At least 300,000 dead; 2.5 million displaced; rape, pillaging and destruction of villages; ethnic cleansing; genocide of innocent civilians, including women and children. I am, of course, talking about the ongoing situation in Darfur, Sudan. I remember my freshman year at Wesleyan I bought a “Free Darfur” T-shirt from a local student group, spending 10 dollars in order to help save these innocent people. I was doing my part, I felt at the time, as probably did the other consumers, as well as the student group itself. But that was two years ago and absolutely nothing has changed since. Within the past two years, tens of thousands of more innocent people have been killed and raped by the vicious janjaweed militia group, directly funded and supported by Omar al-Bashi’s Arab Islamist government against ethnically black Africans. Over this same time period in the same continent we have seen hundreds or thousands killed in Zimbabwe and Kenya, and now Congo is erupting as well.
Focusing on Darfur, we must take a look at the historical precedents this conflict may leave on human history and international politics: it is 100 percent acceptable to systematically kill hundreds of thousands of people and to commit all sorts of war crimes, because the international community, led by the perpetually impotent U.N., will not do anything to stop it. This has been proven time and time again: the international community will do nothing, and it’s absolutely deplorable.
Over the past few years, while the U.N., led by an Islamic voting bloc, as well as the forever anti-American Russia and China, has continually condemned the actions of Israel, it has done nothing to address real genocide and evil in Darfur. For example, virtually all Arab countries have castigated Israel at every possible opportunity, while actively condoning, if not outright supporting, the actions of Bashir’s government. And whatever one thinks of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, whichever side one takes, the horrors in Darfur are orders of magnitude worse by any measure. To call for Israel’s extermination while supporting the genocide in Darfur is an insult to human morality and, frankly, downright bigotry.
If the U.N. won’t do anything, then who will? Well, we arrive at Western Europe and the United States. Another lesson proven time and time again: Western Europe won’t do anything either. A continent of rapid population decline, the countries of Western Europe care more about global warming than actual human lives, especially if they happen to be black African ones. Don’t get me wrong: their approach to climate change has been significantly better than the Bush administration’s, but it does not change the fact that countries like France major in inaction. On the other hand, we have the United States, a country consumed by its ongoing two wars, which has drained our economic and moral capital. I want to first underline that killing Saddam Hussein and removing his regime was, and still is, the right move, especially after his use of chemical weapons to kill 200,000 innocent Kurds and his continual deception over his nuclear arms program. However, the ensuing chaos and civil war in Iraq is completely the Bush administration’s fault, stemming from its ignorance and frightening arrogance, which has severely limited our capacity to address other pressing world issues. The U.N. likes to express its “deep concern” over events in the region, but that isn’t going to cut it; rather, brute force will.
The use of military force should always be the last option on the table, used only when diplomacy has failed. I believe the time is and has been ripe for direct military intervention in Sudan, but again, we are in no position to do such a thing on our own, which can be viewed as an ultimate failure of the Bush administration. If we had conducted the War in Iraq in the right way, or not have done it at all, I believe we could have saved the lives of thousands of innocent black Sudanese. Because the U.N. and the E.U. are morally bankrupt, the reality is that it’s up to us to do something. I implore President Obama to use our military force to stop these killings, to stop these continual genocides as soon as possible. When will “never again” truly mean never again? However, after the Bush administration’s unacceptable mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are just as impotent as the U.N. and E.U., which bodes terribly for the rest of the world.
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