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As it turns out, the United Nations Human Rights Council may not be able to agree that the genocide in Darfur is a violation of human rights, but it was able to agree that dwarf-tossing is a violation of human rights.
Glad we got the important stuff settled.
I think Nina Shea gives George Clooney a little too much, um, credibility in this essay about his cluelessness re:Darfur, but I’m with her on the idea that maybe it’s not Bush’s fault.
I’ve been pretty quiet about Darfur lately, mainly because I’m beaten down by the idea that it’s all too late. People mobilized last weekend, but tomorrow’s the second anniversary of my first post about this stuff, inspired by Samantha Power’s work to publicize the genocide.
Again: it took two years for people to gather in DC to say that we need to stop the genocide. Without, of course, any real plan beyond “pressuring the government.” But it’s not going to happen. Multilateral diplomacy was an utter failure not because of George Bush, but because of China and India’s oil interests in Sudan. Other countries have a very strong interest in not stopping what’s going on in Sudan, while the U.S. has self-imposed sanctions on the country.
The African Union isn’t capable of keeping peace in the region. The UN allowed Sudan to serve on its Human Rights Council, which should give you enough of an idea of what a joke that institution is. The Security Council faces an automatic veto from China, which needs oil more than it needs the people of Darfur alive.
About 7 months after I first wrote about this stuff, a friend of mine asked me about it, because it was going to be a topic in a journalism exam she was taking that weekend. Her premise was, “If the neocons felt that invading Iraq was so important, why are they so quiet about Darfur?”
I tried telling her that, in my opinion, the U.S. has been out in front on this, but that most of the rest of the world would rather it just went away, but that didn’t satisfy her real premise, which was to make sure “it’s all Bush’s fault.”
Anyway, now George Clooney’s on the scene. I feel about this largely the way I felt about The Passion of the Christ; if a guy who wasn’t Mel Gibson made that movie, no one would’ve cared. I guess no one’s asking Noah Wyle or Julianna Margulies how they’d ‘solve’ the genocide in Darfur, but I guess Clooney was the smart guy on ER:
So when Clooney urges a “multi-national” peace keeping force going into Darfur, he must be envisioning a large and powerful army legitimized by the inclusion of troops from other Muslim and Arab nations and sanctioned by the United Nations’ Security Council. And Bush would then have to be blamed for failing to persuade the Arab League and China to vote against their own economic interests in order to defend the human rights of insignificant, impoverished African tribes against the oil-rich Khartoum regime.
Never before has either China or the Arab League based its foreign policy on altruism. It would be remarkable if these dictatorships suddenly sacrificed self-interest in order to defend human rights that they routinely disregard within their own borders. It was the presence of China and various distinguished members of the Arab League on the U.N. Commission on Human Rights that discredited that body and caused it to be disbanded earlier this year. For this group, “never again” has no meaning. Clooney’s “solution” is preposterous.
Yet Clooney does not seem to have any intention of criticizing these countries–in his view, attribution of blame is to be reserved almost exclusively for the Bush administration. Rarely does he criticize any other government by name–not even the government of Sudan, the author of the genocide. His discussion of the facts of Darfur focuses on the victims and on the United States, not on the perpetrators in Sudan and their abettors in China, the Arab League, and the U.N.
Read the essay. I’m gonna go watch some hoops.
Robert Kagan has a longish column at the Washington Post today about why Russia & China support other dictatorships (instead of supporting liberal reform the way U.S. & Europe sorta do):
An irony that Europeans should appreciate is that China and Russia are faithfully upholding one cardinal principle of the international liberal order — insisting that all international actions be authorized by the U.N. Security Council — in order to undermine the other principal aim of international liberalism, which is to advance the individual rights of all human beings, sometimes against the governments that oppress them. So while Americans and Europeans have labored over the past two decades to establish new liberal “norms” to permit interventions in places such as Kosovo, Rwanda and Sudan, Russia and China have used their veto power to prevent such an “evolution” of norms. The future is likely to hold more such conflicts.
