The urgent situation in Sudan

The urgent situation in Sudan

By Gil Troy
July 9, 2004

Sudan has become a symbol to good people around the world who are fed up with the United Nations. That Sudan has a seat on the UN Human Rights Commission strains incredulity, and one's vocabulary, especially after the United States was recently voted off the commission.

More than hypocritical or farcical, it is evil to entrust the lofty ideal of universal rights to such a bestial dictatorship as Sudan. And it is equally unconscionable that the commission, like the UN's General Assembly, has chided democratic Israel so many more times than genocidal Sudan.

The Sudan tragedy results from modern Islamicist evil, Arab expansionism, Muslim complicity and Christian passivity. Jews can better understand why so few non-Jews help us if we contemplate the overwhelming Christian silence while their co-religionists were uprooted, enslaved, raped, branded and slaughtered for 20 years. That much of the murder is ideologically motivated, and related to the broader clash of civilizations misleadingly labelled as the "war on terror," makes it all the more unnerving - and the silence even more unacceptable.

There are two major Sudanese tragedies. The latest crisis in the northwest takes place against a blood-splattered backdrop of two decades of civil war in the south. The Sudanese civil war is winding down, after two million died and countless others were maimed and enslaved - yes, slavery still exists today in the Arab world. The victims were mostly Christians or animists who were targeted by Sudan's Islamic government. The heart-rending silence during that conflict is a matter of historical record, a blot on all of us who were passive.

Now, in the northwestern Darfur region, Arab Janjawid militias are targeting black African tribal farmers in a push for Arab supremacy. The conflict is racial and ethnic, not religious, as the killers and the victims are Muslims. Thus far, the Janjawids have murdered 30,000 and displaced 1.2 million - note how casually we throw around these mind-numbing figures.

The brutality is systematic. Men are murdered as their wives are raped, then branded, to make the emotional trauma physical and permanent. The murderers sometimes throw corpses into the local water sources to poison the water supply.

An ugly ideology and vicious strategies link the two conflicts. A column in the London Times reported that eyewitnesses from Darfur "consistently describe genocidal tactics honed during the war in southern Sudan. Before and after, the Janjawid destroy, plunder, rape, kill and burn their way through a village, the civilians are hit by [the] Sudanese air force to ensure nothing and nobody is left standing. This gargantuan crime requires a high level of co-ordination."

Torrential rains are about to begin, rendering these displaced villagers even more vulnerable to disease and starvation. Then, the Arab Muslim militias will be facilitating genocide by famine - letting nature do their dirty work.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who has written searing pieces from the Sudan, notes that Jewish and Christian charities have helped, but "one of the big gaps has been Islamic charities, which have tended - inexcusably - to show sympathy for Sudan's Arab government. So the sad and ironic outcome is that the people of Darfur, who are virtually all Muslims, are getting significant help from Christians and Jews but almost nothing from fellow Muslims."

Sudan must be more than a punchline in the tragicomedy the United Nations has become. The Sudan must be more than a truncheon swung against an expansionist, delusional, lethal Islamicist ideology and push for Arab supremacy. We ignore it at our peril.

Our professoriate would denounce it more consistently and passionately, were such a xenophobic, toxic and illiberal ideology embraced by westerners, let alone Jews, rather than Third World countries. The tragedy is too vast, the needs too great, for us to rest on our debating points and our self-satisfaction.

We must do something - as Jews burdened by the world's silence during the Holocaust; as Zionists proud of Israel's role in trying to help ease African pain; as human beings embarrassed by our silence during the Rwanda massacres, the Congo famine and the first Sudanese civil war; and as liberal democrats committed to justice.

The challenge is pressing. The opportunity is ours. How dare we sit, drinking our morning coffee, tut-tutting over evil without trying to fight it?

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