk displacement, torture, and murder. We must act quickly and decisively to end this genocide before hundreds of thousands more people are killed. (from savedarfur.org)
Genocide is the systematic destruction of a people, i.e. a specific, ethnic, racial or religious group; ethnic cleansing, like the Germans, who attempted to exterminate Jews in the Holocaust, or the Hutu militia groups who tried to eliminate all Tutsis and Hutu sympathizers in the Rwandan civil war in 1994. But is this what’s going on in Darfur? The United States thinks so. However, the chair of the African Union, the United Nations, and the 2005 Security Council all report unanimously: the civil war in Sudan is not genocide. Consider these statements from the chair of the African Union, Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo in 2004:
Before you can say that this is genocide or ethnic cleansing, we will have to have a definite decision and plan and programme of a government to wipe out a particular group of people, then we will be talking about genocide, ethnic cleansing. What we know is not that. What we know is that there was an uprising, rebellion, and the government armed another group of people to stop that rebellion. That’s what we know. That does not amount to genocide from our own reckoning. It amounts to of course conflict. It amounts to violence. (read more here).
The ensuing Security Council report did find that militias in Darfur, on both sides of the conflict were guilty of “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity,” however this is not genocide, nor is it unique to Sudan. The war in Iraq and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon for example, have been responsible for similar crimes. The United States media, led by Nicholas Kristof, attempts to brand the Sudanese civil war as genocide on the basis that Sudan’s ‘Arab rulers’ are attempting to wipe out all ‘African tribes’ and other non-Arabs. This is the initiative being pushed by an administration who supports wars and occupations in Iraq and Palestine, and benefits from anti-Arab, anti-Muslim sentiment among the American public to justify atrocities of their own design. I’m not a political science major, but am I the only one who finds it curious that the United States would push describe the crisis in Sudan as genocide while neither the African Union or the United Nations follow suit? There definitely appears to be ulterior motives behind this push. Yoshie Furuhashi, a Monthly Review editor, has criticized the “Save Darfur” campaign for U.S. intervention as ‘imperialism’ in humanitarian guise, combined with a strong tinge of anti-Arab prejudice.
So what do we do with this information? Should the conflict in Darfur’s designation as “genocide” vs. “war zone”, influence our desire to speak out for human rights? Even if the United States does have ulterior motives, aren’t we still obliged to stand up against injustice? The fact is, hundreds of thousands of Sudanese lives have already been lost (roughly the same amount of Iraqi lives lost through “Operation Iraqi Freedom”) what can we do to stop the bloodshed? Some people think that a US military invasion would not quell the rebellion in Darfur but rather expand it, as it has done in Iraq and other places. Others think that if the United States does not intervene, we’ll have another Rwanda on our hands. What do you think?
(this article was inspired by our big sisters at Pambazuka News: A weekly forum for social justice in Africa)
Published on April 25, 2007 at 11:44 am.
3 Comments.
Filed under news/politics, Africa.
