Darfur atrocities: by any other name…
Editorial, The Jordan Times
How is it — better still — why is it, that some people are still in denial about the atrocities that have been committed in Sudan’s Darfur province? The statements by a group of members of Arab professional unions and political activists who recently returned from a visit to Darfur contend that the crisis in western Sudan is being blown out of proportion. They point to the usual “culprits” — the West — as making a mountain out of a molehill for their own political and economic gain.
Is humanity never going to learn from the dark and horrific days of past genocides? In the second half of the 19th century, when there was no e-mail, an Irish-American journalist named Janaurius Aloysius MacGahan was commissioned by London’s liberal paper, the Daily News, to go to Bulgaria to investigate reports of atrocities committed by Turkish troops against the Christian population of the south. His first discovery, in his own words, was “a heap of skulls intermingled with bones from all parts of the human body, skeletons, nearly entire, rotting clothing, human hair, and putrid flesh lying there in one foul heap, around which the grass was growing luxuriantly.”
Around 12,000 men, women and children had been butchered by Turkish forces. His telegraph dispatches to the Daily News forced the pro-Turkish Premier Benjamin Disraeli and his government to concede their error in denying the earlier reports of a genocide, and the world’s outrage brought on calls for military intervention. Several months later, in the spring of 1877, Russia launched a war against Turkey.
And that is how it has been with so many other genocides. There are always those who will, for some reason or another, deny these occurrences. But in today’s age of high speed information technology and several internationally reputable human rights watchdog organisations, such atrocities are brought to the fore quickly. The hindrances to putting a stop to genocide or exacting punishment for its perpetrators are always political.
In the case of Darfur, governments, rights organisations and humanitarian NGOs have clearly stated that what is happening there is genocide — the policy of deliberating killing a nationality or ethnic group.
Human Rights Watch spent twenty-five days in and on the edges of West Darfur, documenting abuses in rural areas that were previously well-populated with Masalit and Fur farmers. Afterwards it reported that “the government of Sudan is responsible for ethnic cleansing” and crimes against humanity in Darfur, where government forces oversaw and directly participated in massacres, summary executions of civilians — including women and children — burnings of towns and villages, and forcible depopulation of wide swathes of land long inhabited by the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa.
The Janjaweed militias, Muslim like the African groups they attack, have destroyed mosques, killed Muslim religious leaders, and desecrated Korans “belonging to their enemies.”
Amnesty International charged the Sudanese government with muzzling freedom of expression by arresting witness to human rights violations.
And Eric Reeves, of Smith College in the US, wrote of the petty calculations that some organisations bicker over in distinguishing between “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.” In his article, “Unmistakable Evidence of Genocidal Intent: A Legal Analysis of Khartoum’s Continuing Obstruction of Humanitarian Access to Darfur,” published on June 16, 2004, Reeves states: “This is genocide. Indeed, it is so clearly genocide that one must search for reasons to explain why any other characterisation is offered.”
Perhaps all those who still shy from calling it as it is should do some more fact-finding.