Genocide: never again?
“Never Again.”
Outside the Dachau concentration camp in Germany is a sign that reads “Never Again” in five different languages as a memorial to the Holocaust. A memorial to the tens of thousands of Jews pushed through gates similar to those very gates, then brutally slaughtered – simply because they were Jews.
Never again.
That promise was sworn after the horrors of the Holocaust: 6 million Jews killed.
Never again.
Cambodia: 1.7 million killed by 1979 under the Khmer Rouge.
Bosnia: 427 children killed in 1992 alone in the Bosnian War. Some reports estimate that more than 63,000 Bosniaks were killed, 50 percent of whom were civilians.
Never again.
Rwanda: 800,000 Tutsi were killed in three months during the summer of 1994.
Never again.
All of them were genocide. Could it be happening again now in Darfur?
With 200,000 people killed and 2.5 million people displaced since 2003, some humanitarian organizations want to call it genocide.
Pictures of starving children and burning homes are plastered across Web sites for those humanitarian organizations dedicated to raising awareness about what is going on in Darfur. They are calling for Americans across the country to put pressure on their local leaders to get the United States involved in putting an end to the genocide in Darfur.
“It’s our responsibility to protect the people of Darfur and stop the violence there,” said Ashley Newman the West coast regional representative for STAND, a student anti-genocide coalition. “It’s our responsibility because we declared it a genocide and we’re one of the first internationally that have declared it a genocide. I think the U.S. needs to pursue more of a influential role on the security council to take a lead on this stuff.”
But genocide is a word with a lot of baggage, according to some world leaders, and it may be hard to apply it to this region in the African country of Sudan. For one USU graduate student from Sudan, John (name has been changed), that’s the problem.
“We have a kind of problem, big problem between tribes and government,” he said. “[But] the expression of genocide has been in the media only in the U.S.”
John said the problem is very complex, but it is really coming down to change. Sudan is changing.
“Now in Sudan we are in a transitional phase of how to form a new Sudan,” he said. “I don’t know why it is changing, but [it’s] with a hard price. And who is going to pay this price? The Sudanese people, because we are being killed, we have relatives they lost their lives, they lost their houses, they lost their money.
“But hopefully at the end, these things will be resolved with the help of the international community and we can end all these things in this country in the future.”
The way he described what is occurring in Darfur right now is more along the lines of a civil war, with some tribes rebelling because of their lack of voice in the government and others fighting for rights to land use. According to STAND’s Web site, that is what started the conflict as well. The two differ when they talk about what to call the government’s response to the rebellion.
However, for Dave Thompson, president of the STAND chapter here at USU, these differences of opinion don’t matter.
“There are 400,000 people dead and there are 2.5 million people living in refugee camps,” Thompson said. “These people are running from something, that’s how I view it. Whether it’s civil war or genocide, I’m not really sure.
“It’s just time people in this country start caring about what happens in Africa.”
Sudan is about one-fourth the size of the United States. John said it is one of the richest countries in Africa, not only with water and natural resources, but with oil. For most of the rest of the country, outside Darfur, life is going on. John compared it to the United States when Katrina happened. People in Utah were affected because of refugees coming into the state and because people died, but just because Katrina affected the whole country didn’t mean the whole country was torn apart by the hurricane.
However, even though the conflict is in only one part of Sudan, Darfur is not a small place. The region of Darfur, in the western part of the country, is about the size of France, John said, which makes it that much harder to find a solution that will solve all the problems.
According to the media and press releases put out by the United Nations and other organizations interested in humanitarian affairs, the current conflict began in 2003 when two groups in Darfur, frustrated with a lack of voice in the government, rebelled.
The word genocide surfaced when the government responded by attacking the civilians, not the insurgents, using janjaweed – a militia drawn from local Arab tribes – to burn homes and kill farmers, generally considered native Africans.
John said the media has tried to simplify the problem by saying there are two types of people in Darfur – Muslim Arabs and Christian Africans. But, he said, that isn’t really what one sees in Sudan.
“If you go down to Sudan, actually I have been there two months ago, [the] expression of Arab and African is not the expression you receive. These guys are all African,” he said.
He said there are many different tribes with different opinions. Problems started when some tribes wanted more of a voice in government. Other problems started when the nomadic herders would cross the farmers’ lands. Everything started to blow up when weapons came into play.
“But lately, some tribes, they’ve got guns with them so they have a kind of force. So in order to resolve these problems, the bullets start and then the problems actually are escalated,” John said.
Genocide or not, activists and humanitarian groups say the situation in Darfur has escalated into something that needs to be stopped. People are being killed. They are being driven from their homes into refugee camps.
Thompson and Newman said STAND is advocating that the U.S. puts more pressure on the United Nations to send in a peacekeeping force to help the African Union forces already on the ground in Darfur.
John said he thinks that sending in a United States or a United Nations force could actually escalate the problem because those in Darfur would see them as invaders and not peacekeepers.
“I think the most important thing is getting to the point, why these things [are] happening,” he said. “We should solve these things because … how do you get assurance that the presence of the United States or the United Nations or the United Kingdom will solve the problem? Because the economy is bad, the political system is bad everything is bad.”
However, he said he does think the problems won’t get solved without international help. He said from the way he understands the problem, he would like to see the UN organize peace talks and get all the different factions in one place to sign peace agreements. He also said he likes the idea of USU students getting involved.
“We live in one world. If something happens in one place, it will ultimately affect you because we are not living in a different planet, we are all living on earth,” he said. “So if we want the United States to have a great part of solving the problems of Sudan and Darfur, specifically all of Sudan, it will start from USU, or a different city or whatever.”
-aedmunds@cc.usu.edu
Editors note: This is the first installment of a two-part series. The second will focus on how USU students can become involved.