America could save Darfur kids

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, The New York Times

SARAHA, Sudan, Oct 20, 2004 — Allow me to introduce Abdelrahim Khamis Ghani and his little brother, Muhammad.

The challenge we Americans face in Sudan is this: Are we willing to save Abdelrahim and Muhammad, and two million more like them?

I photographed Abdelrahim and Muhammad in their mostly abandoned Darfur village, where the murderous Janjaweed militia, backed by the Sudanese government, has already killed seven members of their family. The boys have been hiding for months here in a war zone, hungry and frightened and hunted like wild beasts.

“We’re afraid here,” said the boys’ older sister, 17-year-old Asha. “We would go if we could. But we have no transport, no camel.”

This land stinks of fear and death, but perhaps just as striking as the murder and rape are the moral choices that families here are forced to make each day.

For Abdelrahim’s family members, the choice is whether to let adults and older siblings try to hike to safety in Chad – it’s a six-day walk. They could leave one adult behind to try to keep Abdelrahim and Muhammad alive. Or should the whole family stay, putting more people at risk but increasing the chance that the boys can be saved?

The family has elected for now to stay here together, surviving by gathering wild seeds to eat. Apart from starvation, the danger is that the Janjaweed or Sudanese troops will return to kill the men and rape and disfigure – and sometimes kill – the women and girls.

I sneaked into Darfur in a pickup truck from Chad, roaming a countryside speckled with burned and abandoned villages. I don’t know how many survivors in Darfur are still hungry and hunted like these boys, but the number is in the hundreds of thousands. Here, genocide unfurls in slow motion. (For the sights and sounds of my trip to Darfur, click here.)

One morning I came across a 10-year-old girl herding goats. She was frightened when she saw my truck, fearing that I might be in the Janjaweed, which had already burned down her home and killed 30 members of her extended family.

After it was clear that I was not a threat, the girl’s father, Hassan Nahar, emerged from behind a tree. He explained that he had hidden the rest of his family in the hills, but he uses his youngest daughter to keep the goats alive.

“I think it is a bit less likely that the Janjaweed would kill a young girl like her,” he said. “They would kill the older children.” He hid when he saw my truck because there was no way he could protect his child from men with guns, and there was not much point in being killed in front of her.

Aid workers, who are doing heroic work in Darfur, face another painful moral calculus. So far, war zones like this part of Darfur have not gotten any help because it is too dangerous. Relief groups must protect their own employees, even if that means allowing Sudanese to die.

I did see three Save the Children vehicles on an exploratory mission to see whether the area was safe. Then, a couple of hours after I saw them, a Save the Children car in the same area – I can’t be sure if it was one of the same vehicles – hit a mine, and two aid workers were killed. Now aid groups will be even less willing to venture here.

I understand the painful ethical choices of Abdelrahim’s family, of Mr. Hassan and of the international aid agencies. But what I can’t fathom is our own moral choice, our decision to acquiesce in genocide.

We in America could save kids like Abdelrahim and Muhammad. This wouldn’t require troops, just a bit of gumption to declare a no-fly zone, to press our Western allies and nearby Arab and African states, to impose an arms embargo and other targeted sanctions, to push a meaningful U.N. resolution even at the risk of a Chinese veto, and to insist upon the deployment of a larger African force.

Instead, President Bush’s policy is to chide Sudan and send aid. That’s much better than nothing and has led Sudan to kill fewer children and to kill more humanely: Sudan now mostly allows kids in Darfur like Abdelrahim to die of starvation, instead of heaving them onto bonfires. But fundamentally, U.S. policy seems to be to “manage” the genocide rather than to act decisively to stop it.

The lackadaisical international response has already permitted the deaths of about 100,000 people in Darfur, and up to 10,000 more are dying each month. We should look Abdelrahim and Muhammad in the eye and feel deeply ashamed.