Darfur: the politics of genocide denial syndrome

It is just today morning that I did my customary cynical moan about how Sarko and Gordon Brown are wittering on about Darfur and how nothing will happen. And today evening, i saw a paper on Darfur and the politics of genocide denial syndrome. It is a very sad story and it is worthwhile me quoting from it:

Read and weep. We did nothing to stop this genocide from happening, day after day after day. We are culpable in that genocide.

Darfur: the politics of genocide denial syndrome
Author: Matthew Lippman
DOI: 10.1080/14623520701368594
Publication Frequency: 4 issues per year
Published in: journal Journal of Genocide Research, Volume 9, Issue 2 June 2007 , pages 193 - 213

Several non-governmental organizations and American commentators characterized Darfur as a genocide. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, writing in the New York Review of Books, noted that of the 24,000 front-page stories in the New York Times during World War II, only six directly addressed the Nazi attack on European Jews and other groups. He argued that the same lack of attention and concern marked the massacres in Rwanda in 1994, the Armenian genocide of 1915, the Cambodian slaughter of the 1970s and the atrocities in Bosnia in the 1990s. Kristof bemoaned that in each instance the global community only responded following the end of the killings. He noted that Darfur, in contrast, is a "slow motion" genocide that was methodically unfolding before our eyes. Kristof admonished that the world community cannot credibly claim to be unaware of what is transpiring in Darfur.

In February 2005, Kristof confronted readers of his column with the "victims of our indifference" and published four photos from a "secret archive" of photos gathered by African Union monitors, many of which portray attacks on children and were described by Kristof as too "horrific for a newspaper." The archive also included a document allegedly dictated by the President of Sudan to regional commanders and security officials. The text ordered the militia to "change the demography of Darfur and make it void of African tribes" and called for "killing, burning villages and farms, terrorizing people, confiscating property from members of African tribes and forcing them from Darfur."5 Kristoff would later write that "[p]erhaps the most extraordinary aspect of Darfur isn't that gunmen have heaved babies into bonfires as they shout epithets against blacks. It's that the rest of us are responding only with averted eyes and polite tut-tutting."

The UN and associated regional organizations are very far from finding a solution in Darfur and this essay is in the nature of a preliminary commentary on the all too familiar inaction of the international community. In the aftermath of Bosnia and Rwanda, the world community avowed to prevent a recurrence of the scourge of genocide. In 2003, various observers warned that conflicts over land, water and governance in Darfur Sudan between African agricultural tribes and Arab nomadic tribes threatened to escalate into mass atrocities and ethnic cleansing. Security Council resolutions and political agreements have proven unable to halt the violence, which arguably constitutes a genocide. The reluctance of global powers to characterize Darfur as a genocide reflects a "genocide denial syndrome," a reluctance to invoke the morally and politically significant term genocide. The focus is on the genocidal violence sponsored by the Sudanese regime.

The question arises why the international community has insisted that Darfur is not a witness to genocide. The simple answer is that Darfur has fallen victim to a toxic mix of the politics of oil, multinational investment and arms sales and that events in the Middle East and Africa have made the international community reluctant to intervene in the affairs of a fundamentalist Islamic regime

There is, of course, the obvious fact that African victims do not possess the political appeal and potency of Europeans. We also can speculate that there is a deeper explanation for this syndrome of "genocide denial." The historical association of genocide with the Holocaust has provided the term with enormous moral weight. The term is a clarion call to action. The acknowledgement of genocide, however, reminds us once again that there are victims, victimizers and morally culpable bystanders and that there are limits to our resources and compassion. An admission of genocide is a recognition that there are primordial forces at work that call into question our faith in the inevitability of democracy and human rights.

Our image of genocide remains identified with the "Nazi Super State." The acknowledgment of genocide at times seems more a matter of politics than analytical precision. The international community in a seemingly choreographed response invariably characterizes contemporary slaughters as ethnic conflicts in which both sides are equally guilty, violence is inevitable, and intervention is too little too late. These events are viewed as of regional rather than international concern and are portrayed as "humanitarian crises" rather than as criminal conspiracies. The atrocities are labelled as ethnic cleansing and the international community relies on rhetorical acrobatics to avoid invoking the term genocide.

Statistics on death and dying and eyewitness reports are dismissed as hyperbole and the motives and judgment of those who denounce the killings and urge intervention are questioned. We are told that the label genocide is of little consequence and an unnecessary fixation. The economic advantages of good relations with the perpetrators are stressed while the national and humanitarian interest in protecting the victims is minimized.

It is a sad fact that Sudan has remained a member in good standing of the international community despite the fact that the regime has engaged in serial slaughter, against the Darfurians in the west, the Nubian people in the north and the Christians in the south. In short, genocide, in effect, is a "victimless crime." A crime without victims, victimizers or morally culpable bystanders.

The crime of the last century now is clearly established as characteristic of the twenty-first. We can anticipate that future political leaders will one day visit Darfur and, with abject wringing of their hands, repeat President William Clinton's pained apology to the Rwandans107 - that he was unaware of what was transpiring and that the rapidity of events had outpaced the ability of the international community to respond



All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!