Nicholas Kristof of the NYTimes is insanely pissed off at the media for ignoring the genocide in Darfur:
When I’ve asked television correspondents about this lapse, they’ve noted that visas to Sudan are difficult to get and that reporting in Darfur is expensive and dangerous. True, but TV crews could at least interview Darfur refugees in nearby Chad. After all, Diane Sawyer traveled to Africa this year – to interview Brad Pitt, underscoring the point that the networks are willing to devote resources to cover the African stories that they consider more important than genocide.
If only Michael Jackson’s trial had been held in Darfur. Last month, CNN, Fox News, NBC, MSNBC, ABC and CBS collectively ran 55 times as many stories about Michael Jackson as they ran about genocide in Darfur.
Looks like the U.S. hegemon is forcing its way into ANOTHER Muslim country! No blood for oil! Regime change begins at home! Visualize whirled peas!
Oh, wait. It’s a story about how the Air Force is helping bring Rwandan AU troops into Darfur to help stop the genocide being conducted there by the Arab population from the northern region of Sudan. My bad. Well, the root cause of the genocide must be western civilization or something.
Meanwhile, go to the Passion of the Present if you’re interested in learning about the ongoing genocide. Instapundit today pointed out that there’s a Genocide Intervention Fund that provides support for the African Union peacekeepers. Unfortunately, he pointed out, it doesn’t create a fund to hire mercenaries to wreak havoc against the genocidaires.
(U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Bradley C. Church)
Skip ahead if you’re sick of reading about the genocide in Darfur.
Samantha Power wrote a great piece in The New Yorker a few weeks ago about Darfur. Here it is. I didn’t link to it earlier because I couldn’t find any sort of searchable archives at the magazine’s site. Good job, Conde Nast!
Prof. Power also wrote a piece on Darfur in the new issue of Time. Read it.
It’s a poor choice of words, but here’s a harrowing report from the commander of the South African contingent of the African Union’s monitors in Darfur:
Colonel Barry Steyn […] says he counts bodies of Sudan army and Janjaweed victims each week and sends classified reports to Addis Ababa. Describing maggot-infested decomposing skulls, he says: “You believe there�s an inherent goodness in people, but you see some of these villages and it shakes that belief. You look at this stuff and it makes you turn dead white.”
There’s more (like the Russian explanation of why they not only abstained from the UN Security Council resolution last night, but also how they hope to sell more weapons to the Sudan government) at Passion of the Present.
It’s bad enough that the Sudanese government is denying the results of its own WHO study on death rates in Darfur. Now we have a story that, if true, somehow manages to raise the stakes:
Syria tested chemical weapons on civilians in Sudan’s troubled western Darfur region in June and killed dozens of people, the German daily Die Welt claimed in an advance release of its Wednesday edition.
Here’s the original story, in the Die Welt. If any of you guys can read German, let me know if the story equivocates more than the AFP version linked above, wouldja?
oday’s been designated a “Day of Conscience” by people who are trying to stop the genocide in Sudan. If you’re interested in helping save the citizens of Darfur, there are plenty of regional events today that you can participate in.
For more information on the on the genocide in Sudan, you need to go here.
Also: Salim Mansur, a columnist for the London Free Press, discusses the genocide and how it demonstrates the racism of the Arab Muslim world:
This silence is also revealing of culturally entrenched bigotry among Arabs, and Muslims from adjoining areas of the Middle East.
Blacks are viewed by Arabs as racially inferior, and Arab violence against blacks has a long, turbulent record. The Arabic word for blacks (‘abed) is a derivative of the word slave (‘abd), and the role of Arabs in the history of slavery is a subject rarely discussed publicly.
Here, the contrast between the Arab treatment of blacks, irrespective of whether they are Muslims or not, and the Israeli assimilation of black Jews of Ethiopia, known as Falashas, cannot go unnoticed.
Lee Smith, besides being the all-time MLB saves leader and a novelist who writes about southern women, also discusses the Arab world on Slate. Last week, he wrote a pretty neat piece about Sudan, discussing the “palace intrigues” and motivations for the genocide, while also trying to put the current atrocity in its context in the War on Terror.