GENOCIDE ARTICLES INSTRUCTIONS
-
****1--PICK 15 articles below
****2--READ EACH ARTICLE
***3-FOR each article you will write an 8-10
SENTENCE SUMMARY AND AN 8-10 SENTENCE OPINIONATED RESPONSE TO THE
ARTICLE. (this should not exceed one page per article)
.
The Bloodiest War-04.19.02
JEBEL AWLIA, Sudan— Their life stories are so braided with death and despair that Ajok Maniel and Nul Aru make the perfect Sudanese couple, a reflection of the world's most wretched country. Ms. Maniel fled the civil war in southern Sudan when an Arab militia allied with the government swept through her village, shot her brother dead and stole everything her family had. Mr. Aru fled when troops on the rebel side attacked and killed his brother and turned his family from tribal chieftains to refugees. Thus victimized by rival sides in the civil war, Ms. Maniel and Mr. Aru met and fell in love in this refugee camp of several thousand mud huts, married in 1996 and had three children. The eldest died of measles, and now the youngest, a frail 2-year-old girl named Akier, is dangerously ill as well.
The world's attention may be focused elsewhere in the region, but this is by far the Middle East's bloodiest war, with two million Sudanese dead over the last 18 years. The war, arising from the rebellion by the southern part of the country (mostly Christian or animist and black African) against smothering rule by the Muslim, Arab northern part, has also left 4.5 million homeless. With temperatures in this bleak desert town in northern Sudan well over 100 degrees from dawn to dusk, with children dying as parents fret over which of their sick children they can afford to take to the doctor (a visit costs 20 cents), this landscape looks like a vision of hell.
Walk among the mud huts and you meet: 8-year-old Boutros looking after his 4-year-old brother now that his mother has died and his father has vanished in the war; Antony Minaway, explaining that it is best if his five children eat the one meal a day they can afford, sorghum gruel, in the evening so that they can fall asleep afterward; and Angeline Henry wailing and cackling hysterically as neighbors explain that she went insane after troops killed her son and carried off her daughter.
Yet now, amazingly, there is a ray of hope in Sudan -- along with a couple of lessons for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The government of Sudan is stepping away from its terrorist past, and both the government and the rebels seem exhausted by a civil war that neither can win. The Bush administration is handling this country just right, and its special envoy for peace in Sudan, former Senator John Danforth, has achieved a cease-fire in part of the country and inspired growing talk that 2002 may be the year of the peace. ''There's a real momentum for peace,'' notes Alex de Waal, an independent Sudan expert in London. And a new book-length report on Sudan from the International Crisis Group concludes, ''A small window for peace has opened.'' One reason is that, despite occasional sound bites from the Bush White House about never negotiating with terrorists, that's what it is doing here, to its immense credit. It's precisely because this administration is willing to talk seriously and even upgrade relations with the terrorist-tainted government in Khartoum that there is some hope of ending the war. The Clinton administration's policy on Sudan was too idealistic, with Clintonites (and Congressional Republicans) so turned off by the awful government here that they began to flirt with the rebels in the south. But the rebels are also monsters, and it has been clear since 1998 that they could not win. So the American gift of credibility to the rebels arguably only prolonged Sudan's suffering. There may also be two lessons from this for the smaller but better publicized conflict northeast of here. First, even if leaders are as brutal and untrustworthy as Sudan's, it is worth negotiating with them -- because in the real world it often falls to the thugs to become the peace-makers. Second, there is always hope, for if peace can suddenly glimmer here it should be able to shine in a holy land as well.
In any case, while waiting for peace here in Sudan, children continue to die. In the mud hut of Ms. Maniel and Mr. Aru, little Akier is whimpering and crying, and the parents have gone broke buying medicine for her. But they fret that the doctor's diagnosis of malaria may be wrong, for despite the medicine Akier grows more feeble each day. The mother strokes her daughter's stick-like arm, but the girl just cries and cries.
A Slave's Journey In Sudan
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: April 23, 2002
KHARTOUM, Sudan— Abuk Achian was 6 years old when Arab raiders rampaged through her village in southern Sudan, carried her off on horseback and turned her into a slave. Ms. Achian, now a pretty woman of 18 with ebony skin, is one of many thousands of Sudanese women and children who have been kidnapped and enslaved over the last 20 years. Eradicating this slavery will require sensible international pressure -- not the grandstanding that the issue sometimes attracts.
Originally the Sudanese government condoned the slave raids, as a way to reward Arab militias fighting on the government side in Sudan's civil war. Lately it has begun to crack down on the tribal raiding, although it still tends to deny that slavery exists here, acknowledging only what it calls traditional abductions. Ms. Achian was one of about 30 former slaves whom I met in Sudan (despite the efforts of the government, which did just about everything it could to limit my reporting here). Her story is typical: She is a member of the Dinka tribe, black Africans who are Christians or animists, while the kidnappers are Baggara, or Muslim Arab herdsmen. ''I was so scared,'' she recalled of her first few weeks in captivity. ''I couldn't understand the language that they spoke, and I was crying. But they beat me until I stopped crying and started to learn their language.''
Her duties were to sleep outside with the camels, milk them, and make sure they did not run off. Her master beat her regularly and forbade her to ever talk to other Dinka.
Ms. Achian says she tried to escape once. Her master caught her, tied her hands together and hoisted her by her arms from a tree branch so that her feet did not touch the ground. Then he flogged her into a bloody mess with a camel whip, cut her with a knife and let her dangle in the air all night.
After a few beatings, she also agreed to become a Muslim and later underwent the genital cutting that is widespread among Sudanese Muslims. When she was 12 her master sold her to be the bride of a young man. Initially Ms. Achian was afraid of her husband, but soon came to love him and had a son with him.
''He treated me well,'' she said. ''He was a very good man.''
Well, perhaps not that good a man. He too was a slave-raider, and he would periodically go off to attack Dinka villages and return with new slave children. Ms. Achian said she felt sorry for the new slaves but never dared complain to her husband. Then her husband was killed on one of these raids, and Ms. Achian found herself a widow, at age 16. Her parents-in-law seized her son and beat her when she protested, and so she left her boy behind and ran off to freedom.
One approach to ending slavery has been taken by Christian organizations that claim to have purchased tens of thousands of Sudanese slaves and then released them. Unfortunately, there is evidence that many of these slave redemptions are the result of trickery, with fake slave traders selling make-believe slaves many times over.
Another approach favored by many on the left and right alike has been sanctions, aimed either at the Sudanese government or at a Canadian oil company, Talisman, that operates in Sudan. But sanctions reduce the Western presence that is the greatest force for change. Because of sanctions and the threat of them, China is increasingly becoming a dominant player in Sudan's oil industry in place of Western companies -- and none of the Chinese I spoke to in Sudan worried at all about issues like slavery. So ultimately the only workable approach to eradicating slavery is the least sexy: engaging the Sudanese government and applying relentless pressure. We now have a window to press our case, for President Omar al-Bashir is trying to reorient Sudan and improve its relations with the West and is thus unusually attentive. There is a school of thought within the Bush administration that we should not step into distant messes in which we have no compelling national interest at stake. But Sudan's plight cries out to us. Some moral challenges are so great that they undermine our credibility unless we step up to the plate, and slavery is one.
Ethnic Cleansing, Again
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: March 24, 2004
ALONG THE SUDAN-CHAD BORDER— The most vicious ethnic cleansing you've never heard of is unfolding here in the southeastern fringes of the Sahara Desert. It's a campaign of murder, rape and pillage by Sudan's Arab rulers that has forced 700,000 black African Sudanese to flee their villages. The desert is strewn with the carcasses of cattle and goats, as well as fresh refugee graves that are covered with brush so wild animals will not dig them up. Refugees crowd around overused wells, which now run dry, and they mourn loved ones whose bodies they cannot recover.
Western and African countries need to intervene urgently. Sudan's leaders should not be able to get away with mass murder just because they are shrewd enough to choose victims who inhabit a poor region without airports, electricity or paved roads. The culprit is the Sudanese government, one of the world's nastiest. Its Arab leaders have been fighting a civil war for more than 20 years against its rebellious black African south. Lately it has armed lighter-skinned Arab raiders, the Janjaweed, who are killing or driving out blacks in the Darfur region near Chad. ''They came at 4 a.m. on horseback, on camels, in vehicles, with two helicopters overhead,'' recalled Idris Abu Moussa, a 26-year-old Sudanese farmer. ''They killed 50 people in my village. My father, grandmother, uncle and two brothers were all killed.''
''They don't want any blacks left,'' he added.
Most refugees have stories like that. ''They took the cattle and horses, killed the men, raped the women, and then they burned the village,'' said Abubakr Ahmed Abdallah, a 60-year-old refugee who escaped to Toukoultoukouli in Chad. ''They want to exterminate us blacks,'' said Halime Ali Souf. Her husband was killed, and she fled into Chad with her infant. Once refugees like Ms. Halime have fled into Chad, their troubles are not over. The only source of water for many border villages is the riverbed, or wadi, marking the boundary between the two countries, and the Janjaweed regularly shoot men who go there to get water or gather wood. Zakaria Ibrahim was shot dead a few days ago. ''He went to get sticks to build a hut,'' said his haggard widow, Hawai Abdulyaya, who is left with five children.
The Janjaweed regularly invade Chad to seize cattle and attack Sudanese refugees. In addition, the Sudanese Army has dropped bombs on Chadian villages like Tiné and Besa. These skirmishes are taking place in a sparsely populated land of sand, shrubs and occasional oases. The only roads are dirt tracks barely navigable by four-wheel-drive vehicles -- except when the rainy season makes the area completely impassible. (Join me for a multimedia tour of Africa at www.nytimes.com/kristof.) The U.N.'s Sudan coordinator, Mukesh Kapila, described the situation in a BBC interview on Friday as similar in character, if not scale, to the Rwanda genocide of 1994. ''This is ethnic cleansing,'' he said. ''This is the world's greatest humanitarian crisis, and I don't know why the world isn't doing more about it.'' Countless thousands of black Sudanese have been murdered, and 600,000 victims of this ethnic cleansing have fled to other parts of Sudan and are suffering from malnutrition and disease. The 110,000 who have fled into Chad are better off because of the magnificent response of the Chadian peasants. Chadians are desperately poor themselves, but they share what little food and water is available with the Sudanese refugees. ''If we have food or water, we'll share it with them,'' said a Chadian peasant, Adam Isak Abubakr. ''We can't leave them like this.''
Let's hope that we Americans will show the same gumption and compassion. We should call Sudan before the U.N. Security Council and the world community and insist that it stop these pogroms. To his credit, President Bush has already led the drive for peace in Sudan, doing far more to achieve a peace than all his predecessors put together. Now he should show the same resolve in confronting this latest menace. In the 21st century, no government should be allowed to carry out ethnic cleansing, driving 700,000 people from their homes. If we turn away simply because the victims are African tribespeople who have the misfortune to speak no English, have no phones and live in one of the most remote parts of the globe, then shame on us.
Will We Say 'Never Again' Yet Again?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: March 27, 2004
ALONG 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?
Starved For Safety
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: March 31, 2004
ADRÉ, Chad— So why is
Africa such a mess?
To answer that question, let me tell you about a 34-year-old man who limped over to me at this oasis in eastern Chad. ''My name is Moussa Tamadji Yodi,'' he said in elegant French, ''and I'm a teacher. . . . I just crossed the border yesterday from Sudan. I was beaten up and lost everything.'' Mr. Yodi, a college graduate, speaks French, Arabic, English and two African languages. During the decades of Chad's civil war, he fled across the border into the Darfur region of Sudan to seek refuge. Now Darfur has erupted into its own civil war and genocide. Mr. Yodi told how a government-backed Arab militia had stopped his truck -- the equivalent of a public bus -- and forced everyone off. The troops let some people go, robbed and beat others, and shot one young man in the head, probably because he was from the Zaghawa tribe, which the Arab militias are trying to wipe out. ''Nobody reacted,'' Mr. Yodi said. ''We were all afraid.''
So now Mr. Yodi is a refugee for a second time, fleeing another civil war. And that is a window into Africa's central problem: insecurity. There is no formula for economic development. But three factors seem crucial: security, market-oriented policies and good governance. Botswana is the only African country that has enjoyed all three in the last 40 years, and it has been one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. And when these conditions applied, Uganda, Ghana, Mozambique and Rwanda boomed. But the African leaders who cared the most about their people, like Julius Nyerere of Tanzania or Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, tended to adopt quasi-socialist policies that hurt their people. In recent decades, Africans did much better ruled with capitalism than with compassion.
These days, African economic policies are more market-oriented, and governance is improving. The big civil wars are winding down. All this leaves me guardedly optimistic.
Yet Africa's biggest problem is still security. The end of the cold war has seen a surge in civil conflict, partly because great powers no longer stabilize client states. One-fifth of Africans live in nations shaken by recent wars. My Times colleague Howard French forcefully scolds the West in his new book, ''A Continent for the Taking,'' for deliberately looking away from eruptions of unspeakable violence. One lesson of the last dozen years is that instead of being purely reactive, helpfully bulldozing mass graves after massacres, African and Western leaders should try much harder to stop civil wars as they start. The world is now facing a critical test of that principle in the Darfur region of Sudan, where Arab militias are killing and driving out darker-skinned African tribespeople. While the world now marks the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide and solemnly asserts that this must never happen again, it is. Some 1,000 people are dying each week in Sudan, and 110,000 refugees, like Mr. Yodi, have poured into Chad. Worse off are the 600,000 refugees within Sudan, who face hunger and disease after being driven away from their villages by the Arab militias. ''They come with camels, with guns, and they ask for the men,'' Mr. Yodi said. ''Then they kill the men and rape the women and steal everything.'' One of their objectives, he added, ''is to wipe out blacks.''
This is not a case when we can claim, as the world did after the Armenian, Jewish and Cambodian genocides, that we didn't know how bad it was. Sudan's refugees tell of mass killings and rapes, of women branded, of children killed, of villages burned -- yet Sudan's government just stiffed new peace talks that began last night in Chad. So far the U.N. Security Council hasn't even gotten around to discussing the genocide. And while President Bush, to his credit, raised the issue privately in a telephone conversation last week with the president of Sudan, he has not said a peep about it publicly. It's time for Mr. Bush to speak out forcefully against the slaughter. This is not just a moral test of whether the world will tolerate another genocide. It's also a practical test of the ability of African and Western governments alike to respond to incipient civil wars while they can still be suppressed. Africa's future depends on the outcome, and for now it's a test we're all failing.
Put Your Money Where Their Mouths Are
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: April 3, 2004
BISKÉ, Chad— With Democrats on the warpath over trade, there's pressure for tougher international labor standards that would try to put Abakr Adoud out of work.
Abakr lives with his family in the desert near this oasis in eastern Chad. He has never been to school and roams the desert all day with his brothers, searching for sticks that can be made into doors for mud huts. He is 10 years old. It's appalling that Abakr, like tens of millions of other children abroad, is working instead of attending school. But prohibiting child labor wouldn't do him any good, for there's no school in the area for him to attend. If child labor hawks manage to keep Abakr from working, without giving him a school to attend, he and his family will simply be poorer than ever.
And that's the problem when Americans get on their high horses about child labor, without understanding the cruel third world economics that cause it. The push by Democrats like John Kerry for international labor standards is well intentioned, but it is also oblivious to third world realities.
Look, I feel like Scrooge when I speak out against bans on sweatshops or on child labor. In the West, it's hard to find anyone outside a university economics department who agrees with me. But the basic Western attitude -- particularly among Democrats and warm-and-fuzzy humanitarians -- sometimes ends up making things worse. Consider the results of two major American efforts to ban imports produced by child labor:
In 1993, when Congress proposed the U.S. Child Labor Deterrence Act, which would have blocked imports made by children (if it had passed), garment factories in Bangladesh fired 50,000 children. Many ended up in worse jobs, like prostitution.
Then there was the hue and cry beginning in 1996 against soccer balls stitched by children in their homes (mostly after school) in Sialkot, Pakistan. As a result, the balls are now stitched by adults, often in factories under international monitoring. But many women are worse off. Conservative Pakistanis believe that women shouldn't work outside the home, so stitching soccer balls is now off limits for many of them. Moreover, bad publicity about Pakistan led China to grab market share with machine-stitched balls: over the next two years, Pakistan's share of the U.S. soccer ball market dropped to 45 percent from 65 percent. So poor Pakistani families who depended on earnings from women or children who stitched soccer balls are now further impoverished.
I'm not arguing that child labor is a good thing. It isn't. But as Jagdish Bhagwati, the eminent trade economist, notes in his new book, ''In Defense of Globalization,'' thundering against child labor doesn't address the poverty that causes it.
In the village of Toukoultoukouli in Chad, I visited the 17 girls and 31 boys in the two-room school. Many children, especially girls, never attend school, which ends after the fourth grade. So a 12-year-old boy working in Toukoultoukouli has gotten all the education he can. Instead of keeping him from working, Westerners should channel their indignation into getting all children into school for at least those four years -- and there is one way that could perhaps be achieved.
It's bribery. The U.N. World Food Program runs a model foreign aid effort called the school feeding program. It offers free meals to children in poor schools (and an extra bribe of grain for girl students to take home to their families). Almost everywhere, providing food raises school attendance, particularly for girls. ''If there were meals here, parents would send their kids,'' said Muhammad Adam, a teacher in Toukoultoukouli.
School feeding costs just 19 cents per day per child.
So here's my challenge to university students: Instead of spending your energy boycotting Nike or pressing for barriers against child labor, why not sponsor school meals in places like Toukoultoukouli?
I spoke with officials at the World Food Program, and they'd be thrilled to have private groups or individuals help sponsor school feedings. (See www.nytimes.com/kristofresponds for details.) Children in Africa will be much better off with a hot meal and an education than with your self-righteous indignation.
Cruel Choices
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: April 14, 2004
I can't get the kaleidoscope of genocide out of my head since my trip last month to the Sudan-Chad border: the fresh graves, especially the extra-small mounds for children; the piles of branches on graves to keep wild animals from digging up corpses; the tales of women being first raped and then branded on the hand to stigmatize them forever; the isolated peasants, unfamiliar with electricity, who suddenly encounter the 21st century as helicopters machine-gun their children.
Then there were the choices faced by the Sudanese refugees I interviewed. For example, who should fetch water from the wells?
The Arab Janjaweed militia, armed by Sudan's government, shoots tribal African men and teenage boys who show up at the wells, and rapes women who go. So parents described an anguished choice: Should they risk their 7- or 8-year-old children by sending them to wells a mile away, knowing that the children have the best prospect of returning? And what should parents do when the Janjaweed seize their children, or gang-rape their daughters? Should they resist, knowing they will then be shot at once in front of their children?
Or what about the parents described by Human Rights Watch who were allowed by the militia to choose how their children would die: burned alive or shot to death?
Some 1,000 people in Sudan's Darfur region are still dying each week. But at least the world has finally begun to pay attention -- and it's striking how a hint of concern in the West has persuaded Sudan to reach a cease-fire there. President Bush finally found his voice last week, protesting the ''atrocities'' in Darfur. More forcefully, Kofi Annan warned on the day commemorating the Rwandan genocide that reports about brutalities in Darfur ''leave me with a deep sense of foreboding. . . . The international community cannot stand idle.'' So far in Darfur, thousands have been killed, and about one million black Africans have been driven from their homes by the lighter-skinned Arabs in the Janjaweed. Vast sections of Darfur, a region the size of France, have been burned and emptied. The Janjaweed have also destroyed wells, or fouled them by dumping corpses into them, to keep villagers from ever returning. ''You can drive for 100 kilometers and see nobody, no civilian,'' said Dr. Mercedes Tatay, a physician with Doctors Without Borders who has just spent a month in Darfur. ''You pass through large villages, completely burned or still burning, and you see nobody.'' In the refugee camps in Darfur, malnutrition and measles are claiming the survivors, especially young children. Roger Winter, assistant administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, estimates that even if the fighting stops today, at least 100,000 are still likely to die in coming months -- of disease, malnutrition and other ailments. Yet Sudan is still curbing access to Darfur by the U.N. and aid groups. I'm not suggesting an invasion of Sudan. But it's a fallacy to think that just because we can't do everything to stop genocide, we shouldn't do anything. One of the lessons of the last week is how little it took -- from Washington, the U.N. and the African Union -- to nudge Sudan into accepting a cease-fire and pledging access for humanitarian workers. Now we need more arm-twisting to get Sudan to comply with the cease-fire (it marked the first day, Monday, by bombing the town of Anka). The Sudanese government is testing us, but so far the State Department has shown a commendable willingness to stand up to it. We can save many tens of thousands of lives in the coming weeks -- but only if Mr. Bush and Mr. Annan speak out more boldly, if the U.N. Security Council insists on humanitarian access to Darfur and if the aid community mounts a huge effort before the rainy season makes roads impassible beginning in late May.
In the last 100 years, the United States has reacted to one genocide after another -- Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Bosnians -- by making excuses at the time, and then saying, too late, ''Oh, if only we had known!'' Well, this time we know what is happening in Darfur: 110,000 refugees have escaped into Chad and testify to the atrocities. How many more parents will be forced to choose whether their children are shot or burned to death before we get serious?
Dare We Call It Genocide?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: June 16, 2004
ALONG THE CHAD-SUDAN BORDER— The Bush administration says it is exploring whether to describe the mass murder and rape in the Darfur region of
Sudan as ''genocide.'' I suggest that President Bush invite to the White House a real expert, Magboula Muhammad Khattar, a 24-year-old widow huddled under a tree here.
The world has acquiesced shamefully in the Darfur genocide, perhaps because 320,000 deaths this year (a best-case projection from the U.S. Agency for International Development) seems like one more boring statistic. So listen to Ms. Khattar's story, multiply it by hundreds of thousands, and let's see if we still want to look the other way. Just a few months ago, Ms. Khattar had a great life. Her sweet personality and lovely appearance earned a hefty bride price of 40 cattle when she was married four years ago to Ali Daoud, a prosperous farmer. The family owned 300 cattle and 50 camels, making them among the wealthiest in their village, Ab-Layha in western Sudan. Ms. Khattar promptly bore two children, the youngest born late last year. About the same time, though, the Sudanese government resolved to crush a rebellion in Darfur, a region the size of France in western Sudan. Sudan armed and paid a militia of Arab raiders, the Janjaweed, and authorized them to slaughter and drive out members of the Zaghawa, Masalit and Fur tribes. On March 12, Ms. Khattar was performing her predawn Muslim prayers about 4 a.m. when a Sudanese government Antonov aircraft started dropping bombs on Ab-Layha, which is made up of Zaghawa tribespeople. Moments later, more than 1,000 Janjaweed attackers rode into the village on horses and camels, backed by Sudanese government troops in trucks.
''The Janjaweed shouted: 'We will not allow blacks here. We will not let Zaghawa here. This land is only for Arabs,' '' Ms. Khattar recalled.
Ms. Khattar grabbed her children, and, as shots and flames raged around her, raced for a nearby forest. But her father and mother tried to protect their animals -- they were yelling, ''Don't take our livestock.'' They were both shot dead.
The attack was part of a deliberate strategy to ensure that the village would be forever uninhabitable, that the Zaghawa could never live there again. The Janjaweed poisoned wells by stuffing them with the corpses of people and donkeys. They also blew up a dam that supplied water to the farms, destroyed seven hand pumps in the village and burned all the homes and even the village school, the clinic and the mosque.
In separate interviews, I talked to more than a dozen other survivors from Ab-Layha, and they all confirm Ms. Khattar's story. By most accounts, about 100 people were massacred that day in Ab-Layha, and a particular effort was made to exterminate all men and boys, even the very young. Women and girls were sometimes allowed to flee, but the prettiest were kidnapped.
Most of those raped don't want to talk about it. But Zahra Abdel Karim, a 30-year-old woman, told me how in the same attack on Ab-Layha, the Janjaweed shot to death her husband, Adam, and 7-year-old son, Rahshid, as well as three of her brothers. Then they grabbed her 4-year-old son, Rasheed, from her arms and cut his throat.
The Janjaweed took her and her two sisters away on horses and gang-raped them, she said. The troops shot one sister, Kuttuma, and cut the throat of the other, Fatima, and they discussed how to mutilate her. (Sexual humiliation has been part of the Sudanese strategy to drive out the African tribespeople. The Janjaweed routinely add to the stigma by branding or scarring the women they rape.)
