DARFUR: WHY AMERICANS SHOULD CARE
Charles J. Brown
Newsletter, Spring 2005

As I’ve traveled around the country recently, I’ve been surprised by the frequency of one question: why should Americans care about what is happening in Darfur, Sudan?

I’m tempted to give the glib response: because people are dying. But death visits our own communities every day. Why care about a remote backwater thousands of miles away?

Dr. Martin Luther King faced a similar question: why should Americans care about the civil rights movement? His answer, written from a Birmingham jail cell, is as relevant to Darfur today as it was to Alabama then: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere…Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

I think most Americans today get this. Certainly America’s response to the tsunami demonstrates that we care when innocent people die. As I write this, the Bush Administration has committed $950 million to tsunami relief, while private donations have totaled $900 million.

What makes Darfur different? One possible answer is that Darfur is an artificial rather than natural disaster. But are acts of man are somehow less worthy of attention than acts of nature?

We can’t stop a tsunami – even the most sophisticated alert system would not prevent every death. In contrast, Darfur didn’t have to happen. People are dying there because a government decided to murder its own people. The world has the capacity – and the institutions, like the International Criminal Court (ICC) – not only to stop the killing in Sudan but to prevent similar atrocities from happening in the future.

In fact, ending the crisis in Darfur is not as big a challenge as organizing tsunami relief. What’s missing is the political will to stop a genocidal government from depopulating a province the size of Texas and killing anyone who resists. To his credit, President Bush has understood this, demanding an end to the genocide.

But the rest of the world has refused to go along. And now the President is wavering, allowing his dislike for the ICC to get in the way of a solution.

What is happening in Darfur is not new. This government has been killing its own people for years. In April 1994, I traveled to southern Sudan to witness and document the consequences of what was then a ten-year old civil war. What we heard and saw was horrifying. Children dying of malnutrition. Towns starving under government siege. Planes dropping bombs on random targets. Helicopters strafing civilians.

We flew back to Nairobi determined to tell the world. But when we landed, we discovered that while we were in Sudan, genocide had come to Rwanda. Sudan was forgotten as the world turned – not to stop the killing in Rwanda, but to hide its eyes in the hope that it would just go away.

Now we’re told that Darfur is the new Rwanda. But the truth is far uglier: the people of Sudan have been victims of a slow-motion genocide for over twenty years. Over two million people have died in southern Sudan. The recent peace treaty won’t bring them back – and doesn’t do anything to bring their killers to justice. And now that the government has peace in the south, it is using the same tactics to wreak havoc in Darfur. Already somewhere from 70,000 to 200,000 have died, and two million more have fled their homes.

So why care about Darfur? Because we’ve let the killers in Khartoum get away with murder for more than two decades. Isn’t it time that we finally brought them to account? For as Dr. King wrote from that jail cell, “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

Updated February 24, 2005