Darfur Redux

My wife and I recently watched the movie Hotel Rwanda on DVD. I was moved to the point of writing all my senators and representatives and verbally spanking them for inaction on human rights issues. You might get that urge too if you have seen that film. It's a stirring story by itself, let alone that it's a true story. That humans can engender that kind of hatred and brutality is unthinkable for us here in America. That human beings can deliberately kill ALL the people, women, children and elderly, of a certain ethnic grouping of people is an abomination.
And yet it happens a lot, and we sit here on our fat asses and don't do much about it.

Well, folks, it is happening again. The peoples of the Darfur region of Sudan have been subject to murder, rape and savage destruction on a grand scale. You might say: well it's not the government or the military of Sudan that's doing this. Neither was the case in Rwanda, and the government of Sudan is certainly not doing much, if anything, to stop it.
As I've blogged before, the UN is totally incapable of being responsible for this sort of thing. They are stuck in their routine of resolutions and investigative committees, and have declared that since, in their opinion, this is not a true genocide, they don't have to intervene. Or do much of anything. Not even a resolution on sanctions.
You aren't going to see anything from them either as long as countries like Libya and Sudan rank high on human rights committees.

So this is really up to us if we want to do something about it. Now, you might say that we can't invade, as we already catch flack for the occupation of Iraq, and our military is pretty thin because of that.
Well, there was a resolution in congress that intended to fund the African Union, set up sanctions against Sudan (primarily American, not international sanctions), and impose a no-fly zone over the Darfur area. It was in the form of amendments to the wartime supplement bill that is floating through, and I believe has already passed, both chambers.
The Senate voted UNANIMOUSLY for it. Once it got to the house, though, a curious thing happened.

Last month, both the House and Senate unanimously passed amendments to the war-time supplemental bill that called on the Bush administration to ratchet up its diplomatic efforts to help end the crisis in Darfur. Yet today, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the House is expected to pass the supplemental bill, and surprise, surprise, those Darfur provisions won't be included. What happened? After pressure from the White House (including a letter from administration officials to House Appropriations Chairman Jerry Lewis), the Darfur Accountability provisions were stripped from the bill. Thankfully, it's not all bad news. The conference report does include $50 million to strengthen and expand the African Union mission in Darfur, along with increases in disaster aid for Sudan and other crises. (For more, see this excellent new Darfur overview by Bradford Plumer in Mother Jones magazine, or the Human Rights Watch presentation, "Darfur Drawn: The Conflict Through Children's Eyes.")

This comes on the tail of reports that Bush is negotiating with Sudan for help with terrorism, as Sudan has promised to give information to the CIA. Now there are a few reasons why Bush might be tentative about getting tough on Sudan regarding this (and note that the provision for some money for the African Union's mission to Darfur).
Nicolas Kristof:

So why is Bush so reluctant to do a bit more and save perhaps several hundred thousand more lives? I sense that there are three reasons.

First, Bush doesn't see any neat solution, and he's mindful that his father went into Somalia for humanitarian reasons and ended up with a mess.

Second, Bush is very proud-- justly-- that he helped secure peace in a separate war between northern and southern Sudan. That peace is very fragile, and he is concerned that pressuring Sudan on Darfur might disrupt that peace while doing little more than emboldening the Darfur rebels (some of them cutthroats who aren't negotiating seriously).

Third, Sudan's leaders have increased their cooperation with the CIA...

All three concerns are legitimate. But when historians look back on his presidency, they are going to focus on Bush's fiddling as hundreds of thousands of people were killed, raped or mutilated in Darfur-- and if the situation worsens, the final toll could reach a million dead.

I don't think it justifies not getting tougher on the government, though. The peace agreement regarding the Christian south was kind of a tardy effort, as the government of Sudan had been terrorizing the south for years before anyone tried to settle things diplomatically, and even then, the peace agreement didn't come until after Bush started invading terrorist sponsoring countries. So why stop being tough now?
George, Somalia was a disaster because we wimped out. Rwanda was a disaster because we wimped out.

Bill Clinton and other Western leaders of the time will live and die with the shame of failing to recognize and respond to the Rwandan genocide of more than a decade ago. Does Bush-- for whatever "practical" reasons-- really want to end his administration with a similar moral failure on his record and his conscience?

Write your congressman. Give the verbal spanking.