An American Dilemma

Why The Genocide in Darfur Is Our Problem Too

Andrew Garib, Turn Left | It’s the face of America we like to see, and a part of the American tradition of generosity and supreme righteousness which Americans would love to see more: Dan Baum’s recent article in The New Yorker (‘Mission To Sumatra’, 7 February 2005) featured the over 2000 sailors of Expeditionary Strike Group Five (a cluster of eight US Navy vessels) who found themselves at ground zero of the greatest natural disaster of the twenty first century, last December’s tsunami that wreaked havoc on the coasts of twelve nations and claimed the lives of untold thousands. The story of Expeditionary Strike Group Five is one of America doing the right thing; a story about those with the resources necessary to make a difference doing whatever they can to help; and, perhaps most striking, it’s a story of the American armed forces’ humility and respect for their ‘target’ — whether military or humanitarian — at a time of great crisis in the world’s largest Muslim nation.

This is the image of America that we can all be proud of, but it’s hardly the norm. When it comes to the ethnic cleansing, mass rape and genocide of so-called Africans by Khartoum-sponsored Arab militias in the western Sudanese region of Darfur, America and her traditional allies have been anything but swift in action and sincere in their desire to see an end to Sudan’s government-run project of mass extermination. This nightmarish vision of America many of us would like see change, and certainly the United States has very good reasons to do so.

These paired examples – the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster and the genocide in Darfur – show a duplicity in our attitudes towards the protection of innocent human life, but more importantly show how events around the world increasingly define our own moral stature, our own ethical legitimacy. George Bush may have rejected John Kerry’s ‘global test’ paradigm of a smarter foreign policy, but no president can turn his or her head from the reflection of America’s moral authority gone stale in its neglect of humanity’s neediest. Both the tsunami and Khartoum’s heinous project in Darfur are mirrors to our own ethical integrity, and as things stand, the United States, indeed the entire western world, beholds a sad and torn face returning its gaze.

‘The formal order came by on December 28th … to proceed at best speed to Sri Lanka. “‘Proceed at best speed’ aren’t words you often hear,” [Rear Admiral Christopher] Ames said. “An order like that isn’t given without considerable forethought.” A few days later, the group was redirected to Banda Aceh, in Sumatra, the city closest to the earthquake’s epicenter.’

Within two days of the tsunami, the United States government ordered Rear Admiral Ames to lead Expeditionary Strike Group Five to the area most affected by the infamous earthquake and waves of 26 December 2004. Baum describes a crew ‘itching to get to the beaches’ to do what they can to help. Yet, ironically, these honorable intentions and actions of America’s finest only make glaring the inaction on the part of the US in light of the first genocide of the twenty-first century. Taken simply as humanitarian crises, certainly both Darfur and the tsunami have at least equal claim to alarm, but the problem lies in the nature of the Darfur emergency itself.

The problem, of course, is that what’s happening in Darfur is genocide. Both Congress and former Secretary of State Colin Powell have recognized it as such. Despite the UN’s recent niggling equivocation in failing to describe the Sudanese government’s mass slaughter and starvation of hundreds of thousands of Darfuri in Powell’s formidable words, in March the UN’s former humanitarian coordinator for Sudan stated plainly that ‘the only difference between Rwanda and Darfur is the numbers involved of dead, tortured and raped.’ Even that may not be true today. Some estimates put the number of dead past a third of a million over the course of the 24-month conflict, nearly half of the number of dead during the 1994 Rwandan massacre of Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Moreover, the racial factor so deeply ingrained in the situation — the distinction between ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ — is without question alive in the minds of both perpetrator and victim, no matter how artificial the schizm. One can only guess at the politics behind the UN’s January shrinking from the term ‘genocide’, but the facts remain crystal clear.

Clear are the fact that the French, Russians and Chinese are prepared to halt any UN motion that would even intimate action against the Sudanese government and threaten the flow of oil; that American ‘unilateralism’ in Iraq has provided neat excuses for the European Union to describe Darfur in terms of civil war rather than mass slaughter, and thus to obviate any responsibility to lead military action, or at least, to levy sanctions. It’s clear that the United States’ righteous crusade on the Fertile Crescent against plodding multilateralism through bureaucratic international bodies is now concurrent to the Bush Administration’s pussyfooting even economic action against Khartoum, insisting on working through organizations such as the United Nations to take action if the Security Council deems it necessary. It’s clear also that both the US and the EU are not eager to upset the fine balance weighed between Khartoum and Southern rebels in Sudan, with the peace treaty between whom signed only weeks ago, ending Africa’s longest civil war.

Indeed such myopia disregards Khartoum’s history of genocidal warfare in several regions throughout Sudan, its harboring of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, and its fundamental obstruction to a peaceful and democratic future in Africa’s largest state. Indeed, if soccer moms decided three months ago that America’s best course was one of proactive foreign policy, quashing terrorist movements and spreading liberty, perhaps America’s true potential as the light of freedom in the world rests in the suburbs of her great cities.

Soccer moms should certainly worry about defending the homeland, but they should also worry about the blend of heroic determination and cowardly apathy, shining virtues and the basest realpolitik, that make up America’s current political moral fabric — the very morality which their children shall inherit and mould into an uncertain future. Will that future once again produce an American foreign policy that valiantly acts to save lives after natural disasters within days, but waits years to make the slightest effort to stop the latest example of humanity’s greatest crime?

