Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Little Rock)
May 24, 2005 Tuesday
COLUMNISTS Cozying up to genocide
George Arnold
Sam Totten is an education professor at the University of Arkansas.
In addition to training aspiring teachers, he has another specialty.
He studies genocide.
It’s a passion with him. He’s just back from Armenia, where he
attended an international conference on the subject. On the way home,
he traveled into the Syrian desert to attend a ceremony commemorating
the slaughter of the Armenians by the Turks in the early 20th
century.
He does more than study the bad old days. Last summer, he was one of
24 investigators chosen to document the systematic extermination of
black Africans by Arabs in the Darfur region of Sudan. He was based
in Chad, where he interviewed survivors of the ongoing massacres.
When Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, reported to Congress
in September that genocide was occurring in Darfur, he cited the work
of the investigators as evidence.
But when Professor Totten came home from his latest trip, he found
the U.S. government had backed away from Colin Powell’s damning
words. The White House wants Congress to drop consideration of
legislative sanctions related to Darfur. The Darfur Accountability
Act, already passed by the Senate, would freeze assets of those
directing the genocide and would impose a no-fly zone to stop the
bombing of villages by Sudanese aircraft.
The conflict in Darfur has already claimed an estimated 400,000
lives. As many as 500 more die every day, according to Sam Totten.
The State Department (post-Colin Powell) now declines to repeat his
charge of genocide.
Why the reversal?
Here we go again, with the war on terror crowding out other
considerations. The Sudanese government, its hands bloody from
abetting the Darfur massacres, is said to be cooperating with
Washington in the global war on terror. So the administration doesn’t
want to rock that particular boat.
This isn’t just a case of cozying up to yet another repressive
regime. It’s giving a pass to thugs responsible for as many as 500
deaths a day-every day. The death toll in Darfur dwarfs the carnage
in Iraq these days, and Iraq routinely makes the front page. Darfur
hardly makes the news at all. The world doesn’t much care what’s
going on in Darfur, horrific as it is.
Sam Totten says the reasons for the lack of concern are complicated.
With no popular demand that something be done, the governments that
could make a difference in Darfur are free to play geopolitics over
the issue. Sudan is a Muslim country and other Muslim countries don’t
want to interfere with it. European governments are already nervous
because some of them have supported the war in Iraq. They don’t want
to stir more resentment by getting involved in Darfur.
Other than cooperation in the war on terror, the United States has
little direct interest in Sudan. China, which does oil drilling in
Sudan, consistently runs interference for the Sudanese government in
the United Nations. Russia, like China, a permanent, veto-wielding
member of the UN Security Council, sells arms to Sudan and opposes
sanctions.
Finally, there could be a racial angle to the lack of interest. Black
Africans are the victims of the genocide in Darfur. They might get
more attention from the world if their skin color were different. The
same lack of interest was apparent over Rwanda when that African
country experienced tribal genocide in the 1990s.
In short, two dynamics are in play over Darfur: a lack of interest by
many, and vested interests on the part of a few.
Sam Totten’s trying to mobilize public opinion. He and a colleague
have put up a page on the Internet. The page urges a letter writing
campaign to get Congress to breathe life back into the Darfur
Accountability Act. And there’s talk of a long-term protest at the
UN. But the Sam Tottens of the world are a small minority. Focusing
public attention on Darfur is a tough sell, made even more difficult
because the administration in Washington has decided to look the
other way.
Adolf Hitler supposedly brushed off worries about his plans for the
Holocaust by saying, “Who remembers the Armenians?” Now, many
remember them. But not enough did something about the Armenian
genocide when it would have mattered. It’s a recurring theme: Waiting
too long to act while mass murder is the order of the day. That’s now
the policy of the U.S. government. With that kind of attitude, one
day we’ll be sadly commemorating the genocide in Darfur, long after
there’s nothing else left to do for the victims.
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George Arnold is opinion editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s
northwest edition.