I sit here in my comfortable home, surrounded by the comforts of Western life. I commute 40 minutes to work every day and though it has become a bigger burden on my family, we can afford the ever increasing price for gasoline. We eat very well. We can afford to go to the best doctors and receive the best medical attention, even though the cost of insurance is also on the rise.
In every aspect of my life, I cannot fathom having to live under the conditions in modern day Darfur. It would be absurd of me to say so.
Since 2003, nearly two million people have been displaced by a campaign of genocide undertaken by the Sudanese government and bands of Janjaweed militia against the people of Darfur. Of this number, 80,000 to 400,000 estimated have been ruthlessly killed.
From the haunting article "They Came at Dawn and Killed the Men," written by Ewen Macaskill and published by the Guardian on June 8, 2004, we get a sense of the unimaginable, the horrific details of murder on a grand scale. Macaskill narrates:
During a three-hour flight over Darfur, hundreds of blackened and scorched villages were starkly visible against the red desert. Mrs Mousa walked for three days to reach Kalma after the Janjaweed militia attacked her village, Shatee, west of the Mara mountains, two months ago.
"They came at dawn, at 4am. They came on horses, donkeys, camels and Land Cruisers. They burnt the houses and killed the men and many of the male children. I don't know if my husband is alive or dead."
She fled with her four sons and three daughters, but one of her children, Omar Abdul Rahin, seven, died on the way.
The same week this article appeared, The Washington Post published an editorial titled "300,000 Deaths Foretold." In this article, the paper validates the structured system of ethnic cleansing employed by Sudan. Consider this explanation:
Sudan's government is delighted with this slaughter. It perfected the art of ethnic cleansing in its long war against the country's southern rebels, and it has expertly repeated the process in Darfur. The formula is to destroy villages using a combination of informal militias and government air power, then to deny relief organizations access and let starvation do the rest. When international protests heat up toward the boiling point, some humanitarian access is granted, but it's always late and inadequate.
We are at another important junction in our knowledge of the situation in Darfur, especially when the news of the genocide there is relegated to footnotes while news of the unworthy and ridiculous receive prime-time coverage, specifically the Michael Jackson court case and verdict; the Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes relationship; and the Runaway Bride.
To compound the insanity, word got out today that the television stations NBC, CBS, NBC-4, CBS-9, and Gannett (the parent corporation of CBS-9), are not going to air ads regarding the grave situation in Darfur. Their decision to not air this video is a most egregious one.
If the genocide of Rwanda taught us anything, it is that political support from the international community is key to putting pressure on those instigating the genocide. If this pressure is not applied through financial and material means, well then, nothing happens, the killing and rape continue unabated.
There are situations that demand our knowledge and support. Darfur is just one of them. (And I appreciate the fact that Darfur is just one of many hotbeds of chaos, but should this stop us from helping?)
Last year, Terry George’s vivid and unflinching depiction of genocide in his film Hotel Rwanda revealed far too much about history and humankind, mainly that we have a capacity to ignore, be privy to, or initiate lies, hate, abuse, and murder.
Specifically, he introduces us to a mere sampling of the cleansing that ravaged Rwanda in 1994, in which over one million Tutsis were slaughtered.
But he also revealed to us how humankind has the propensity to do amazing things in the face of atrocity. George’s film is primarily about Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager (and Hutu) who took in and eventually saved 1,286 Tutsis refugees (including his own wife and children) from being slaughtered by the Hutu militia. Some people step forward in the only way they know how , or out of the basic need to survive, and by this act take upon them the salvation of many. Paul was such a human.
But the primary point that correlates so poignantly with Darfur is that Rusesabagina was forced to act on his own because the international community lost its interest and thus the political support literally shut down.
I am writing tonight as a member of the human family, on behalf of many souls I have never met. But I know, as sure as I am sitting here, that if I let these words of encouragement and persuasion stay unread or unheard, that many will fall to the sword and to the suffering that accompanies it.
Don’t you think that it is high time that we make genocide newsworthy? I do. People can't help eradicate genocide if they are not aware that it is happening. To these media corporations: please allow your stations to play these ads. I assure you your good viewers will take the reigns from there and act.
And to you readers who feel strongly about humanity, I encourage you to get involved in any way you can.
In the closing moments of the video series The Ascent of Man, the philosopher James Bronowski walks out into a pond. Around him are the remnants of old battlements and buildings. "This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz," he explains.
"This is where people were turned into numbers."
As Bronowski’s expensive loafers are completely submerged under the surface of the pond, he gets down on his haunches, reaches down into the water, and with both hands brings up dark-colored mud, the color of coal and ash.
"Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people," he exclaimed. "And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance...."
In junior high, I first learned about the Holocaust. I remember seeing black and white footage, footage after footage of the deportations of thousands of people. We even saw footage of men and women, barely clothed, starved to the point where they looked like the walking dead, flesh stretched out upon brittle bones.
I remember Shuree Harrison suddenly became ill and had to race out of the room. That was the day we learned about the evil of mankind, when people became branded and segregated and numbered. We realized that people can die as numbers.
This is the nature of genocide. It strips us of our dignity and of our basic rights as members of the human family. And, most appallingly, it strips us of our name, that little piece of us we know and like to think even God recognizes.
With the shadows of genocide’s painful past stretching over us into our future, do we walk deeper into it, lose site of one another, and eventually lose even ourselves? Or, do we act with the foresight to step out of the past’s grasp and walk each other out into the sun? This is the vantage point upon which we now stand. Where do we go from here?
*****
For more information regarding the Be A Witness for Darfur organization, click here.
For news, commentary, and advocacy regarding stopping the genocide in Darfur, please visit the blog Passion of the Present.
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