Issue 244

Goth is a veteran journalist, freelance writer, the first Somali blogger and editor of a leading news website . He is also a regular contributor to major Middle Eastern and African newspapers and online journals.

Somalia/United Arab Emirates - Looking at the prolonged suffering of the people of Darfur, one wonders why the world fails to act? No matter how hard one tries to resist, there is a nagging explanation that pops to the African's mind. It is the question of race.

Back in July 2004 the two chambers of the U.S. Congress passed a resolution declaring the atrocities in Darfur genocide. Since then the world has been making a lot of sympathetic noise but taken no tangible action to pacify Darfur. Apart from the African Union's under financed and ill-equipped peacekeeping force, the world has been turning a deaf ear to what the United Nations describes as the world's worst humanitarian disaster.

Conservative estimates put the death toll in Darfur at 200,000 to 400,000 while up to 2.5 million have been displaced. Just like Tibet before it, the civilized world washes its guilt of Darfur by organizing an International Day for Darfur. Politicians, UN officials, activists and ordinary people all come out in their thousands in many capitals of the world, march and shout in the streets, attend speaking forums, feel good and then go about their business until the next year. In Darfur, however, the killing spree by the armed forces of the Islamist Sudanese government and its Janjaweed brigands continues unabated.

Why has the world failed to act? South African Nobel Peace laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu pointed to race, accusing the international community of taking African crises less seriously. "The harsh truth is that some lives are slightly more important than others... If you are swarthy, of a darker hue, almost always you are going to end up at the bottom of the pile," he said on the eve of the UN Security Council's resolution on Darfur.

One would have no choice but to ponder on the truth of Tutu's statement. Otherwise what keeps the international community from acting quickly on Darfur as it did on Kosovo and Lebanon? The truth of the statement may also take us back to Rwanda where the international community failed to act until it was too late.

Darfur has all ingredients for international intervention. A ruthless and dictatorial regime committing the worst humanitarian crimes against its own people, hundreds of thousands killed and millions displaced, rejection of UN resolutions and above all the mother of all pretenses for humanitarian intervention: Oil. Maybe the fact that Sudan has claimed to have weapons of mass destruction is the only thing holding U.S. wrath at bay.

Another explanation for the world's slow reaction to Darfur could be the conventional attitude of Arab states to look the other way and protect an Arab brother committing a crime against his own people. It happened in Syria when late Hafiz Al Assad unleashed his armed forces to kill around 25,000 in what has later become known as the Hama massacre. It happened in Somalia where Siyad Barre bombarded the Somaliland towns of Hargeysa and Buroa to rubble and killed thousands of civilians.

The Arabs, however, move quickly when one of their blood brothers comes under foreign attack as we saw in Lebanon and Palestine. It was Arab pressure that brought a quick end to the one-month long Israeli-Hezbollah war in Lebanon. And it is Arab pressure that keeps the Palestinian issue on the world agenda. The Arab League is a club of Orwellian nature where some members are more equal than others. While vigorous Arab mediation brought an end to the Lebanese civil war in the 1980s, the Arabs rarely put a serious effort into solving the problems of Arab League member Somalia. It is not unusual for Arab states to open their hospitals for the wounded in Palestine and Lebanon at times of conflict, but it is unthinkable to give such treatment to Darfurian or Somali war victims.

African Arabs are placed way down in the club's political schedule. This is why Arabs are suffering from denial regarding the issue of Darfur. They cannot envisage how an Arab can commit a humanitarian crime against his Arab brother, albeit a black one. This is where the traditional Arab ostrich mentality and conspiracy theories come to play. They love to dangle western hegemony and crusade before the ignorant masses. The fact that an Arab crusade against black Muslims is taking place doesn't matter to them. The Arab-backed Sudanese government, which earlier rejected African intervention, had later campaigned for the AU forces deployment in order to avert international intervention.

Responding to this race issue though tacitly, Black Africa denied Sudan the AU Chairmanship while the Arab League had unscrupulously adorned her with the League's chairmanship. Amr Moussa, Arab League's Secretary General, doesn't miss a chance to dismiss any international intervention in Darfur, while embracing the Sudanese government's stances whole-heartedly. Moussa, however, came fuming out of an Arab meeting during the Israel-Hezbollah duel to declare the Middle East process as dead. This reminded me of an African friend of mine who once told me that Arabs think justice is only for them.

As the U.S. is embroiled in Iraq and is recovering from its recent fallout with the Arabs on Lebanon, it cannot afford to open another clash with Arab countries, particularly as it needs their support on the Iranian nuclear issue. Hence, Washington can do nothing more than issuing toothless statements. The AU's recent decision to extend its peacekeeping mandate in Darfur might therefore be seen as a safety valve for the U.S. Administration and a rescue mission by the African leaders for the UN Security Resolution.

It is no wonder that the Arabs had also jumped on the bandwagon by agreeing to provide funding although they made such a pledge earlier and all they could offer was peanuts, while flooding Lebanese market with cash to help their brethren country stand again on its feet.

With this unfortunate situation and high profile power politicking, the only choice open might be to empower the AU force with sufficient funds and armaments and ask NATO to provide air cover on a non-fly zone over Darfur. Another option may be a travel ban on Sudanese government officials and initiating crimes against humanity cases against the Sudanese leadership including the President if the Sudanese government insists on stonewalling the AU's peacekeeping efforts. This may also convince the U.S. Arab allies to distance themselves from being implicated for complacency.

By Bashir Goth | September 22, 2006; 7:25 AM

Source: washingtonpost.com

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