Darfur: When did our expectations for human beings get so low?

Yesterday the Enough Project hosted a conference call on the situation in Sudan.  In many ways, it was a “wake up” call, an impassioned plea to get people to stop hitting their snooze button on Darfur, looking for any reason to go back to sleep.  As Enough co-founder John Prendergast said, a new (American) administration needs some time to settle.  And, they’ve had some time.

Prendergast and Enough Executive Director John Norris discussed the recent comments by the US Special Envoy on Sudan, Scott Gration, particularly his claim that:

"What we see is the remnants of genocide.  What we see are the consequences of genocide, the results of genocide.  We still have thousands of people living in camps as IDPs.  We have women who are still afraid to go out and collect firewood.  And we have children that are not having the benefits of growing up in their homeland -- that are growing up in these camps. (…)The violence still exists where bandits and Janjaweed and warlords and those kinds of folks do conduct terrorist activities on these folks and do increase terror.  But it doesn’t appear that it is a coordinated effort that was similar to what we had in 2003 to 2006."

If you have time, listen to Prendergast and Norris here.  If not, consider the following.  Article 2 of the Genocide Convention is actually very clear. It reads:

 

Article 2

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Women are afraid to collect firewood because they are being raped.  Children are growing up outside their homeland because they have been forcibly removed from it. People are starving and dying of sickness because access to aid has been turned off. This is genocide.  Because villages are not burning and aerial attacks are not taking place does not mean the genocide has ended. It means that Khartoum responded to the attention of the world and the bright light that was shining on Darfur for a while.

When asked about improvements in Darfur, Prendergast rightly responded with exasperation. Improvements? How are things “better”? Really, when did our expectations for human beings get so low?  Debating how much better things are or how much Khartoum has “improved” the situation is a recipe for spinning our wheels and for becoming tangled up in precisely the kind of endless debate that impedes action.

So, it’s time to shine that light on Darfur again and turn up the heat on ourselves.