Darfur Updates

Several updates on the Darfur situation to offer up today [previous Darfur posts here and here]:

The Coalition for Darfur posted their weekly update, "Lacking the Political Will". Some of the horrifying highlights:
- The World Food Program has announced that more than 200,000 refugees from Darfur risk hunger in the coming months due to a severe lack of funding - this just a few days after an earlier announcement that rations for more than one million refugees have been decreased because of money shortages.
- The village of Khor Abeche was destroyed last week, almost immediately following a warning from UN observers. Eric Reeves has a sickening but excellently done analysis of the assault on Khor Abeche.


UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote an op-ed column for the Times today, "Billions of Promises to Keep." "Time is running out for the people of Sudan," Annan writes, adding "If we fail in Sudan, the consequences of our actions will haunt us for years to come." Citing the food shortages, Annan says "in a matter of weeks we will run out of food for two million people."

Annan also calls on the world to increase accountability for those responsible for the massacres in Darfur. "We know what is happening in Darfur. The question is, why are we not doing more to put an end to it?" He urges African nations to provide more troops to protect the residents of Darfur, noting that "giving aid without protection is like putting a Band-Aid on an open wound. Unarmed aid workers, while vitally necessary, cannot defend civilians from murder, rape or violent attack. Our collective failure to provide a much larger force is as pitiful and inexcusable as the consequences are grave for the tens of thousands of families who are left unprotected."


The International Herald Tribune runs an op-ed piece written by Romeo Dallaire, who served as commander of the UN's Assistance Mission in Rwanda during the time of the genocide there a decade ago. In "Lessons from Rwanda," Dallaire reminds us that at the time of the Rwandan genocide, the world was focused on the trial of another washed-up celebrity (in that case, OJ Simpson) and ignored the tragedy as it began - and then avoided making tough decisions to protect the Rwandan civilians, giving all sorts of reasons for the dithering. I include the final four paragraphs of Dallaire's piece in full:

"Could we have prevented or curtailed the genocide? The short answer is yes. If we had received the modest increase in troops and equipment that we had requested, we could have stopped the killings. Instead, for two months, the Western nations, who were the only ones with the capacity, refused to do so. In that time, hundreds of thousands died.

It is a story that, almost more than any other I can think of, shames us in the developed world. It was not "the United Nations" that failed, it was each of us in the West. Even our governments and news media only reflected our own lack of real interest in what was happening.

I include myself in this record of shame. I was commander of a force that failed completely. Not least, I failed to convince a single country to come and help save this small country.

If there is any useful lesson that can be drawn from the events of April 1994, it is surely one about just how personal genocide is: for those who are killed, of course, but also for those who kill, and for those, however far away, who just do nothing. Our governments are no better than we are. The United Nations is no better than its governments."

And we are no better than the steps we take to make sure that we never have to say "never again" again.