‘The United States had a rare opportunity to make a grand gesture of friendship to the Islamic world at a time when many Muslims were viewing the war in Iraq, and the broader war on terror, as a cover for a war on Islam. Marines tend to be idealistic. They believe that the United States is righteous, and [the marines] were genuinely eager to get out there and prove it.’ At the heart of the Iraqi and Indonesian situations, there is the glowing potential to show American power in its best light. No less in Sudan, where a racist Arab government with a history of genocide wages war to eliminate a set of Muslim ethnic minorities, provides a home-away-from-home to the world’s worst terrorists, and sets the greatest obstacle to peace and democracy. The hypocrisy is clear to any opponent of the Iraq war. In Iraq, the Bush Administration cited a list of past massacres and genocides perpetrated by the Hussein regime as post-hoc justification for invasion; but in Darfur we have an ongoing and acute crisis which, according to some estimates, may result in the deaths of perhaps a million people if nothing is done. Darfur is also an opportunity to show the Muslim world that our campaign is not against Islam but despotic and murderous governments, not for energy reserves but for democracy and peace. With unilateral military action in Darfur, America would potentially save millions of devout Muslims, and at the same time take a legitimate stand against backwards Islamic republics who condone racist Arabism, oppress their own religious and ethnic minorities, threaten our allies, condone anti-semitism, and oppose democracy. The US can reestablish its stature as the preeminent liberal and just force in the world, providing her with clout and soft-power resources to lead the world in defending humanity from the 21st century’s second genocide. Instead, history will see our half-hearted attempts to address the Darfur situation and our rejection of the International Criminal court, coupled with our duplicity and arrogance shown in the rush to war in Iraq, as a failure of leadership, providing our best- equipped but most spineless allies with the excuse to dismiss the Darfur conflict as an internal matter best left to the perpetrators in Khartoum. The failure of the New American Century will be forever entwined with our regular ignorance of our history, our present apathy and myopia, and our future persistent hypocrisy.

At the heart of the Iraqi and Indonesian situations, there is the glowing potential to show American power in its best light. No less in Sudan, where a racist Arab government with a history of genocide wages war to eliminate a set of Muslim ethnic minorities, provides a home-away-from-home to the world’s worst terrorists, and sets the greatest obstacle to peace and democracy. The hypocrisy is clear to any opponent of the Iraq war. In Iraq, the Bush Administration cited a list of past massacres and genocides perpetrated by the Hussein regime as post-hoc justification for invasion; but in Darfur we have an ongoing and acute crisis which, according to some estimates, may result in the deaths of perhaps a million people if nothing is done.

Darfur is also an opportunity to show the Muslim world that our campaign is not against Islam but despotic and murderous governments, not for energy reserves but for democracy and peace. With unilateral military action in Darfur, America would potentially save millions of devout Muslims, and at the same time take a legitimate stand against backwards Islamic republics who condone racist Arabism, oppress their own religious and ethnic minorities, threaten our allies, condone anti-semitism, and oppose democracy. The US can reestablish its stature as the preeminent liberal and just force in the world, providing her with clout and soft-power resources to lead the world in defending humanity from the 21st century’s second genocide.

Instead, history will see our half-hearted attempts to address the Darfur situation and our rejection of the International Criminal court, coupled with our duplicity and arrogance shown in the rush to war in Iraq, as a failure of leadership, providing our best- equipped but most spineless allies with the excuse to dismiss the Darfur conflict as an internal matter best left to the perpetrators in Khartoum. The failure of the New American Century will be forever entwined with our regular ignorance of our history, our present apathy and myopia, and our future persistent hypocrisy.

‘The civilians, grimacing against our noise and rotor wash, were destitute —frighteningly thin, traumatized, their clothes ragged and filthy. We made a bucket brigade to hand out the rice, then each of us Americans shook hands with each of the Indonesians, soldier and civilian alike. They touched their hearts and pressed their hands together…’

At stake in Darfur are more than hundreds of thousands of lives. Our own moral voice is emptier than a vast desert, which, like the creeping Sahara, may grow with time, but only consume more life and shrink the potential for peace and prosperity. Preventing genocide and recouping from disaster are both extremely important; but stopping genocide has special moral tinge, for both the sakes of the perpetrators and for our own nation. Do we want to live in a world with more murderers, a global society with more people who stood idly by when murder happened in front of their eyes? Do we wish to be among those apathetic and selfish masses?

At the bottom of this story is the soul of our ethics, the value we place on human life and the ancient network of humanity that keeps us together as a people. If we fail on our pledge to never again allow our species to show its most gruesome face, then history will record our failure as the ultimate judgment of our civilization. It’s time we looked at Darfur and asked ourselves if we are satisfied with what we see.

Sources:
Dan Baum’s ‘Mission To Sumatra’: http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/050207fa_fact1
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR29.5/dewaal.html
http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2005/02/04/sudan-pronk050204.html
http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040830_fact1
http://www.refintl.org/content/article/detail/4655/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn-A49802-2004Dec8?language=printer End.