Doing something about Darfur

Dec. 13, 2006

In the desert of western Sudan, a 35-year-old woman named Hatum is “pregnant with the baby of one of 20 Janjaweed raiders who murdered her husband and then gang-raped her.”
Those are the words of Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times who has spent the past few years trying to rub the western world’s face in the genocide underway in Africa’s largest country.
Kristof‘s stories take you on a weekly tour of hell. Last week, he wrote of an elderly woman who lept into the burning brush covering her husband to smother the flames with her own body. And of a 25-year-old sister who sacrificed herself to gang-rapists so her 10-year-old sibling could run and hide -- if the rapists got her, it was a sure thing that no man would ever marry her... And of a young girl whose legs were spread so wide during a gang rape that she is now crippled for life.
Each week, it’s a similar story. Defenseless tribal people doused in gasoline and set on fire. Babies tossed in bonfires. Kids trying to defend their families with bows and arrows against Arab Janjaweed militias armed with machine guns.
And all this is at the behest of the Sudanese government which is our quasi “ally” in the War on Terror.
In 2003, according to www.SaveDarfur.org, “Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir moved to crush opposition by unleashing vicious armed militias to slaughter entire villages of his own citizens. After three years, 400,000 innocent men, women and children have been killed. 2.5 million driven from their homes.”
In June, 2005, President Bush bucked the United Nations and members of his administration to declare that genocide was occuring in the Darfur region of western Sudan. This was a follow-up to his condemnation of the atrocities a year earlier.
But U.S. attempts at diplomacy at the United Nations have been a failure: France, the former colonial power in Sudan, holds the largest oil reserves in the country and has blocked any progress. China and Russia have also dragged their feet (again, for selfish purposes) and the United States is hardly in a position to step into another Somalia-style disaster and start shooting it out with Muslim militiamen.
Last week, Sudan declined a U.S. offer to send in a multi-national force to restore order. It would rather rely on the do-nothings of the African Union instead.
And so it goes.
Perhaps it’s up to us to do something, meaning individuals, organizations and churches around the world that are beyond disgust over the weekly stories.
Decades ago, before liberals became co-opted by the paralysis of pacifism, there was a progressive tradition of taking up arms against atrocities such as those practiced in Darfur.
During the Spanish Civil War of 1936-’39, for instance, some 2,800 American volunteers of the Abe Lincoln Brigade traveled to Spain to fight against a fascist takeover supported by Hitler and Mussolini. They joined approximately 35,000 anti-fascist volunteers from 52 countries.
And during World War I, writer Ernest Hemingway was one of many American volunteers who entered the war early to serve as ambulance drivers with the Red Cross. Hemingway was severely wounded with shrapnel and machine gun fire two weeks before his 19th birthday. He made his way home to Petoskey to recover from his mental and physical wounds, which served as the undercurrent of his story, “The Big Two-Hearted River.”
Today, it’s hard to imagine an Abe Lincoln Brigade of armed volunteers flocking to Sudan to shoot it out with the Jangaweed thugs. For one thing, people who go to war tend to get shot, even when it’s a worthy cause.
“When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality,” Hemingway wrote. “Other people get killed; not you... when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you.”
Still, we can raise our voices. We can lobby Congress, organize, donate, and spread the news. Currently www.SaveDarfur.org is encouraging the creation of Save Darfur groups across the country. Church groups, students and peace activists are finding common cause and there are several Save Darfur groups in Michigan.
Their numbers are only a handful, but it’s a start. If you’d like to do something about Darfur, even if it’s only sending a message to Congress or passing along information to friends, then go to www.SaveDarfur.org. Make a donation, wear a green Darfur wristband, write a letter, support Physicians for Human Rights, start a conversation. Who knows? Maybe your voice will mean one less child tossed on a bonfire.