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Will We Say 'Never Again' Yet Again?

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  • Will We Say 'Never Again' Yet Again?

    Will We Say 'Never Again' Yet Again?
    By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

    Published: March 27, 2004

    LONG THE CHAD-SUDAN BORDER - For decades, whenever the topic of
    genocide has come up, the refrain has been, "Never again."

    Yet right now, the government of Sudan is engaging in genocide against
    three large African tribes in its Darfur region here. Some 1,000
    people are being killed a week, tribeswomen are being systematically
    raped, 700,000 people have been driven from their homes, and Sudan's
    Army is even bombing the survivors.

    And the world yawns.

    So what do we tell refugees like Muhammad Yakob Hussein, who lives in
    the open desert here because his home was burned and his family
    members killed in Sudan? He now risks being shot whenever he goes to a
    well to fetch water. Do we advise such refugees that "never again"
    meant nothing more than that a Führer named Hitler will never
    again construct death camps in Germany?

    Interviews with refugees like Mr. Hussein ' as well as with aid
    workers and U.N. officials ' leave no doubt that attacks in Darfur are
    not simply random atrocities. Rather, as a senior U.N. official,
    Mukesh Kapila, put it, "It is an organized attempt to do away with a
    group of people."

    "All I have left is this jalabiya," or cloak, said Mr. Hussein, who
    claimed to be 70 but looked younger (ages here tend to be vague
    aspirations, and they usually emerge in multiples of 10). Mr. Hussein
    said he'd fled three days earlier after an attack in which his three
    brothers were killed and all his livestock stolen: "Everything is
    lost. They burned everything."

    Another man, Khamis Muhammad Issa, a strapping 21-year-old, was left
    with something more than his clothes ' a bullet in the back. He showed
    me the bulge of the bullet under the skin. The bullet wiggled under my
    touch.

    "They came in the night and burned my village," he said. "I was
    running away and they fired. I fell, and they thought I was dead."

    In my last column, I called these actions "ethnic cleansing." But
    let's be blunt: Sudan's behavior also easily meets the definition of
    genocide in Article 2 of the 1948 convention against genocide. That
    convention not only authorizes but also obligates the nations
    ratifying it ' including the U.S. ' to stand up to genocide.

    The killings are being orchestrated by the Arab-dominated Sudanese
    government, partly through the Janjaweed militia, made up of Arab
    raiders armed by the government. The victims are non-Arabs: blacks in
    the Zaghawa, Massaliet and Fur tribes. "The Arabs want to get rid of
    anyone with black skin," Youssef Yakob Abdullah said. In the area of
    Darfur that he fled, "there are no blacks left," he said.

    In Darfur, the fighting is not over religion, for the victims as well
    as the killers are Muslims. It is more ethnic and racial, reflecting
    some of the ancient tension between herdsmen (the Arabs in Darfur) and
    farmers (the black Africans, although they herd as well). The Arabs
    and non-Arabs compete for water and forage, made scarce by
    environmental degradation and the spread of the desert.

    In her superb book on the history of genocide, "A Problem from Hell,"
    Samantha Power focuses on the astonishing fact that U.S. leaders
    always denounce massacres in the abstract or after they are over '
    but, until Kosovo, never intervened in the 20th century to stop
    genocide and "rarely even made a point of condemning it as it
    occurred." The U.S. excuses now are the same ones we used when
    Armenians were killed in 1915 and Bosnians and Rwandans died in the
    1990's: the bloodshed is in a remote area; we have other priorities;
    standing up for the victims may compromise other foreign policy
    interests.

    I'm not arguing that we should invade Sudan. But one of the lessons of
    history is that very modest efforts can save large numbers of
    lives. Nothing is so effective in curbing ethnic cleansing as calling
    attention to it.

    President Bush could mention Darfur or meet a refugee. The deputy
    secretary of state could visit the border areas here in Chad. We could
    raise the issue before the U.N. And the onus is not just on the U.S.:
    it's shameful that African and Muslim countries don't offer at least a
    whisper of protest at the slaughter of fellow Africans and Muslims.

    Are the world's pledges of "never again" really going to ring hollow
    one more time?
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