As President Bush met with Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo last week, a neglected and tragic situation quietly and briefly moved back to the forefront — the ongoing systematic killings in Western Sudan. While the United States, its allies and international agencies have stood idly by, a pro-Arab nomadic militia has been methodically exterminating black Africans in the Darfur region since February of last year. To date, the most gracious estimates predict over 50,000 have been killed, while millions have been displaced. According to the United States Agency for International Development, if nothing is done, 350,000 or more civilians may die over the coming months.
The horrendous atrocity of ethnic genocide is nothing new in this tragic world; nor is the United States’ inability to help end them. The mass murder in Sudan has failed to spur any kind of visible outrage in the United States from either government leaders (including inadequate discussion during last month’s election) or the American public. Citizens have ceded to the media bureaucracy, who buries Darfur news reports in the back pages, accepting the genocide as if it were commonplace. Our current preoccupation with other foreign-policy initiatives has fed such apathy; Iraq has proven to be a diplomatic and militaristic distraction on many fronts. It is nothing new for Africa to be neglected by U.S. policy and international agencies. Underdeveloped countries like Sudan have little to offer prosperous economies. Perhaps this is why Darfur marks the third genocidal occurrence in Africa over the past decade. However, most people are unaware of genocide’s perverse side-effects that make U.S. involvement, on some scale, in our best interests.
The eventual impacts of Darfur, typical of horrendous mass murders, are dire — international instability, social plight, economic downfall, moral crumbling and cultural division. Sudan’s chaos is threatening neighboring countries, especially Chad, which is an increasing source of U.S. oil. In this new age of terror, we should be especially concerned — not only is genocide terrorism at its worst, genocidal regions often become breeding grounds for terrorist activity.
Current U.S. occupations should serve as testimony that genocidal situations, if left ignored, can come back to haunt the international community. Saddam Hussein gassed 10,000 Kurds in Northern Iraq in 1987, at a time when the Reagan administration supported the brutal dictator. Our inability to act gave Hussein the impression that he could, without consequence, invade neighboring Kuwait in 1991, which led to the first Gulf War. Now, after failing to apprehend Saddam when he was committing obvious mass genocide, we have had to invade Iraq on a questionably justifiable ground in a poorly planned war. And let us not forget the Bosnian genocide in 1996, when Osama bin Laden lurked all around the country while the U.S. government ignored the entire situation. Six years later, bin Laden masterminded the worst attack on American soil. Had we helped intervene in either case, tragedies of the past three years could have been prevented.
In addition to Darfur’s potentially widespread negative effects, America must realize that when Secretary of State Colin Powell courageously gave evidence to Congress validating that Darfur was indeed genocide (a move unprecedented by any senior U.S. official in history), he implemented the United States’ legal obligation to intervene. Under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, any nation that officially concludes genocide is occurring anywhere in the world is obligated to, either unilaterally or multilaterally, take action to stop genocide from taking place. The stipulations of the convention have spurred past American leaders’ refusals to classify genocide-like situations by their true name. The most nauseating case was in 1994 when then-President Clinton refused to classify Rwanda, which witnessed 7,000 murdered in one day and whose death toll would reach 800,000, as genocide. It wasn’t until years later that Clinton would admit his irresponsible actions were a mistake. Though we have currently provided millions in humanitarian aid to Sudan, our bold declaration of genocide compels us, under international law, to go further in the diplomatic process.
I do not necessarily propose U.S. military intervention in Sudan, and I would not propose it even if our troops were not stretched thin in the Middle East. The United Nations’ failure to react is as inexcusable as the United States’, and since America has such great influence over the international peacekeeping force, our leaders should pressure the Security Council to act accordingly and work with other institutions, such as the African and European Unions, to help end the mass murder in Darfur.
Though U.S. intervention is legally obligated, we should not need a piece of paper to compel us to act. Such a desire should stem from basic human compassion. Even if one were to argue (contrary to what I mentioned above) that responding to Sudan is not in the best interests of the United States, should morality not trump self-interest? Two years after we declared an international “war on terror,” I would not consider it ethical, by any standards, to allow innocent people to be ruthlessly slaughtered. Is the systematic ethnic cleansing of 50,000 men, women and children any less of a brutal and despicable act of terrorism than crashing planes into buildings and murdering 3,000 innocent Americans? Does it demand any less widespread outrage, or any less of an effective international response?
Adam Lichtenheld ([email protected]) is a freshman majoring in political science and international relations.
