The Fugitive’s Tale

The New York Times
July 16, 2006 Sunday

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Traditionally, our best excuse for inaction in the face of genocide
was that we didn’t fully know what was going on — until too late.

During the Holocaust, reports trickled out of Nazi areas of atrocities
and extermination camps, but they encountered widespread skepticism. "I
don’t believe you," Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court justice,
told Jan Karski, a Polish Catholic who at extraordinary risk had
visited a Nazi death camp as well as the Warsaw Ghetto and finally
escaped with hundreds of documents.

Likewise, the Turks mostly barred access to the scene as they
industriously killed off Armenians (a pattern of denial that persists
in Turkey today). Cambodia sealed itself off during Pol Pot’s rule.
And when Westerners evacuated from Rwanda in 1994 (the French airlifted
out their embassy dog, while leaving behind local employees to be
butchered), few witnesses were left to chronicle the savagery day
by day.

That’s what makes Darfur so unusual in the history of genocide: the
savagery is unfolding in plain view, and yet as world leaders gather
in Russia for the Group of 8 summit meeting, the basic international
response is to look the other way.

No genocide has ever been publicly chronicled so extensively as
this one. We have satellite images of the burned villages, and
detailed reports from groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty
International. Aid workers interact daily with the two million
displaced people, and we can watch as Sudan spreads instability into
neighboring countries.

Indeed, now we have a witness who has come all the way to America:
Hashim Adam Mersal, a young man now living in Pennsylvania with the
help of the Pittsburgh Refugee Center.

Mr. Hashim, who is 26, is a member of the Zaghawa tribe, which has been
particularly targeted for death in Darfur. He grew up in a village
called Tomorna and lived a relatively prosperous life because of his
family’s large herd of 400 cattle and 150 sheep.

Then in August 2003, the Sudanese government sent the janjaweed
militias to attack black African villages in his region. Mr. Hashim
escaped with some of the livestock, but his father and brother (a
24-year-old father of two) were both killed, along with many others —
including eight children in one family. Mr. Hashim isn’t sure what
happened to the rest of his family.

"It was humans and livestock all mixed together, running for
survival," Mr. Hashim remembers. "Some kids were falling behind,
and we just couldn’t help. We couldn’t do anything for those falling
back. There was lots of crying, but you were too scared to stop and
help anyone. Some were wounded and couldn’t keep up. Some were left
behind and died."

In that flight, Mr. Hashim passed other villages that had been
burned. "Bodies were scattered everywhere," he said.

Eventually, Mr. Hashim made his way to the Chadian capital. He used
cash and tribal connections to obtain a fake Chadian passport and,
somehow, a diplomatic visa to the U.S. So Mr. Hashim came to the U.S.
— only to be jailed on immigration charges. He was released on bail
and is fighting deportation back to Sudan; a hearing is scheduled
for October.

Frankly, the best place to put Mr. Hashim isn’t in jail, but in the
White House Rose Garden for a photo-op with President Bush to call
attention to the genocide.

Mr. Hashim studies English into the wee hours in hopes of communicating
better, so as to plead with Americans to help save his people. At
the same time, he is wracked by guilt at having survived when so many
others died. "I am alive and breathing, but I am like a dead man who
walks," he said. "The rest of my life will be nothing but sorrow."

In the small community of Darfur-watchers in America, there is
deepening gloom. There has been an outcry at the grass-roots level —
gathered one million signatures demanding a greater
response — but the genocide is still spreading. John Prendergast
of the International Crisis Group, just back from the region, warns
that "the international community is actually missing the potential
enormity of the crisis as it metastasizes to Chad and the Central
African Republic."

A conference of donors on Tuesday in Brussels will be an important
test of whether there is any international resolve to save lives.

But increasingly it appears that even when the world has no excuse
at all for inaction — when it is fully informed about a genocide in
real time — it still cannot be bothered to do much about it.