The Cairo massacre

The Boston Globe
SUNDAY, JANUARY 8, 2006

Something shameful has been happening in Cairo, where Egyptian security forces assaulted Sudanese refugees who had been camping out before the offices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Egyptian authorities said that 26 Sudanese were killed, but the Cairo representative of the southern Sudan People's Liberation Movement, after tallying mortality figures from area hospitals, announced a total of 265 dead. The exact number of people killed on Dec. 30 may never be established, but the shame of those killings is unconcealable.

The shame is shared among the Egyptians who ordered the attack, the Sudanese regime the refugees were fleeing, and the UNHCR officials who had refused to resettle the refugees in some third country and then said that, sad as the Cairo massacre may have been, nobody was to blame for the loss of life.

The victims belonged to Christian and animist tribal groups of southern Sudan. Because a tenuous peace accord last year formally ended a long war in southern Sudan between the National Islamic Front regime in Khartoum and the Dinka and Nuer peoples of southern Sudan - a war that took two million lives - UN officials in Cairo justified their refusal to heed the refugees' pleas for resettlement somewhere other than Sudan with the bureaucratic explanation that the petitioners no longer qualified as refugees.

Different kinds of shame hover in the background of the Cairo killings. The worst belongs to the rulers in Khartoum. They use their oil wealth not only to finance their genocidal violence against the non-Arab African tribal groups of Darfur, but to buy the complicity or silence of other governments.

Egypt has a long history of collaboration with the Khartoum regime. Egypt's influence was instrumental in arranging to have the African Union summit meeting held later this month in Khartoum and an Arab League summit meeting convened there in March. These diplomatic events lend prestige and an aura of legitimacy to Sudan's government even as its ringleaders continue their merciless annihilation of hundreds of thousands of people in Darfur.

China, which has bought oil concessions in Sudan, protects the Khartoum regime from UN sanctions by threatening to use its veto in the Security Council. The Bush administration, which has called the Darfur genocide by its true name, has nonetheless flown Sudan's intelligence chief to Washington for consultations and has apparently gained Khartoum's cooperation in the war against Al Qaeda terrorism, raising fears of a discreet U.S. acquiescence in the ongoing Darfur genocide.

There is more than enough shame to go around when nobody may be blamed for the murder of people regarded as nobodies.

- The Boston Globe