''One Janjaweed said: 'You belong to me. You are a slave to the Arabs, and this is the sign of a slave,' '' she recalled. He slashed her leg with a sword before letting her hobble away, stark naked. Other villagers confirmed that they had found her naked and bleeding, and she showed me the scar on her leg.
By comparison, Ms. Khattar was one of the lucky ones. She lost her parents, her home and all her belongings, but her husband and children were alive, and she had not been raped. Unfortunately, her luck would soon run out.
I'll tell you more of her story on Saturday, because if she and her people aren't victims of genocide, then the word has no meaning.
Sudan's Final Solution
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: June 19, 2004
ALONG THE SUDAN-CHAD BORDER— In my last column, I wrote about Magboula Muhammad Khattar, a 24-year-old woman whose world began to collapse in March, when the Janjaweed Arab militia burned her village and slaughtered her parents.
Similar atrocities were happening all over Darfur, in western Sudan, leaving 1.2 million people homeless. Refugees tell consistent tales of murder, pillage and rape against the Zaghawa, Fur and Masalit tribes by the Arabs driving them away. As this genocide unfolded, the West largely ignored it. That was not an option for Ms. Khattar and her husband, Ali Daoud.
The night after the village massacre, survivors slipped out of the forest to salvage any belongings and bury their dead. They found the bodies of Ms. Khattar's mother and father; her father's corpse had been thrown in a well to poison the water supply. Ms. Khattar was now responsible for her 3-year-old sister as well as her own two children.
Then, as they prepared the bodies, one moved. Hussein Bashir Abakr, 19, had been shot in the neck and mouth and left for dead, but he was still alive. His parents had both been killed, along with all his siblings except for one brother, who had been shot in the foot but escaped.
That brother, Nuradin, gave up his duty to bury their parents, choosing instead to carry Hussein into the forest and to try to nurse him with traditional medicines. Nuradin's bullet wound made every step agonizing, but he was determined to save the only member of his family left. Over the next 46 nights, Nuradin dragged himself and his brother toward Chad. Finally, they staggered over the dry riverbed marking the border, where I found them. Hussein has lost part of his tongue and many of his teeth and cannot eat solid food. He is sick and inconsolable; his wife and baby were carried off by the Janjaweed and haven't been seen since. As I interviewed him, he bent over to retch every couple of minutes, Nuradin still cradling him tenderly.
Ms. Khattar and most of the other villagers decided they could not make the long trek to Chad. So they inched forward at night to find refuge on a nearby mountain. Every other night, she crept down the mountain to fetch water, risking kidnapping by the Janjaweed. ''It was so hard in the mountains,'' Ms. Khattar recalled. ''There were snakes and scorpions, and a constant fear of the Janjaweed.'' Six-foot cobras have killed some of the refugees. To feed her children, Ms. Khattar boiled leaves and plants normally eaten only by camels. Even so, her mother-in-law died.
Officially, Sudan had agreed to a cease-fire in Darfur. But at the end of May, a Sudanese military plane spotted the villagers' hideout, and soon after, the Janjaweed attacked. ''Ali had told me: 'If the Janjaweed attack, don't try to save me. You can't help. Don't get angry. Just keep the children and run away to Bahai [in Chad]. Don't shout or say anything,' '' Ms. Khattar said. So she hid in a hollow with the children, peeking out occasionally. She saw the Janjaweed round up all the villagers, including her husband and his three young brothers: Moussa, 8, Mochtar, 6, and Muhammad, 4. ''Even the boys,'' she remembers. ''They tied their hands like this'' -- she motioned with her arms in front of her -- ''and then forced them to lie on the ground.'' Then, she says, the males were all shot to death, while women were taken away to be raped. There were 45 corpses, all killed because of the color of their skin, part of an officially sanctioned drive by Sudan's Arab government to purge the western Sudanese countryside of black-skinned non-Arabs. The Sudanese authorities, much like the Turks in 1915 and the Nazis in the 1930's, apparently calculated that genocide offered considerable domestic benefits -- like the long-term stability to be achieved by a ''final solution'' of conflicts between Arabs and non-Arabs -- and that the world would not really care very much. It looks as if the Sudanese bet correctly.
Perhaps Americans truly don't care about the hundreds of thousands of lives at stake -- we have other problems, and Darfur is far away. But my hunch is that if we could just meet the victims, we would not be willing to acquiesce in genocide. After two Janjaweed attacks, Ms. Khattar was left a widow, responsible for three small, starving children in a land where showing her face would mean rape or death. I'll continue her saga in Wednesday's column.
Magboula's Brush With Genocide
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: June 23, 2004
ALONG THE SUDAN-CHAD BORDER— Meet Magboula Muhammad Khattar and her baby, Nada.
I wrote about Ms. Khattar in my last two columns, recounting how the Janjaweed Arab militia burned her village, murdered her parents and finally tracked her family down in the mountains. Ms. Khattar hid, but the Janjaweed caught her husband and his brothers, only 4, 6 and 8 years old, and killed them all.
Ms. Khattar decided that the only hope for saving her two daughters and her baby sister was to lead them by night to Chad. They had to avoid wells where the Janjaweed kept watch, but eight days later, half-dead with hunger and thirst, they staggered across the dry riverbed that marks the border with Chad. That's where I found Ms. Khattar. She is part of a wave of 1.2 million people left homeless by the genocide in Darfur. Among those I met was Haiga Ibrahim, a 16-year-old girl who said her father and three older brothers had been killed by the Janjaweed. So Haiga led her crippled mother and younger brothers and sisters to Chad. But the place they reached along the border, Bamina, was too remote to get help from overtaxed aid agencies. So when I found her, Haiga was leading her brothers and sisters 30 miles across the desert to the town of Bahai. ''My mother can't walk any more,'' she said wearily. ''First I'm taking my brother and sisters, and then I hope to go back and bring my mother.'' There is no childhood here. I saw a 4-year-old orphan girl, Nijah Ahmed, carrying her 13-month-old brother, Nibraz, on her back. Their parents and 15-year-old brother are missing in Sudan and presumed dead. As for Ms. Khattar, she is camping beneath a tree, sharing the shade with three other women also widowed by the Janjaweed. In some ways Ms. Khattar is lucky; her children all survived. Moreover, in some Sudanese tribes, widows must endure having their vaginas sewn shut to preserve their honor, but that is not true of her Zaghawa tribe.
Ms. Khattar's children have nightmares, their screams at night mixing with the yelps of jackals, and she worries that she will lose them to hunger or disease. But her plight pales beside that of Hatum Atraman Bashir, a 35-year-old woman who is pregnant with the baby of one of the 20 Janjaweed raiders who murdered her husband and then gang-raped her.
Ms. Bashir said that when the Janjaweed attacked her village, Kornei, she fled with her seven children. But when she and a few other mothers crept out to find food, the Janjaweed captured them and tied them on the ground, spread-eagled, then gang-raped them.
''They said, 'You are black women, and you are our slaves,' and they also said other bad things that I cannot repeat,'' she said, crying softly. ''One of the women cried, and they killed her. Then they told me, 'If you cry, we will kill you, too.' '' Other women from Kornei confirm her story and say that another woman who was gang-raped at that time had her ears partly cut off as an added humiliation.
One moment Ms. Bashir reviles the baby inside her. The next moment, she tearfully changes her mind. ''I will not kill the baby,'' she said. ''I will love it. This baby has no problem, except for his father.''
Ms. Khattar, the orphans, Ms. Bashir and countless more like them have gone through hell in the last few months, as we have all turned our backs -- and the rainy season is starting to make their lives even more miserable. In my next column, I'll suggest what we can do to save them. For readers eager to act now, some options are at www.nytimes.com/kristofresponds, Posting 479.
Dithering As Others Die
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: June 26, 2004
ALONG THE SUDAN-CHAD BORDER— The ongoing genocide in
Darfur is finally, fortunately, making us uncomfortable. At this rate, with only 250,000 more deaths it will achieve the gravitas of the Laci Peterson case.
Hats off to Colin Powell and Kofi Annan, who are both traveling in the next few days to Darfur. But the world has dithered for months already. Unless those trips signal a new resolve, many of the Darfur children I've been writing about over the last few months will have survived the Janjaweed militia only to die now of hunger or diarrhea. I've had e-mail from readers who are horrified by the slaughter, but who also feel that Africa is always a mess and that there's not much we can do. So let me address the cynics. Look, I'm sure it's terrible in Darfur. But lots of places are horrific, and we can't help everyone. Why obsess about Sudan? The U.N. describes Darfur as the No. 1 humanitarian crisis in the world today. The U.S. Agency for International Development estimates that at best 320,000 more people will still die of hunger and disease this year -- or significantly more if we continue to do nothing. Moreover, apart from our obligation to act under the Genocide Convention, acquiescence only encourages more genocide -- hence the question attributed to Hitler, ''Who today remembers the Armenian extermination?''
Haven't we invaded enough Muslim countries?
The U.S. is not going to invade Sudan. That's not a plausible option. But we can pass a tough U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing troops, as well as more support for African peacekeepers. If Germany, France and Spain don't want to send troops to Iraq, then let them deploy in Darfur. And we must publicly condemn the genocide. What good is a speech in the U.N.? Why would Sudan listen? Governments tend to be embarrassed about exterminating minorities. In Sudan, a bit of publicity about Darfur coupled with a written statement from President Bush led Sudan to agree to a cease-fire in April and to improve access for aid agencies. More publicity prompted it to promise to disband the Janjaweed raiders. Sudan lies and wriggles out of its promises, but its genocide is still calibrated to the international reaction. Likewise, it is still denying visas and blocking supplies for emergency relief, but pressure has led it to improve access. So, Mr. Bush, if a single written statement will do so much good, why won't you let the word ''Darfur'' pass your lips? Why the passivity in the face of evil? You could save tens of thousands of lives by making a forceful speech about Darfur. Conversely, your refusal to do so is costing tens of thousands of lives. If the Sudanese were notorious pirates of American videotapes, if they were sheltering Mullah Omar, you'd be all over them. So why not stand up just as forcefully to genocide?
Mr. Bush seems proud of his ''moral clarity,'' his willingness to recognize evil and bluntly describe it as such. Well, Darfur reeks of evil, and we are allowing it to continue. What can ordinary Americans do?
Yell! Mr. Bush and John Kerry have been passive about Darfur because voters are. If citizens contact the White House or their elected representatives and demand action, our leaders will be happy to follow. Readers can also contribute to one of the many aid agencies saving lives in Darfur. (I've listed some at www.nytimes.com/kristofresponds, Posting 489.) Be realistic. We don't have our national interest at stake in Darfur. But we do. Sudan's chaos is destabilizing surrounding countries, especially Chad, which is an increasing source of oil for us. Moreover, when states collapse into chaos, they become staging grounds for terrorism and for diseases like ebola and polio (both have broken out recently in Sudan). In any case, America is a nation that has values as well as interests. We betrayed those values when we ignored past genocides, and we are betraying them again now. In my last three columns, I wrote about Magboula Muhammad Khattar, a 24-year-old woman struggling to keep her children alive since her parents and husband were killed by the Janjaweed. Each time I visited the tree she lives under, she shared with me the only things she had to offer: a smile and a bowl of brackish water.
Is a cold shoulder all we have to offer in return?
Saying No To Killers
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: July 21, 2004
PORTLAND, Oregon— So what would you do if, like Carl Wilkens, you were caught in the middle of a genocide?
Mr. Wilkens, a Seventh-day Adventist missionary, was living with his wife and three small children in Kigali, Rwanda, in 1994. Then a Hutu militia began to slaughter the Tutsi, beginning with prominent figures like his banker neighbors, who threw their two youngest children to safety over a back fence before they were executed. Mr. Wilkens and his wife, Teresa, tried to distract their children from the carnage by playing a variation of musical chairs in which you could move only when there was no gunfire nearby. U.S. officials and church leaders ordered Mr. Wilkens to join an emergency evacuation of foreigners from Rwanda, and relatives and friends implored him to go. He refused.
Ms. Wilkens and the children left, but Mr. Wilkens insisted on staying in Kigali to try to protect Tutsi friends. His father warned him that even if he survived, his insubordination might end his career in the church. In the end, every other American left Kigali, but Mr. Wilkens remained through the entire genocide. ''It just seemed the right thing to do,'' he recalled in an interview here in Oregon, where he is now an Adventist pastor in the small town of Days Creek. ''I could take my blue passport and go, and moments later my housegirl and night watchman, both identifiable Tutsis, were going to be butchered.'' One evening the militia came to kill Mr. Wilkens and his Tutsi servants, but Hutu neighbors praised his humanitarian work and the militia went away. Death threats piled up, but Mr. Wilkens spent his days talking his way through roadblocks of snarling, drunken soldiers so he could take water and food to orphanages around town. The Raoul Wallenberg of Rwanda, he negotiated, pleaded and bullied his way through the bloodshed, saving lives everywhere he went. This continued for three months as 800,000 people were slaughtered. During all this time, President Bill Clinton and other Americans dithered, and there was an utter moral failure around the world.
But Mr. Wilkens plodded on each day, saving lives on a retail scale. Survivors describe him as extraordinarily courageous, not only for staying in Rwanda but also for venturing out each day into streets crackling with mortars and gunfire and pushing his way through roadblocks of angry, bloodstained soldiers armed with machetes and assault rifles.
Of course, Mr. Wilkens managed to save only a tiny number of Tutsi in Kigali, and Americans sometimes ask if his work wasn't like spitting into the ocean. That's true, he acknowledged, adding, ''But for the people you help, it's pretty significant.'' Ten years later, it's a useful exercise to wonder how many of us would have the courage Mr. Wilkens showed. Yet we don't have to wonder idly how we would respond to such an African genocide -- one is unfolding, right now, in the Darfur region of Sudan, and once again we're doing next to nothing. The World Health Organization estimates that 10,000 people are dying there each month, and again the response around the world has been abject moral failure. Colin Powell's visit to Sudan was an excellent first step, but President Bush has remained passive. As for John Kerry, he averted his eyes from Darfur for months, but last week he finally demanded action against what he termed genocide. The U.S. needs to send massive aid shipments and take much tougher steps, like issuing an ultimatum that will lead to a no-flight zone over most of Darfur until the Sudanese government disarms the genocidal Janjaweed militia. That would get Khartoum's attention. To respond to this genocide, we don't need to stand up to drunken killers with machetes and AK-47's, as Mr. Wilkens did. Yet we, as individuals or as a nation, still can't muster the will to take minimal steps to save lives, like providing adequate food, water and medicine, and browbeating Sudan into halting the killing. If readers want to help, I've listed some actions they can take on www.nytimes.com/kristofresponds, Posting 520 (but please don't send money to me). Moral choices lie not only with those who, like Carl Wilkens, risk death to help others, but also with the millions of ordinary people who are spared the risks but still face a basic decision: Do we try to save lives, or do we simply turn away?
As Humans Are Hunted
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: October 13, 2004
ARAWIYA, Sudan Hawa Moussa Abdullah was lucky enough to survive the first round of murder here in Darfur, but all the international outrage at Sudan's genocide isn't helping her much. She and her four children are still having to live like hunted beasts. She is one of more than 500,000 victims of the Darfur genocide who are beyond the reach of international aid. The inability to reach victims is one reason the United Nations describes Darfur as the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today. So Ms. Hawa and her children gather wild seeds to eat, and they huddle under trees at night. They live in constant terror that the Sudanese Army or the militia it financed, the Janjaweed, will find them and kill them all.
The Army and the Janjaweed attacked her village early this year. The thatched huts were burned, and village wells were filled with rubble or corpses. Ms. Hawa's husband disappeared and presumably was killed.
Most of the village's survivors escaped to Chad or to camps outside the cities. It is the frail - the young, the old, the infirm - who remain, stuck in a war zone with no way to flee. Ms. Hawa was heavily pregnant and could not make the journey to Chad, a four-day trip by camel. So she hides with her children in the hills. She gave birth under a tree with the help of an elderly neighbor who was also too weak to escape. Ms. Hawa tries to nurse her baby daughter, but she has little milk and the infant is scrawny.
"It's like we're being hunted," said a woman from the village of Karakil, 60-year-old Kultuma Muhammad. "We're still staying outside, because of fear. We're terrified, and besides, our houses are burned." The Sudanese government refuses to give me a visa so I came here on my own, sneaking across the border into Darfur from neighboring Chad. The area is desolate and throbs with malevolence, with villages burned and abandoned and survivors hiding from the Janjaweed and the Sudanese Army. Tearing across the desert in a pickup truck, I see more gazelles than humans. When survivors see my vehicle, they tend to hide. And, frankly, when I see a man, my impulse is to hide as well. That makes interviews difficult.
This area is controlled, to some degree, by rebels of the Sudan Liberation Army. The rebels have also killed and robbed civilians, but not nearly as often as the Sudanese government. The limits of rebel discipline were underscored when I rolled up to a rebel checkpoint: the commander scolded me for not calling ahead because, he said, the rebels might have shot me by mistake.
The stories of those hiding in Darfur are heartbreaking. Zahra Mochtar Muhammad, from the village of Darma, saw the Janjaweed kill her husband. In the chaos of the gunfire and burning huts, she and her children ran in different directions, and she lost her 4-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son. Later, she found her children's bodies where they had died of thirst. They were together - the older one had apparently tried to protect her brother.
Ms. Zahra's family had owned 100 camels, 50 sheep and 150 cattle - a net worth of more than $100,000 - but now she is a homeless, penniless cavewoman. She and her four surviving children, ages 5 to 10, live furtively under trees or in abandoned huts, surviving on wild seeds.
"If I had transport, I would go to Chad," she said. But she and two other widows' families have only one donkey among them. Even if the adults and older children could walk to safety, the younger ones could not. It's progress that the world has denounced the genocide without waiting the customary 10 years before wringing its hands in regret. But there are many other steps the United States could take: a no-flight zone, an arms embargo, an asset freeze on businesses owned by Sudan's ruling party, and greater teamwork with African and Islamic countries to exert more pressure on Sudan. President Bush is already in the forefront of the world leaders who have addressed the slaughter in Darfur, and he has done far more than President Clinton did during the Rwandan genocide. But there is so much more the United States can still do. Mr. President, you pride yourself on your willingness to stand up to evil - so why do you remain so passive in the face of such evil?
The Dead Walk
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: October 16, 2004
LONG THE CHAD-SUDAN BORDER — In June I wrote several columns about Magboula Muhammad Khattar, a young Sudanese woman whose parents and husband had been murdered in Darfur and who had escaped by night to the Chad border. She was living under a tree there. One of her sons was then so sick, probably from contaminated water - 20,000 people were living out in the open without a single toilet - that he seemed likely to die.
On returning this month, I searched again for Ms. Khattar.
Now, each time I write about the genocide in Darfur, I hear from readers who say something like: "It's terrible to hear the stories, but face reality - Africans are always slaughtering each other." Or: "It's none of our business, and anyway we don't have extra troops to send." Or: "There's nothing we can do." If that were true, then Ms. Khattar would now be dead.
So would the woman I'd met huddled under the very next tree, Zahra Abdel Karim, whose husband and two young sons had been slaughtered by the Janjaweed militia. She had been gang-raped along with her two sisters, who were then killed. Ms. Zahra was slashed with a sword and left to hobble away, naked and bleeding - but determined to survive so she could stagger across the desert to Chad and save her remaining child. Yet I just had a wonderful reunion here with Ms. Khattar and Ms. Zahra, who are now fast friends. They and the other 200,000 Darfur refugees in Chad are living in camps, with tents for shelter, purified water, medical care and food distributions. Even within Darfur itself, the United Nations World Food Program managed to get food to 1.3 million people last month out of the 2 million who need it. "It's much better here now," Ms. Khattar told me, flashing a beautiful smile as her son - now recovered - played with other children a few feet away.
I also tracked down two lovely orphans, Nijah and Nibraz Ahmed, 1 and 4 years old, whom I had met in June after their parents were both killed by the Janjaweed. Their grandmother sneaked back into Darfur two weeks ago to try to find their older brother, so their widowed aunt is caring for them. Her situation has improved enough that she fed me a home-cooked breakfast on the ground outside her tent. The improvement for the refugees in Chad underscores how easy it is to save lives in a situation like this. Just a dollop of international attention led Sudan to rein in the Janjaweed to some degree, and to provide more humanitarian access. An international aid effort, overseen by the U.N., is saving countless lives by spending as much in a year as we spend in Iraq in a few days. I wish President Bush had done more to help Darfur. But he has done more than just about any other leader, and his legacy will be hundreds of thousands of lives saved in Darfur - but also tens of thousands of deaths that could have been averted if he had acted earlier. Dr. David Nabarro of the World Health Organization estimates that within Darfur itself, 70,000 people have perished since March 1 of hunger and illness. Add the deaths from violence, the deaths of refugees in Chad and the deaths before March 1, and my guess is that the Darfur genocide has claimed more than 100,000 lives so far - and the total is still rising by 5,000 to 10,000 deaths per month. If a halfhearted effort can save hundreds of thousands of lives - without dispatching troops, without a visit to the region by Mr. Bush, without providing all the money that is needed - then imagine what we could accomplish if we took serious action.
Sudan's leaders are not Taliban-style fanatics. They are pragmatists who engaged in genocide because they thought it was the simplest way to end unrest among tribal peoples in Darfur. If we raise the costs of ethnic cleansing with a no-fly zone, an arms embargo, travel restrictions on senior officials and other targeted sanctions, then I think they can be persuaded to negotiate seriously toward peace. The history of genocide in the last century is one in which well-meaning Americans were distressed as Turks slaughtered Armenians, Nazis rounded up Jews and Gypsies, and Serbs wiped out Bosnians - but because there were no good or easy options, they did nothing.
Note to Mr. Bush: This time, we can still redeem ourselves - but time is running out, at the rate of 200 lives a day.
He Ain't Heavy. . .
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: October 20, 2004
ARAHA, Sudan — Allow me to introduce Abdelrahim Khamis Ghani and his little brother, Muhammad. The challenge we Americans face in Sudan is this: Are we willing to save Abdelrahim and Muhammad, and two million more like them? I photographed Abdelrahim and Muhammad in their mostly abandoned Darfur village, where the murderous Janjaweed militia, backed by the Sudanese government, has already killed seven members of their family. The boys have been hiding for months here in a war zone, hungry and frightened and hunted like wild beasts. "We're afraid here," said the boys' older sister, 17-year-old Asha. "We would go if we could. But we have no transport, no camel."
This land stinks of fear and death, but perhaps just as striking as the murder and rape are the moral choices that families here are forced to make each day.
For Abdelrahim's family members, the choice is whether to let adults and older siblings try to hike to safety in Chad - it's a six-day walk. They could leave one adult behind to try to keep Abdelrahim and Muhammad alive. Or should the whole family stay, putting more people at risk but increasing the chance that the boys can be saved? The family has elected for now to stay here together, surviving by gathering wild seeds to eat. Apart from starvation, the danger is that the Janjaweed or Sudanese troops will return to kill the men and rape and disfigure - and sometimes kill - the women and girls.
I sneaked into Darfur in a pickup truck from Chad, roaming a countryside speckled with burned and abandoned villages. I don't know how many survivors in Darfur are still hungry and hunted like these boys, but the number is in the hundreds of thousands. Here, genocide unfurls in slow motion. (For the sights and sounds of my trip to Darfur, click here.) One morning I came across a 10-year-old girl herding goats. She was frightened when she saw my truck, fearing that I might be in the Janjaweed, which had already burned down her home and killed 30 members of her extended family.
After it was clear that I was not a threat, the girl's father, Hassan Nahar, emerged from behind a tree. He explained that he had hidden the rest of his family in the hills, but he uses his youngest daughter to keep the goats alive.
"I think it is a bit less likely that the Janjaweed would kill a young girl like her," he said. "They would kill the older children." He hid when he saw my truck because there was no way he could protect his child from men with guns, and there was not much point in being killed in front of her.
