Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pennsylvania)
July 25, 2007 Wednesday
SOONER EDITION

DEALING WITH DARFUR;
WASHINGTON HAS OTHER FISH TO FRY, BUT WE STILL SHOULD DO MORE TO STOP
THE GENOCIDE

by Dan Simpson

Pittsburgh benefited last week from the visit of retired U.S.
ambassador Larry G. Rossin, currently serving as senior international
coordinator for the Save Darfur Coalition, represented here by the
five-organization Pittsburgh Darfur Emergency Coalition.

Mr. Rossin has experience dealing with tough problems, including as
U.S. Ambassador to Croatia and assignments in Haiti and Kosovo. As
problems go, Darfur is as bad as it gets. He remains upbeat and has
ideas of how to push ahead.

Darfur, which means "place of the Fur people," is part of Western
Sudan. Its problems have spilled over into neighboring Chad and the
Central African Republic. The adjacent regions of both of those
countries share with Darfur excruciating dryness and poverty,
isolation and now displaced people and conflict. It is estimated that
more than 2.5 million people have been dislodged by the Darfur
troubles, which began in 2003, with between 200,000 and 400,000
killed. One must add that whenever numbers like that are rounded off
to the nearest hundred thousand it means that no one really knows how
many have been displaced or killed. But it’s a lot.

Partly because the Darfur problem has been around for a while it
receives some attention. On Thursday President Bush said he had
considered sending U.S. troops there — but had rejected the idea.
(It might have been the matter of 170,000 U.S. troops in Iraq with
more possibly to be sent to enhance the "surge.") On Friday, meeting
in Paris, new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and new French
President Nicolas Sarkozy pledged to do something about Darfur, in
the U.N. Security Council or somewhere, joining Mr. Bush in talking
about what a terrible problem it was and how something had to be done
about it by someone.

Darfur stays in front of a not-awfully-interested U.S. population
because of the good work of people like Mr. Rossin and the Rev.
Carmen A. D’Amico, pastor of St. Benedict the Moor Catholic Church on
the Hill, which hosted a public meeting Thursday night. One reason
the Darfur issue continues to get attention is that it has been
called genocide.

This means, first, that peoples who have been victims of genocide,
such as Armenians, Jews and Rwandans, are interested in Darfur due to
fellow-feeling and the sympathy of shared pain and grief, and because
they don’t want their own fates to be forgotten by history.

Second, genocide is something that no one wants to be accused of
perpetrating, or of having condoned by inaction. This is what gets
Mr. Bush to talk about it, although he has yet to do anything that
has any significant impact in Darfur or Sudan.

Although Darfur is a perfectly ghastly problem, it is not easily
susceptible to becoming an issue in the U.S. presidential elections
because it is too complicated. It is hard to see the candidates
making a point in a speech about Darfur, starting by hoisting a map
to show where the place is.

Here are some of the reasons why Darfur is so hard.

* Like real estate, location. No infrastructure. No roads. No air
strips. Not even any cities. Geographically it is in the middle of
the roughest part of Africa.

* It is in Sudan, a country that has been the epitome of difficult
African countries since well before independence in 1956. If anyone
saw the movie "Khartoum," remember when the Mahdi, played by Sir
Laurence Olivier in black face with an Indian accent, organized the
death by spearing of Charlton Heston, playing British General Sir
Charles Gordon, on the porch of his office? Sudan is and always has
been an uneasy combination of pastoralists speaking Arabic,
darker-skinned farmers speaking African languages and others, living
in a large country with little water and few resources. The
pastoralists, with a general, Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, as
president now, have been on top pretty much since the beginning. His
group’s approach to human rights has been very mixed.

Sudan was torn by north-south civil war for decades, ending with a
fragile agreement in 2005. Some people speculate that the reason the
world hasn’t pushed Sudan harder on Darfur is because of the risk of
the north-south accord, which was difficult to achieve, coming
unglued.

The Sudanese government is quite artful at fending off attempts to
influence its behavior through international pressure. It allowed
basically clawless African Union peacekeepers to be sent to Darfur.
It has bobbed and weaved about allowing in potentially more competent
U.N. peacekeeping forces.

* Sudan found oil. Chinese companies have staked out most of it.
China has also quietly assumed the role of protector of Sudan in the
United Nations and other forums. There is some thought that China’s
wishing to host a quiet and unprotested Olympic games in 2008 will
make it susceptible to pressure to push the Sudanese to be reasonable
about Darfur. I am skeptical. If one wanted to push the Chinese about
something in connection with the Olympics, one could easily think of
trying to ensure the human rights of the Tibetans, the Uighars or
Falun Gong, under China’s own roof.

Apart from giving the Sudanese independence of action, its oil also
serves as a deterrent to U.S. involvement in the Darfur affair. All
it would take is for someone to suggest that the United States was
interested in intervening in Sudan to get its hands on the country’s
oil — as it is sometimes suggested with respect to Iraq — or,
worse, that the United States was, in fact, zeroing in on another
Muslim country, and our engagement could become unwelcome indeed.

I see some hope in increased French interest in Darfur, since it has
military and other resources in neighboring Chad and the Central
African Republic. I think, for now, however, that the United States
has other fish to fry, although the Darfur coalition should
definitely keep the heat on Washington on this issue.