What they said about Darfur
By Toby Manhire, The Guardian
July 21, 2004 — On Saturday, negotiations between the Sudanese government and rebel groups resisting attacks by Arab militias collapsed. The breakdown prompted renewed calls in western newspapers for intervention to halt the killing in the Darfur region in western Sudan.
The rebels from Darfur accuse the government of arming and supporting the Arab militia known as the Janjaweed. The government denies any involvement. But the papers agreed the government had shown no real interest in ending the killing. As Arab militias took the lives of more than 30,000 black Africans and drove a million from their homes, “the Sudanese government has done little more than feign concern”, said the Seattle Times.
A million people were being “driven into the jaws of famine by the devil’s pact between Arab militias and the Khartoum government”, said the Daily Telegraph. Shamefully, however, there was “little prospect of international intervention”. Despite the complicity of this “loathsome regime”, added the London Evening Standard, “western governments have done little”, while “Arab governments are silent”.
It was a “deafening silence”, nodded Salim Mansur in the Toronto Sun. “The contrast in the preoccupation of Arab governments and the Arab media with Palestine and Iraq, while ignoring crimes against humanity perpetrated in Sudan by an Arab government” revealed an “entrenched racial bigotry”.
The collapse of the peace talks had confirmed that “the viability of the softly-softly approach is rapidly waning”, said the Australian. “With the wet season due … disease will replace ethnic cleansing, rape and pillage as the worst enemy of the black Africans in the region, and we could be looking at 300,000 dead this side of Christmas.”
It was up to the world’s media, said Guy Rundle in the Melbourne Age, to press for action. “The alternative is that Darfur, like Cambodia and Rwanda, becomes an event rather than a place, an occasion for shameful hand-wringing about what could have been done.” Republican senator Tom Tancredo, writing in the Denver Post, feared “the sickening, unpardonable display in the 90s of nation after nation falling over itself to say ‘never again’ will soon be repeating itself.”