Aid workers, who are doing heroic work in Darfur, face another painful moral calculus. So far, war zones like this part of Darfur have not gotten any help because it is too dangerous. Relief groups must protect their own employees, even if that means allowing Sudanese to die. I did see three Save the Children vehicles on an exploratory mission to see whether the area was safe. Then, a couple of hours after I saw them, a Save the Children car in the same area - I can't be sure if it was one of the same vehicles - hit a mine, and two aid workers were killed. Now aid groups will be even less willing to venture here.
I understand the painful ethical choices of Abdelrahim's family, of Mr. Hassan and of the international aid agencies. But what I can't fathom is our own moral choice, our decision to acquiesce in genocide.
We in America could save kids like Abdelrahim and Muhammad. This wouldn't require troops, just a bit of gumption to declare a no-fly zone, to press our Western allies and nearby Arab and African states, to impose an arms embargo and other targeted sanctions, to push a meaningful U.N. resolution even at the risk of a Chinese veto, and to insist upon the deployment of a larger African force. Instead, President Bush's policy is to chide Sudan and send aid. That's much better than nothing and has led Sudan to kill fewer children and to kill more humanely: Sudan now mostly allows kids in Darfur like Abdelrahim to die of starvation, instead of heaving them onto bonfires. But fundamentally, U.S. policy seems to be to "manage" the genocide rather than to act decisively to stop it. The lackadaisical international response has already permitted the deaths of about 100,000 people in Darfur, and up to 10,000 more are dying each month. We should look Abdelrahim and Muhammad in the eye and feel deeply ashamed.
Facing Down the Killers
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: December 18, 2004
The new movie "Hotel Rwanda" is a gut-wrenching true story of a hotel manager who sheltered 1,268 people in his hotel during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, bribing, begging and bullying the killers who came to hack people apart with machetes. One of the most powerful scenes comes when the U.N. commander admits to the hotel manager, Paul Rusesabagina, that the West is allowing the genocide to run its course. "We think you're dirt, Paul," he says brokenly, adding: "You're an African. ... They're not going to stop the slaughter."
Against that backdrop of local butchery and Western indifference, the hotel manager summons the courage to stare down the killers, even as they hold guns to his head. The film is painful to watch not only for the slaughter it depicts, but also because it forces us, as viewers, to wonder what we would do in such a situation.
But we don't have to wonder. We know, for a genocide is unfolding again, in Darfur. And rather than standing up to the killers, we're again acquiescing. The Darfur situation, after a few months of looking a bit more hopeful, is deteriorating sharply. The rebels have grown more intransigent, and security on the ground is getting worse. Save the Children has now had four aid workers killed in Darfur, and aid groups are pulling back. "The present situation in Darfur is therefore that of a time bomb, which could explode at any moment," Maj. Gen. Festus Okonkwo, the commander of an African Union force, said at a press conference yesterday. He said an "astronomical" amount of weaponry had been brought into Darfur, and suggested that the fighting was now poised to get much worse. Early in his presidency, Mr. Bush read a report about Bill Clinton's paralysis during the Rwandan genocide and scrawled in the margin, "Not on my watch."
But in fact the same thing is happening on his watch, and I find that heartbreaking and baffling. Mr. Bush's core constituency, the religious right, has been pushing him to be more active on Sudan, and some of the first people to jump up and down about Darfur were in Mr. Bush's own Agency for International Development. Mr. Bush did take modest action (much more than most Europeans), and even these baby steps halted the worst of the killing, saving tens of thousands of lives. So, in effect, Mr. Bush had the ball in his hands - and then fumbled it.
What should the president do?
Mr. Bush should travel to Sudan, as Tony Blair did. He should forcefully denounce the brutality - and also the misconduct of the rebels. He should convene a summit meeting to organize a larger international force for Darfur. He should push ahead with a U.N. resolution, even at the risk of a veto from China. And he should threaten targeted economic sanctions against Sudan's leaders unless attacks stop immediately. Finally, Mr. Bush should bar the Sudan government from using its aircraft to terrorize civilians. Imposing such a no-fly zone wouldn't have to involve constant surveillance flights. As an American general, Charles Wald, whose command includes Africa, told me, "It would be easier to tell the Sudanese that if they do use aircraft for civilian attacks, bad things will happen to their planes on the ground." After Sudan lost its first plane, it might stop strafing civilians. What can ordinary Americans do? They can call the White House or their members of Congress to demand action, and they can reach into their pockets. Jack Weisberg, a New Yorker with no previous interest in such causes, asked me for the name of an organization doing good work in Darfur. I mentioned Doctors Without Borders. Saying he was suffering an "attack of conscience," he then wrote the group a check for $500,000. "Look, I love money," Mr. Weisberg said. "But it's time to share what I've made. ... Our money is life to them."
A lot of lives, in the case of his donation, although even a $20 contribution goes a long way in Sudan. But above all we need Mr. Bush to show some moral leadership - and, yes, some of his "moral values." Mr. Bush bemoaned Mr. Clinton's use of the White House for sex with an intern, and he was right to do so. But it's incomparably more immoral, and certainly a greater betrayal of American values, for Mr. Bush to sit placidly in the White House and watch a genocide from the sidelines.
The Secret Genocide Archive
Photos don't normally appear on this page. But it's time for all of us to look squarely at the victims of our indifference.
These are just four photos in a secret archive of thousands of photos and reports that document the genocide under way in Darfur. The materials were gathered by African Union monitors, who are just about the only people able to travel widely in that part of Sudan. This African Union archive is classified, but it was shared with me by someone who believes that Americans will be stirred if they can see the consequences of their complacency.
The photo at the upper left was taken in the village of Hamada on Jan. 15, right after a Sudanese government-backed militia, the janjaweed, attacked it and killed 107 people. One of them was this little boy. I'm not showing the photo of his older brother, about 5 years old, who lay beside him because the brother had been beaten so badly that nothing was left of his face. And alongside the two boys was the corpse of their mother. The photo to the right shows the corpse of a man with an injured leg who was apparently unable to run away when the janjaweed militia attacked.
At the lower left is a man who fled barefoot and almost made it to this bush before he was shot dead.
Last is the skeleton of a man or woman whose wrists are still bound. The attackers pulled the person's clothes down to the knees, presumably so the victim could be sexually abused before being killed. If the victim was a man, he was probably castrated; if a woman, she was probably raped.
There are thousands more of these photos. Many of them show attacks on children and are too horrific for a newspaper.
One wrenching photo in the archive shows the manacled hands of a teenager from the girls' school in Suleia who was burned alive. It's been common for the Sudanese militias to gang-rape teenage girls and then mutilate or kill them.
Another photo shows the body of a young girl, perhaps 10 years old, staring up from the ground where she was killed. Still another shows a man who was castrated and shot in the head.
This archive, including scores of reports by the monitors on the scene, underscores that this slaughter is waged by and with the support of the Sudanese government as it tries to clear the area of non-Arabs. Many of the photos show men in Sudanese Army uniforms pillaging and burning African villages. I hope the African Union will open its archive to demonstrate publicly just what is going on in Darfur. The archive also includes an extraordinary document seized from a janjaweed official that apparently outlines genocidal policies. Dated last August, the document calls for the "execution of all directives from the president of the republic" and is directed to regional commanders and security officials.
"Change the demography of Darfur and make it void of African tribes," the document urges. It encourages "killing, burning villages and farms, terrorizing people, confiscating property from members of African tribes and forcing them from Darfur." It's worth being skeptical of any document because forgeries are possible. But the African Union believes this document to be authentic. I also consulted a variety of experts on Sudan and shared it with some of them, and the consensus was that it appears to be real. Certainly there's no doubt about the slaughter, although the numbers are fuzzy. A figure of 70,000 is sometimes stated as an estimated death toll, but that is simply a U.N. estimate for the deaths in one seven-month period from nonviolent causes. It's hard to know the total mortality over two years of genocide, partly because the Sudanese government is blocking a U.N. team from going to Darfur and making such an estimate. But independent estimates exceed 220,000 - and the number is rising by about 10,000 per month. So what can stop this genocide? At one level the answer is technical: sanctions against Sudan, a no-fly zone, a freeze of Sudanese officials' assets, prosecution of the killers by the International Criminal Court, a team effort by African and Arab countries to pressure Sudan, and an international force of African troops with financing and logistical support from the West. But that's the narrow answer. What will really stop this genocide is indignation. Senator Paul Simon, who died in 2003, said after the Rwandan genocide, "If every member of the House and Senate had received 100 letters from people back home saying we have to do something about Rwanda, when the crisis was first developing, then I think the response would have been different." I'm sorry for inflicting these horrific photos on you. But the real obscenity isn't in printing pictures of dead babies - it's in our passivity, which allows these people to be slaughtered.
During past genocides against Armenians, Jews and Cambodians, it was possible to claim that we didn't fully know what was going on. This time, President Bush, Congress and the European Parliament have already declared genocide to be under way. And we have photos.
This time, we have no excuse.
The American Witness
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: March 2, 2005
American soldiers are trained to shoot at the enemy. They're prepared to be shot at. But what young men like Brian Steidle are not equipped for is witnessing a genocide but being unable to protect the civilians pleading for help.
If President Bush wants to figure out whether the U.S. should stand more firmly against the genocide in Darfur, I suggest that he invite Mr. Steidle to the White House to give a briefing. Mr. Steidle, a 28-year-old former Marine captain, was one of just three American military advisers for the African Union monitoring team in Darfur -- and he is bursting with frustration. ''Every single day you go out to see another burned village, and more dead bodies,'' he said. ''And the children -- you see 6-month-old babies that have been shot, and 3-year-old kids with their faces smashed in with rifle butts. And you just have to stand there and write your reports.''
While journalists and aid workers are sharply limited in their movements in Darfur, Mr. Steidle and the monitors traveled around by truck and helicopter to investigate massacres by the Sudanese government and the janjaweed militia it sponsors. They have sometimes been shot at, and once his group was held hostage, but they have persisted and become witnesses to systematic crimes against humanity. So is it really genocide?
''I have no doubt about that,'' Mr. Steidle said. ''It's a systematic cleansing of peoples by the Arab chiefs there. And when you talk to them, that's what they tell you. They're very blunt about it. One day we met a janjaweed leader and he said, 'Unless you get back four camels that were stolen in 2003, then we're going to go to these four villages and burn the villages, rape the women, kill everyone.' And they did.''
The African Union doesn't have the troops, firepower or mandate to actually stop the slaughter, just to monitor it. Mr. Steidle said his single most frustrating moment came in December when the Sudanese government and the janjaweed attacked the village of Labado, which had 25,000 inhabitants. Mr. Steidle and his unit flew to the area in helicopters, but a Sudanese general refused to let them enter the village -- and also refused to stop the attack. ''It was extremely frustrating -- seeing the village burn, hearing gunshots, not being able to do anything,'' Mr. Steidle said. ''The entire village is now gone. It's a big black spot on the earth.''
When Sudan's government is preparing to send bombers or helicopter gunships to attack an African village, it shuts down the cellphone system so no one can send out warnings. Thus the international monitors know when a massacre is about to unfold. But there's usually nothing they can do. The West, led by the Bush administration, is providing food and medical care that is keeping hundreds of thousands of people alive. But we're managing the genocide, not halting it.
''The world is failing Darfur,'' said Jan Egeland, the U.N. under secretary general for humanitarian affairs. ''We're only playing the humanitarian card, and we're just witnessing the massacres.'' President Bush is pushing for sanctions, but European countries like France are disgracefully cool to the idea -- and China is downright hostile, playing the same supportive role for the Darfur genocide that it did for the Khmer Rouge genocide. Mr. Steidle has just quit his job with the African Union, but he plans to continue working in Darfur to do his part to stand up to the killers. Most of us don't have to go to that extreme of risking our lives in Darfur -- we just need to get off the fence and push our government off, too. At one level, I blame President Bush -- and, even more, the leaders of European, Arab and African nations -- for their passivity. But if our leaders are acquiescing in genocide, that's because we citizens are passive, too. If American voters cared about Darfur's genocide as much as about, say, the Michael Jackson trial, then our political system would respond. One useful step would be the passage of the Darfur Accountability Act, to be introduced today by Senators Jon Corzine and Sam Brownback. The legislation calls for such desperately needed actions as expanding the African Union force and establishing a military no-fly zone to stop Sudan from bombing civilians. As Martin Luther King Jr. put it: ''Man's inhumanity to man is not only perpetrated by the vitriolic actions of those who are bad. It is also perpetrated by the vitiating inaction of those who are good.''
Mr. Bush, Take a Look at MTV
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: April 17, 2005
When Turkey was massacring Armenians in 1915, the administration of Woodrow Wilson determinedly looked the other way. The U.S. ambassador in Constantinople sent furious cables to Washington, pleading for action against what he called "race murder," but the White House shrugged. It was, after all, a messy situation, and there was no easy way to stop the killing. The U.S. was desperate to stay out of World War I and reluctant to poison relations with Turkey. A generation later, American officials said they were too busy fighting a war to worry about Nazi death camps. In May 1943, the U.S. government rejected suggestions that it bomb Auschwitz, saying that aircraft weren't available. In the 1970's, the U.S. didn't try to stop the Cambodian genocide. It was a murky situation in a hostile country, and there was no perfect solution. The U.S. was also negotiating the establishment of relations with China, the major backer of the Khmer Rouge, and didn't want to upset that process. Much the same happened in Bosnia and Rwanda. As Samantha Power chronicles in her superb book, "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," the pattern was repeated over and over: a slaughter unfolded in a distant part of the world, but we had other priorities and it was always simplest for the American government to look away. Now President Bush is writing a new chapter in that history.
Sudan's army and janjaweed militias have spent the last couple of years rampaging in the Darfur region, killing boys and men, gang-raping and then mutilating women, throwing bodies in wells to poison the water and heaving children onto bonfires. Just over a week ago, 350 assailants launched what the U.N. called a "savage" attack on the village of Khor Abeche, "killing, burning and destroying everything in their paths." Once again, there's no good solution. So we've looked away as 300,000 people have been killed in Darfur, with another 10,000 dying every month. Since I'm of Armenian origin, I've been invited to participate in various 90th-anniversary memorials of the Armenian genocide. But we Armenian-Americans are completely missing the lesson of that genocide if we devote our energies to honoring the dead, instead of trying to save those being killed in Darfur. Meanwhile, President Bush seems paralyzed in the face of the slaughter. He has done a fine job of providing humanitarian relief, but he has refused to confront Sudan forcefully or raise the issue himself before the world. Incredibly, Mr. Bush managed to get through recent meetings with Vladimir Putin, Jacques Chirac, Tony Blair and the entire NATO leadership without any public mention of Darfur. There's no perfect solution, but there are steps we can take. Mr. Bush could impose a no-fly zone, provide logistical support to a larger African or U.N. force, send Condoleezza Rice to Darfur to show that it's a priority, consult with Egypt and other allies - and above all speak out forcefully. One lesson of history is that moral force counts. Sudan has curtailed the rapes and murders whenever international attention increased. Mr. Bush hasn't even taken a position on the Darfur Accountability Act and other bipartisan legislation sponsored by Senators Jon Corzine and Sam Brownback to put pressure on Sudan. Does Mr. Bush really want to preserve his neutrality on genocide? Indeed, MTV is raising the issue more openly and powerfully than our White House. (Its mtvU channel is also covering Darfur more aggressively than most TV networks.) It should be a national embarrassment that MTV is more outspoken about genocide than our president. If the Bush administration has been quiet on Darfur, other countries have been even more passive. Europe, aside from Britain, has been blind. Islamic Relief, the aid group, has done a wonderful job in Darfur, but in general the world's Muslims should be mortified that they haven't helped the Muslim victims in Darfur nearly as much as American Jews have. And China, while screaming about Japanese atrocities 70 years ago, is underwriting Sudan's atrocities in 2005. On each of my three visits to Darfur, the dispossessed victims showed me immense kindness, guiding me to safe places and offering me water when I was hot and exhausted. They had lost their homes and often their children, and they seemed to have nothing - yet in their compassion to me they showed that they had retained their humanity. So it appalls me that we who have everything can't muster the simple humanity to try to save their lives.
Day 113 of the President's Silence
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: May 3, 2005
Finally, finally, finally, President Bush is showing a little muscle on the issue of genocide in Darfur. Is the muscle being used to stop the genocide of hundreds of thousands of villagers? No, tragically, it's to stop Congress from taking action.
Incredibly, the Bush administration is fighting to kill the Darfur Accountability Act, which would be the most forceful step the U.S. has taken so far against the genocide. The bill, passed by the Senate, calls for such steps as freezing assets of the genocide's leaders and imposing an internationally backed no-fly zone to stop Sudan's Army from strafing villages. The White House was roused from its stupor of indifference on Darfur to send a letter, a copy of which I have in my hand, to Congressional leaders, instructing them to delete provisions about Darfur from the legislation. Mr. Bush might reflect on a saying of President Kennedy: "The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality."
Aside from the effort to block Congressional action, there are other signs that the administration is trying to backtrack on Darfur. The first sign came when Condoleezza Rice gave an interview to The Washington Post in which she deflected questions about Darfur and low-balled the number of African Union troops needed there. Then, in Sudan, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick pointedly refused to repeat the administration's past judgment that the killings amount to genocide. Mr. Zoellick also cited an absurdly low estimate of Darfur's total death toll: 60,000 to 160,000. Every other serious estimate is many times as high. The latest, from the Coalition for International Justice, is nearly 400,000, and rising by 500 a day. This is not a partisan issue, for Republicans and the Christian right led the way in blowing the whistle on the slaughter in Darfur. As a result, long before Democrats had staggered to their feet on the issue, Mr. Bush was telephoning Sudan's leader and pressing for a cease-fire there. Later, Mr. Bush forthrightly called the slaughter genocide, and he has continued to back the crucial step of a larger African Union force to provide security. Just the baby steps Mr. Bush has taken have probably saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
So why is Mr. Bush so reluctant to do a bit more and save perhaps several hundred thousand more lives? I sense that there are three reasons.
First, Mr. Bush doesn't see any neat solution, and he's mindful that his father went into Somalia for humanitarian reasons and ended up with a mess. Second, Mr. Bush is very proud - justly - that he helped secure peace in a separate war between northern and southern Sudan. That peace is very fragile, and he is concerned that pressuring Sudan on Darfur might disrupt that peace while doing little more than emboldening the Darfur rebels (some of them cutthroats who aren't negotiating seriously). Third, Sudan's leaders have increased their cooperation with the C.I.A. As The Los Angeles Times reported, the C.I.A. recently flew Sudan's intelligence chief to Washington for consultations about the war on terror, and the White House doesn't want to jeopardize that channel. All three concerns are legitimate. But when historians look back on his presidency, they are going to focus on Mr. Bush's fiddling as hundreds of thousands of people were killed, raped or mutilated in Darfur - and if the situation worsens, the final toll could reach a million dead. This Thursday marks Holocaust Remembrance Day. The best memorial would be for more Americans to protest about this administration's showing the same lack of interest in Darfur that F.D.R. showed toward the genocide of Jews. Ultimately, public pressure may force Mr. Bush to respond to Darfur, but it looks as if he will have to be dragged kicking and screaming by Republicans and Democrats alike. Granted, Darfur defies easy solutions. But Mr. Bush was outspoken and active this spring in another complex case, that of Terry Schiavo. If only Mr. Bush would exert himself as much to try to save the lives of the two million people driven from their homes in Darfur. So I'm going to start tracking Mr. Bush's lassitude. The last time Mr. Bush let the word Darfur slip past his lips publicly (to offer a passing compliment to U.S. aid workers, rather than to denounce the killings) was Jan. 10. So today marks Day 113 of Mr. Bush's silence about the genocide unfolding on his watch. Day 141 of Bush's Silence By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: May 31, 2005
A reader from Eugene, Ore., wrote in with a complaint about my harping on the third world: "Why should the U.S. care for the rest of the world?" he asked. "The U.S. should take care of its own. ... It's way past time for liberal twits to stop pushing the U.S. into nonsense or try to make every wrong in the world our responsibility." And while that reader wasn't George W. Bush, it could have been. Today marks Day 141 of Mr. Bush's silence on the genocide, for he hasn't let the word Darfur slip past his lips publicly since Jan. 10 (even that was a passing reference with no condemnation). There are several points I could make to argue that it's in our own interest to help Darfur. Turmoil in Darfur is already destabilizing all of Sudan and neighboring Chad as well, both oil-exporting countries. And failed states nurture terrorists like Osama and diseases like polio, while exporting refugees and hijackers. But there's an even better argument: Magboula, a woman I met at the Kalma Camp here.
She lived with her husband and five children in the countryside, but then as the Arab janjaweed began to slaughter black African tribes like her own, she and her family fled to the safety of a larger town. In December, the Sudanese Army attacked that town, and they ran off to the bush. Two months ago, the janjaweed militia caught up with them.
First the raiders shot her husband dead, she said, her voice choking, and then they whipped her, taunted her with racial insults against black people and mocked her by asking why her husband was not there to help her. Then eight of them gang-raped her.
They may also have mutilated her. At one point she spoke of being slashed with a knife in the shoulder and chest, but when I asked her about it, she kept changing the subject.
"I was very, very ashamed, and very frightened," she said, leaving it at that.
After the attack, Magboula was determined to save her children. So they traipsed together on a journey across the desert to the Kalma Camp, where a small number of foreign aid workers are struggling heroically to assist 110,000 victims of the upheaval. Magboula carried her 6-month-old baby, Abdul Hani, in her arms, and the others, ranging from 2 to 9, stumbled beside her.
Magboula finally arrived at Kalma a few weeks ago. But the Sudanese government is blocking new arrivals like her from getting registered, which means they can't get food and tents. So Magboula is getting no rations and is living with her children under a straw mat on a few sticks.
Then a few days ago, Abdul Hani, Magboula's baby, died.
She and her children are surviving on handouts from other homeless people who arrived earlier and are getting U.N. food. They have almost nothing themselves, but they at least have the compassion to help those who are even needier.
The world might also respond if people could see what is going on, but Sudan has barred most reporters from the area. I'm here because I accompanied Kofi Annan on a visit - bless him for coming! - and then jumped ship while here. Magboula and the 2.2 million other homeless people from Darfur need food and shelter, and President Bush has been good about providing that. But above all they need the international community to shame Sudan for killing and raping people on the basis of their tribe. Each time Sudan has been subjected to strong moral pressure, it has backed off somewhat - but lately the attention has subsided, and Mr. Bush even killed the Senate-passed Darfur Accountability Act, which would have condemned the genocide. What killed Magboula's husband and child was, indirectly, the world's moral indifference.
Others can still be saved if there is unrelenting pressure on Sudan to disarm the janjaweed, on intransigent Sudanese rebels to negotiate seriously for peace (instead of lounging about their hotel suites) and on governments like Egypt's and China's to stop being complicit in the Darfur genocide. When Americans see suffering abroad on their television screens, as they did after the tsunami, they respond. I wish we had the Magboula Channel, showing her daily struggle to forge ahead through humiliation and hunger, struggling above all to keep her remaining children alive. If you multiply Magboula by 2.2 million, you get the reasons why we should care.
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: June 5, 2005
All countries have rapes, of course. But here in the refugee shantytowns of Darfur, the horrific stories that young women whisper are not of random criminality but of a systematic campaign of rape to terrorize civilians and drive them from "Arab lands" - a policy of rape. Skip to next paragraph One measure of the international community's hypocrisy is that the world is barely bothering to protest. More than two years after the genocide in Darfur began, the women of Kalma Camp - a teeming squatter's camp of 110,000 people driven from their burned villages - still face the risk of gang rape every single day as they go out looking for firewood. Nemat, a 21-year-old, told me that she left the camp with three friends to get firewood to cook with. In the early afternoon a group of men in uniforms caught and gang-raped her.
"They said, 'You are black people. We want to wipe you out,' " Nemat recalled. After the attack, Nemat was too injured to walk, but her relatives found her and carried her back to camp on a donkey.
A neighbor, Toma, 34, said she heard similar comments from seven men in police uniforms who raped her. "They said, 'We want to finish you people off,' " she recalled.
Sometimes the women simply vanish. A young mother named Asha cried as she told how she and her four sisters were chased down by a Janjaweed militia; she escaped but all her sisters were caught.
"To this day, I don't know if they are alive or dead," she sobbed. Then she acknowledged that she had another reason for grief: a Janjaweed militia had also murdered her husband 23 days earlier.
