WurfWhile

Yesterday’s Washington Post Editorial “An Opportunity in Darfur” shows where things stand in the ongoing Sudanese genocide of “African” Muslims there, much to the shame of the United States and the world. Sudan’s policy has shifted from arguing it should be left alone to inviting the world to help prevent the genocide. Given the Sudanese government support and coordination of the genocide, it is hard to take the offer sincerely. What the offer shows, however, is how cynically the government in Khartoum can play America and the world. This is a disaster that has claimed 300,000 civilian lives, and displaced 2 million others, including about 1.6 million who now live in refugee camps. In Darfur, the government-sponsored Janjaweed Arab militia kill, rape, mutilate and displace (often leading to starvation) the African Muslims that live in Darfur with little to stop them. Former U.S. Marine Brian Steidle recently gave his own grim observations of the situation in Darfur,

“Every day we surveyed evidence of killings: men castrated and left to bleed to death, huts set on fire with people locked inside, children with their faces smashed in, men with their ears cut off and eyes plucked out, and the corpses of people who had been executed with gunshots to the head. We spoke with thousands of witnesses - women who had been gang-raped and families that had lost fathers, people who plainly and soberly gave us their accounts of the slaughter.”

Compared to the numbers of people under attack, relatively little money and troops (Steidle’s estimate is 25,000 African troops) along with sanctions against the Sudanese government could do a lot to prevent the systematic attack of whole villages that are leveled to the ground by government Janjaweed forces, like the village of Labado, with a population of 20,000 people, that was burned and leveled. It took only 35 African Union peace keeping troops to prevent Labado-like destruction to a nearby village twice Labado’s size. Money, troops and sanctions could save tens of thousand of deaths each month, not to mention preventing physical harm and displacement.

Contrast the inaction of the president and congress to this mass genocide entering its third year, with the recent congressional special session for Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman who state courts have found to be in a persistent vegetative state from a severe oxygen loss to her brain that occurred 15 years ago, when her heart stopped. President George W. Bush and the Republican congressional majority rushed back from vacation for the special session to pass a law sending the case to federal court. As Congressman James Moran of Virginia has observed, [t]en courts, and 19 judges all have reached the same conclusion,” through the state judicial process, finding in favor of Terri’s husband, Michael Schiavo, that Terri would have wanted the feeding tube be removed. Michael has said Terri told him that she did not want to live that way. What business does the president and congress have acting in this individual case? Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank may have said it best, describing the situation and his colleagues, “I don’t know what her wishes were, but neither do any of you.”

This is not an argument about the value of one life vs. another. Because Terri Schiavo did not write down her views about life support, her case is not as clear cut as we might like. But the courts over many years have found for her husband, and the conservative U.S. Supreme Court decided not to take up the case recently. In view of the court rulings, how the president and congress could advance justice through an unprecedented, barely considered law that refers the case to yet another court, when most members of congress were not present to discuss the law or vote on it, is hard to imagine.

But it is not hard to imagine, as the genocide in Darfur has continued over the years, what purpose congress and the president could have to advance justice there, in an unprecedented, thoughtfully considered law that members could discuss and vote for - it is not hard to imagine a law combining money and sanctions to prevent genocide, if our president and congress truly value one life - or millions of lives. The president and congress seem to have had little time for what has happened in Darfur the last two years, and for what continues to happen. Life, in all its richness, is held cheap in Sudan.

[Editor Note: I have added a link for further clarification of the sentence “What business does the president and congress have acting in this individual case?”]