Manila Times, Philippines
April 26 2004
DOUBLETAKE
Ignoring genocide
By Eric F. Mallonga
SUPERPOWER America possesses vast information on world events before
they even happen. Its government either makes world events happen or
wait for events to happen to it or to other countries before it even
react. Often, America ignores the world event, especially when it
has no bearing or consequence to America’s security and economy. As
the only superpower nation today, it claims the moral authority to
direct world events and shepherd other interest in shepherding are
those that possess vast natural resources, the destruction of which
would substantially affect the American economy, such as Iraq and the
other oil-producing Middle East countries.
Former President Bill Clinton knew about the fierce rivalry between
the Hutus and Tusis of Rwanda. He had been informed about the
genocidal assaults by one tribe against the other even as they were
still on the planning table. He took no action – nothing remedial nor
preemptive. Obviously, America has no economic or security interest
in the Dark Continent, or in any of its countries, except for one
phase in its historical past when its people engaged in the
shamelessness of African slavery in America. In many African
countries, genocide takes place on a daily occurrence albeit on a
lesser scale than the Rwandese bloodbath or the Kurdish massacre by
the Hussein regime in Iraq. I was shocked when one Congolese social
worker informed participants at a Monte-Carlo symposium last year
that children as young as eight years or even younger, were recruited
by both government and insurgency forces into their respective armies
for as long as they could carry a gun. These child combatants would
commit massacres, rapes, torture and other atrocities as directed or
allowed by their military commanders. Sometimes, the comparison with
the Philippine situation is surprisingly similar as we now witness on
our television screen the participation of teenagers or children in
their pre-teens, as young as eight years, in armed conflict, having
been recruited into the communist or extremist Islamic insurgency
groups. It is a legacy of bloodbath and violence that Marxist rebels
and Muslim jihadists wish to pass on to the younger generations of
Filipinos, or to the world.
Today, nobody seems to be aware or even outraged by the genocide
taking place in Sudan. Dubya Bush is not interested. Neither is Kofi
Annan raising a voice against the bloody purges. In Darfur, Sudan,
thousands of people have already been massacred, with one million
black Africans driven from their homes by lighter skinned Arabs in
the Janjaweed. The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof points
out that Darfur, a region which is the size of France, has been
burned and emptied as the Arab Janjaweed militia, armed by the
Sudanese government, have destroyed the water wells, or fouled them
up by dumping corpses into them, to prevent the villagers from ever
returning to their ancestral lands. When tribal African men and
teenage boys show up at the wells to gather water for their families,
they are shot. When it is African women and girls, they are raped.
One thousand people are dying weekly and the world is not paying any
attention.
The United Nations Security Council was not established for the
parochial interest of its five most powerful council-member nations.
As hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees are escaping into the
Chad border, hundreds of thousands of fresh graves are being dug up
for Sudanese children. In the Darfur villages, isolated and
unschooled tribal peasants are suddenly confronted with modern
helicopters opening fire with their machine guns and missiles on
their innocent children. The United Nations was created to respond to
the evils of genocide as it had never been able to respond
appropriately to past genocidal events – in Armenia, in Germany, in
Cambodia, in Vietnam, in Bosnia. But Kofi Annan should not rely on
Bush for any support as the world knows that America’s interests are
delimited to its own national security and economy. American
companies might even be earning billions from the purchase by the
Sudanese government of war equipment, vehicles, helicopters and
armaments used in the Sudanese genocide so that maintaining political
instability in that side of the world remains beneficial to American
economy.
How many more children have to be massacred, tortured, burned to
death, raped, branded like animals, recruited into the army and
transformed into killing and raping machines before the world finally
demands accountability from the participants to this genocide,
including those countries which supply armaments that make genocide
possible?