Gang rape is terrifying anywhere, but particularly so here. Women who are raped here are often ostracized for life, even forced to build their own huts and live by themselves. In addition, most girls in Darfur undergo an extreme form of genital cutting called infibulation that often ends with a midwife stitching the vagina shut with a thread made of wild thorns. This stitching and the scar tissue make sexual assault a particularly violent act, and the resulting injuries increase the risk of H.I.V. transmission. Sudan has refused to allow aid groups to bring into Darfur more rape kits that include medication that reduces the risk of infection from H.I.V. The government has also imprisoned rape victims who became pregnant, for adultery. Even those who simply seek medical help are harassed and humiliated.
On March 26, a 17-year-old student named Hawa went to a French-run clinic in Kalma and reported that she had been raped. A French midwife examined her and confirmed that she was bleeding and had been raped.
But an informer in the clinic alerted the police, who barged in and - over the determined protests of two Frenchwomen - carried Hawa off to a police hospital, where she was chained to a cot by one leg and one arm. A doctor there declared that she had not been raped after all, and Hawa was then imprisoned for a couple of days. The authorities are now proposing that she be charged with submitting false information.
The attacks are sometimes purely about humiliation. Some women are raped with sticks that tear apart their insides, leaving them constantly trickling urine. One Sudanese woman working for a European aid organization was raped with a bayonet.
Doctors Without Borders issued an excellent report in March noting that it alone treated almost 500 rapes in a four-and-a-half-month period. Sudan finally reacted to the report a few days ago - by arresting an Englishman and a Dutchman working for Doctors Without Borders. Those women who spoke to me risked arrest and lifelong shame by telling their stories. Their courage should be an inspiration to us - and above all, to President Bush - to speak out. Mr. Bush finally let the word Darfur pass his lips on Wednesday, after 142 days of silence, but only during a photo op. Such silence amounts to acquiescence, for this policy of rape flourishes only because it is ignored. I'm still chilled by the matter-of-fact explanation I received as to why it is women who collect firewood, even though they're the ones who are raped. The reason is an indication of how utterly we are failing the people of Darfur, two years into the first genocide of the 21st century. "It's simple," one woman here explained. "When the men go out, they're killed. The women are only raped."
Uncover Your Eyes
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: June 7, 2005
Last fall President Bush declared the slaughter here in Darfur to be genocide, and then looked away. One reason for his paralysis is apparently the fear that Darfur may be another black hole of murder and mutilation, a hopeless quagmire to suck in well-meaning Americans - another Somalia or Iraq. We're again making the same mistake we've made in past genocides: as in the slaughter of Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Rwandans and Bosnians, we see no perfect solutions, so we end up doing very little. Because we could not change Nazi policies, we did not bother to bomb rail lines leading to death camps; today, because we have little leverage over Sudan, we do not impose a no-fly zone to stop the strafing of civilians or even bother to speak out forcefully. Yet this town of Labado underscores that Darfur is not hopeless, that even the very modest actions that the international community has taken so far have saved vast numbers of lives. A desert town that used to hold about 25,000 people, Labado was attacked in December by the Sudanese military and the militia known as the janjaweed. For several days, the army burned huts, looted shops, killed men and raped women.
For months, Labado was completely deserted and appeared destined to become a ghost town. But then African Union forces, soldiers from across Africa who have been dispatched to stop the slaughter, set up a small security outpost of 50 troops here. Almost immediately, refugees began returning to Labado, followed by international aid groups. Today there are perhaps 5,000 people living in the town again, building new thatch roofs over their scorched mud huts. The revival of Labado underscores how little it takes to make a huge difference on the ground. If Western governments help the African Union establish security, if we lean hard on both the government and the rebels to reach a peace agreement, then by the end of this year Darfur might see peace breaking out. For now, Labado is only an oasis, and when the people here step out of the town they risk being murdered or raped by the janjaweed militia.
Refugees fleeing to Kalma from a village called Saleya described how nine boys were seized by the janjaweed, stripped naked and tied up, their noses and ears cut off and their eyes gouged out. They were then shot dead and left near a public well. Nearby villagers got the message and fled.
Aid workers report that in another village, the janjaweed recently castrated a 10-year-old boy, apparently to terrorize local people and drive them away. The boy survived and is being treated.
Yet along with atrocities, there are hopeful signs. While Mr. Bush should do more, he has forthrightly called the killings genocide and heaped aid on Darfur, probably saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Indeed, aid shipments have brought malnutrition rates in much of Darfur below those of other places in Sudan, partly because donor governments have "borrowed" aid from other regions. So children are going hungry in southern and eastern Sudan as a consequence of Darfur. If Mr. Bush led a determined effort to save Darfur, there would be real hope for peace here - plus, the international image of the U.S. would improve. And a new Zogby poll commissioned by the International Crisis Group found that Americans by margins of six to one favor bolder action in Darfur, such as a no-fly zone. But Mr. Bush is covering his eyes. Last year administration figures like Colin Powell and John Danforth led the response to Darfur, but now neither Condoleezza Rice nor the White House seems much interested. Darfur will never be a Somalia or Iraq, because nobody is talking about sending in American combat troops. But simply an ounce of top-level attention to Darfur would go a long way to save lives. In 1999, Madeleine Albright traveled to Sierra Leone and met child amputees there, wrenching the hearts of American television viewers and making that crisis a priority in a way that eventually helped resolve it. Ms. Rice could do the same for Darfur if she would only bother to go. Mr. Bush values a frozen embryo. But he hasn't mustered much compassion for an entire population of terrorized widows and orphans. And he is cementing in place the very hopelessness he dreads, by continuing to avert his eyes from the first genocide of the 21st century.
All Ears for Tom Cruise, All Eyes on Brad Pitt
Published: July 26, 2005
Some of us in the news media have been hounding President Bush for his shameful passivity in the face of genocide in Darfur. More than two years have passed since the beginning of what Mr. Bush acknowledges is the first genocide of the 21st century, yet Mr. Bush barely manages to get the word "Darfur" out of his mouth. Still, it seems hypocritical of me to rage about Mr. Bush's negligence, when my own beloved institution - the American media - has been at least as passive as Mr. Bush. Skip to next paragraph Condi Rice finally showed up in Darfur a few days ago, and she went out of her way to talk to rape victims and spotlight the sexual violence used to terrorize civilians. Most American television networks and cable programs haven't done that much. Even the coverage of Ms. Rice's trip underscored our self-absorption. The manhandling of journalists accompanying Ms. Rice got more coverage than any massacre in Darfur has. This is a column I don't want to write - we in the media business have so many critics already that I hardly need to pipe in as well. But after more than a year of seething frustration, I feel I have to.
Like many others, I drifted toward journalism partly because it seemed an opportunity to do some good. (O.K., O.K.: it was also a blast, impressed girls and offered the glory of the byline.) But to sustain the idealism in journalism - and to rebut the widespread perception that journalists are just irresponsible gossips - we need to show more interest in the first genocide of the 21st century than in the "runaway bride."
I'm outraged that one of my Times colleagues, Judith Miller, is in jail for protecting her sources. But if we journalists are to demand a legal privilege to protect our sources, we need to show that we serve the public good - which means covering genocide as seriously as we cover, say, Tom Cruise. In some ways, we've gone downhill: the American news media aren't even covering the Darfur genocide as well as we covered the Armenian genocide in 1915. Serious newspapers have done the best job of covering Darfur, and I take my hat off to Emily Wax of The Washington Post and to several colleagues at The Times for their reporting. Time magazine gets credit for putting Darfur on its cover - but the newsweeklies should be embarrassed that better magazine coverage of Darfur has often been in Christianity Today. The real failure has been television's. According to monitoring by the Tyndall Report, ABC News had a total of 18 minutes of the Darfur genocide in its nightly newscasts all last year - and that turns out to be a credit to Peter Jennings. NBC had only 5 minutes of coverage all last year, and CBS only 3 minutes - about a minute of coverage for every 100,000 deaths. In contrast, Martha Stewart received 130 minutes of coverage by the three networks. Incredibly, more than two years into the genocide, NBC, aside from covering official trips, has still not bothered to send one of its own correspondents into Darfur for independent reporting. "Generally speaking, it's been a total vacuum," said John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group, speaking of television coverage. "I blame policy makers for not making better policy, but it sure would be easier if we had more media coverage."
When I've asked television correspondents about this lapse, they've noted that visas to Sudan are difficult to get and that reporting in Darfur is expensive and dangerous. True, but TV crews could at least interview Darfur refugees in nearby Chad. After all, Diane Sawyer traveled to Africa this year - to interview Brad Pitt, underscoring the point that the networks are willing to devote resources to cover the African stories that they consider more important than genocide. If only Michael Jackson's trial had been held in Darfur. Last month, CNN, Fox News, NBC, MSNBC, ABC and CBS collectively ran 55 times as many stories about Michael Jackson as they ran about genocide in Darfur. The BBC has shown that outstanding television coverage of Darfur is possible. And, incredibly, mtvU (the MTV channel aimed at universities) has covered Darfur more seriously than any network or cable station. When MTV dispatches a crew to cover genocide and NBC doesn't, then we in journalism need to hang our heads. So while we have every right to criticize Mr. Bush for his passivity, I hope that he criticizes us back. We've behaved as disgracefully as he has.
Walking the Talk
Published: October 9, 2005
A year ago, a group of Swarthmore students decided to take on an unusual extracurricular activity: stopping genocide.
Mark Hanis, one of the students, is Jewish and all four of his grandparents survived the Holocaust. He was troubled by the way generations of Americans acquiesced in one genocide after another - only to apologize afterward and pledge "Never Again."
Skip to next paragraph So Mr. Hanis and fellow students started to raise money to help provide security to stop the slaughter in Darfur. In particular, they wanted to help pay for African Union peacekeepers. Their Genocide Intervention Fund has now raised $250,000 and is about to hand over the first installment to the leaders of the African Union. The money may be used to pay for female African police officers to protect Darfur women from being raped. The Genocide Intervention Fund now has an all-star cast, including the backing of former White House officials, generals, and celebrities like Mia Farrow and Don Cheadle. Its spokeswoman, a Rwandan genocide survivor who is now a Swarthmore sophomore, introduced Bill Clinton at a student conference. It has opened a Washington office and is lobbying for the bipartisan Darfur Peace and Accountability Act, which calls for sanctions on Sudan and a no-fly zone. "We do lobby days, where we arrange for people to come to Washington to meet their Congressional offices and say, 'I've put $20 down to protect the people of Darfur. What are you doing?' " said Mr. Hanis, who graduated recently. So far more than 100 colleges have raised money for the fund (www.genocideinterventionfund.org), and universities have become the center of the movement to stop the slaughter. A group started at Georgetown, Stand (Students Taking Action Now: Darfur), has chapters nationwide and across Canada, and Harvard led a divestment effort by having its endowment sell stock in companies that support the Sudanese government. In the long term, the organizers hope to encourage more education about genocide in American schools - California and a few other states have passed laws that public schools must include education about genocide - and to bolster an early warning system so that the world will respond to atrocities more promptly. "We're getting smarter at this," Mr. Hanis said. "We're building a permanent political constituency against genocide." He paused and added soberly: "Of course, there are lives lost every day."
So while President Bush is proving wimpish on genocide, the response of many ordinary Americans like Mr. Hanis has been inspiring. Aside from students, the leaders in the effort include Jewish and Armenian groups (the word genocide has special resonance for both) and religious groups.
In Dallas, Temple Emanu-El started Dolls for Darfur, which has made thousands of tiny paper dolls representing the victims of Darfur. It has sent them to senators and is preparing "advocacy kits" to help people lobby for a sterner American response to the genocide (see dollsfordarfur.org). Then there are the big-hearted folks at Ginghamsburg Church, a large Methodist church in Tipp City, Ohio. After the pastor, Mike Slaughter, read about atrocities in Darfur, he decided to ask the congregation to spend only half as much on Christmas presents last year as they planned, and to donate the rest to victims in Darfur. The result, along with other fund-raising efforts, was $327,000 in donations; the congregation is planning the same campaign this Christmas. The money is being used to keep children alive and safe in South Darfur. "We recognize that this is only a pittance in the face of the entire crisis in Darfur," says Karen Smith, director of operations for the church. "However, if we can successfully engage other churches across the U.S. in this call so that they issue the same challenge to their constituents, the impact could truly be God-sized." During the Holocaust, when Franklin Roosevelt was as uninterested in genocide as George W. Bush is today, Arthur Koestler referred to those who demanded action as "the screamers." Today, Mr. Hanis, Ms. Smith and others like them are "the screamers," and if it weren't for them the death toll in Darfur would be even higher. Countless thousands of survivors sitting in refugee camps owe their lives to screams coming from places like Swarthmore or Ginghamsburg. So out of the miasma of horror that is Darfur, something uplifting is taking place. Ordinary Americans are finding creative ways to respond to the slaughter, so that they personally inject meaning into those traditionally hollow words: Never Again.
Never Again, Again?
Published: November 20, 2005
So who killed 2-year-old Zahra Abdullah for belonging to the Fur tribe?
At one level, the answer is simple: The murderers were members of the janjaweed militia that stormed into this mud-brick village in the South Darfur region at dawn four weeks ago on horses, camels and trucks. Zahra's mother, Fatima Omar Adam, woke to gunfire and smoke and knew at once what was happening. Skip to next paragraph She jumped up from her sleeping mat and put Zahra on her back, then grabbed the hands of her two older children and raced out of her thatch-roof hut with her husband. Some of the marauders were right outside. They yanked Zahra from Ms. Fatima's back and began bludgeoning her on the ground in front of her shrieking mother and sister. Then the men began beating Ms. Fatima and the other two children, so she grabbed them and fled - and the men returned to beating the life out of Zahra.
At another level, responsibility belongs to the Sudanese government, which armed the janjaweed and gave them license to slaughter and rape members of several African tribes, including the Fur.
Then some responsibility attaches to the rebels in Darfur. They claim to be representing the tribes being ethnically cleansed, but they have been fighting each other instead of negotiating a peace with the government that would end the bloodbath. And finally, responsibility belongs to the international community - to you and me - for acquiescing in yet another genocide.
Tama is just the latest of many hundreds of villages that have been methodically destroyed in the killing fields of Darfur over the last two years. Ms. Fatima sat on the ground and told me her story - which was confirmed by other eyewitnesses - in a dull, choked monotone, as she described her guilt at leaving her child to die. "Zahra was on the ground, and they were beating her with sticks, but I ran away," she said. Her 4-year-old son, Adam, was also beaten badly but survived. A 9-year-old daughter, Khadija, has only minor injuries but she told me that she had constant nightmares about the janjaweed.
At least Ms. Fatima knows what happened to her daughter. A neighbor, Aisha Yagoub Abdurahman, is beside herself because she says she saw her 10-year-old son Adil carried off by the janjaweed. He is still missing, and everyone knows that the janjaweed regularly enslave children like him, using them as servants or sexual playthings. In all, 37 people were killed in Tama, and another 12 are missing.
The survivors fled five miles to another village that had been abandoned after being attacked by the janjaweed a year earlier. Now the survivors are terrified, and they surrounded me to ask for advice about how to stay alive.
None of them dared accompany me back to Tama, which is an eerie ghost town, doors hanging off hinges and pots and sandals strewn about. The only inhabitants I saw in Tama were camels, which are now using the village as a pasture - and which the villagers say belong to the janjaweed. On the road back, I saw a group of six janjaweed, one displaying his rifle.
Darfur is just the latest chapter in a sorry history of repeated inaction in the face of genocide, from that of Armenians, through the Holocaust, to the slaughter of Cambodians, Bosnians and Rwandans. If we had acted more resolutely last year, then Zahra would probably still be alive. Attacks on villages like Tama occur regularly. Over the last week, one tribe called the Falata, backed and armed by the Sudanese government, has burned villages belonging to the Masalit tribe south of here. Dozens of bodies are said to be lying unclaimed on the ground.
President Bush, where are you? You emphasize your willingness to speak bluntly about evil, but you barely let the word Darfur pass your lips. The central lesson of the history of genocide is that the essential starting point of any response is to bellow moral outrage - but instead, Mr. President, you're whispering. In a later column, I'll talk more specifically about actions we should take, and it's true that this is a complex mess without easy solutions. But for starters we need a dose of moral clarity. For all the myriad complexities of Darfur, what history will remember is that this is where little girls were bashed to death in front of their parents because of their tribe - and because the world couldn't be bothered to notice.
Sudan's Department of Gang Rape Published: November 22, 2005
When the Arab men in military uniforms caught Noura Moussa and raped her the other day, they took the trouble to explain themselves.
Skip to next paragraph Ms. Noura is one of thousands of women and girls to be gang-raped in Darfur, as part of what appears to be a deliberate Sudanese government policy to break the spirit of several African tribes through mass rape. This policy is shrewd as well as brutal, for the exceptional stigma of rape here often silences victims even as it terrorizes the entire population and forces people to flee.
Ms. Noura, 22, expected to be married soon, and the neighbors said she probably would have received a bride price of 30 cows. These days, they say, she will be lucky to find any husband at all - and will not get a single cow.
This is the first genocide of the 21st century, and we are collectively letting the Sudanese government get away with it. Sudan's leaders appear to have made a calculated decision that some African tribes in the Darfur region are more of a headache than the international protests that result when it depopulates large areas of those tribes. In effect, it is our acquiescence that allows the rapes and murders to continue. The solution isn't to send American troops. But a starting point is to convey American outrage - loudly and insistently - and demonstrate that Darfur is an American priority. Ms. Noura's saga began when the Sudanese Army and janjaweed militia burned down her village a year ago and killed her father. She and her family fled here to Kalma, but she is the eldest child and needed money to support her younger brothers and sisters.
So she ventured out of Kalma to cut grass in the nearby fields to sell. That was when the men raped and beat her, leaving her unable to walk home.
Rape leads to particular injuries in Darfur because many girls, as part of female circumcision rites, have their vaginas sewn shut with a wild thorn. The resulting physical trauma from rape also increases the risk of H.I.V. transmission. In addition, the attackers sometimes rape women with sticks or bayonets, causing internal injuries that leave the victims incontinent. Sudan has backed off a bit in response to protests about the rapes, and it has stopped arresting women who go to foreign aid workers to seek medical treatment. But the rapes themselves are continuing, unabated. The Sudanese police and military are everywhere in the area, but they don't secure the fields outside the camp where the attacks take place. In just one of eight sectors in Kalma, I found three women who acknowledged on the record that they had been gang-raped this month within a few days of each other.
Arifa Muhammad, 25, told of being caught by 10 men as she planted okra to have a little more food for her three children. One of the men said, "I know you are Zaghawa, so we will rape you." Afterward, they beat her with the butts of their guns.
The very next day, Saida Abdukarim, also 25, was tending her vegetables when three men with guns seized her. She pleaded with them, pointing out that she is eight months' pregnant.
"They said, 'You are black, and so we can rape you,' " she recalled. Then they gang-raped her and beat her with sticks and their guns. She absorbed the beating, trying to protect her unborn baby, and although she was too battered to walk, she has so far not miscarried.
To me, Ms. Noura, Ms. Arifa and Ms. Saida are among the heroes of Darfur. There is no shame in being raped, but plenty of stigma should attach to those who ignore crimes against humanity. In my book, it's the politicians who don't consider genocide a priority who aren't worth a single cow. These three women have the backbone to stand up and be counted. We in the West have so much less to lose, yet we can't even find our own voices. Let's hope that the courage of these three women may inspire President Bush, Kofi Annan and other world leaders finally to show a little more backbone and stand much more firmly against genocide.
A Tolerable Genocide
Published: November 27, 2005
Who would have thought that a genocide could become worse? But after two years of heartbreaking slaughter, rape and mayhem, the situation in Darfur is now spiraling downward. Skip to next paragraph More villages are again being attacked and burned - over the last week thatch-roof huts have been burning near the town of Gereida and far to the northwest near Jebel Mun. Aid workers have been stripped, beaten and robbed. A few more attacks on aid workers, and agencies may pull out - leaving the hapless people of Darfur with no buffer between themselves and the butchers. The international community has delegated security to the African Union, but its 7,000 troops can't even defend themselves, let alone protect civilians. One group of 18 peacekeepers was kidnapped last month, and then 20 soldiers sent to rescue them were kidnapped as well; four other soldiers and two contractors were killed in a separate incident.
What will happen if the situation continues to deteriorate sharply and aid groups pull out? The U.N. has estimated that the death toll could then rise to 100,000 a month.
The turmoil has also infected neighboring Chad, which is inhabited by some of the same tribes as Sudan. Diplomats and U.N. officials are increasingly worried that Chad could tumble back into its own horrific civil war as well. This downward spiral has happened because for more than two years, the international community has treated this as a tolerable genocide. In my next column, my last from Darfur, I'll outline the steps we need to take. But the essential starting point is outrage: a recognition that countering genocide must be a global priority. It's true that a few hundred thousand deaths in Darfur - a good guess of the toll so far - might not amount to much in a world where two million a year die of malaria. But there is something special about genocide. When humans deliberately wipe out others because of their tribe or skin color, when babies succumb not to diarrhea but to bayonets and bonfires, that is not just one more tragedy. It is a monstrosity that demands a response from other humans. We demean our own humanity, and that of the victims, when we avert our eyes. Already, large swaths of Darfur are so unsafe that they are "no go" areas for humanitarian organizations - meaning that we don't know what horrors are occurring in those areas. But we have some clues. There are widespread reports that the janjaweed, the government-backed Arab marauders who have been slaughtering members of several African tribes, sometimes find it convenient not to kill or expel every last African but to leave a few alive to grow vegetables and run markets. So they let some live in exchange for protection money or slave labor.
One Western aid worker in Darfur told me that she had visited an area controlled by janjaweed. In public, everyone insisted - meekly and fearfully - that everything was fine. Then she spoke privately to two sisters, both of the Fur tribe. They said that the local Fur were being enslaved by the janjaweed, forced to work in the fields and even to pay protection money every month just to be allowed to live. The two sisters said that they were forced to cook for the janjaweed troops and to accept being raped by them.
Finally, they said, their terrified father had summoned the courage to beg the janjaweed commander to let his daughters go. That's when the commander beheaded the father in front of his daughters.
"They told me they just wanted to die," the aid worker remembered in frustration. "They're living like slaves, in complete and utter fear. And we can't do anything about it."
That aid worker has found her own voice, by starting a blog called "Sleepless in Sudan" in which she describes what she sees around her. It sears at http://sleeplessinsudan.blogspot.com, without the self-censorship that aid groups routinely accept as the price for being permitted to save lives in Darfur. Our leaders still haven't found their voices, though. Congress has even facilitated the genocide by lately cutting all funds for the African Union peacekeepers in Darfur; we urgently need to persuade Congress to restore that money. So what will it take? Will President Bush and other leaders discover some backbone if the killing spreads to Chad and the death toll reaches 500,000? One million? God forbid, two million? How much genocide is too much?
What's to Be Done About Darfur? Plenty Published: November 29, 2005
In 1915, Woodrow Wilson turned a blind eye to the Armenian genocide. In the 1940's, Franklin Roosevelt refused to bomb the rail lines leading to Auschwitz. In 1994, Bill Clinton turned away from the slaughter in Rwanda. And in 2005, President Bush is acquiescing in the first genocide of the 21st century, in Darfur. Skip to next paragraph Mr. Bush is paralyzed for the same reasons as his predecessors. There is no great public outcry, there are no neat solutions, we already have our hands full, and it all seems rather distant and hopeless. But Darfur is not hopeless. Here's what we should do. First, we must pony up for the African Union security force. The single most disgraceful action the U.S. has taken was Congress's decision, with the complicity of the Bush administration, to cut out all $50 million in the current budget to help pay for the African peacekeepers in Darfur. Shame on Representative Jim Kolbe of Arizona - and the White House - for facilitating genocide. Mr. Bush needs to find $50 million fast and get it to the peacekeepers.
