A rchive Date
[ 17-07-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Sudan ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Toronto/Salim_Mansur/2004/07/17/545834.html
No outrage over Sudan?
By SALIM MANSUR - For the Toronto Sun
Sat, July 17, 2004
RECENTLY COLIN Powell, the U.S. Secretary of State, and Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, visited Darfur in Sudan, Africa. Their visits were prompted by continuing horrors of ethnic cleansing of Darfurians by Janjaweed militia, backed by Sudan's military government. Powell and Annan hoped to raise the profile of an unfolding tragedy 10 years after the Rwandan genocide that the world watched and responded to with mere homilies.
But ethnic rape, pillage and slaughter of Darfurians have been occurring for some time in the full knowledge of international bodies, such as the UN High Commission for Human Rights (UNHCHR). Since early 2003, ethnic slaughter of local people in Darfur, organized and supported by the Sudanese army and air force, has escalated.
Sudan, with a population of approximately 35 million, has a two-decade-old ongoing civil war - between the predominantly Arab and Muslim north and the mostly black and Christian south. It has claimed more than 2 million lives and made some 4 million people homeless. In the midst of this civil war erupted the horrors of Darfur.
The population of this region is around 6 million, of which more than 1 million have been driven from their villages, an estimated 110,000 have taken refuge in neighbouring Chad, and another 2 million have been affected variously by the state-directed offensive.
Sudan's latest victims in Darfur belong to the Muslim faith. But ethnically they are not Arabs, as are power-holders in Khartoum, the Janjaweed militia, and the majority populations of North Africa and the Middle East.
The deafening silence of the Arab-Muslim majority over ethnic-cleansing in Darfur is revealing once more an entrenched racial bigotry. The contrast in the preoccupation of Arab governments and the Arab media with Palestine and Iraq, while ignoring crimes against humanity perpetrated in Sudan by an Arab government and member of the Arab League, is indicative of how selective the moral outrage of the Arab-Muslim world often is.
To be sure, there are isolated voices of courage occasionally heard from the Arab world. Kamel Labidi, a Cairo-based Tunisian journalist, writing in the Wall Street Journal, has noted: "Arab reaction to the plight of the hundreds of thousands dispossessed, abused and displaced Darfurians is reminiscent of the shocking silence both of the Arab media and civil society that followed the gassing of thousands of Kurds by Iraqi troops led by former dictator Saddam Hussein more than 15 years ago. Such atrocious campaigns of ethnic cleansing in Iraq at the end of the last century and in Sudan today would have prompted deafening official and popular protests in Arab capitals had the victims been of Arab descent and the perpetrators non-Arabs."
Of course, Arab governments and their representative body, the Arab League, are not alone in shunning the plight of Darfurians. The 53 member-states of the African Union have mostly watched the tragedy unfold. African members of the UNHCHR, acting as a group, have done their best to obstruct any condemnation of the Sudanese government.
The European Union discussed the issue, and preferred to do what it did during the Balkan crisis - procrastinate.
The only voice of moral outrage calling for action from the UN body in Darfur and against the genocidal regime in Sudan, according to Human Rights Watch (no friend of the Bush administration), belongs to the United States.
Darfur is a desperately poor region in one of the poorest countries of the world. There is no oil there, nor diamond mines. But we have not witnessed any worldwide demonstration demanding justice for Darfurians.
Should we be surprised? Obviously not, for contemporary moral outrage is relative and generally comes packaged as anti-Americanism.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column appears alternate Thursdays.
He can be reached at: smansurca@yahoo.ca Letters to the editor should be sent to: editor@tor.sunpub.com Home Page
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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