Once again, genocide

Palm Beach Post Editorial

Sunday, January 08, 2006

In a world that keeps vowing "never again," the genocide continues. We have just left what some have called the century of mass murder. We haven't left behind the catastrophe continuing in Sudan because of the government-backed militias known as the Janjaweed. More than 400,000 people have died in the Darfur region, according to recent reports by the United Nations and U.S.-based humanitarian organizations working there. At least 4 million people are hungry or starving, and 1.2 million, including 400,000 to 500,000 children, have become refugees from the violence between Khartoum and anti-government rebels.

It has happened even as the international players, notably the United States, have debated the semantics. In July 2004, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell met with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in Khartoum and afterward said the situation "doesn't meet the tests of the definition of genocide." That was more than a year after Arab militias had begun killing and raping African civilians and burning their villages to clear from the region people considered disloyal to the government. By last June, even President Bush was agreeing with his then former secretary that the human carnage constituted genocide. Congress already had passed a resolution declaring it so.

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As usual with such "cleansing," ethnic, religious or fill-in-the-blank hatreds are promoted for political motives stemming from economic roots. The rich Sudanese oilfields in this case explain why China and other nations have blocked effective U.N. action.

Yet there's no shortage of good avenues for restoring civilization. A no-fly zone to end government gunship attacks? Definitely; neither the refugees nor the rebels have planes. Also, restore the $50 million for bolstering the African Union peacekeepers that Congress and the administration shamefully cut. Get that security force U.N. peacekeeping status, plus resources from NATO nations.

Mr. Bush may be hesitant to use his bully pulpit, given his loss of international credibility after his 9/11 and weapons of mass destruction rationales for invading Iraq have proved false. He should not prefer to apologize after the fact as President Clinton did for ignoring the genocide in Rwanda. Mr. Bush must help disabuse humanity of the usual excuses: It's too far away or just too depressing, or the adversaries always have hated each other. Whether in Birmingham, Vietnam, Auschwitz or Tiananmen Square, the last century showed that the more exposure of the crimes, the more humanity is motivated to motivate the politicians.