Second, the U.S. needs to push for an expanded security force in Darfur. The African Union force is a good start, but it lacks sufficient troops and weaponry. The most practical solution is to "blue hat" the force, making it a U.N. peacekeeping force built around the African Union core. It needs more resources and a more robust mandate, plus contributions from NATO or at least from major countries like Canada, Germany and Japan. Third, we should impose a no-fly zone. The U.S. should warn Sudan that if it bombs civilians, then afterward we will destroy the airplanes involved. Fourth, the House should pass the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act. This legislation, which would apply targeted sanctions and pressure Sudan to stop the killing, passed the Senate unanimously but now faces an uphill struggle in the House. Fifth, Mr. Bush should use the bully pulpit. He should talk about Darfur in his speeches and invite survivors to the Oval Office. He should wear a green "Save Darfur" bracelet - or how about getting a Darfur lawn sign for the White House? (Both are available, along with ideas for action, from www.savedarfur.org.) He can call Hosni Mubarak and other Arab and African leaders and ask them to visit Darfur. He can call on China to stop underwriting this genocide. Sixth, President Bush and Kofi Annan should jointly appoint a special envoy to negotiate with tribal sheiks. Colin Powell or James Baker III would be ideal in working with the sheiks and other parties to hammer out a peace deal. The envoy would choose a Sudanese chief of staff like Dr. Mudawi Ibrahim Adam, a leading Sudanese human rights activist who has been pushing just such a plan with the help of Human Rights First.
So far, peace negotiations have failed because they center on two groups that are partly composed of recalcitrant thugs: the government and the increasingly splintered rebels. But Darfur has a traditional system of conflict resolution based on tribal sheiks, and it's crucial to bring those sheiks into the process. Ordinary readers can push for all these moves. Before he died, Senator Paul Simon said that if only 100 people in each Congressional district had demanded a stop to the Rwandan genocide, that effort would have generated a determination to stop it. But Americans didn't write such letters to their members of Congress then, and they're not writing them now.
Finding the right policy tools to confront genocide is an excruciating challenge, but it's not the biggest problem. The hardest thing to find is the political will.
For all my criticisms of Mr. Bush, he has sent tons of humanitarian aid, and his deputy secretary of state, Robert Zoellick, has traveled to Darfur four times this year. But far more needs to be done. As Simon Deng, a Sudanese activist living in the U.S., puts it: "Tell me why we have Milosevic and Saddam Hussein on trial for their crimes, but we do nothing in Sudan. Why not just let all the war criminals go. ... When it comes to black people being slaughtered, do we look the other way?" Put aside for a moment the question of whether Mr. Bush misled the nation on W.M.D. in Iraq. It's just as important to ask whether he was truthful when he declared in his second inaugural address, "All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors." Mr. Bush, so far that has been a ringing falsehood - but, please, make it true.
Helping Bill O'Reilly
Published: February 7, 2006
Please, readers, help Bill O'Reilly!
Skip to next paragraph After Mr. O'Reilly denounced me in December as a "left-wing ideologue" (a charge that alarmed me, given his expertise on ideologues), I challenged him to defend traditional values by joining me on a trip to Darfur. I wrote: "You'll have to leave your studio, Bill. You'll encounter pure evil. If you're like me, you'll be scared ... and you'll finally be using your talents for an important cause." A few days ago, I finally got my answer. Mr. O'Reilly declared in his column: "I do three hours of daily news analysis on TV and radio. There's no way I can go to Africa." No need to give up so easily, Bill. With a satellite phone, you can do your show from anywhere.
But maybe Mr. O'Reilly's concern is cost, so I thought my readers might want to give him a hand. You can help sponsor a trip by Mr. O'Reilly to Darfur, where he can use his television savvy to thunder against something actually meriting his blustery rage. If you want to help, send e-mail to sponsorbill@gmail.com or snail mail to me at The Times, and tell me how much you're willing to pay for Mr. O'Reilly's expenses in Darfur. Offers will be anonymous, except maybe to the N.S.A. Don't send money; all I'm looking for is pledges. I'll post updates at nytimes.com/ontheground. (Note: pledges cannot be earmarked. It is not possible to underwrite only Mr. O'Reilly's outgoing ticket to Darfur without bringing him home as well.) Sure, this is a desperate measure. But with several hundred thousand people already murdered in Darfur and two million homeless and living in shantytowns, the best hope for those still alive is a strong dose of American outrage. Worse, all the horrors that we've already seen in Darfur may be remembered only as the prelude. Security in the region is deteriorating, African Union peacekeepers are becoming targets, and the U.N. has warned that if humanitarian agencies are forced out, the death toll may rise to 100,000 per month. Just as dangerous, the government-supported janjaweed — the brutal militia responsible for the slaughter — is now making regular raids across the border into Chad. There is a growing risk that Chad will collapse into war as well, hugely increasing the death toll and spreading chaos across a much larger region. Last week, the United Nations agreed to plan for an international force. It will be nice if the force materializes — but even that half-step is probably almost a year away. The solution isn't American ground forces, but a starting point would be American resolve to put genocide at the top of the international agenda. Unfortunately, Mr. Bush barely lets the word "Darfur" past his lips. The best way for President Bush to honor Coretta Scott King isn't simply to recite platitudes at her funeral today, but to push loudly and forcefully to stop genocide. Was the essential message of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. about the need to be seen at funerals? Or about standing up to injustice, like a genocide in which infants are grabbed from their mothers' arms and tossed onto bonfires?
The reality is that the only way the White House will move on Darfur is if it is flooded with calls from the public — and that will happen only when the genocide is brought home to living rooms around America. According to the Tyndall Report, which analyzes the content of the evening newscasts of the broadcast networks, their coverage of Darfur actually declined last year. The total for all three networks was 26 minutes in 2004. That wasn't much — but it dropped to just 18 minutes during all of 2005. ABC's evening news program had 11 minutes about Darfur over the year, NBC's had 5 minutes, and CBS's found genocide worth only 2 minutes of airtime during the course of 2005. In contrast, the networks gave the Michael Jackson trial in 2005 a total of 84 minutes of coverage. There aren't comparable figures for cable networks like Fox, but Mr. O'Reilly and other cable newscasters pretty much ignored the Darfur catastrophe. Mr. O'Reilly has a big audience and a knack for stirring outrage. Lately, he (quite properly) galvanized an outcry over a ridiculously light sentence for a sexual predator in Vermont. The upshot was that the sentence was increased. Good stuff! So imagine the furor Mr. O'Reilly could stir up if he publicized the hundreds of thousands of rapes, murders and mutilations in Darfur. He could save lives on a grand scale. Join the pledge drive! I'm starting with my own $1,000 pledge to sponsor Mr. O'Reilly's trip. Please help.
Disposable Cameras for Disposable People
Published: February 12, 2006
Meet some of the disposable people of Darfur, the heirs of the disposable Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Rwandans and Bosnians of past genocides. Look carefully, for several hundred thousand people like these have already been slaughtered in Darfur in western Sudan — and the lives of two million more are in our hands. Skip to next paragraph On my fifth and last trip to Darfur, in November, I smuggled in 20 disposable cameras to hand out to these disposable people. While taking photos without a permit is illegal in Sudan, two aid groups agreed to distribute the cameras, teach the genocide survivors how to use them, and then send me the pictures (for their own protection, I'm not naming those aid groups). Many of the resulting photos were unusable, for those shooting the pictures had mostly never held a camera before. Many of them were living until recently in thatch-roof mud huts, and their first direct encounter with the modern world came when Sudanese military aircraft strafed their villages.
The photos were taken in makeshift camps near the town of Zalingei where survivors have lived since fleeing their villages. Taking a photo more publicly might have led to an arrest or a beating. These scenes reflect the banality of waiting — for food, for protection, for death. In short, such photos are a bit like those from the Warsaw Ghetto in the early 1940's. The photo in the upper left shows Assim, 5, Asiel, 3, and Salma, almost 2; Assim says he misses the village trees he used to climb, for in the camps the trees have all been cut for firewood. The photo in the upper right shows a man named Adam in his tailor "shop."
The photo in the lower left shows Aisha and Fatima, preparing their "stove." And in the lower right is Halima, a 27-year-old widow whose husband and brother were murdered when the government-supported janjaweed militia attacked her village. An aid group helps her and other women make biscuits and cheese to sell in local markets — so they won't have to venture out of the camps and risk rape by the janjaweed.
Granted, people like these die all the time in Africa of malaria or AIDS. And it's true that it's probably as wrenching for a parent to lose a child to malaria as to a machete. But when a government deliberately slaughters people because of their tribe or skin color, then that is a special affront to the bonds of humanity and creates a particular obligation to respond. Nothing rips more at the common fabric of humanity than genocide — and the only way to assert our own humanity is to stand up to it. President Bush is doing more about Darfur than most other leaders, but that's not saying much. The French are being particularly unhelpful, while other Europeans (including, alas, Tony Blair) seem to wonder whether it's really worth the expense to save people from genocide. Muslim countries are silent about the slaughter of Darfur's Muslims, while China disgraces itself by protecting Sudan in the United Nations and underwriting the genocide with trade. Still, even Mr. Bush is taking only baby steps. Here are some grown-up steps Mr. Bush could take: He could enforce a no-fly zone to stop air attacks on civilians in Darfur, lobby Arab leaders to become involved, call President Hu Jintao and ask China to stop protecting Sudan, invite Darfur refugees to a photo op at the White House, attend a coming donor conference for Darfur, visit Darfur or the refugee camps next door in Chad, push France and other allies for a NATO bridging force to provide protection until United Nations troops arrive, offer to support the United Nations force with American military airlift and logistical support (though not ground troops, which would help Sudan's hard-liners by allowing them to claim that the United States was starting a new invasion of the Arab world), make a major speech about Darfur, and arrange for Colin Powell to be appointed a United Nations special envoy to seek peace among Darfur's tribal sheiks.
With Mr. Bush saying little about Darfur, presidential leadership on Darfur is coming from ... Slovenia. The Slovenian president, Janez Drnovsek, has emerged as one of the few leaders who are actually organizing an international effort to stop the genocide. "You ask, Why Slovenia?" he told me. "I can ask, Why not Slovenia?" Mr. Drnovsek came to the United States recently to talk about Darfur with Kofi Annan, Bill Clinton and Chinese officials. But he says that President Bush declined to see him; if Mr. Bush were more serious about Darfur, he would be hailing Slovenia's leadership — indeed, emulating it. On Tuesday, Mr. Bush spoke movingly at the funeral of Coretta Scott King. I hope he'll look at these photos and ruminate on an observation of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: "Man's inhumanity to man is not only perpetrated by the vitriolic actions of those who are bad, it is also perpetrated by the vitiating inaction of those who are good."
The Silence of Bystanders
Published: March 19, 2006
ALONG THE CHAD-SUDAN BORDER
Skip to next paragraph I saw a lot of heartbreak on my latest visit to the fringes of Darfur: two orphan boys living under a tree after their family was murdered, a 13-year-old girl shot in the chest and a 6-year-old boy trying desperately not to cry as doctors treated shrapnel wounds to his leg. But the face of genocide I found most searing belonged to Idris Ismael, a 32-year-old Chadian. Mr. Idris said that a Sudan-sponsored janjaweed militia had attacked his village, Damri, that very morning. He had managed to run away. But his wife, Halima, eight months pregnant, could only hobble. And so she was still in the village, along with their four children, ages 3 to 12.
"The village is surrounded by janjaweed, with civilians inside," Mr. Idris said. "There's no way for people to escape. The janjaweed will kill all the men, women and children, take all our blankets and other property, and then burn our homes. They will kill every last person."
"The janjaweed will rape and kill my family," Mr. Idris added. "And there's nothing I can do."
Elie Wiesel once said, referring to victims of genocide: "Let us remember: what hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor but the silence of the bystander." And it's our own silence that I find inexplicable.
In Darfur, we have even less excuse than in past genocides. We have known about this for more than two years, we have photos and eyewitnesses, our president has even described it as genocide, and yet we're still paralyzed. Part of the problem is that President Bush hasn't made it a top priority, but at least he is now showing signs of stirring — and in fact he's done more than most other world leaders, and more than many Democrats. Our failure in Darfur is utterly bipartisan. Mr. Bush met recently at the White House with Mudawi Ibrahim Adam, an authentic Sudanese hero, to get advice on Darfur, and he seems engaged — though still not ready to leap into the issue publicly by making a major speech on Darfur, or by welcoming refugees for a photo op at the White House. Alas, Mr. Bush is far more timid than the American people. A new poll by Zogby International that surveyed 1,000 Americans a few days ago asked about Darfur. Sixty-two percent said that "the United States has a responsibility to help stop the killings in the Darfur region of Sudan"; only 24 percent disagreed. In response to another question, only 24 percent said that "the U.S. has done enough diplomatically to help end the crisis." In contrast, 59 percent said that more could be done. One measure we could take would be to enforce a no-fly zone from the air base in Abéché, Chad. The president of Chad says he would be happy to have Americans do this, and it would be easy: instead of keeping airplanes in the air, we would simply wait until a Sudanese plane bombed a village, then strafe that plane on the ground afterward. (The first time, we would just damage the plane; we would destroy any after that.) Asked about such a no-fly zone in the Zogby poll, 70 percent said they supported the idea, and only 13 percent opposed it.
So Americans are, I think, better than our national policy. How do we align our government with our hearts? The only way is to push our leaders, whether by calling the White House or members of Congress, or by attending the rally in Washington on April 30 planned by the Save Darfur Coalition (www.savedarfur.org). Darfur is not hopeless. We need a new peace initiative, focused on the sheiks of the region. We need a well-equipped U.N. peacekeeping force and a no-fly zone. We need a public pledge by France to use its military forces in Chad to stop any invasion from Sudan. And we need Arab leaders to speak up for the Muslim victims of Darfur: where are you, Hosni Mubarak? With those measures, Darfur might again be a place where children play, rather than one in which they are thrown into bonfires. Among the few heroes in this genocide are the ordinary Chadian villagers. They are desperately poor, but when 200,000 Darfuris escaped into Chad, these villagers shared water, forage and food with them. Now these same Chadians are themselves becoming victims of an ever-expanding Sudanese genocide. In the town of Borota, I talked to Fatima Adam, 15, who described being gang-raped and beaten by six janjaweed a few days earlier. As often happens, the men had used racial slurs against blacks to justify the attack. "The same things they were doing in Darfur," Fatima said, "now they are doing to us."
The Slaughter Spreads
Published: April 16, 2006
Last month villagers along Chad's border with Sudan told me how brutal militias were attacking their towns, murdering their babies, raping their daughters and burning their huts, while shouting racial slurs against blacks. Now those impoverished Chadians may find themselves not only attacked by genocidal marauders but also ruled by them. Skip to next paragraph Over the past week, Sudan has sponsored a full-scale invasion of Chad, seeking to oust Chad's president and replace him with the warlord who has overseen the murder, rape and pillage in those border areas. Sudan seems determined to extend its genocide to Chad, and the upshot is that the catastrophe of Darfur may now be multiplied manyfold. One of the towns I stayed in during my visit to Chad last month was Adré, which by some accounts — denied by the government — has now been seized by this Sudanese proxy force known for throwing babies into bonfires. So I wonder what happened to the children I met in the Adré hospital, like Fatima Juma, a 13-year-old girl who would have been unable to flee because she had been shot in the chest and arm while fetching water.
That the fighting has spread to Chad underscores that our policy in Darfur has not only been morally bankrupt, but also catastrophic in a practical sense. Appeasing Sudan has allowed the situation to worsen, because our policy has essentially consisted, after every outrage, of making the Darfuris turn the other cheek. Chad's president, Idriss Déby, is a corrupt dictator. But he at least had the gumption to show some discontent at the genocide next door, and Sudan is taking aim at him precisely for that reason. If we let Sudan get away with ousting him for refusing to applaud a mass slaughter, we will have compounded our own shameful record. It's not that President Déby was even very active against the genocide. Worried about offending Sudan, his government threatened to arrest me if I again sneaked into Darfur illegally from Chad to cover the genocide. But Mr. Déby did have the guts to grant Darfur refugees a safe haven in Chad, saving their lives — although now, disgracefully, he has threatened to expel them if the Darfur conflict is not resolved by June. The fighting in Chad, including a battle in the capital, Ndjamena, that reportedly killed 350 people on Thursday, is nominally between the government and rebels. But make no mistake: those "rebels" are simply a proxy force of Sudan, made up in part by the Sudanese janjaweed militias that orchestrated the killing of several black African tribes in Darfur. The Chadian rebels operate from a base that journalists have visited in Sudan. The rebels' guns, vehicles and uniforms come from the Sudanese government. Their leader, Mohamed Nour, was handpicked by Sudan to lead this invading force. Sudan's vice president, Ali Osman Taha, has visited Mr. Nour at his base. And the "rebels" often drop by the town of Geneina, where everybody sees that they include some Chadians but also many Sudanese janjaweed fighters. "Even a kid of 5 years old in Geneina knows that the Sudanese government is organizing the militias," said Mudawi Ibrahim Adam, a heroic Sudanese who leads an independent human rights group active in Darfur. The danger now is threefold.
First, Chad may collapse into civil war, chaos and banditry, like Darfur itself but on a much larger scale. Second, the 200,000 refugees who fled Darfur and are living in U.N.-run camps in Chad may be specifically targeted for mass slaughter. Third, the unrest may force international aid workers to pull out of Chad. Then the refugees will starve to death more gradually. The U.S. has called on "all parties ... to reduce those levels of violence" — which is a bit like suggesting in 1943 that Nazis and Jews alike cease hostilities. The U.S. and other major powers need to be much more forceful in shoring up Chad against the invaders. France has a major military base in eastern Chad and should start strafing the invaders. The U.S. should back France, send a top envoy to Chad to show support, and provide intelligence to Chad and France about the invaders' whereabouts. President Bush and millions of Americans today will celebrate Easter and the end of Holy Week. But where is the piety in reading the Bible while averting one's eyes from genocide? Mr. Bush, how about showing your faith by doing something a bit more meaningful — like standing up to the butchers?
China and Sudan, Blood and Oil Published: April 23, 2006
Americans make a habit of bashing China for all the wrong reasons.Skip to next paragraph It's hypocritical of us to scream at President Hu Jintao, as we did during his visit last week, about China's undervalued currency. Sure, that's a problem for the world economy — but not nearly as much as our own budget deficits, caused by tax cuts we couldn't afford. We're now addicted to capital from China and other foreign countries, and that should be a concern. But our deficits aren't China's fault, and junkies like us don't have any basis to complain about the moral turpitude of those who supply cheap capital or other narcotics. But there are two good reasons to complain to President Hu. First, he has presided over a broad clampdown on freedom of expression in China, including the imprisonment for 19 months of my colleague Zhao Yan, an employee of The New York Times. Second, China is now underwriting its second genocide in three decades. The first was in Pol Pot's Cambodia, and the second is in Darfur, Sudan. Chinese oil purchases have financed Sudan's pillage of Darfur, Chinese-made AK-47's have been the main weapons used to slaughter several hundred thousand people in Darfur so far, and China has protected Sudan in the U.N. Security Council. Indeed, it's because of China's support that Sudan felt it could get away this month with sending a proxy army to invade neighboring Chad. For more than two years now, I've been holding President Bush's feet to the fire over his refusal to make the Darfur genocide a priority for his administration. But Mr. Bush has taken half-steps in the right direction — including pushing President Hu to cooperate on Darfur — and that's more than can be said of the leaders of most other countries. Europe has snored through this genocide. Then there's the Arab League, which met last month in Sudan, in effect legitimizing the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Muslims (almost all the victims in Darfur are Muslim). And where's the Arab press? Isn't the murder of 300,000 or more Muslims almost as offensive as a Danish cartoon?
The biggest obstacle to forceful action is China. The latest outrage came a few days ago when the U.S. and Britain tried to impose the most feeble possible sanctions — targeting just four people, including a midlevel Sudanese official. China and Russia blocked even that pathetic action. Why is China soft on genocide? The essential reason is oil. China traditionally was self-sufficient in oil, but since 1993 it has been a net oil importer and it is increasingly worried about this vulnerability. So China has been bustling around the globe trying to ensure oil supplies from as many sources as possible. And partly because most of the major oil fields are already taken, China has ended up with the world's thugs: Sudan, Iran and Myanmar. China has been particularly active in Africa. About 60 percent of Sudan's oil flows to China, and Beijing has a close economic and even military relationship with Khartoum. A recent Council on Foreign Relations report on Africa notes that China has supplied Sudan with small arms, anti-personnel mines, howitzers, tanks, helicopters and ammunition. China has even established three arms factories in Sudan, and you see Chinese-made AK-47's, rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns all over Darfur. Last month in a village on the Chad-Sudan border, I interviewed a man who told how a Sudanese militia had grabbed his baby boy, Ahmed Haroun, thrown Ahmed to the ground and shot him in the chest. The odds are overwhelming that that gun and those bullets came from China. Likewise, the women and children I've seen torn apart by bullets in Darfur and Chad — that lead and steel was molded in Chinese factories. When women are raped and mutilated in Darfur, the gun barrels pointed at their heads are Made in China. Let's hope China's 13 million bloggers take up this issue, for this has received very little attention in China but it is not so sensitive that discussion of it will get anyone arrested. One of the central questions for the 21st century will be whether China's rise will be accompanied by increasingly responsible behavior in its international relations. Darfur is a test, and for now China is failing. Published: May 7, 2006
For three grueling years, Eric Reeves has been fighting for his life, struggling in a battle with leukemia that he may eventually lose. And in his spare time, sometimes from his hospital bed, he has emerged as an improbable leader of a citizens' army fighting to save hundreds of thousands of other lives in Darfur. Skip to next paragraph Pressure from that citizen army helped achieve a breakthrough on Friday: a tentative peace deal between the Sudanese government and the biggest Darfur rebel faction, brokered in part by U.S. officials. We should be skeptical that this agreement will really end the bloodshed — past cease-fires and promises have not been honored — but also rejoice in a glimpse of sun over the most wretched place in the world today. If the violence does diminish — and that will take hard work in the months and years ahead — part of the credit will go to Mr. Reeves, a scholar of English literature at Smith College who has used an arsenal of e-mail messages, phone calls and Web pages to battle the Sudanese government and American indifference. He was the first person I know to describe the horrors of Darfur as genocide, and he financed his quixotic campaign by taking out a loan on his house. Perhaps the most striking distinction in the history of genocide is not between those who murder and those who don't, but between "bystanders" who avert their eyes and "upstanders" who speak out. Professor Reeves has been a full-time upstander on Sudan since 1999, back when the people being slaughtered there were Christians in the south of the country. He noticed immediately in 2003 that Sudan had diversified into butchering Muslims in Darfur, and his frantic blowing of the whistle helped alert me and others. Visit his Web site, sudanreeves.org, but be careful — his fury may set your computer smoking. I don't agree with every bit of Mr. Reeves's analysis, and sometimes I flinch at his stridency. But there's no better excuse for stridency than genocide.
While Darfur has been incredibly depressing, the grass-roots movement in this country to stop the genocide is immensely inspiring. (To join, go to Web sites like www.savedarfur.org or www.genocideintervention.net.) The activist kids just bowl me over: girls like Rachel Koretsky, a 13-year-old who organized a rally in Philadelphia, distributed circulars and conducted a raffle to raise money for Darfur as her bat mitzvah charity project. So far, Rachel has raised $14,000 for Darfur. Or kids like Tacey Smith, a 12-year-old in the farm town of Gaston, Ore. After seeing the movie "Hotel Rwanda," she formed a Sudan Club with a few friends and has raised $400 for Darfur by selling eggs, washing cars and asking for donations instead of birthday presents. Her best friend's Christmas present to her was raising $50 for Darfur. Now Tacey is organizing a Darfur fair next month. President Bush has been more active lately on Darfur, and without the administration's relentless pushing the peace deal on Friday would have been impossible. But by and large, there has been a vacuum of leadership on Darfur over the last few years, and ordinary Americans — particularly young people — have tried to fill it. I don't know whether to be sad or inspired that we can turn for moral guidance to 12-year-olds. Then there are the entertainers. Frankly, I think it's bizarre that we turn to movie stars for guidance on international relations. But in this case, I bow low to George Clooney, who had the guts to travel to the Darfur area last month, and to Angelina Jolie, who has visited the Darfur area twice and is pushing for action on Darfur more forcefully than almost anyone in Washington. It gets weirder: "CBS Evening News" decided that genocide wasn't newsworthy, devoting only two minutes to coverage of Darfur in all of 2005 — but there's excellent coverage on MTV's university network and in episodes of the TV show "E.R." set in Darfur. And one of the best presentations of life in Darfur is in an extraordinary video game developed with help from MTV and available free at www.darfurisdying.com. In the game, you're a Darfuri, trying to survive as Sudan's janjaweed militias hunt you down. So that's how the response is unfolding to the first genocide of the 21st century: a video game is one of the best guides to understanding the slaughter, and our moral vacuum is filled by teenyboppers and movie stars.
