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Sudanese “Genocide”?

The resolution of the US House of Representatives – adopted unanimously by 422 votes and 12 abstentions – says the Bush administration should call the atrocities in Darfur by its rightful name: ‘genocide’.” It urges the Bush administration to consider “multilateral or even unilateral intervention to prevent genocide should the United Nations Security Council fail […]

The resolution of the US House of Representatives – adopted unanimously by 422 votes and 12 abstentions – says the Bush administration should call the atrocities in Darfur by its rightful name: ‘genocide’.”

It urges the Bush administration to consider “multilateral or even unilateral intervention to prevent genocide should the United Nations Security Council fail to act”.

“While the world debates, people die in Darfur,” Kansas Republican Senator Sam Brownback was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency.

“We actually could save some lives instead of lamenting afterward that we should have done something.”

~ BBC News, July 23, 2004

How is it that a term as extreme as genocide can be unanimously approved by the members of the House, minus the abstentions, and how is it that American congressmen believe that we have either the obligation or right to intervene in yet another foreign internecine war? How can murder and forcible expulsion in Africa be the legitimate business or concern of the people of this country, except perhaps in the most strict terms of humanitarian aid?

Genocide is perhaps the most serious charge one can level against another group of people today, yet, as with all dubious invocations of human rights crimes, it must be nearly impossible to prove. One cannot prove that the Janjweed or Khartoum are interested in exterminating a race of people (some of the victims of the attackers are themselves Arabs, according to The Economist), and it is yet another abuse of language to describe what is happening there as genocide.

It is surely a very ugly war over resources and territory, such as men have always waged, but usually for there to be a genocide the victims of the genocide must at least be perceived by their oppressors to be of a different race or ethnicity. The “Arab” identity of the Janjaweed is itself a label of political affiliation for some of the militiamen, as many of the bedouin involved are every bit as black African as their victims. Their Arabness exists only insofar as they are allied with an Arab government in Khartoum or have been trained by the Libyan government (some of these are of a different ethnicity from the black Darfuris as Bosniaks are of a different ethnicity from Serb or Croat, which is to say not at all). Their motives seem as straightforward and old as war itself: booty, land and power.

The cover of The Economist screams at us this week: “Sudan can’t wait.” But it can wait, and has waited for decades while millions have perished in the war with Sudanese People’s Liberation Army in the south of the country. What is it about Darfur that now catches the eye of the interventionists? Unsurprisingly, the example of the fake “genocide” in Kosovo is invoked by The Economist as precedent for intervention in what appears to be a much more serious, but still non-genocidal, conflict in the Sudan.

The filthy refugee camps that the Sudanese themselves have established are in dreadful condition, but these are no different in kind (though presumably worse in their conditions) from the camps used by the British to round up the Afrikaners whom they had burned out of their homes during the last, brutal phases of the Boer War. Had hysterical interventionists been alive then, they would probably have charged the British with genocide. The expulsions into the desert and into neighbouring Chad are the logical, albeit horrific results of total war against a civilian population in an enemy zone.

This is the element of the story that Western media reports tend to ignore. The attacks that have caused the expulsions and which have killed some estimated 30,000 people are the response to rebellion against the central authority in Darfur under the rebel groups Sudan Liberation Army and Justice and Equality Movement. It is yet another rebel war in Africa, not unlike the carnage that has unfolded and continues to flare up occasionally in central Africa.

One important point here is that very few conflicts are ever actually genocidal in nature, even if we were to grant that genocide itself somehow necessitates foreign military intervention. How much less are we obliged to intervene in others’ affairs when the situation falls well short of genocide and the explosive term is used to build up concern over a conflict that is, sadly, not much different from the numerous conflicts all across Africa?

The real question for Americans is what do we owe these people in Darfur in terms of taking direct action against the Janjaweed, and why would we owe it to them? Who are they to us, in terms of kinship, culture or faith? If there is no demonstrable self-interest in intervening (and there is none), there must be some reason for taking up their plight. The interventionists who assume that the obligation to intervene is self-evident will never provide a satisfactory answer. Why then should any American or Westerner entertain sending their own to defend one side in a war?

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