CanadianChristianity.com, Canada
Sept 23 2004
Comment: Sudan genocide challenges Canadian indifference
By Mel Middleton
ChristianWeek
GENOCIDE is raging in the nation of Sudan. It is now unquestionably
the greatest humanitarian crisis in the world today.
Unfortunately, our political leadership is not acknowledging it. The
reason for this is clear. Use of the term ‘genocide,’ under
international law, carries with it an obligation for countries to act
— and action to save African lives carries too few political
benefits.
Following the Nazi holocaust, a shocked international community
cried, “Never again!” Never again would a dictator like Hitler be
permitted to exterminate an ethnic group like the Jews. Never again
would the world stand idly by while hundreds of thousands of people
stood waiting to be slaughtered. Never again would such an evil be
allowed to take root and flourish.
But it has. The list of post-Nazi genocides — including Biafra,
Cambodia, Rwanda, Congo and Sudan — continues to grow. The
international community, including Canada, has yet to demonstrate
that it is serious about stopping genocide.
We recently observed the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan holocaust,
where the world community stood idly by while extremists hacked to
death more than 800,000 people in front of the world’s media. This
genocide was both predictable and preventable, yet the international
community did nothing.
But no politician, no bureaucrat, no western official has paid any
political price for this decision — one which has wrought such
unimaginable suffering on the entire region. U.S. president Bill
Clinton, who led the way in ‘doing nothing,’ was re-elected. UN
bureaucrat Kofi Annan, who gave the orders to ‘do nothing,’ was
promoted to the top UN position of Secretary General.
Recently, the Canadian House of Commons voted to declare the Turkish
slaughter of Armenians to be “genocide.” Yet Canada’s Liberal cabinet
refused to support the motion. Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham
urged parliamentarians not to recognize this genocide, fearing that
it might adversely affect trade with Turkey. Canada’s justice
minister, Irwin Cotler, who only a few days before had issued strong
pronouncements about the need to never stand idly by in the face of
genocide, did not even bother to show up for the vote.
With political leadership like this, it is not surprising that
genocide is mushrooming in Darfur, Sudan. As New York Times columnist
Nicholas D. Kristof wrote in an April 14 editorial: “In the last l00
years, the United States has reacted to one genocide after another —
Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Bosnians — by making excuses at the
time, and then saying, too late, ‘Oh, if only we had known!’
“Well, this time we know what is happening in Darfur: 110,000
refugees have escaped into Chad and testify to the atrocities. How
many more parents will be forced to choose whether their children are
shot or burned to death before we get serious?”
On July 9, 2004, Sudan researcher Eric Reeves pleaded with the world
to take action, concluding that if genocide is allowed to take its
ugly course in Sudan, “It will not be because we did not know what
was happening or what needed to be done. It will be because we
ourselves, acquiescing in the face of political obstacles, judged
these African lives not worth saving. It is difficult to imagine an
uglier truth for history to record, but history will have no choice.”
For Canadians, the moral implications of genocide in Sudan are even
more disturbing. It was Canadian oil money and Canadian moral cover
which helped to solidify Khartoum’s brutal stranglehold on power in
Sudan. It was this blood oil, backed by Canada’s banks and the Canada
Pension Plan, which provided Sudan’s military junta with the
resources to purchase the helicopter gunships and other weaponry of
genocide. Sudan’s holocaust is the direct result of failed Canadian
foreign policy.
The real lesson of the tragedy in Sudan is that genocide will
continue to occur until politicians pay a price for allowing it to
occur. As long as turning a blind eye to genocide is the political
path of least resistance, the cry of “never again” will have no
meaning.
For God’s people, who are commanded to “let justice roll down like a
river,” indifference is not a moral option.
Mel Middleton is executive director of Freedom Quest International.