Still Dying in Darfur

The Nation
Aug. 24, 2005

Here's a sad little secret: Every time I write about Darfur in this space, traffic drops by at least a third. So here goes nothing.

A few months ago I asked a veteran news producer why television had devoted so little attention to such a significant humanitarian crisis. The producer cited budget constraints and added, "Plus, the villages aren't burning anymore." When they were burning, as Nick Kristof has so poignantly documented, the media hardly cared. NBC spent 5 minutes on Darfur coverage last year; CBS devoted 3 minutes. This June, the major network and 24/7 cable news stations aired 126 segments on Sudan, compared to 8,303 segments on the runaway bride, Michael Jackson and Tom Cruise.

The world says "never again" to genocide and then it happens again. Ethnic cleansing by the government-backed Janjaweed militia has killed nearly 180,000 native Darfurians, mostly black Africans populating an arid region the size of France. Almost two million people have been displaced from their homes (not counting four million more displaced by the 21-year, North-South civil war).

"Despite some stabilization of the security situation in Darfur, at a deeper level, living conditions are steadily deteriorating,"
Kofi Annan recently told the UN Security Council, warning of a "descent into lawlessness." 3.2 million people need humanitarian assistance; 1.9 million live in crowded refuge camps. Rampant looting, criminality and the targeting of aid workers hampers crucial relief efforts. The death three weeks ago of rebel leader John Garang threatens to tear the fragile peace process apart.

The international response to Darfur has been shameful. The Bush Administration declared the conflict "genocide" in September 2004, and then quietly lobbied against the bipartisan Darfur Accountability Act in Congress, which would assist African Union peacekeeping teams already on the ground, force new sanctions against the central government in Khartoum and refer war criminals to the International Criminal Court. Despite the Islamist government-sponsored killing, pillaging and rape, Khartoum remains a crucial ally in Washington's war on terror.

"Meanwhile, the commitments of the other countries to relief efforts have been less than stellar," writes Darfur expert Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College. "The financial responses of Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and the oil-rich Arab countries have been scandalously laggard."

The black gold of oil may offer one explanation. Khartoum subsists on $1 million in oil revenues per day, "which the government funnels into arms--helicopters and bombers from Russia, tanks from Poland and China, missiles from
Iran," journalist David Morse reports. "And so Darfurian villages have been burned to clear the way for drilling and pipelines." The canadian oil company Talisman has been charged with helping government forces blow up a church and kill religious leaders. Last June, after discovering additional reserves, the government signed oil deals with Chinese, Indian, British and Malaysian companies. US oil conglomerates are itching for a piece of the pie.

None of this makes lasting peace likely. The current African Union peacekeeping force is well-intentioned but undersized and under-equipped. Are NATO troops needed? It's a question the media ought to ask and the international community must answer.