Someday we will look back at this motley army of children and celebrities, presided over by a man struggling with leukemia, and thank them for salvaging our national honor.
Dithering Through Death
Published: May 16, 2006
For those of us who admire the United Nations, there is an uncomfortable reality to grapple with:
Skip to next paragraph The U.N. has put barely a speed bump in the path to genocide in Darfur. The U.N. has been just as ineffective there for the last three years as it was during the slaughter in Rwanda, Bosnia and Cambodia. Once again, it rolled over. It's no wonder that anti-genocide campaigners have barely bothered protesting at the U.N. and have instead focused their pressure on the White House. The sad fact is that the U.N. is a wimp. It publishes fine reports and is terrific at handing out food and organizing vaccination campaigns, but the General Assembly and the Security Council routinely doze through crimes against humanity.
Sure enough, to the extent that there is now a ray of hope in Darfur, what has changed is not that the U.N. has awakened, but that President Bush has shown greater initiative. My guess is that the recent peace deal in Darfur will fall apart. It is fragile on the rebel side, and Sudan is probably lying once again when it promises to disarm the janjaweed militia. All that said, this peace agreement is the best hope we have to end the genocide, and the U.N. needs to back it up by dispatching an international force to Darfur. If the U.N. fails that test in the coming weeks, it will have disgraced itself again. Frankly, the U.N. has regularly failed abysmally in situations like the one in Darfur, when military intervention is needed but a major power (in this case China) uses the threat of a veto to block action.
The U.N. has done better in organizing security for elections. The U.N. effort to help Mozambique out of its civil war in the early 1990's was a huge success, and the U.N. also helped greatly in the run-up to the birth of East Timor in 2002. But by and large, victims of war and genocide are served about as well by the U.N. as earlier generations were by the Kellogg-Briand pact to outlaw war. Granted, when the U.N. fails, that simply means that its member states fail — but the upshot is still that when genocide alarm bells tinkle, the places to call are Washington, London and Paris, not New York. Does this mean I buy into the right wing's denunciations of the U.N.?
No, partly because the U.N. agencies do a fine job in humanitarian operations. The World Food Program and Unicef are first-rate; they jointly run the U.N. operation I most admire, the school-feeding program. For 19 cents a day per child, they provide meals in impoverished schools, and those meals hugely increase school attendance (see www.wfp.org). And without the World Food Program organizing food shipments to Sudan and Chad, hundreds of thousands more people would have died. Those U.N. field workers are heroic — just this month, a 37-year-old Spanish woman working for Unicef was shot and critically injured in Chad. People like her redeem the honor of the U.N. There's also an ounce of hope that the U.N.'s senior officials will learn how to use one tool they have neglected: their bully pulpit.
The best example of this approach is the work by Jan Egeland, the U.N.'s under secretary for humanitarian affairs — one of the real (and rare) heroes of Darfur. Mr. Egeland is Norwegian, but I wish he could quickly become an Asian and thus have a chance to be the next secretary general. Mr. Egeland has led the way on disasters by being undiplomatic about horrors like the slaughter in Darfur and the catastrophe in Congo. Perhaps it helps that Mr. Egeland is so evenhanded that he offends everybody. After the tsunami, he correctly called many rich countries "stingy" with their foreign aid, thus touching off a useful debate in the U.S. about our aid levels. If other U.N. officials followed Mr. Egeland's undiplomatic example and spent more time being offensive, devoting less energy to diplomatic receptions and more to dragging journalists through the world's hellholes, the globe would be a better place — and the U.N. would be more relevant.
John Bolton, now the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., once suggested it wouldn't matter if the U.N.'s top 10 floors were lopped off. But let's not do that — the U.N. is far better than the alternative of having no such institution. But take it from this disillusioned fan of the U.N. system: let's also be realistic and drop any fantasy that the U.N. is going to save the day as a genocide unfolds. In that mission, the U.N. is failing about as badly as the League of Nations did.
When Genocide Worsens
Published: July 9, 2006
A genocide by its nature would seem to be the rock bottom of human behavior. But in Darfur, we see a genocide that is growing worse. Skip to next paragraph The Darfur Peace Agreement, signed on May 5, signaled a ray of hope in a desperate land. But on the ground, its deadlines are not being met, security is deteriorating, and the violence is rippling from Sudan ever wider into both Chad and the Central African Republic. One measure of how awful the situation has become in eastern Chad is that at least 15,000 villagers have fled ... into Darfur! In one broad swath of the Chad border region, the only Westerners brave enough (and crazy enough) to stay are French doctors with Doctors Without Borders. Hats off to them. In just the last six months, aid groups in eastern Chad have lost 26 vehicles to armed hijackers. A Spanish woman working for Unicef was shot and nearly killed in May when her vehicle was stolen — and the car was later spotted in Sudan, sailing through government checkpoints. This insecurity puts relief agencies in a terrible situation, for they don't want to risk having their aid workers murdered or raped, and yet if they pull out many thousands of Darfuris will die. "We cannot play with the lives of our own staff beyond a certain limit," frets Jan Egeland, an under secretary general of the United Nations, adding, "Our people in the field are increasingly desperate."
"I think we're headed toward total chaos," he said. "Will we have collapse in nine days, nine weeks, nine months? I don't know. But the situation is unsustainable."
One problem is that provisions of the Darfur Peace Agreement aren't actually being carried out so far — and in the meantime it has inflamed tensions among the African tribes that have been victimized by the genocide. The Fur tribe, one of the biggest in Darfur ("Darfur" means "Homeland of the Fur"), has mostly opposed the deal, and so there has been fighting between Fur and men of the Zaghawa tribe, whose top commander signed the agreement. "There is a significant risk that the Darfur Peace Agreement will collapse," the U.N. special envoy for Sudan, Jan Pronk, wrote in his blog. "The agreement does not resonate with the people of Darfur. ... It is not yet dead, but severely paralyzed." Meanwhile, Sudan is as adamant as ever that it will never accept United Nations peacekeepers, and the international community isn't prepared to push back hard. The two most important Bush administration officials on Darfur, Robert Zoellick and Michael Gerson (who has been the conscience of the White House), have both announced their resignations, so there is a vacuum in Washington as well. President Bush should address this vacuum by appointing a top-level envoy for the crisis. Mr. President, how about calling in James Baker, or else Colin Powell? In talking to experts about Darfur over the last three years, I usually have encountered both optimists and pessimists. These days, I just can't find an optimist. The range of opinion is between those who think the crisis will deteriorate slowly and those who think the situation will disintegrate so precipitously that soon 100,000 people will be dying each month, unless the peace agreement can somehow be revived. There are specific measures I can suggest. We need to amplify (though not reopen) the peace agreement to bring the Fur in, and we need to ensure that its deadlines are met. We need a U.N.-led or French-led protection force in eastern Chad. We need to bolster the African Union force in Darfur immediately and push harder for Sudan to admit U.N. peacekeepers. We need a no-fly zone. We need to press Europeans to become more involved and to remind Arabs that the slaughter of several hundred thousand Muslims in Darfur is every bit as worthy of protest as cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. But most of all, we must put genocide squarely on the international agenda. One lesson of history is that world leaders always prefer to ignore a genocide, but when forced to face the horrors — as in Bosnia or Kosovo — they figure out ways of responding. The most acute need is not for policies but for political will.
So here's a suggestion: Let's charter a few cargo planes to carry the corpses of hundreds of new victims from Darfur and Chad to the U.N. The butchered victims of Darfur could lie in state as a memorial to global indifference — and as a spur to become serious about the first genocide of the 21st century.
The Fugitive’s Tale
Published: July 16, 2006
Traditionally, our best excuse for inaction in the face of genocide was that we didn’t fully know what was going on — until too late.
During the Holocaust, reports trickled out of Nazi areas of atrocities and extermination camps, but they encountered widespread skepticism. “I don’t believe you,” Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court justice, told Jan Karski, a Polish Catholic who at extraordinary risk had visited a Nazi death camp as well as the Warsaw Ghetto and finally escaped with hundreds of documents.
Likewise, the Turks mostly barred access to the scene as they industriously killed off Armenians (a pattern of denial that persists in Turkey today). Cambodia sealed itself off during Pol Pot’s rule. And when Westerners evacuated from Rwanda in 1994 (the French airlifted out their embassy dog, while leaving behind local employees to be butchered), few witnesses were left to chronicle the savagery day by day. That’s what makes Darfur so unusual in the history of genocide: the savagery is unfolding in plain view, and yet as world leaders gather in Russia for the Group of 8 summit meeting, the basic international response is to look the other way. No genocide has ever been publicly chronicled so extensively as this one. We have satellite images of the burned villages, and detailed reports from groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Aid workers interact daily with the two million displaced people, and we can watch as Sudan spreads instability into neighboring countries. Indeed, now we have a witness who has come all the way to America: Hashim Adam Mersal, a young man now living in Pennsylvania with the help of the Pittsburgh Refugee Center. Mr. Hashim, who is 26, is a member of the Zaghawa tribe, which has been particularly targeted for death in Darfur. He grew up in a village called Tomorna and lived a relatively prosperous life because of his family’s large herd of 400 cattle and 150 sheep. Then in August 2003, the Sudanese government sent the janjaweed militias to attack black African villages in his region. Mr. Hashim escaped with some of the livestock, but his father and brother (a 24-year-old father of two) were both killed, along with many others — including eight children in one family. Mr. Hashim isn’t sure what happened to the rest of his family.
“It was humans and livestock all mixed together, running for survival,” Mr. Hashim remembers. “Some kids were falling behind, and we just couldn’t help. We couldn’t do anything for those falling back. There was lots of crying, but you were too scared to stop and help anyone. Some were wounded and couldn’t keep up. Some were left behind and died.”
In that flight, Mr. Hashim passed other villages that had been burned. “Bodies were scattered everywhere,” he said.
Eventually, Mr. Hashim made his way to the Chadian capital. He used cash and tribal connections to obtain a fake Chadian passport and, somehow, a diplomatic visa to the U.S. So Mr. Hashim came to the U.S. — only to be jailed on immigration charges. He was released on bail and is fighting deportation back to Sudan; a hearing is scheduled for October. Frankly, the best place to put Mr. Hashim isn’t in jail, but in the White House Rose Garden for a photo-op with President Bush to call attention to the genocide.
Mr. Hashim studies English into the wee hours in hopes of communicating better, so as to plead with Americans to help save his people. At the same time, he is wracked by guilt at having survived when so many others died. “I am alive and breathing, but I am like a dead man who walks,” he said. “The rest of my life will be nothing but sorrow.”
In the small community of Darfur-watchers in America, there is deepening gloom. There has been an outcry at the grass-roots level — www.savedarfur.org gathered one million signatures demanding a greater response — but the genocide is still spreading. John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group, just back from the region, warns that “the international community is actually missing the potential enormity of the crisis as it metastasizes to Chad and the Central African Republic.” A conference of donors on Tuesday in Brussels will be an important test of whether there is any international resolve to save lives. But increasingly it appears that even when the world has no excuse at all for inaction — when it is fully informed about a genocide in real time — it still cannot be bothered to do much about it.
Why Genocide Matters
Published: September 10, 2006
When I spoke at Cornell University recently, a woman asked why I always harp on Darfur. Skip to next paragraph It’s a fair question. The number of people killed in Darfur so far is modest in global terms: estimates range from 200,000 to more than 500,000. In contrast, four million people have died since 1998 as a result of the fighting in Congo, the most lethal conflict since World War II. And malaria annually kills one million to three million people — meaning that three years’ deaths in Darfur are within the margin of error of the annual global toll from malaria. So, yes, you can make an argument that Darfur is simply one of many tragedies and that it would be more cost-effective to save lives by tackling diarrhea, measles and malaria. But I don’t buy that argument at all. We have a moral compass within us, and its needle is moved not only by human suffering but also by human evil. That’s what makes genocide special — not just the number of deaths but the government policy behind them. And that in turn is why stopping genocide should be an even higher priority than saving lives from AIDS or malaria.
Even the Holocaust amounted to only 10 percent of World War II casualties and cost far fewer lives than the AIDS epidemic. But the Holocaust evokes special revulsion because it wasn’t just tragic but also monstrous, and that’s why we read Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel. Teenage girls still die all the time, and little boys still starve and lose their parents — but when this arises from genocide, the horror resonates with all humans.
Or it should. But for whatever reason, Sudan’s decision to kill people on the basis of tribe and skin color has aroused mostly yawns around the globe. Now Sudan is raising the stakes by starting a new military offensive in Darfur — and by eliminating witnesses. The government charged Paul Salopek, an ace Chicago Tribune correspondent, with espionage in an effort to keep foreign reporters away (on Saturday it released him after a month in prison). And even African Union peacekeepers may be forced out of Darfur by the end of this month. Twelve aid workers have been killed since May — more than in the previous three years. These killings are forcing aid groups to pull back, and the U.N. warns that if the humanitarian operation collapses, the result will be “hundreds of thousands of deaths.” If all foreign witnesses are pushed out, the calamity is barely imaginable.
We urgently need U.N. peacekeepers, even over Sudan’s objections. (If Sudan sees them coming, it will hurriedly consent.) The U.S. should also impose a no-fly zone from Chad and work with France to keep Chad and the Central African Republic from collapsing into this maelstrom. President Bush showed an important flash of leadership on Darfur early this year, but lately he has fallen quiet again. He should appoint a special envoy for Darfur and use his bully pulpit to put genocide on the international agenda — for starters, by employing his speech to the U.N. General Assembly this month to remind the world of the children being tossed onto bonfires in Sudan. He could also announce that the U.S. will choose candidates to support for U.N. secretary general based in part on their positions on the genocide. If we don’t act, the slaughter may end up claiming more than one million lives, but this is about more than body count. This time the teenagers are not named Anne and Elie, but Fatima and Ahmed, but the horror is the same.
To stir up interest among young people in issues like Darfur and global poverty, I held a contest in the spring to choose a university student to take with me on a reporting trip to Africa. From 4,000 entries, I chose Casey Parks, a young woman from Mississippi who had never been outside the U.S. We’re leaving tomorrow for Equatorial Guinea. It’s a backwater that has fascinated me since I first traveled through Africa in 1982 and my Lonely Planet guidebook said about it: “We’ve never heard of any travelers going there, so we have no details.” Casey and I then travel through remote parts of Cameroon and the Central African Republic. You can follow our journey beginning Wednesday with our daily blog entries at www.nytimes.com/kristof.
If Not Now, When?
Published: October 29, 2006
Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of Darfur isn’t that gunmen on the Sudanese payroll heave babies into bonfires as they shout epithets against blacks. It’s that the rest of us are responding only with averted eyes and polite tut-tutting. Skip to next paragraph This past week alone, Sudan expelled the U.N. envoy for Sudan and sent a proxy army to invade eastern Chad. Those moves underscored both the audacity of Sudan’s leaders and the fecklessness of the rest of the world’s. In fact, there’s plenty we can do. The international community has focused on getting U.N. peacekeepers into Darfur, but Sudan refuses to admit them. The stalemate drags on; the slaughter continues — but here’s what we can do: • Kofi Annan should appoint a new U.N. envoy of utmost prominence. Possibilities include Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Richard Holbrooke and Bernard Kouchner (a founder of Doctors Without Borders). The envoy’s job would be to lead an intensive negotiation aimed at achieving a political settlement.
The focus has been on getting U.N. peacekeepers into Darfur, and they are needed, but in the long run only a peace accord can calm Darfur. “This is distracting from the main need,” Mudawi Ibrahim Adam, a Sudanese human rights campaigner, said of the focus on peacekeepers. In May a peace agreement was stillborn after only one Darfur rebel faction signed it, but the pact can be renegotiated, for the differences are small and bridgeable. • President Bush and European leaders need to use their leverage on four nations in particular to make them part of the solution: China, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Libya. China is playing a disgraceful role underwriting the Darfur genocide, by giving Sudan the guns used to shoot children and by protecting Sudan in the U.N. Security Council. And the three Arab states need to be involved so that Sudan cannot claim that plans to protect Darfuris are American or Jewish plots to dismember the country. “It is very clear there is a plan to redraw the region,” the Sudanese president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, said last month, explaining the calls for U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur. “Any state in the region should be weakened, dismembered in order to protect the Israelis.”
Sudanese journalists say that Mr. Bashir has cleverly used such arguments to portray himself as a nationalist, and as a result is in a stronger position now than when he started killing babies in Darfur. Arab leaders need to show that they care about Muslim children being shot even when Israel is not responsible. • To get more coverage on Al Jazeera and other Arab networks, Mr. Annan could take a planeload of Arab journalists on a visit to Darfur refugee camps. Condi Rice could do the same. The U.S. could put video footage (I’d supply some) of Darfur atrocities on its Arabic-language satellite television station, Al Hurra. • The U.S., France and U.N. should immediately send peacekeepers to Chad and the Central African Republic to prop up those countries (the U.S. can supply airlift, intelligence and communications support, but our ground troops would create a backlash). Sudan has sent proxy forces to invade both, and they are teetering. • We need contingency plans for forcible military intervention. There is talk that in the coming months Sudan’s janjaweed militias may start systematically massacring some of the two million people who have taken shelter in camps in Darfur. If that were to happen, U.N. and NATO forces would have to go in and rescue those people — and if Sudan knew of such contingency plans, that would make massacres less likely. • The U.S. and French air forces should jointly impose a no-fly zone from the French air base in Abéché, Chad, as the Chadian president has invited us to do. • Western countries should apply targeted sanctions that freeze international assets of Sudanese leaders whom the U.N. has already listed as involved in the genocide.
• Mr. Bush must use his bully pulpit. He could invite Arab and African leaders to the White House for a summit on Darfur. He could suggest to the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, that they jointly visit the area. After fewer than 10,000 white people had died in Kosovo, the U.S. intervened to prevent a genocide. So far, several hundred thousand black people have been slaughtered in Darfur, and our president hasn’t even dedicated a speech to it. If we don’t try bold new approaches now, when? After 750,000 have died and Chad has collapsed? After all north central Africa is in chaos and 1.5 million are dead? When?
Bandages and Bayonets
Published: November 12, 2006
Skip to next paragraph In diplomatic circles, the Sudanese government can be wonderfully polished as it scoffs at accusations of genocide and denounces calls for U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur. In isolated villages, everything is more straightforward — like the men in Sudanese military uniforms who on Tuesday captured Abdullah Idris, a 27-year-old father of two, in the fields as he was farming. They tried to shoot him in the chest, but the gun misfired.
“So they beat him to the ground,” explained Osman Omar, a nephew of Mr. Abdullah who was one of several neighbors who recounted the events in the same way. “And then they used their bayonets to gouge out his eyes.”
Mr. Abdullah lay on his back on a hospital bed, his eye sockets swathed in bandages soaked in blood and pus. A sister sat on the floor beside him, crying; his wife and small children stood nearby, looking overwhelmed and bewildered. He was so traumatized in the incident that he has been unable to speak since, but he constantly reaches out to hold the hands of his family members.
Three men and two women were killed in that attack by the janjaweed, the militias of Arab nomads that have been slaughtering black African farmers for more than three years now. A 26-year-old woman was kidnapped, and nobody has seen her since.
The janjaweed even explained themselves to the people they were attacking. Survivors quoted them as shouting racial epithets against blacks and yelling, “We are going to kill you, and we are going to take your land.”
Mr. Abdullah’s eyes were gouged out as part of a wave of recent attacks here in southeastern Chad. Officials from the U.N. refugee agency counted at least 220 people killed in the last week in this area near Goz Beida. We’re used to seeing brutal janjaweed attacks in Darfur itself and along the border with Chad, but now they have reached 60 miles and more inside Chad, and Chadian Arab groups are joining in the attacks on black African tribes. As I write this on my laptop, I’ve just returned from a long drive through abandoned countryside. The village of Tamajour was still smoldering after being burned by janjaweed attackers two days earlier. I finally found some residents of Tamajour, clustered around the hospital of Goz Beida. Abdelkarim Zakaria, a 25-year-old man, lay in a bed with two bullets lodged in his back. Friends had carried him more than 20 miles to the hospital to save his life. Outside the hospital, two old women from Tamajour lay on the ground, suffering from terrible burns. The women were too feeble to flee, and they said that the janjaweed fighters set fire to their huts even though they knew the women were inside. One woman, Gida Zakaria, who said she thought she was about 70, had a back that was just an ulcerating mass of raw flesh.
After more than three years of such brutality, it seems incredibly inadequate for the international community simply to hand out bandages when old women are roasted in their huts and young men have their eyes gouged out. What we need isn’t more bandages, but the will to stand up to genocide.
A starting point would be to rush U.N. troops to Chad and the Central African Republic to prevent the cancer of genocide from completely upending these two countries. It’s incomprehensible that we’re allowing the madness of Darfur to spread inexorably into two more countries. President Bush could visit Chad and the Central African Republic as a show of support to keep those two countries from collapsing — and he could invite Chinese leaders, who provide Sudan with the guns used for atrocities, to join him. At the least, Mr. Bush could dispatch Condi Rice to Chad to show the U.S.’s support — then have her stop off in Cairo for meetings with Arab leaders on the crisis. The U.S. could also try targeted sanctions against Sudanese leaders, a no-fly zone to stop Sudanese jets from bombing civilians, and especially a major new effort to start a real peace process in Darfur, for ultimately only a peace agreement can end these horrors. The most painful sight I’ve seen here isn’t Mr. Abdullah’s bloody face, but the expression of disgust on his children’s faces as they stare at him. You see that, and you can’t help feeling equal horror and disgust — at our shamefully weak international response, which allows this first genocide of the 21st century to drag on and on.
Poisoned Arrows vs. Machine Guns
Published: November 14, 2006
Skip to next paragraph Around this remote market town are janjaweed, the Sudanese-sponsored Arab militias that hunt down black Africans and shoot or rape them. The janjaweed are armed with AK-47s, grenade launchers and heavy machine guns mounted on pickup trucks. Here in Koukou, the Africans are waiting for the attackers — with bows and arrows.
The international community has shamefully abandoned the people of eastern Chad, allowing the Darfur genocide to spread relentlessly. Incredibly, this year some 15,000 Chadians have sought security by fleeing into Darfur. So the people in little Chadian towns like Koukou are left to themselves, and they have organized a self-defense force out of the town’s 2,000 people. They have 12 hunting rifles, and every man has bows and arrows. Many also carry spears or swords.
It is an astonishing sight in the 21st century: Almost every male you meet here over the age of 12 carries a homemade bow and a quiver of arrows, just in case they come across marauders with machine guns. It is as crazy as it is courageous.
“I will try to defend myself with this bow and arrow,” said Muhammad Hamid, a 40-year-old farmer walking down the path by the town. “If I die, that’s O.K., but I will try to fight.”
Mr. Muhammad gave me a demonstration of his archery and it was, frankly, pitiful. He could fire the arrow only about 50 feet. Another villager sent the arrow only 40 feet.
Yet the villagers are fighting for the lives of their loved ones, and that counts for something. They also apply traditional poison to the arrowheads, and they say that if it reaches the bloodstream it is deadly. In a destroyed village southwest of here, I saw a janjaweed horse that had been killed by a defender’s arrow.
The local peasants certainly do better than I do. When I ran into a band of janjaweed yesterday in a burned-out village near here, I fled. The peasants of Koukou stand their ground.
Indeed, the archers of Koukou managed to turn back an attack by the janjaweed over two days in May. One janjaweed fighter they killed carried a Sudanese military identity card — one more indication that Sudan is behind these attacks. “God gave us help to win,” said Muhammad Ibrahim, the chief of the locality, explaining the janjaweed retreat in May. But after a string of attacks on 20 villages in the area over the last 10 days, he now expects another assault on Koukou by the janjaweed.
The townspeople have talked about pulling up stakes and moving en masse, but they have nowhere to go.
