- Originally published by the USA Today on August 20, 2004 [here
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By Julianne Malveaux
More than a decade after the world turned its back on the ethnic cleansing that claimed nearly a million lives in Rwanda, people are being driven from their land and dying in the Northern African nation of Sudan. The world is responding tepidly:
* In late July, a United Nations resolution passed that called for "measures," not sanctions, if Sudan could not pacify the situation in 30 days.
* The African Union placed about 80 observers at the border, convened peace talks and plans to send a few thousand troops if the killing continues.
* Secretary of State Colin Powell has visited the area and condemned the violence.
Yet people are still dying.
An estimated 50,000 people have been killed. Even if the killings stopped today, 350,000 more will die soon from starvation and disease. More than a million have been displaced; most live in refugee camps. About 200,000 have fled to neighboring Chad.
Warring factions in Sudan signed a cease-fire in May, but that curiously did not include the genocide in the Darfur region. The country resists international intervention as the killing continues.
There is an ethnic component to this madness. Non-Muslim black Africans are being pushed from their land by rebel Arab horsemen, called the Janjaweed, who seem to be trying to cleanse farmland of black Africans. Refugees say that after government air raids, rebels storm villages, killing men, raping women and destroying farmland. Some women are held as sex slaves. The destruction of farmland has left more than a million people with no way to feed themselves.
Analysts say it will take from 15,000 to 20,000 troops to bring peace and stability to the area. The U.N. World Food Program is seeking $195 million to feed refugees. It says the worst is still to come. The U.N. ought to stop dancing around and call this outrage in Darfur what it is: genocide. The world body has avoided the official designation of "genocide" because doing so would require international intervention, according to the Geneva Conventions.
How can the U.S. maintain the fiction that we invaded Iraq to stop torture and killing while we accept such horrors in the Sudan? The carnage in Darfur could be stopped if our nation, and the rest of the world, acted with greater urgency. In the name of human rights, how dare the world stand by and watch hundreds of thousands of people perish?
Julianne Malveaux, an economist and author, is co-editor of The Paradox of Loyalty: An African American Response to the War on Terrorism.