"Genocide in Slow Motion" (Kristof on Darfur in NYRB)

[swag]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18674

Genocide in Slow Motion
By Nicholas D. Kristof

During the Holocaust, the world looked the other way. Allied leaders turned down repeated pleas to bomb the Nazi extermination camps or the rail lines leading to them, and the slaughter attracted little attention. My newspaper, The New York Times, provided meticulous coverage of World War II, but of 24,000 front-page stories published in that period only six referred on page one directly to the Nazi assault on the Jewish population of Europe. Only afterward did many people mourn the death of Anne Frank, construct Holocaust museums, and vow: Never Again.

The same paralysis occurred as Rwandans were being slaughtered in 1994. Officials from Europe to the US to the UN headquarters all responded by temporizing and then, at most, by holding meetings. The only thing President Clinton did for Rwandan genocide victims was issue a magnificent apology after they were dead.

Much the same has been true of the Western response to the Armenian genocide of 1915, the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s, and the Bosnian massacres of the 1990s. In each case, we have wrung our hands afterward and offered the lame excuse that it all happened too fast, or that we didn't fully comprehend the carnage when it was still under way.

And now the same tragedy is unfolding in Darfur, but this time we don't even have any sort of excuse. In Darfur genocide is taking place in slow motion, and there is vast documentary proof of the atrocities. Some of the evidence can be seen in the photo reproduced with this essay, which was leaked from an African Union archive containing thousands of other such photos. And now, the latest proof comes in the form of two new books that tell the sorry tale of Darfur: it's appalling that the publishing industry manages to respond more quickly to genocide than the UN and world leaders do.

In my years as a journalist, I thought I had seen a full kaleidoscope of horrors, from babies dying of malaria to Chinese troops shooting students to Indonesian mobs beheading people. But nothing prepared me for Darfur, where systematic murder, rape, and mutilation are taking place on a vast scale, based simply on the tribe of the victim. What I saw reminded me why people say that genocide is the worst evil of which human beings are capable.
. . .

[Igel]

1. I'm not sure about one of Kristof's lines.

"The killing in Darfur, a vast region in western Sudan, is not a case of religious persecution, since the killers as well as the victims of this genocide are Muslim."

It's rather like saying the killing of the Huguenots was not a case of religious persecution, since the killers as well as the victims of that genocide were Christian.

Some reports from a couple of years ago indicated four traits that usually co-occurred: Arabic/strict+traditional Islam/slightly lighter skin on average/nomadic ~ non-Arabic-speaking/laxer Islam/dark skin/settled. I.e., there was a religious component: takfir is not unheard of. Other reports pointed out that while a Janjaweed may say 'black', the man wielding the epithet could be just as dark as the 'black' man was: the epithet wasn't just, or even primarily, racial. After all, there is nothing that can be called an 'Arab' race at this point, it's mostly a cultural and linguistic term. It would be of interest to see if the co-occurrence of the four traits really did hold.

Then there's this:
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-africa-summit.html

[Australian]

2. Agreement

I must agree Darfur and many other African mass killings are essentially civil wars using ethnic claims to try and justify the murder. The Jewish holocaust of WW-II started with a government that was 1) persecuting a group, and 2) preventing that group from getting relief from the abuse; that government then invaded other nations such as Poland, the Netherlands, France and applied the same systems of abuse there. This is not the first or last time such things have happen.

In Indonesia you see genocide in almost every island under Java's military occupation; in Sumatra millions of Javanese farmers & settlers have been shipped in by the government against local wishes to Javanize the much larger island, starting in the south where a once proud nation had rivaled against the Javanese empires is now no more than extension of Java itself, to the Christian majority west coast, the forest people of the eastern coast and inland jungles, and finally the people of Aceh at the northern end of Sumatra. The current President was the Minister who conducted a brutal 3 year military retribution against the Acehnese for asking for independence just as they have kept doing since the invasion in the 1870s and when the UN forced them to become part of the 'United Sates of Indonesia' in Dec 1949 which in turn was crashed by Sukarno's militia during 1950 and declared to be part of his 'Republic of Indonesia' in July 1950.