NEVER AGAIN, WE SAY, BUT STILL THE DEVILS ON HORSES COMMIT GENOCIDE
By Ronan Mullen
Daily Mail (London)
April 25, 2007 Wednesday
WE WERE well aware that as guards of Auschwitz, we would not be treated
kindly some of the things that happened there weren’t necessarily in
accord with human rights.’ That statement by a former Nazi camp guard
must rank as a particularly chilling example of understatement. The
scale of the crimes committed in Auschwitz, where more than a million
Jews were murdered, still has the capacity to shock.
Or does it? Every year the world commemorates the liberation of
Auschwitz in 1945. And every year, the great and the good intone the
phrase most associated with the Holocaust, ‘Never again’.
But the expression has an increasingly hollow ring. It seems that we
only mean it to apply to light-skinned people, or those from Europe.
Just ask the people of Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and, today, Sudan.
In the late Seventies, the Khmer Rouge murdered approximately
1.7million people.
In the early Nineties, Bosnian Serbs, aided by Serbian president
Slobodan Milosevic, killed tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims. In
1994, Hutu militias took just 100 days to murder more than 800,000
Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda.
Apart from unimaginable suffering, the common denominator in each
case was the indifference of the international community.
Today, it’s Darfur. More than 200,000 people there have been killed
by the government backed Janjaweed militia since 2003.
Villages are raided by ‘devils on horses’ who kill men, women and
children. The Sudanese government supports these raids by bombing
villages.
About 2.3million people are thought to have fled.
Of course, there have been UN resolutions, monitors, embargoes and
threats of sanctions. But no sign of effective military action. So
the killing goes on.
‘Never again’ has become ‘Same again’.
Only last week, the UN accused the Sudanese government of violating
an arms embargo into Darfur, and using UNmarked planes to do it.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon expressed ‘deep concern’. He expects
‘full cooperation from the government of Sudan, and all other parties
to provide prompt clarification’.
That’s a bit like expecting Kilkenny to win the All-Ireland Football
Championship this year.
The Sudanese government denies everything. Reports of their continued
role in the indiscriminate bombing of civilians are merely ‘lies
designed to further the agenda of those who want to impose United
Nations peacekeepers’.
At the moment, there are 7,000 African Union troops in the region,
supposedly keeping the peace. But the soldiers haven’t been paid in
months, their morale is poor and there are too few of them. Their
deputy commanding officer admits that the mission is almost hopeless.
A plan to put in place a force of 20,000 UN troops has been ruled
out by the Sudan government.
Meanwhile, the plight of the refugees grows worse. Aid workers are
pulling out of the region, the situation being too
volatile. Many of the displaced Darfurians have fled to neighbouring
Chad, but even there they are not safe from the Janjaweed.
The U.S. and the UK have called for tougher UN sanctions if the
Sudanese government does not agree to the larger force.
But China, which has an oil deal with Sudan, says it will veto any
such plan.
The reality is that the international community simply doesn’t care
enough to sacrifice blood and treasure on people who live in mud
huts. Last week 32 people died in a university in Virginia. It was
a shocking tragedy. But how many were killed in Darfur in the same
week? Given the rate of killing over the past few years, we can reckon
that it was just shy of 1,000 people.
You didn’t hear that on the news.
The killings in Darfur became headline news for a few weeks in
August 2004.
It was clear that tens of thousands were being raped and murdered
by government sponsored thugs. It looked as if public interest might
force international action.
But then the Beslan school tragedy happened, with the loss of 300
lives.
Again, a horrific story. Yet while weighing human lives in some sort
of cosmic balance may be inappropriate, the Beslan tragedy was hardly
on the same scale as the mass killing in Darfur.
THEN again, the skin tone of the victims was considerably lighter. In
fact, it’s hard to avoid concluding that, in some western eyes,
African lives matter less than those of Americans or Europeans. It’s
understandable, of course, that the U.S. media would focus on an
American tragedy. But does the rest of the world have to follow suit?
Even allowing for greater media access, the contrast between the
saturation coverage of the Virginia Tech murders and the media vacuum
surrounding the daily butchery in Darfur is stunning.
Hitler is said to have poured scorn on the notion that there would be
an international outcry about his campaign of genocide-Who, after all,
speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?’ he asked.
He was wrong about the Holocaust not being remembered. But the evidence
of Darfur suggests that he wasn’t entirely wrong about human nature.
This isn’t to say that Irish people don’t care about people in the
developing world.
Just last week, the Government pledged to increase its contribution
to TrUcaire from e52.7million to e116million between now and 2011.
BUT WE need more than charity.
We need a sense of global solidarity, a radical sense that the bell
doesn’t just toll for Darfur tribesmen, or starving Ethiopians or
for war-torn Rwandans, but for all of us.
We have to stop regarding Africans as ‘those poor people’. We must
see them as fellow global citizens. We need to see events in Darfur
as no more remote than what happens in Denmark or Dusseldorf.
Otherwise, we should stop mouthing empty platitudes like ‘never again’
and simply shrugging our shoulders at the latest outrage.
Global solidarity would mean taking direct, forceful action against
genocidal thugs whether in Darfur, Rwanda or Bosnia. It could mean
getting embroiled in factional disputes in Africa or Asia. But there
is a strong possibility that one determined and cohesive blow against
such evil, would make other oppressors think twice.
The UN is the obvious candidate to sponsor such a force. But infighting
among its various factions has led only to inertia.
Effective action requires approval from the Security Council.
Countries like China and Russia can always use their veto power to
stymie any effective action. Far from being, as President Kennedy once
said, ‘our last, best, hope’, the UN is now hopeless. Its resolutions
noted for being irresolute.
Ask Paul Rusesabagina. He’s the man who saved over 1,200 Rwandan lives
in 1994 while the UN fiddled. The UN bent over backwards to avoid
describing what was happening there as genocide, an international crime
which would have required action. Instead they used the expression
‘acts of genocide’, allowing the powers of the Security Council to
sit on their hands.
Rusesabagina is unsparing in his criticism. ‘A detachment of well-
equipped peacekeepers, made up of less than one twentieth of the
American troops now stationed in Iraq, could have easily stopped the
killings and sent the powerful message that the world would no longer
tolerate mass murders of civilians.’ If the UN is not to lead such
a force into Darfur, then who will?
A difficult question.
It comes down to political will. If people in Europe and the U.S.
want these outrages to stop, they must make it clear to their elected
representatives.
All that would be needed would be a show of military strength. Just a
demonstration of our refusal to tolerate genocide, ethnic cleansing or
any other euphemism used to describe actions ‘not necessarily in accord
with human rights’. Otherwise, we might as well stop commemorating
Auschwitz or any of the other Nazi death camps.