The courage of ordinary citizens here offers a pointed contrast to the fecklessness everywhere else. France, the former colonial power here, has troops in both Chad and the Central African Republic — which it seems ready to use primarily to evacuate Europeans as order collapses. (During the Rwandan genocide, France left its local staff to be butchered but took care to evacuate the embassy dog.) As for the U.S., President Bush has found the courage to do little more than demand that the U.N. do something. Frankly, we should be embarrassed that the mightiest superpower in the history of the world can’t summon the gumption of Chadian peasants with bows and arrows. Already, the U.N. and the major powers have allowed hundreds of thousands of people to be killed in Darfur. Now they seem equally ready to allow the genocide to spread to a far larger area and cause the collapse of Chad and the Central African Republic. Local Chadians in this region, from the sultan to the homeless people now sleeping under trees, regularly plead for U.N. peacekeepers, or any international intervention.
Here’s a suggestion: How about a joint U.S. and French operation to fly sorties, at the invitation of the Chadian government, from the French air base in Abéché, Chad, to strafe janjaweed raiding parties? Most of the janjaweed destroying eastern Chad seem to be Sudanese, guided by some Chadian Arabs who know this territory, and many appear to be in it for the pay and the spoils. Such mercenaries may find it less of an adventure if they risk being gunned down themselves. In this semidesert land, large bands of janjaweed can be spotted relatively easily. And there is no sovereignty objection in assisting Chad in securing its own territory. The people in Koukou and other towns here, with their bows and arrows, have the guts to stand up to genocide. I wish we did.
The Face of Genocide
Published: November 19, 2006
Skip to next paragraph A woman named Marguerite H. wrote to me recently to complain about my columns on Darfur. “While the situation there is dreadful, we have plenty of needs to be filled at home,” she wrote. “You would be better off putting your energy into making a difference here at home.” So, Marguerite, meet Halima Abdelkarim. Her life is partly in your hands. Watch her story, and see if you still think we should put off helping her until we have solved our own problems. Halima, 20, belongs to the Dajo tribe, one of the black African tribes being slaughtered by Sudanese-sponsored Arab militias called the janjaweed. The attacks began three years ago, but the world largely shared your view, Marguerite, that Darfur was a tragedy but not of strategic significance. And so we have fussed a bit but allowed the genocide to spread. This March, Darfur’s slaughter crossed the border and reached Halima’s hometown in Chad. The janjaweed killed many men and seized 10 women and girls, including Halima and her little sister, Sadia. Halima says that the janjaweed, many of them wearing Sudanese military uniforms, mocked the women with racial epithets against blacks, beat them with sticks, and gang-raped them all. Halima, who was then four months pregnant, says she was raped by three men and saw two rape Sadia — who was just 10 years old.
After two days of torment, the janjaweed released them. “But Sadia refused to give up her donkey, and so they shot her,” Halima recalled. “I was with her. She died right away.”
The survivors trekked to a shantytown outside Goz Beida. At first they were safe, and Halima gave birth to a baby daughter. But a couple of months ago the janjaweed began to attack them when they left the camp to get firewood.
Still, the world shared your attitude, Marguerite: It’s sad but a long way off, and anyway we have our own problems.
So last month, the janjaweed caught Halima again — in effect, we allowed the janjaweed to capture her again.
Halima was gathering firewood with a large group of women, who were hoping for safety in numbers. But raiders with guns suddenly appeared and caught seven of them.
The men asked what tribe they belonged to, and upon learning that they were Dajo who had already fled their villages, said, “We’re looking for you.” Halima was carrying her infant girl, Noorelayn, and she says the janjaweed threw the baby to the ground.
“You blacks are not human,” she quoted them as yelling. “We can do anything we want to you. You cannot live here.”
Finally, she says, three men raped her, beat her and stole her clothes. Another of the seven who were caught, Aziza Yakub, 17, confirmed Halima’s story, and added that the janjaweed told her while raping her: “You blacks are like monkeys. You are not human.”
The only way for these women to survive is to gather firewood to sell or exchange for food. Only women collect firewood, because, as they themselves say: “The men are killed; the women are ‘only’ raped.”
Halima’s husband doesn’t know about the latest attack. She didn’t tell him about the first one, but he figured out what must have happened during the two days she disappeared. Although he didn’t blame her, he left her for a few months partly to work out his anger at the janjaweed, and partly to cultivate crops to feed his family. The area he went to was attacked this month, with the janjaweed killing many men or occasionally gouging out their eyes with bayonets. There has been no word from him.
So, Marguerite, Halima’s future is up to us. In the last few days, Sudan has bowed to outside pressure and reluctantly agreed in principle to accept some U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur. That’s a reminder that pressure can work, but we haven’t applied nearly enough. For the peacekeepers to save lives and the killings to stop, much greater effort will be essential. If you didn’t find yourself too preoccupied, Marguerite, maybe you could make a phone call to the White House or write a letter to your member of Congress. You have other priorities, I know, and so do we all. But our indifference has already allowed Halima to be gang-raped twice and her sister murdered in the first genocide of the 21st century. So, Marguerite, look Halima in the eye, and decide if you’re willing to turn away as she is slaughtered, or how many more times you’re willing to allow her to be raped.
The Face of Genocide
Published: November 19, 2006
GOZ BEIDA, ChadSkip to next paragraph
A woman named Marguerite H. wrote to me recently to complain about my columns on Darfur. “While the situation there is dreadful, we have plenty of needs to be filled at home,” she wrote. “You would be better off putting your energy into making a difference here at home.” So, Marguerite, meet Halima Abdelkarim. Her life is partly in your hands. Watch her story, and see if you still think we should put off helping her until we have solved our own problems. Halima, 20, belongs to the Dajo tribe, one of the black African tribes being slaughtered by Sudanese-sponsored Arab militias called the janjaweed. The attacks began three years ago, but the world largely shared your view, Marguerite, that Darfur was a tragedy but not of strategic significance. And so we have fussed a bit but allowed the genocide to spread. This March, Darfur’s slaughter crossed the border and reached Halima’s hometown in Chad. The janjaweed killed many men and seized 10 women and girls, including Halima and her little sister, Sadia. Halima says that the janjaweed, many of them wearing Sudanese military uniforms, mocked the women with racial epithets against blacks, beat them with sticks, and gang-raped them all. Halima, who was then four months pregnant, says she was raped by three men and saw two rape Sadia — who was just 10 years old.
After two days of torment, the janjaweed released them. “But Sadia refused to give up her donkey, and so they shot her,” Halima recalled. “I was with her. She died right away.”
The survivors trekked to a shantytown outside Goz Beida. At first they were safe, and Halima gave birth to a baby daughter. But a couple of months ago the janjaweed began to attack them when they left the camp to get firewood.
Still, the world shared your attitude, Marguerite: It’s sad but a long way off, and anyway we have our own problems.
So last month, the janjaweed caught Halima again — in effect, we allowed the janjaweed to capture her again.
Halima was gathering firewood with a large group of women, who were hoping for safety in numbers. But raiders with guns suddenly appeared and caught seven of them.
The men asked what tribe they belonged to, and upon learning that they were Dajo who had already fled their villages, said, “We’re looking for you.” Halima was carrying her infant girl, Noorelayn, and she says the janjaweed threw the baby to the ground.
“You blacks are not human,” she quoted them as yelling. “We can do anything we want to you. You cannot live here.”
Finally, she says, three men raped her, beat her and stole her clothes. Another of the seven who were caught, Aziza Yakub, 17, confirmed Halima’s story, and added that the janjaweed told her while raping her: “You blacks are like monkeys. You are not human.”
The only way for these women to survive is to gather firewood to sell or exchange for food. Only women collect firewood, because, as they themselves say: “The men are killed; the women are ‘only’ raped.”
Halima’s husband doesn’t know about the latest attack. She didn’t tell him about the first one, but he figured out what must have happened during the two days she disappeared. Although he didn’t blame her, he left her for a few months partly to work out his anger at the janjaweed, and partly to cultivate crops to feed his family. The area he went to was attacked this month, with the janjaweed killing many men or occasionally gouging out their eyes with bayonets. There has been no word from him.
So, Marguerite, Halima’s future is up to us. In the last few days, Sudan has bowed to outside pressure and reluctantly agreed in principle to accept some U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur. That’s a reminder that pressure can work, but we haven’t applied nearly enough. For the peacekeepers to save lives and the killings to stop, much greater effort will be essential. If you didn’t find yourself too preoccupied, Marguerite, maybe you could make a phone call to the White House or write a letter to your member of Congress. You have other priorities, I know, and so do we all. But our indifference has already allowed Halima to be gang-raped twice and her sister murdered in the first genocide of the 21st century. So, Marguerite, look Halima in the eye, and decide if you’re willing to turn away as she is slaughtered, or how many more times you’re willing to allow her to be raped.
Boy’s Wish: Kill Them All
Published: November 21, 2006
Skip to next paragraph “If I had a gun,” Ismail Hassan said venomously from his hospital bed, “I would shoot Arabs.” “Surely not women and children?” I remonstrated.
“Every one of them,” Ismail snarled.
Ismail is a 15-year-old boy, and that conversation underscores how Chad is falling off a cliff, with escalating hatreds, violence and insecurity. He is a member of one of the black African tribes now being hunted down by the Sudanese-sponsored janjaweed Arab militia, at first in Darfur alone and now in Chad as well. After the janjaweed attacked his village and shot his father, Ismail raced forward to cover his father’s body with his own. That courage didn’t move the janjaweed, who simply shot Ismail as well.
The genocide that started in Darfur in 2003 is now threatening to topple the governments of Chad and the Central African Republic. If these two countries collapse into chaos and civil war for years to come, then neighboring countries like Cameroon and Niger will be threatened as well — and the death toll triggered by the Darfur genocide will eventually number in the millions. None of this was — or is — inevitable. In late 2003 and early 2004, some Republican appointees in the Bush administration (particularly in the Agency for International Development) were among the first to push for a government response to the slaughter in Darfur, but the White House wasn’t interested. Then in 2004, Colin Powell boldly used the “genocide” label to describe Darfur, over initial Pentagon and White House objections, and several of his aides drafted a set of policy options to confront the genocide. Those included pushing the French to use fighter aircraft from their base in Chad to intimidate the janjaweed, pushing Egypt to be more involved, recruiting peacekeeping troops from Pakistan and Bangladesh, and generally using American diplomatic muscle to push harder for a solution. None of those things happened, partly because of reluctance from the White House and Pentagon, and partly because of resistance from France and other countries. So the genocide in Darfur has steadily expanded. Arabs here in Chad repeatedly complain now that the black Africans steal their cattle, poison their wells, occupy their land, and shoot at them. I don’t see much basis to those charges, for the Arabs have assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades (supplied by the Sudanese), while the black Africans have bows and arrows, but this narrative is widely held among Arabs. “We consider them our enemies and they consider us their enemies,” said Brahim Wadia, the patriarch of a group of Arabs who were grazing their cattle on what had been a black African farm. “So each side will shoot the other and kill the other.”
Mr. Brahim and most members of his entourage were light-skinned, and they were civil to me (considering it white solidarity?). But that same morning nearby, several black Africans who tried to recover food from their burned and abandoned village were shot dead.
One person in Mr. Brahim’s party was a boy of about 13 with black skin who looked unlike the others. He appeared physically unable to speak, and it wasn’t clear if he had been hired as a herdsman or captured in a raid and enslaved.
The most common question I get from readers about Darfur is: What can I do? The simplest answer is to write or call the White House and members of Congress. (See how your representative does on the issue at www.darfurscores.org). Imagine if Mr. Bush had made Darfur an important issue at the Asian summit meeting last week, if he had returned via Cairo for a meeting with Arab leaders, if he had dispatched Condi Rice to Chad to shore it up. Beyond pushing our own government, we can write the embassies of countries like France and Egypt that could play especially crucial roles. The same is true of China, which provides Sudan the guns used to shoot children like Ismail. We in the news business, including Arab and European television networks, could use a few pokes to appreciate that genocide is newsworthy. The heroic efforts of aid groups in Darfur and Chad — 13 aid workers have been killed in Darfur since May — deserve support as well. (I list some groups active in Darfur in my blog, nytimes.com/ontheground.) The aid workers risk their lives daily to try to save people, putting up with janjaweed, scorpions, camel spiders and pit toilets inhabited by bats. They can use our backup.
A Sister’s Sacrifice
Published: November 26, 2006
Skip to next paragraph When the janjaweed militia attacked Fareeda, a village here in southeastern Chad near Darfur, an elderly man named Simih Yahya didn’t run because that would have meant leaving his frail wife behind. So the janjaweed grabbed Mr. Simih and, shouting insults against blacks, threw him to the ground and piled grass on his back. Then they started a bonfire on top of him.
But his wife, Halima, normally fragile and submissive, furiously tried to tug the laughing militia members from her husband. She pleaded with them to spare his life. Finally, she threw herself on top of the fire, burning herself but eventually extinguishing it with her own body.
The janjaweed may have been shamed by her courage, for Mr. Simih recalls them then walking away and saying, “Oh, he will die anyway.” He told me the story as he was treated at a hospital where doctors peeled burned flesh from his back.
Atrocities like this make up the news and constitute the Sudanese-sponsored genocide here in the region surrounding Darfur, but it is also stories like this — of superhuman courage — that keep me going through my reporting here. Invariably, the most memorable stories to emerge from genocide aren’t those of the Adolf Eichmanns, but those of the Anne Franks and Raoul Wallenbergs. Side by side with the most nauseating evil, you stumble across the most exhilarating humanity.
So this is a column about the uplifting side of genocide.
I see examples all the time, from the aid workers who persevere against impossible odds (13 have been murdered in Darfur since May) to the children who carry bows and arrows to try to protect their parents from men with machine guns. One of the most inspiring people here is Suad Ahmed, a 25-year-old mother of two from Darfur. She lives here in the Goz Amir refugee camp, and last month she was collecting firewood with her beloved little sister, Halima, when a band of janjaweed ambushed them. The janjaweed regularly attack women and girls — part of a Sudanese policy of rape to terrorize and drive away black African tribes — and Ms. Suad knew how brutal the attacks are. A 12-year-old neighbor girl had been kidnapped by the janjaweed and gang-raped for a week; the girl’s legs were pulled so far apart that she is now crippled.
But Ms. Suad’s thoughts were only for her sister, who is just 10. “You are a virgin, and you must escape,” she told her. “Run! I’ll let myself be captured, but you must run and escape.”
The local culture is such that if the little girl were raped, she might never be able to marry. So Ms. Suad made herself a decoy and allowed herself to be caught, while her sister escaped back to the camp.
Ms. Suad plays down her heroism, saying that even if she had tried to escape, she might have been caught anyway, for she was five months pregnant. Or, she says, maybe she and her sister both would have been captured.
In any case, however, the janjaweed beat Ms. Suad, and seven of them gang-raped her despite her pregnancy. “You black people have no land,” she recalls them telling her. “This land is not for you.”
People from the camp found Ms. Suad in the hills that evening, too injured to walk, and carried her back. Ms. Suad said she didn’t seek medical treatment, because she wanted to keep the rape as much of a secret as possible and didn’t even tell her husband, although he eventually found out along with a few others. He accepted that it was not her fault.
The gang rape and beating were excruciating, she says, but her sacrifice was worth it. “When my sister saw me brought back and saw what had happened to me, she understood,” Ms. Suad says. “She is very grateful to me.”
So, yes, this is a land of numbing brutality, scarred by what may be the ugliest crime of all, genocide — abetted by indifference abroad. But it has elicited the best of humanity along with the worst. In Ms. Suad and those like her, I find a courage, nobility and compassion that offer a perfect contrast to the fecklessness of the rest of the world.
Published: January 28, 2007
Over the next two days, African leaders will convene in Ethiopia and choose a new head of the African Union. Incredibly, that job may go to Sudan’s blood-drenched president, Omar al-Bashir, architect of the genocide in Darfur. The outcome is still uncertain, with Sudan campaigning furiously for the job, but it’s mind-boggling that African countries would even consider selecting as their leader a man who has systematically dispatched militias that pick out babies on the basis of tribe and skin color and throw them into bonfires. At a time when Africa is enjoying solid economic growth and improved leadership, this self-inflicted wound would sully Africa’s image and make it far more difficult for African Union peacekeepers to save lives in Darfur. Mr. Bashir hasn’t confined himself to killing his own people, but has also sent his janjaweed militias to invade Chad and the Central African Republic. The janjaweed have beaten mothers with their own babies, until the infants are dead, and lately they have diversified into gouging out people’s eyes with bayonets. For anyone who wants the best for Africa, it is repulsive to think of President Bashir as the duly elected spokesman for the continent. One reason Mr. Bashir has continued to engage in such behavior is that the world doesn’t seriously object. Almost all North African countries are backing his bid to chair the African Union. China, which supplies nearly all the AK-47s that are used to kill children in Darfur, has underwritten the genocide. Lately, it has encouraged Sudan to be more responsible, but President Hu Jintao is visiting Sudan shortly — let’s see whether he publicly expresses concern about Chinese-supported atrocities in Africa that far exceed the Rape of Nanjing. Sudan promised a cease-fire, but instead it has been attacking aid workers. As Newsweek reported, at least four female aid workers have been beaten and sexually abused recently — raped in the case of two French women. In addition, an aid worker in Sudan tells me that on Jan. 22 the police raided a party in the city of Nyala and arrested 22 employees of aid groups. Several were beaten and one woman was sexually abused but managed to fend off an attempted rape. Broader security is also collapsing. On a road near Bulbul that used to be safe, gunmen stopped a public bus in the middle of the day and brutally beat the men and gang-raped the women for hours. In the face of all this, aid workers are jittery and some are pulling out.
Yet Europe is oblivious (the Davos conference here has great sessions on Africa but nothing on Darfur). President Bush has been better than most world leaders, but still pathetic: he mustered half a sentence in his State of the Union address. Perhaps this is because Mr. Bush regards the situation as tragic but hopeless, but in fact there is plenty he could do. He could speak out forcefully about Darfur. He could bring victims to the White House for a photo op. He could help the U.N. send a force to protect Chad and the Central African Republic — while continuing to push for U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur itself. He could visit Darfur or Chad and invite European or Chinese officials to join him. He could invite African leaders to Washington for a summit meeting that would include discussion of Darfur. He could impose a no-fly zone. He could develop targeted sanctions against Sudanese leaders. He could begin forensic accounting to find assets of those leaders in Western countries. He could call on NATO and the Pentagon to prepare contingency plans in case the janjaweed start massacring the hundreds of thousands of Darfuris in camps. And this weekend he could telephone a few African presidents to tell them what a catastrophe it would be if Africa chose Mr. Bashir as its leader. Serious negotiations between the government and Darfur’s rebels are crucial for a lasting peace deal in Darfur, and new discussions are expected soon (that may be why President Hu dares visit Khartoum). But Mudawi Ibrahim Adam, a Sudanese human rights leader, says the new talks will fail unless the Darfur rebels have a chance to consult first. And when they try to meet, the Sudanese government bombs them.
How Do You Solve a Crisis Like Darfur? Published: March 13, 2007
For anyone who thinks that “genocide” is absolutely the rock-bottom possibility, keep an eye on Darfur. Skip to next paragraph The area of crisis has already spread from an area the size of France to one the size of Western Europe, encompassing Chad and Central African Republic while threatening to reignite the separate war between north and south Sudan. And aid workers increasingly are finding themselves under attack, so that humanitarian access is now lower than at any time since 2004. Six weeks ago, I invited readers to send in their own suggestions for what we should do about Darfur, and the result was a deluge of proposals from all over the world. The common thread was a far more muscular approach. Several readers suggested that we should dispatch a private force — supplied by a military contractor like Blackwater USA — to fight the janjaweed militia. Many readers also recommended that we supply arms to Darfur refugees or rebel groups. Some people suggested that we blockade Port Sudan, through which Sudan exports oil. Many also wanted a much tougher approach toward China, which has protected Sudan diplomatically. Some advocated a boycott of all Chinese products, while others favor a boycott of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. After inviting the discussion, I feel ungrateful in criticizing such well-meaning suggestions — but I’m afraid that in the aftermath of the Iraq war, aggressive military measures would be counterproductive. We would be handing President Omar al-Bashir a propaganda victory and a chance to rally support (“Those American crusaders are trying to steal another Arab country’s oil!”). Likewise, Darfur is already awash with guns and irresponsible armed factions terrorizing civilians. The last thing Darfur needs is more AK-47s. As for China, a boycott would antagonize ordinary Chinese and cause Beijing to dig in its heels. But I like the idea of activists like Eric Reeves of organizing a “Genocide Olympics” campaign to shame Beijing into better behavior. Likewise, I approve of many suggestions that sought more television coverage of Darfur. The slacker now is ABC News. The Tyndall Report, which monitors network news coverage, found that ABC’s nightly newscasts included just 11 minutes of coverage of Darfur in all of 2006, compared with the 23 minutes ABC devoted to the false confession to the killing of JonBenet Ramsey. If only a Darfuri would falsely confess to killing JonBenet, maybe ABC would cover genocide ... I’ve posted more reader suggestions on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground. But in general, what Darfur needs isn’t a single dramatic solution but a collection of incremental steps that add to the pressure for a peace agreement there. President Bush could ratchet up the pressure by giving a prime-time speech on Darfur. He and Tony Blair could lead a summit on Darfur in Europe. He could invite leaders of China and Egypt to join him on a trip to a Darfur refugee camp in Chad. Mr. Bush is expected to announce soon a series of financial sanctions on Sudan (similar to those that have inflicted considerable pain on North Korea and Iran), and those are welcome. Enforcing a no-fly zone would also help add to the pressure. But the top priority for Darfur is something that few people talk about — a negotiated peace agreement. Peacekeepers are desperately needed, but the only real hope for lasting security is a negotiated peace among all the tribes of Darfur. And that is conceivable: an attempt last April came close, but ultimately a flawed deal was reached that made the conflict worse. Human rights groups have laid out excellent proposals for a Darfur peace process, and they need a vigorous push. To get an agreement, Khartoum will have to make a few more concessions (such as naming a Darfuri vice president, uniting the Darfur provinces, verifying the disarming of janjaweed), and it will also have to allow rebels to meet to work out negotiating positions. Western countries should also pledge to help finance reconstruction and compensation schemes, as incentives to wary Darfuris to back a peace deal. So far the U.S. has spent $2.7 billion on Darfur, and it would be a bargain to invest several hundred million dollars in a peace. Otherwise, north central Africa may collapse completely into war and anarchy, costing us countless billions and resulting in several million deaths over the coming decade.
Driving Up the Price of Blood
Published: April 17, 2007
Perhaps the most surprising thing about President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan isn’t that he has presided over the systematic slaughter of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children who are members of black African tribes. Skip to next paragraph It is that President Bashir’s own family appears to come from an African tribe. Yes, Mr. Bashir has led a genocide against people like himself.
As best I can establish from my contacts in Sudan, Mr. Bashir’s grandfather was from the Falata tribe and grew up in Nigeria. He migrated to Sudan to work on the Gezira irrigation project and settled in a village called Um Audam. Then the grandfather was killed in a dispute, and Mr. Bashir’s father and grandmother moved to Hash Banaga in the Arab north. Mr. Bashir grew up speaking Arabic, so in that sense he is Arab — but by heritage he is Falata and a black African.
Americans often misunderstand genocide, assuming it is impossible to stop because it is driven by millenniums of racial or ethnic hatreds. But historically genocide has mostly been rooted in cool, calculated decisions by national leaders that the most convenient way to solve a problem or stay in power is to scapegoat and destroy a particular group. So it has been in most past genocides, and so it is again in Darfur. Nor is Mr. Bashir the only person in such a position. The on-and-off leader of the janjaweed militias, Musa Hilal, has unleashed his soldiers with particular brutality on another black African tribe, the Zaghawa. You can drive for hours through Zaghawa regions of Darfur where every single village has been burned; only corpses are left, and some of those have been stuffed into wells to poison them. Yet, according to people from Musa Hilal’s hometown, his own mother is Zaghawa.
Likewise, the rebels of Darfur have sometimes turned on their own tribes — raping and murdering their own people, or those of allied tribes. So what motivates these people? Not ancient hatreds, but greed. They are not Taliban-style extremists, but rather amoral, ruthless, calculating opportunists.
