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Monday, September 19, 2005
W's not helping the people in Darfur any more than he did those in New Orleans
I seem to be always recommending Paul Krugman columns but if there is a conscience of the major American press it is Krugman's fellow NYT writer Nicholas Kristof. (Of course as of today you can't read either one of them without paying. I'm still trying to decide if I will take the plunge.) Week in and week out Kristof addresses many of the humanitarian issues that no one else bothers with because they somehow aren't exciting enough. Sunday was no exception:
We were constantly reminded by W of all the past horrors in Iraq prior to our arrival there so why is it he mostly turns a blind eye to Darfur? That's a rhetorical question, by the way. I already know the answer and so do you.President Bush doesn't often find common cause with Cuba, Zimbabwe, Iran, Syria and Venezuela. But this month the Bush administration joined with those countries and others to eviscerate a forthright U.N. statement that nations have an obligation to respond to genocide.
It was our own Axis of Medieval, and it reflected the feckless response of President Bush to genocide in Darfur. It's not that he favors children being tossed onto bonfires or teenage girls being gang-raped and mutilated, but he can't bother himself to try very hard to stop these horrors, either.
It's been a year since Mr. Bush - ahead of other world leaders, and to his credit - acknowledged that genocide was unfolding in Darfur. But since then he has used that finding of genocide not to spur action but to substitute for it.
...
I can't understand why Mr. Bush is soft on genocide, particularly because his political base - the religious right - has been one of the groups leading the campaign against genocide in Darfur. As the National Association of Evangelicals noted in a reproachful statement about Darfur a few days ago, the Bush administration "has made minimal progress protecting millions of victims of the world's worst humanitarian crisis."
Incredibly, the Bush administration has even emerged as Sudan's little helper, threatening an antigenocide campaigner in an effort to keep him quiet. Brian Steidle, a former Marine captain, served in Darfur as a military adviser - and grew heartsick at seeing corpses of children who'd been bludgeoned to death.
In March, I wrote a column about Mr. Steidle and separately published photos that he had taken of men, women and children hacked to death. Other photos were too wrenching to publish: one showed a pupil at the Suleia Girls School; she appeared to have been burned alive, probably after being raped, and her charred arms were still in handcuffs.
Mr. Steidle is an American hero for blowing the whistle on the genocide. But, according to Mr. Steidle, the State Department has ordered him on three occasions to stop showing the photos, for fear of complicating our relations with Sudan. Mr. Steidle has also been told that he has been blacklisted from all U.S. government jobs.
The State Department should be publicizing photos of atrocities to galvanize the international community against the genocide - not conspiring with Sudan to cover them up.
I'm a broken record on Darfur because I can't get out of my head the people I've met there. On my very first visit, 18 months ago, I met families who were hiding in the desert from the militias and soldiers. But the only place to get water was at the occasional well - where soldiers would wait to shoot the men who showed up, and rape the women. So anguished families sent their youngest children, 6 or 7 years old, to the wells with donkeys to fetch water - because they were least likely to be killed or raped. The parents hated themselves for doing this, but they had no choice - they had been abandoned by the world.
That's the cost of our passivity.
3 Comments:
I know I'm hopelessly naive, but it seems to me that stopping genocide would be a great way to protect the country from terrorism. Terrorists tend to come from the poorest places with the most suffering. (OBL, of course, is an obvious exception, with his history of privilege and wealth. His foot soldiers, though, tend to be impoverished and uneducated.) If we mitigate the suffering, we would create allies instead of enemies.
Just one more good reason to stop genocide, as if we needed it. Tho for what it's worth I don't know that our actions in Bosnia did us much good in the Muslim world, even tho they were the ones who most benefited from it.
We'll have to see how many Bosnia extremists we're dealing with in 20 years.
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