The shadow of Darfur
by: Yosef Goell
The Jerusalem Post
March 21, 2005, Monday
It would be hard to overstate the diplomatic coup entailed in
assembling so many of the world’s leaders as Israel did last week for
the inauguration of Yad Vashem’s new Holocaust museum in Jerusalem.
It would be premature however to parlay those first impressions into
predictions about their effect on the rising tide of anti-Semitism –
most of it of Muslim origin – in their respective countries.
But as I listened to the cascade of speeches some of them truly moving
and impressive I found myself getting madder and madder. For there
among those speakers and in the front seats of the world’s movers and
shakers sat the very men who could if they wanted to put an end not
to a 65 genocide against the Jewish people but to an ongoing genocide
in not-too-far off Darfur in Sudan.
On March 9 top UN relief official Jan Egeland sounded the alarm in a
call for more troops from the African Union. There is no other place
in the world where so many lives are at stake, Egeland said. “If
it goes well we could have a historic turn for the better for six
million internally displaced – which is five times more than were
displaced by the Indian Ocean tsunami. If it goes badly it could be
a situation of mass death mass suffering for millions of people.”
The US Congress and government have in July and September 2004
respectively defined the continuing horrors in Darfur as “genocide.”
Yet the United Nations has not; and this week the UN Security Council
remained deadlocked over a resolution that would step up monitoring
and threaten sanctions against the Sudanese government.
The hesitation of the UN is incredible given that this week Egeland
himself more than doubled his estimate of the number killed over the
past 19 months to 180 0
IN THE shadow of Darfur the tone at the Yad Vashem ceremony could
only be described as smug – since the world leaders were there to
claim that the lesson of the Holocaust had been learned. The sorry
fact is that the gentlemen shivering in their heavy coats in the
Jerusalem winter had apparently learned… nothing.
It is doubtful that their leadership predecessors in the 1930s and
40s wanted to conspire with Hitler in annihilating the Jews; what
caused the number of butchered Jews to pile up to six million was
those leaders’ inaction.
Darfur is merely the latest example of the failure of the international
community to apply the lessons of the Holocaust to the barbarity of
Bosnia and Kosovo in Europe of Rwanda in Africa and much earlier of
the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
On Saturday the Los Angeles Times reported that UN Secretary-General
Kofi Annan was due to table sweeping proposals for revamping the
60-year-old world organization which has lately come in for scathing
criticism. I wouldn’t hold my breath however in expecting these
reforms to turn the UN into an effective genocide-fighting body.
One of the silver linings to the black cloud of a feckless
international community has been the performance of some of the world’s
top journalists. Whatever I know about Darfur has come nearly entirely
from my hero New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff who has done
a masterful job of reporting from Darfur forcing the international
community to sit up and take notice.
I mention Kristoff as a comparison to the Times’s own abysmal failure
two decades earlier as the Rwanda holocaust took place. I used to
follow infrequent one-inch reports in the Times on cases of ethnic
slaughter (the term ethnic cleansing had not yet emerged) in that
unheard of country somewhere in the middle of the Black Continent.
Apparently no Times editor believed those horrendous reports justified
full follow-ups. Which is why Kristoff and his editors deserve kudos
on their coverage of Darfur today.
SOME OF the Israeli media accompanied the Yad Vashem inauguration with
reports of an ideological debate between Yad Vashem and the Foreign
Ministry over how to balance the universal and particularist aspects
of the Holocaust. It was also reported that the new Yad Vashem was
seen as an answer to the architecturally more sophisticated Holocaust
Museum in Washington DC.
When my wife and I visited the Washington museum in the early 1990s we
were impressed with a plaque on the wall bearing a quote from Hitler
to his Wermacht generals to the effect that the same world that had
chosen to overlook the Turkish genocide against the Armenians during
World War I would let the Germans do what they wanted with the Jewish
populations slated for annihilation.
This is exactly what occurred. And what happened to us 60 years ago
was so horrendous that we have the right to demand of the world that
no further genocides against the Jews be permitted. But the fuller
lesson of the Holocaust is that no genocide should be permitted
against anyone anywhere.
Toleration of genocide anywhere coupled with the persistence of even
low-level anti-Semitism will mean that Darfurs Rwandas and Bosnias
will soon evolve into new genocides against the Jews.