Genocide in Sudan’s Darfur
By Nat Hentoff, The Washington Times
Only once in the presidential debates was the mounting genocide in Sudan mentioned. In the first debate, moderator Jim Lehrer brought it up. The president and his opponent said they were much concerned, but soon went on to issues much more likely to win them support in the election here.
However, on Oct. 10, in “The Killing in Sudan,” CBS’ “60 Minutes” partially redeemed Dan Rather’s use of fake sources concerning George W. Bush’s service in the National Guard on “60 Minutes II.” In a vividly penetrating account, Scott Pelley and his colleagues brought to millions of Americans the reality of the mass murders and rapes of black Africans being continually committed by the National Islamic Front government in Khartoum in alliance with its barbaric Arab allies, the Janjaweed.
But there was one underresearched statement in the program. Like nearly every other report in the media I’ve seen on Darfur, Mr. Pelley said “there are at least 50,000 dead.” This is like the New York Times and other newspapers automatically coupling the term “unsubstantiated charges” when referring to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The statement is not wholly accurate. Some of the Swift Boat charges are valid, and the death toll in Darfur is much larger than 50,000.
Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College in Massachusetts has, in the past six years, become the most authoritative source for the history, politics and body county of the genocide in Darfur. In an Oct. 8 synthesis of reliable statistical reports, Mr. Reeves wrote that “this present analysis of total mortality related to the Darfur conflict concludes that the most appropriate figure for deaths from violence, disease, and malnutrition from February 2003 to the present approaches 300,000.
“Of these, over 200,000 have died from the effects of violence; over 80,000 have died from disease and malnutrition.” Mr. Reeves emphasizes the “highly distressed and weakened displaced population that is not receiving half the necessary food aid, or critical non-food items (clean water sources, shelter, sanitary facilities). Moreover, as the deadly mismatch between humanitarian need and humanitarian capacity continues to grow in the coming months, the global Crude Mortality Rate (CMR) will begin to surge.” The Smith College professorquotesWilliam Garvelink, deputy assistant administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID): “‘The crisis in Darfur has not yet peaked. We have not yet seen the worst.” And USAID head Andrew Natsios told the British daily The Observer on Oct. 3 that “we estimate right now, if we get relief in we’ll lose a third of a million people and, if we don’t, the death rates could be dramatically higher, approaching a million people.” The 1994 genocide in Rwanda was 800,000. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and other world leaders pledged that such genocide would never happen again. But Annan and his U.N. cohorts are letting this one continue to happen.
On “60 Minutes,” Samantha Power, author of the invaluable “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” said the future Darfur body count “won’t look like Rwanda. If a million people die in Darfur, we’ll all sigh and say, ‘Isn’t it a shame we couldn’t get medicine to those poor, sick, Darfurians?’ As if they were poor and sick to begin with…. When we know there are between a million and 2 million who can yet be saved, what is our excuse for watching this happen in slow motion?”
The Rwanda genocide happened in less than 90 days. Are the United States, and the world, waiting for the numbers of dead in Darfur to go beyond those in Rwanda? The one journalist who has done the most to bring the suffering in Darfur home to American readers is Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, who has written a series of dispatches from the killing fields. In a column on Oct. 11, Mr. Kristof wrote: “President Bush is already in the forefront of the world leaders who have addressed the slaughter in Darfur, and he has done far more than President Clinton did during the Rwandan genocide. But there is so much more the United States can still do.” Mr. Kristof cites: “a no-flight zone, an arms embargo, an asset freeze on businesses owned by Sudan’s ruling party, and greater teamwork with African and Islamic countries to exert more pressure on Sudan.” He then directly addresses the president but this equally applies to John Kerry if he is the next president: “You pride yourself on your willingness to stand up to evil so why do you remain so passive in the face of such evil?”
On Oct. 18, the tragedy in Darfur deepened when four African nations led by Nigeria rejected “all foreign intervention in Darfur” in “this purely African question.” They will accept humanitarian aid, but nothing more. And they support the Sudan government.
This remains total state terrorism by the government of Sudan. We brought down Saddam Hussein. Is Sudan’s president Omar al-Basher invulnerable?