Blood soaks Sudan
Editorial, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
April 26, 2005 — While wanton slaughter rages in the Darfur region of Sudan, some members of the world community continue dithering over diplomatic details, as if carefully parsed expressions of grave concern somehow excuse our collective inaction. It cannot.
The conflict in Darfur began more than two years ago, when the Arab-dominated central government, located in Khartoum, sought to quell an uprising by non-Arab African rebels in southern Sudan who demanded equal rights. Since then, the Janjaweed, a militia group sponsored by the Sudanese government, has been murdering, raping and torturing non-Arab Africans. Independent relief agencies monitoring the escalating violence have estimated that the savagery has killed as many as 400,000 people and created more than 2 million refugees, most of whom are women and children.
Yet after a recent visit to the country, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick placed the death toll in Darfur somewhere between 60,000 and 160,000 people, which seems an effort to downplay the horror of what is really happening in Sudan. That low-ball figure appears based on a death toll estimate provided by the World Health Organization that only accounted for a seven-month period.
Furthermore, the WHO figures only include those who died as a result of malnutrition and disease, not carnage. Exact figures are hard to come by, but even the more conservative analyses from on-the-ground relief agencies strongly suggest that the number of dead — from violent and nonviolent causes — is at least 380,000. And shamefully, neither ghastly statistics nor soaring rhetoric have been sufficient to rouse some of the world’s most powerful nations from their collective torpor.
For example, while the Bush administration and Congress have correctly branded the killings as “genocide” and have extended millions in upfront humanitarian aid with more promised, our government has been reluctant to send U.S. troops to help stop the bloodshed.
The European Union has already sent a small peacekeeping force to Darfur to buttress an inadequate and ineffective contingent of observers from the 53-nation African Union. EU commissioners are considering sending more troops in the coming months, but by then it may be too little, too late.
In fact, Western and international groups seem all too eager to find excuses for inaction. A special U.N. investigatory panel, after dutifully cataloguing the atrocities in Darfur, politely declined to label them as genocide, because accepting that description might require a more robust military response from the U.N. as well as economic sanctions against Sudan.
Last week, the U.N. Human Rights Commission approved a resolution condemning what it called “widespread and systematic violations by all parties of human rights and international humanitarian law.” But in a compromise intended not to offend, the unrepentant Sudanese government was not directly named.
This is madness. The rising tide of death and misery in Darfur cries out for direct intervention by all those who bear silent witness to the suffering, but haven’t yet summoned the moral conviction that will be needed to stop it.