Four months ago, the international community marked the 10-year anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, in which the Hutu majority butchered over 800,000 of the Tutsi minority while the world stood as silent witnesses to the horrors.
This day was overshadowed with the specter of genocide resurfacing in Darfur, the western region of Sudan in which Arab militias known as the Janjaweed have sustained a program of mass terrorization against the region's African population.
Armed and recruited by the Arab-dominated Sudanese government, the Janjaweed began their assault in early 2003, prompted by the uprisings of the Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudanese Liberation Movement, two groups agitating for African rights. The Janjaweed's response has since escalated to a full-out onslaught against all black Sudanese, an expansion rooted in Darfur's long-standing tensions between nomadic Arabs and agriculturally based African peoples. The tactics of the Janjaweed include mass rape, the systematic annihilation of crops and settlements and the well-organized decimation of vulnerable civilians.
Yet as with the cases of Rwanda and Bosnia, the United Nations and the current administration have conspicuously avoided any reference to the word "genocide." Rather, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan calls the violence unfolding in Darfur a "humanitarian catastrophe"; President Bush refers to it as one of the "worst humanitarian tragedies of our time," and Prime Minister Tony Blair denounces it as "ethnic cleansing."
If the killings in Darfur are defined as genocide, the term carries with it the legal responsibility for the U.N. to "prevent and punish" the crime, as coded in the 1948 U.N. Convention on Genocide, to which the United States is signatory. It should come as no surprise then that, as in the past, the presiding administration has shied away from the word. Such duties can be, after all, politically inconvenient.
Meanwhile as the world equivocates, more than 50,000 Africans have been killed in Darfur and over 1.2 million people displaced from their homes.
On July 23, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution condemning the violence as genocide, urging the Bush administration to recognize it as such and to spearhead an international effort to end it. Representatives Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), Joseph Hoeffel (D-Penn.), Bobby Rush (D-Ill) and Albert Wynn (D-Md.) were arrested for protesting outside Sudan's embassy in Washington. For the first time in its history, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has declared a "genocide emergency" in Darfur, a plea for international action.
In 1994, despite the CIA's ample documentation that warned of the impending Rwandan crisis, the Clinton administration adamantly refused to intercede against the horrific genocide that was to unfold. It was only four years and millions of deaths later that then-President Bill Clinton reflecting on the crisis recognized the events as genocide, avowing, "Never again must we be shy in the face of the evidence."
Yet again, we see the same hesitations.
On July 30, the U.N. Security Council gave the Sudanese government a month to disarm and bring the Janjaweed to justice. Last week, that deadline expired. The attacks continue, yet no real pressure has been brought to bear against the Sudanese government. The U.S. Agency for International Development warns that the death toll could rise to 350,000 if aid does not reach people soon.
The United States and the U.N. have the moral imperative to use every tool available to end the killings. To remain silent now is to scatter ashes while Darfur burns, murmuring platitudes over the graves of the snameless.
Humanitarian aid is not enough. More international monitors are not enough. Whether or not Colin Powell recognizes Darfur as genocide when he testifies before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee this Thursday, increased political pressure and the threat of intervention must continue to be brought against Khartoum.
Since the Holocaust, the phrase "never again" has repeatedly been invoked against the memory of genocide in Bosnia, Turkey, Cambodia and Armenia.
We failed Rwanda. The international community must not again forsake its pledge to "prevent and punish" genocide in Darfur.
Te-Ping Chen '07 is a new contributor to these pages.
