Will We Say ‘Never Again’ Yet Again?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: March 27, 2004

LONG THE CHAD-SUDAN BORDER – For decades, whenever the topic of
genocide has come up, the refrain has been, “Never again.”

Yet right now, the government of Sudan is engaging in genocide against
three large African tribes in its Darfur region here. Some 1,000
people are being killed a week, tribeswomen are being systematically
raped, 700,000 people have been driven from their homes, and Sudan’s
Army is even bombing the survivors.

And the world yawns.

So what do we tell refugees like Muhammad Yakob Hussein, who lives in
the open desert here because his home was burned and his family
members killed in Sudan? He now risks being shot whenever he goes to a
well to fetch water. Do we advise such refugees that “never again”
meant nothing more than that a Führer named Hitler will never
again construct death camps in Germany?

Interviews with refugees like Mr. Hussein ‘ as well as with aid
workers and U.N. officials ‘ leave no doubt that attacks in Darfur are
not simply random atrocities. Rather, as a senior U.N. official,
Mukesh Kapila, put it, “It is an organized attempt to do away with a
group of people.”

“All I have left is this jalabiya,” or cloak, said Mr. Hussein, who
claimed to be 70 but looked younger (ages here tend to be vague
aspirations, and they usually emerge in multiples of 10). Mr. Hussein
said he’d fled three days earlier after an attack in which his three
brothers were killed and all his livestock stolen: “Everything is
lost. They burned everything.”

Another man, Khamis Muhammad Issa, a strapping 21-year-old, was left
with something more than his clothes ‘ a bullet in the back. He showed
me the bulge of the bullet under the skin. The bullet wiggled under my
touch.

“They came in the night and burned my village,” he said. “I was
running away and they fired. I fell, and they thought I was dead.”

In my last column, I called these actions “ethnic cleansing.” But
let’s be blunt: Sudan’s behavior also easily meets the definition of
genocide in Article 2 of the 1948 convention against genocide. That
convention not only authorizes but also obligates the nations
ratifying it ‘ including the U.S. ‘ to stand up to genocide.

The killings are being orchestrated by the Arab-dominated Sudanese
government, partly through the Janjaweed militia, made up of Arab
raiders armed by the government. The victims are non-Arabs: blacks in
the Zaghawa, Massaliet and Fur tribes. “The Arabs want to get rid of
anyone with black skin,” Youssef Yakob Abdullah said. In the area of
Darfur that he fled, “there are no blacks left,” he said.

In Darfur, the fighting is not over religion, for the victims as well
as the killers are Muslims. It is more ethnic and racial, reflecting
some of the ancient tension between herdsmen (the Arabs in Darfur) and
farmers (the black Africans, although they herd as well). The Arabs
and non-Arabs compete for water and forage, made scarce by
environmental degradation and the spread of the desert.

In her superb book on the history of genocide, “A Problem from Hell,”
Samantha Power focuses on the astonishing fact that U.S. leaders
always denounce massacres in the abstract or after they are over ‘
but, until Kosovo, never intervened in the 20th century to stop
genocide and “rarely even made a point of condemning it as it
occurred.” The U.S. excuses now are the same ones we used when
Armenians were killed in 1915 and Bosnians and Rwandans died in the
1990’s: the bloodshed is in a remote area; we have other priorities;
standing up for the victims may compromise other foreign policy
interests.

I’m not arguing that we should invade Sudan. But one of the lessons of
history is that very modest efforts can save large numbers of
lives. Nothing is so effective in curbing ethnic cleansing as calling
attention to it.

President Bush could mention Darfur or meet a refugee. The deputy
secretary of state could visit the border areas here in Chad. We could
raise the issue before the U.N. And the onus is not just on the U.S.:
it’s shameful that African and Muslim countries don’t offer at least a
whisper of protest at the slaughter of fellow Africans and Muslims.

Are the world’s pledges of “never again” really going to ring hollow
one more time?