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Genocide in Darfur

Rule of Law Resource Center Staff
6/23/2008 4:24:46 PM

As you ate your dinner last night, another child in Darfur died of malnutrition and disease.

As you drove to work this morning, what was left of a Darfur family was murdered by janjaweed militiamen.

And it keeps happening, and you know it is, and people in high places are supposedly working to bring peace. Yet, people keep suffering and dying.

"All of us should be impatient. We have failed in our responsibility to the people of Sudan," Rich Williamson, U.S. President George W. Bush's special envoy for Darfur since January, told a meeting with U.N. Security Council members as reported by the Associated Press. He continued:

"And in Darfur, we've another conflagration, a genocide in slow motion. For over 300,000 people have perished, and over 2.5 million people have been driven from their homes," he said at a meeting organized by the U.S. Mission to the U.N. "If we keep doing what we've been doing, we won't save those lives."

Associated Press went on to report that the Sudan's U.N. Ambassador Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamed stated to them that such statements reflect election-year politics and don't help bring peace to Darfur.

But President Bush isn’t campaigning for reelection, and American domestic political posturing is clearly not the issue. The issue is the plethora of widespread documented atrocities – abuses of every fundamental human right in the Universal Declaration – that the Sudanese government is, to give the benefit of the doubt, hopelessly unable in any way to prevent.

What should the world do about the Sudanese government’s failure or inability to act? If a government claims it cannot control a rebel militia, should not the UN be able to step in to protect people who are the militia’s victims?

Ramesh
9/9/2008 1:32:15 PM

There are inherent provisions in the UN charter to intervene in such situations and there have been instances when the Security Council has taken upon itself to intervene. What needs to be asked actually is "are we, as a comity of nations, really concerned?" If we are then the UN and other powers be would find a way to impose military/economic/political measures to bring peace to Darfur. This is not to say that nothing is being done now. just that it doesn''t seem enough.

Human rights everywhere should be the concern of human beings everywhere. While it may be necessary for the developed world to offer a little more resources, the developing world has equal obligation to muster world opinion. After all,irrespective of color or creed or race, we all are humans first!

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