The Weekly Darfur: A Tolerable Genocide

The Coalition for Darfur has the weekly post here!

I have a confession to make. I missed the Coalition's post from last week. Sloppy, I know. It won't happen again.

Here it goes:

Who would have thought that a genocide could become worse? But after two years of heartbreaking slaughter, rape and mayhem, the situation in Darfur is now spiraling downward.

More villages are again being attacked and burned -- over the last week thatch-roof huts have been burning near the town of Gereida and far to the northwest near Jebel Mun.

Aid workers have been stripped, beaten and robbed. A few more attacks on aid workers, and agencies may pull out -- leaving the hapless people of Darfur with no buffer between themselves and the butchers.

The international community has delegated security to the African Union, but its 7,000 troops can't even defend themselves, let alone protect civilians. One group of 18 peacekeepers was kidnapped last month, and then 20 soldiers sent to rescue them were kidnapped as well; four other soldiers and two contractors were killed in a separate incident.

What will happen if the situation continues to deteriorate sharply and aid groups pull out? The U.N. has estimated that the death toll could then rise to 100,000 a month.

The turmoil has also infected neighboring Chad, which is inhabited by some of the same tribes as Sudan. Diplomats and U.N. officials are increasingly worried that Chad could tumble back into its own horrific civil war as well.

This downward spiral has happened because for more than two years, the international community has treated this as a tolerable genocide. In my next column, my last from Darfur, I'll outline the steps we need to take. But the essential starting point is outrage: a recognition that countering genocide must be a global priority.

It's true that a few hundred thousand deaths in Darfur -- a good guess of the toll so far -- might not amount to much in a world where two million a year die of malaria. But there is something special about genocide. When humans deliberately wipe out others because of their tribe or skin color, when babies succumb not to diarrhea but to bayonets and bonfires, that is not just one more tragedy. It is a monstrosity that demands a response from other humans. We demean our own humanity, and that of the victims, when we avert our eyes.

Already, large swaths of Darfur are so unsafe that they are ''no go'' areas for humanitarian organizations -- meaning that we don't know what horrors are occurring in those areas. But we have some clues.

There are widespread reports that the janjaweed, the government-backed Arab marauders who have been slaughtering members of several African tribes, sometimes find it convenient not to kill or expel every last African but to leave a few alive to grow vegetables and run markets. So they let some live in exchange for protection money or slave labor.

One Western aid worker in Darfur told me that she had visited an area controlled by janjaweed. In public, everyone insisted -- meekly and fearfully -- that everything was fine.

Then she spoke privately to two sisters, both of the Fur tribe. They said that the local Fur were being enslaved by the janjaweed, forced to work in the fields and even to pay protection money every month just to be allowed to live. The two sisters said that they were forced to cook for the janjaweed troops and to accept being raped by them.

Finally, they said, their terrified father had summoned the courage to beg the janjaweed commander to let his daughters go. That's when the commander beheaded the father in front of his daughters.

''They told me they just wanted to die,'' the aid worker remembered in frustration. ''They're living like slaves, in complete and utter fear. And we can't do anything about it.''

That aid worker has found her own voice, by starting a blog called ''Sleepless in Sudan'' in which she describes what she sees around her. It sears at http://sleeplessinsudan.blogspot.com, without the self-censorship that aid groups routinely accept as the price for being permitted to save lives in Darfur.

Our leaders still haven't found their voices, though. Congress has even facilitated the genocide by lately cutting all funds for the African Union peacekeepers in Darfur; we urgently need to persuade Congress to restore that money.

So what will it take? Will President Bush and other leaders discover some backbone if the killing spreads to Chad and the death toll reaches 500,000? One million? God forbid, two million?

How much genocide is too much?

We stand condemned by our silence if we do nothing. Our leadership must hear from us how horrified we are that yet another genocide occurs unchallenged. The carnage in Darfur is no less a threat to liberty than the insidious operations of Al Qaeda. Indeed, if the violence that escalates in the Darfur region spills over into Chad, then how much longer will it be before both nations become the fertile ground for islamofascists? Is the intelligence that Sudan provides worth the hundreds of thousands--and millions--that have died and will die? Is it worth opening a new front in the Global War on Terror.

The last thing our nation should tolerate is the cultural lag of applied cold war thinking. Our nation tolerated dictatorships that declared themselves against communism. Our practice of Realpolitic may have helped end the threat of the Soviet Union to the World; it also perpetrated the cognitive dissonence from which our nation still suffers. The Land of the Free and Home of the Brave used its resources to fund Kleptocrats and corrupt thugs simply because they claimed they opposed Stalinism.

Are we making the same mistake with Sudan as an "Ally" in the Global War on Terror? What unintended consequences will we unleash then?

Certainly one: we will place ourselves under God's judgement yet again. For we have the resources and the military assets to prevent Sudan from continuing its rampage. We have the influence within NATO and the UN to pressure Sudan into compliance. We have the moral and economic high ground through which we can coerce Sudan into abandoning its genocidal policies. If we do not exercise this power in the ultimate preferential option for the poor, then we become the ones driving nails into Christ again. Make no mistake about it: Christ is present among his suffering brothers and sisters in Darfur. If we ignore them, we ignore our Savior. Exactly how will that end well for us?

Yes, I know that Europe is as culpable for this grave sin against humanity as the US. I don't vote in European elections. My leaders rule with my consent; if I don't knock their electoral-sniffing heads together, they'll pay me no mind and continue their mindless pursuit of this morally bankrupt appeasement. European Parliments and Eurocrats could care less what I think; my congress and president don't have a choice.

Awaken our leadership to our disgust with Sudan's house of horrors. Demand that this administration make authentic efforts to end this genocide. Accept nothing less than the might of the United States of America leading the world in standing behind the words, "Never again!"

Let's make those words mean something before the last victims of the latest genocide perish. For a change.