| Darfur - Where HOPE is indeed scaping |
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by Jonathan Gurwitz Note: Mr. Gurwitz is a columnist of the San Antonio's Express-News and the following work was recently published by The New York Times (vea versión en español aquí). He has been for years a crusader in favor of the opressed black population of Sudan, trying to stop the genocide being commited in Darfur by the Islamic Khartoum government. Amid the massacres — silence Sep.16.- The United Nations has called it the world's worst humanitarian crisis. The U.S. delegation to the U.N. Human Rights commission said it was "the most egregious example of human rights abuse in the world." Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Weisel referred to it as "the capital of suffering." New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof labeled it a genocide in slow motion. All were referring to the Darfur region of Sudan, where the world has had more than three years to contemplate a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing. To this compendium of annihilation, U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland recently added a memorable new quote. "In Darfur, all of our nightmares have become realities," he told the U.N. News Service. "We are at a point where even hope may escape us." Beneath the somnolent stare of world leaders who ritually intone the incantation of "never again," the Sudanese government has perpetrated enormous crimes against humanity. In 2004, the U.N. Integrated Regional Information Networks recounted a typical offensive of rape and pillage in Tawila in northern Darfur: "Thirty villages were burned to the ground, over 200 people killed and over 200 girls and women raped — some by up to 14 assailants and in front of their fathers who were later killed. A further 150 women and 200 children were abducted." Amnesty International, among other human rights organizations, has documented the ethnically inspired hatred behind the campaign of sexual violence and annihilation. A survivor of an attack on Disa in western Darfur provided an account repeated countless times by others: "I was taken away by the attackers, they were all in uniforms. They took dozens of other girls and made us walk for three hours. During the day we were beaten and they were telling us: 'You, the black women, we will exterminate you, you have no god.' At night we were raped several times." Men and boys, when they are not killed summarily, are often castrated and left to bleed to death. The perverted logic of the desolate camps overflowing with 2.5 million refugees is that it is preferable for defenseless women to venture out for firewood. As the International Rescue Committee quoted a woman in the As Salaam camp in northern Darfur last month, "We ... have chosen to risk being raped rather than let the men risk being killed." Partisans and ideologues have peddled charges of crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide and ethnic cleansing so recklessly and with so much abandon that they have camouflaged the genuine article in Darfur with garish counterfeits in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, the West Bank and Lebanon. In fact, one of the most morally perplexing and revealing aspects of the Darfur tragedy is that so many people and groups who profess to care for the stranger, the dispossessed and the oppressed, particularly in the Islamic world, have been so utterly silent about the massacre in Darfur of black Muslims — 400,000 so far. Darfur, the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy has observed, violates the shibboleths of Western academic and intellectual discourse. The carnage there is not attributable to European colonialism, American imperialism, Christian triumphalism, white supremacism or Israeli Zionism. In Darfur, it is Arab Muslims slaughtering African blacks. And about that, about a real genocide, the usually caring and compassionate folks who urge sensitivity about cartoons and outrage about olive trees are despicably mute. Since 2003, a host of little Eichmanns has enabled the butchers in Khartoum: Chinese bureaucrats seeking oil, Russian plutocrats selling arms, Arab diplomats touting solidarity, African autocrats protecting sovereignty, peace advocates keeping silent. Now that African Union monitors are set to leave Darfur and the Sudanese government is obstructing the creation of a U.N. peacekeeping force, the nightmare of extermination is set to become reality. Hope is indeed escaping — with a little help from Khartoum's friends. |
