Slaughter In Darfur: Is Anybody Listening

By Shlomo Maital

Child in Darfur

    As  Public Radio podcasts often warn:   What follows contains words that are disturbing, shocking and painful.  You may prefer not to read this blog.

     Nicholas Kristof, New York Times columnist, has been very critical of my country, Israel, for its war in Gaza.  But he has now alerted the world to a recurring tragedy in Darfur, Sudan, that is largely ignored, in his May 15 column.

      And the question is, why?

      Here is what Kristof describes, in part:

       “You may remember Darfur: It was the site of a genocide two decades ago. Those atrocities galvanized a vast response, led by protesters across the United States. Barack Obama and Joe Biden, then senators, were among those who called for action, and they were joined by tens of thousands of high school and college students, plus activists from churches, synagogues and mosques working together.”

      “….While hundreds of thousands were slaughtered in Darfur at that time, the campaign also probably saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of others. Other countries imposed sanctions and an arms embargo, peacekeeping forces were established by the African Union and the United Nations, and the Sudanese leader who commanded the genocide [al-Bashir] was eventually ousted.”

      It is happening again!   Kristof asserts “…a humanitarian crisis is happening now in Sudan that has been overshadowed by Gaza and Ukraine and may be about to get far worse. It’s a conflict, by some accounts a genocide, unfolding particularly in the Darfur region there”.

     “…today the slaughter in Darfur is resuming — and the international response is not. Most Western nations and African ones alike have been fairly indifferent. The inaction pales in comparison to the situation 20 years ago, when global leaders felt morally and legally obliged to act on Darfur, Human Rights Watch noted in a new 228-page report.”

     “Some of the same Arab forces responsible for the genocide in the 2000s are picking up where they left off. They are massacring, torturing, raping and mutilating members of non-Arab ethnic groups — the same victims as before — while burning or bulldozing their villages, survivors say.   There’s a racist element: Arab militias mock their victims as “slaves” and taunt them with racial epithets — the non-Arabs are often darker skinned. The militias seem to be trying to systematically eliminate non-Arab tribes from the area.  The Rapid Support Forces, an Arab militia associated with the worst atrocities, is on the edge of the city of El Fasher, with some 800,000 inhabitants, and may be about to sack it. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, warns that El Fasher is “on the precipice of a large-scale massacre.”

       Kristof recounts that the oil-rich United Arab Emirates has been sending plane loads of weapons to the genocidal RSF, to an airport in nearby Chad.  Why?  I guess, because RSF are Arabs, and those being slaughtered are not. 

       How many of the 800,000 civilians in El Fasher will be slaughtered?  Does anyone care?  And when Arabs are responsible for the slaughter, does the world ignore it, because the Arabs have money and political power?  And, hey, where are those young kids demonstrating at Columbia, Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton and everywhere?  Including many African-Americans?  Are they indifferent to the slaughter of Blacks, in El-Fasher? 

       What the hell!?