Mr. Bashir and others in his government faced a genuine problem back in 2003: African tribes (including the Zaghawa) were staging a rebellion in Darfur. Calling in the army to fight the rebels was problematic because many soldiers in the regular army are from African tribes in Darfur and might not be reliable in combat against their brethren. So Mr. Bashir adopted an approach he had already used against rebels in southern Sudan. He armed irregular militias and gave them license to wipe out civilians and depopulate large areas. This would deprive the rebels of their base of support and send a warning to any other tribe in Sudan that might contemplate a rebellion. Presumably Mr. Bashir guessed that foreigners might not like the idea of mass murder. But he could deny visas to prying journalists, and he had Chinese diplomatic protection at the United Nations.
So after weighing the pros and cons, Mr. Bashir decided that genocide was the simplest counterinsurgency method. Some of the marauders were driven by prejudice, and Arab attackers routinely shouted racial epithets against blacks. But the leaders —— they were just cynics. Musa Hilal and some of the rebel commanders seemed to view murder and rape simply as paths to accumulate power and livestock.
All this makes genocide easier to stop than people imagine. Where it arises from a weighing of costs and benefits, then it is possible for outsiders to impose additional costs and change the outcome. That’s what we need to do. The U.S. should lead other countries in pushing hard on all sides for a negotiated peace agreement among the warring factions, for that is ultimately the best hope to end the slaughter in Darfur and in neighboring areas in Chad and the Central African Republic. I find President Bashir’s ruthlessness pretty easy to understand. What is harder to fathom is President Bush’s refusal to stand up to the genocide for four years. Why not impose a no-fly zone, why not hold an international conference on Darfur, why not invite survivors to the White House for a photo-op, why not give a prime-time speech about Darfur? Perhaps the explanation for Mr. Bush’s passivity is the same as the explanation for Mr. Bashir’s brutality. Maybe Mr. Bush has made his calculations, looked at the number of calls and letters he gets about Darfur, weighed the pros and cons, and decided that Americans really don’t care enough about genocide to make him pay a major price for allowing it to continue.
Published: May 10, 2007
Finally, we’re beginning to understand what it would take to galvanize President Bush, other leaders and the American public to respond to the genocide in Sudan: a suffering puppy with big eyes and floppy ears. Skip to next paragraph That’s the implication of a series of studies by psychologists trying to understand why people — good, conscientious people — aren’t moved by genocide or famines. Time and again, we’ve seen that the human conscience just isn’t pricked by mass suffering, while an individual child (or puppy) in distress causes our hearts to flutter. In one experiment, psychologists asked ordinary citizens to contribute $5 to alleviate hunger abroad. In one version, the money would go to a particular girl, Rokia, a 7-year-old in Mali; in another, to 21 million hungry Africans; in a third, to Rokia — but she was presented as a victim of a larger tapestry of global hunger.
Not surprisingly, people were less likely to give to anonymous millions than to Rokia. But they were also less willing to give in the third scenario, in which Rokia’s suffering was presented as part of a broader pattern.
Evidence is overwhelming that humans respond to the suffering of individuals rather than groups. Think of the toddler Jessica McClure falling down a well in 1987, or the Lindbergh baby kidnapping in 1932 (which Mencken described as the “the biggest story since the Resurrection”).
Even the right animal evokes a similar sympathy. A dog stranded on a ship aroused so much pity that $48,000 in private money was spent trying to rescue it — and that was before the Coast Guard stepped in. And after I began visiting Darfur in 2004, I was flummoxed by the public’s passion to save a red-tailed hawk, Pale Male, that had been evicted from his nest on
Fifth Avenuein
New York City. A single homeless hawk aroused more indignation than two million homeless Sudanese.
Advocates for the poor often note that 30,000 children die daily of the consequences of poverty — presuming that this number will shock people into action. But the opposite is true: the more victims, the less compassion.
In one experiment, people in one group could donate to a $300,000 fund for medical treatments that would save the life of one child — or, in another group, the lives of eight children. People donated more than twice as much money to help save one child as to help save eight.
Likewise, remember how people were asked to save Rokia from starvation? A follow-up allowed students to donate to Rokia or to a hungry boy named Moussa. Both Rokia and Moussa attracted donations in the same proportions. Then another group was asked to donate to Rokia and Moussa together. But donors felt less good about supporting two children, and contributions dropped off.
“Our capacity to feel is limited,” Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon writes in a new journal article, “Psychic Numbing and Genocide,” which discusses these experiments. Professor Slovic argues that we cannot depend on the innate morality even of good people. Instead, he believes, we need to develop legal or political mechanisms to force our hands to confront genocide. So, yes, we should develop early-warning systems for genocide, prepare an African Union, U.N. and NATO rapid-response capability, and polish the “responsibility to protect” as a legal basis to stop atrocities. (The Genocide Intervention Network and the Enough project are working on these things.) But, frankly, after four years of watching the U.N. Security Council, the International Criminal Court and the Genocide Convention accomplish little in Darfur, I’m skeptical that either human rationality or international law can achieve much unless backed by a public outcry. One experiment underscored the limits of rationality. People prepared to donate to the needy were first asked either to talk about babies (to prime the emotions) or to perform math calculations (to prime their rational side). Those who did math donated less.
So maybe what we need isn’t better laws but more troubled consciences — pricked, perhaps, by a Darfur puppy with big eyes and floppy ears. Once we find such a soulful dog in peril, we should call ABC News. ABC’s news judgment can be assessed by the 11 minutes of evening news coverage it gave to Darfur’s genocide during all of last year — compared with 23 minutes for the false confession in the JonBenet Ramsey case. If President Bush and the global public alike are unmoved by the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of fellow humans, maybe our last, best hope is that we can be galvanized by a puppy in distress.
Published: July 9, 2007
In May 2006, President Bush declared: “The vulnerable people of Darfur deserve more than sympathy. ... America will not turn away from this tragedy.”Skip to next paragraph Since then, Mr. Bush has turned away — and 450,000 more people have been displaced in Darfur. “Things are getting worse,” noted Mudawi Ibrahim Adam, a human rights campaigner in Sudan. One of the most troubling signs is that Sudan has been encouraging Arabs from Chad, Niger and other countries to settle in Darfur. More than 30,000 of them have moved into areas depopulated after African tribes were driven out. In the last few months, Sudan’s government has given these new arrivals citizenship papers and weapons, cementing in place the demographic consequences of its genocide. And if Sudan thinks it has gotten away with mass murder in Darfur, it is more likely to resume its war against southern Sudan — which seems increasingly likely. Within Darfur, aid groups have increasingly become targets, and in April alone three aid workers were shot and 20 were kidnapped, while hijackers tried to seize aid workers’ vehicles at a rate of almost one a day. As for African Union peacekeepers, seven of them were shot dead the same month — so they’re in no position to rescue aid workers. The cancer has also been spreading into Chad and the Central African Republic, compounding each country’s intrinsic instability. Last month a 27-year-old French woman, Elsa Serfass, on her first assignment with Doctors Without Borders, was shot dead in C.A.R. as she drove through an area where militias had been burning villages. So Doctors Without Borders has had to suspend much of its work in the area. Something similar is happening in eastern Chad. Mia Farrow, the actress — who has shown a toughness about genocide that no Western leader has — has just returned from her sixth visit to the region and says that eastern Chad now feels like Somalia. “Pick-ups with machine guns bolted onto the rear and loaded with armed, uniformed men careen through the dusty streets terrorizing people,” she told me. “No one knows who they are.” While Ms. Farrow was visiting the town of Abéché, an elderly guard at a U.N. compound there was killed and two people were badly beaten. Then there’s rape. Ever since Sudan began the genocide, it has been using rape to terrorize populations of Africans — and then periodically punishing women who seek treatment on charges of adultery or fornication. So far this year, at least two young women have been sentenced to death by stoning for adultery. As Refugees International puts it in a new report: “The government is more likely to take action against those who report and document rape than those who commit it.”
Much of the news on Darfur has been a bit optimistic lately, because it has focused on recent flurries of international diplomacy. While it’s true that China is belatedly putting some pressure on Sudan to admit international peacekeepers, at the same time China continues to supply Sudan with the guns used to slaughter Darfuri children. China also just signed a 20-year agreement to develop offshore oil for Sudan, and in April China pledged “to boost military exchanges and cooperation” with Sudan. Let’s hope that athletes who go to Beijing for the Olympics next year will wear T-shirts honoring the victims of the genocide that China is underwriting. In the burst of diplomatic activity, one person who stands out is Nicolas Sarkozy, the new president of France. Mr. Sarkozy is pushing to send a European Union force, including many French troops, to stabilize Chad and the Central African Republic. If they arrive by October, as planned, they just might pull those two countries back from the brink of collapse. In contrast, Mr. Bush has been letting Darfur rhyme with Rwanda and Bosnia. For years, Mr. Bush’s aides have discussed whether he should give a prime-time speech on Darfur to ratchet up the pressure; he still hasn’t. Laura Bush just completed a four-nation swing through Africa, but she didn’t include a visit to any of the areas affected by the Darfur crisis. Ultimately, the only way the genocide will end will be with a negotiated political settlement — but the only way to get that is to put much more pressure on Khartoum. So how about if Mr. Bush invites Mr. Sarkozy — along with Gordon Brown, Hu Jintao and Hosni Mubarak — for a joint visit to Chad and C.A.R. to meet Darfuri refugees? Maybe Mr. Sarkozy could lend Mr. Bush and the others a little backbone.
He Rang the Alarm on Darfur Published: July 16, 2007
Some day an American president will visit a genocide museum in Darfur and repeat the standard refrain: If only we had known ... But that excuse will ring hollow, because there was a whistle-blower in the heart of the Bush administration. Roger Winter, whom President Bush had appointed in 2001 to a senior post in the U.S. Agency for International Development, frantically tried to ring alarm bells — but instead the administration turned away.
If there was a hero within the U.S. government on Darfur, it was Mr. Winter. But it was doubly frustrating for him because in 1994 he had the same experience during the Clinton administration, when he was running a refugee organization and desperately trying to galvanize officials to respond to the Rwandan genocide. In outrage at Bill Clinton’s inaction during the Rwandan slaughter, Mr. Winter abandoned the Democratic Party and became a Republican.
Mr. Winter, 65, who also served in the Carter and (briefly) Reagan administrations, traveled regularly to Sudan for the Bush administration, trying to end the 20-year war between northern and southern Sudan. On those trips, Mr. Winter encountered the slaughter in Darfur as it began. In May 2003, long before any newspaper noticed, Mr. Winter warned in Congressional testimony that violence was erupting in Darfur. Then, on Nov. 3, 2003, the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum transmitted a message warning Washington that “the situation in Darfur is critical” and adding that “ethnic cleansing ... is underway.” State Department officials apparently worried that an uproar over Darfur would derail the north-south agreement in Sudan, a prize achievement for the Bush administration. So they looked away. The State Department was even angry when the Agency for International Development released satellite photos showing the burned villages in Darfur. Before testifying to Congress, Mr. Winter had to submit prepared remarks to the State Department for vetting. Frustrated by State’s passivity, he used his off-the-cuff remarks to speak passionately — and uncensored — about the horrors in Darfur. Mr. Winter once took an administration colleague with him to fly over Darfur from Chad, to show him the Janjaweed militias as they burned villages. Administration officials aren’t supposed to invade another country’s air space and buzz militias as they slaughter civilians, but Mr. Winter was desperate to get another administration witness. “We were trying to get everybody’s attention, including the White House and State Department and everybody else,” Mr. Winter recalls.
When Sudanese forces blocked a road to aid groups, Mr. Winter invited aid groups to join his own convoy and insisted on going down the road to assure humanitarian access.
It was agonizing, he says, to feel that Mr. Bush wanted to do the right thing on Sudan — and yet see the administration acquiesce on mass murder. Later Mr. Winter served as State Department envoy for Darfur, but at State he burned with the same frustration and retired last year, deeply disillusioned. “Khartoum looked the U.S. in the eye, and we looked away,” Mr. Winter said, adding: “There was no real intention of taking effective action. They saw that. They read us. And so they weren’t threatened.” Mr. Winter favored — and still favors — a no-fly zone over Darfur. We wouldn’t keep planes in the air, or even shoot planes down. But after Sudan bombed civilians in Darfur, we would later destroy a Sudanese attack helicopter on the ground. Aid groups worry that such a strike would endanger their efforts. But I think Mr. Winter, who has 26 years’ experience in Sudan, is exactly right that a no-fly zone is the best way to shake up Sudanese officials and make them negotiate seriously for a peace agreement in Darfur. “What we have done with our handling of Darfur is show Khartoum that in certain circumstances we are a toothless tiger,” he says. “No matter how forceful the words we use, we don’t act. Or we act in ways that the bad guys in Khartoum find tolerable. ... It tells them that they can get away with mass murder.” The upshot, Mr. Winter believes, is that Sudan is increasingly likely to resume its war against southern Sudan, erasing one of Mr. Bush’s genuine achievements. Mr. Winter says of administration officials, “They’re turning a silk purse into a sow’s ear.” Mr. Winter admires Mr. Bush for pushing for north-south peace but fears that the administration is simply running out the clock on Darfur. “Where we have gotten to with Sudan,” he says heavily, “is a tragedy.”
Mr. Bush, Here’s a Plan for Darfur Published: August 6, 2007
Frustrated by the genocide he is tolerating in Darfur, President Bush has suggested to aides on occasion that maybe the U.S. should just send troops there. Skip to next paragraph He alluded to that when he told a woman in Tennessee who asked him about Darfur: “The threshold question was: If there is a problem, why don’t you just go take care of it?” Mr. Bush was talked out of the idea by Condi Rice, who told him that the U.S. just couldn’t start another war in a Muslim country. So, as Mr. Bush told the questioner: “I made the decision not to send U.S. troops unilaterally into Darfur.” That was the right decision. The Sudanese regime would use our invasion as a rallying cry against infidels and make the crisis harder to resolve.
But the upshot was that Mr. Bush, lacking a military option, hasn’t taken up other options. He seems genuinely appalled by the horrors of Darfur — he raises them regularly with foreign leaders, even when aides haven’t put them on his talking points — yet he has done little, apparently because he doesn’t know quite what to do. So here are some practical suggestions. First, the administration should invest far more energy toward seeking a negotiated peace between rebels and government — the only long-term solution to the slaughter. Instead, the diplomatic focus has been on U.N. peacekeepers, and they are a terrific addition but not a solution in themselves.
The preliminary step is for the rebels to form a united negotiating front, and they are now meeting in Tanzania to do so. The U.S. desperately needs to assist that process to the hilt. Second, we should back an international appeal for Sudan to release Suleiman Jamous, an elder who is one of the best hopes for uniting the rebel factions and leading them to peace. Third, we need to work with other countries to insist that Sudan stop importing tens of thousands of Arabs from neighboring countries to repopulate those areas where it has slaughtered the local population. These new settlements seal the demographic consequences of genocide, outrage the survivors and make peace harder to achieve. Fourth, we need to increase intelligence coverage over the area, and release occasional satellite photos so that Sudan knows it is being watched. Releasing a photo of the beleaguered Gereida camp, for example, would reduce the chance that Sudan will slaughter its 130,000 occupants. Fifth, Mr. Bush can join Nicolas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown in the trip they have discussed to Chad. They should also publicly invite the leaders of China and Egypt, two countries that are critical to pressuring Sudan, to join them. Sixth, the U.S. can quietly encourage Muslim leaders to push for peace. Malaysia’s prime minister, who is also the head of a group of Islamic countries, has prepared a peace proposal, and Saudi Arabia is interested in helping. Seventh, Mr. Bush can use the bully pulpit. He can give a prime-time speech or bring Darfuri refugees to the White House for a photo-op.
Eighth, the U.S. should begin contingency planning in case Sudan starts mass slaughters of people in camps, or in case Sudan resumes its war against its south. If the former, we could secure camps and create a corridor to bring survivors to Chad; if the latter, we should arm South Sudan and perhaps blockade Port Sudan. Ninth, we need to work much more with China, which has the most leverage over Sudan. The goal should be to get China to suspend arms transfers to Sudan until Khartoum makes a serious effort at peace. Tenth, we can work with France to stabilize Chad and Central African Republic. President Sarkozy is pushing for European peacekeepers to rescue both countries after Sudanese-sponsored proxy invasions, and he deserves strong support. Finally, we should work with Britain and France to enforce the U.N.’s ban on offensive military flights in Darfur. At a minimum, we should seek U.N. sanctions for Sudan’s violations. In addition, when Sudan bombs a village, we can afterward destroy one of its Chinese-made A-5 Fantan fighter bombers that it keeps in Darfur. Many aid workers disagree with this suggestion, for fear that Sudan will retaliate by cutting off humanitarian access. But after four years, I think we need to show President Omar Hassan al-Bashir that he will pay a price for genocide. And he values his gunships and fighter bombers in a way he has never valued his people.
A Genocide Foretold
Published: February 28, 2008
Skip to next paragraph The Sudanese government started the first genocide of the 21st century in Darfur, and now it seems to be preparing to start the second here among the thatch-roof huts of southern Sudan. South Sudan is rich in oil, but its people are among the poorest in the world, far poorer than those in Darfur. Only 1 percent of girls here finish elementary school, meaning that a young woman is more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than to become literate. Leprosy and Ebola linger here. South Sudan is the size of Texas, yet it has only 10 miles of paved road and almost no electricity; just about the only running water here is the Nile River. The poverty is mostly the result of the civil war between North and South Sudan that raged across the southern part of the country for two decades and cost 2 million lives. For many impoverished villagers, their only exposure to modern technology has been to endure bombings by the Sudanese Air Force. The war finally ended, thanks in part to strong American pressure, in 2005 with a landmark peace agreement — but that peace is now fraying. Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir is backing away from the peace agreement, and prodding Arab militias to revive the war with the South Sudan military forces. Small-scale armed clashes have broken out since late last year, and it looks increasingly likely that Darfur will become simply the prologue to a far bloodier conflict that engulfs all Sudan. Even my presence here is a sign of the rising tensions and mistrust. The Sudanese government refuses me visas, but the authorities in the south let me enter from Kenya without a visa because they want the word to get out that war is again looming. The authorities in disputed areas such as the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile State also welcomed me, rather than arresting me, even though those areas technically are on the northern side of the dividing line. Local officials in both areas warned that President Bashir and his radical Arab political party are preparing to revive the war against non-Arab groups in the south and center of the country. “If things go on as they are now, war will break out,” said Sila Musa Kangi, the commissioner of Kormuk in Blue Nile. “And it can break out at any time.” Although people speak of renewed “war,” the violence is more likely to resemble what happens in a stockyard. If it is like the last time, government-sponsored Arab militias will slaughter civilians so as to terrorize local populations and drive them far away from oil wells.
Under the 2005 deal that ended the war, Sudan is supposed to hold elections early next year, but President Bashir is unlikely to allow them because he almost surely would lose. Likewise, Mr. Bashir is unlikely to abide by his commitment to allow the south to hold a referendum in 2011 to decide whether to separate from Sudan because southerners would likely vote overwhelmingly for independence — and more than three-quarters of the country’s oil is in the south. Already, the Sudanese government is backtracking on its commitments under the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, or C.P.A.: It still hasn’t withdrawn all of its troops from the south; it hasn’t accepted a boundary commission report for the oil-rich border area of Abyei; it keeps delaying a census needed for the elections; and it appears to be cheating the south of oil revenues. And the U.S. and other countries have acquiesced in all this. “We say to the international community, ‘you midwifed the C.P.A., and then you left,’ ” said Rebecca Garang, the widow of the longtime southern leader, John Garang. “You must come back and check the baby.”
Those who focused on Sudan’s atrocities in Darfur, myself included, may have inadvertently removed the spotlight from South Sudan. Without easing the outrage over Darfur — where the bloodshed has been particularly appalling lately — we must broaden the focus to include the threat to the south. One of the lessons of Darfur, Rwanda and Bosnia is that it is much easier to avert a genocide ahead of time than to put the pieces together afterward. So let’s not wait until gunshots are ringing out again all over the south. There are steps that the U.S. can take to diminish the risk of a new war. We can work with the international community to raise the costs to President Bashir of defying his treaty obligations. We can warn Sudan that if it starts a new war, we will supply anti-aircraft weapons to the south to make it harder for the north to resume bombing hospitals, churches and schools. We can also raise the possibility of protecting the south with a no-fly zone, which might be enough to deter Mr. Bashir from starting yet another genocide.
Published: April 10, 2008
President Bush seems genuinely troubled by the slaughter in Darfur and has periodically suggested to Condoleezza Rice: Why can’t we just send troops in and take care of it? Each time, Ms. Rice patiently explains: You can’t invade a third Muslim country, especially one with oil. And so Mr. Bush backs off and does nothing. Skip to next paragraphBut this week marks the 14th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide — the last time we said “never again.” And while Ms. Rice is right that we can’t send in American ground troops, there are concrete steps that President Bush can take if he wants to end his shameful passivity:
1. Work with France to end the proxy war between Sudan and Chad and to keep Sudan from invading Chad and toppling its government. Stopping the Darfur virus from infecting the surrounding countries must be a top priority. And even if the West lacks the gumption to do much within Sudan, it should at least try to block the spread of genocide to the entire region. France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is leading the way in providing a European force to stabilize Chad and Central African Republic, and we should back him strongly. If Sudan dispatches additional proxy troops, France and the U.S. should use aircraft to strafe the invaders. But we should also push Chad’s repressive president to accommodate his domestic opponents rather than imprison them. 2. Broaden the focus from “save Darfur” to “save Sudan.” There is a growing risk that the war between North and South Sudan will resume in the coming months and that Sudan will shatter into pieces. The U.S. should try to shore up the fraying north-south peace agreement and urgently help South Sudan with an anti-aircraft capability, to deter Khartoum from striking the South. 3. Right before or after this summer’s G-8 summit, President Bush should convene an international conference on Sudan, inviting among others Mr. Sarkozy, Gordon Brown of Britain, Hu Jintao of China, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Sudanese leaders themselves. The conference should be convened in Kigali, Rwanda, so that participants can reflect on the historical resonance of genocide. One aim would be to pressure China to suspend arms transfers to Sudan until it seriously pursues peace in Darfur (we’ll get further by treating China as important rather than as evil). Such an arms suspension would be the single best way to induce Sudan to make concessions needed to achieve peace. The conference would also focus on supporting the U.N. peacekeeping force in Darfur with helicopters, training and equipment. 4. The conference should aim to restart a Darfur peace process, because the only way the slaughter will truly end is with a peace agreement. A prominent figure like Kofi Annan should lead the talks, working full time and with a first-rate staff to crack heads of Sudanese officials and rebel leaders alike. 5. The U.N. and U.S. should take South Sudan up on its offers in 2004 and 2005 to provide up to 10,000 peacekeepers for Darfur. South Sudanese peacekeepers wouldn’t need visas or interpreters. They can simply walk to Darfur from their present positions, and they would make a huge difference in security. 6. The U.S. should impose a no-fly zone over Darfur from the air base in Abeche, Chad (or even from our existing base in Djibouti). We wouldn’t keep planes in the air or shoot down Sudanese aircraft. Rather, the next time Sudan breaches the U.N. ban on offensive military flights, we would wait a day or two and then destroy a Sudanese Antonov bomber on the ground. Aid groups mostly oppose this approach for fear that Sudan would respond by cutting off humanitarian access, and that’s a legitimate concern. We should warn Sudan that any such behavior would lead it to lose other aircraft. Sudan’s leaders are practical and covet their planes. 7. We should warn Sudan that if it provokes a war with the South, attacks camps for displaced people or invades a neighboring country, we will destroy its air force. As Roger Winter, a longtime Sudan expert, puts it: “They act when they are credibly threatened. They don’t react when we throw snow at them.” 8. The central reason for our failure in Sudan is that we haven’t proffered meaningful sticks or carrots. A no-fly zone is a stick, but we also should reiterate that if President Omar al-Bashir seeks peace in Darfur and South Sudan, then the U.S. will normalize relations, lift sanctions and take Sudan off the list of nations that sponsor terrorism. If President Bush takes all these steps, will they succeed in ending the genocide? We don’t know, but pretending that there is nothing more that we can do is as dishonest as it is disgraceful.
