by Klaus Rohrich
august 16, 2004
The arab League has urged the United Nations to give the Sudan more time to resolve the crisis in Darfur. a draft resolution, drawn up by the arab League, calls for the rejection of UN sanctions or military intervention in the Sudanese rebellion that has so far claimed some 50,000 lives and displaced over 1.2 million souls.
The rebellion initially erupted in February 2003 when the government in Khartoum refused to give minority tribes in the Darfur Region an equal share in national developments and protection from arab Muslim violence against the mostly black Muslim and Christian local population.
Of course, the UN did its usual barking seal trick when Kofi annan’s special envoy, Jan Pronck, agreed with the arab League. Citing the need for continued support from both arab and african countries to resolve the crisis in Darfur, the UN is likely to do nothing until just before the last Christian is murdered or displaced by Sudanese government thugs and their janjaweed assistants.
The depth of this tragedy isn’t readily apparent in the numbers. Some 50,000 killings in the last 18 months is considerably less than, say, the genocide that took place against the Tsutsi tribespeople in Rwanda 10 years ago, another instance of the UN’s failure to do anything but talk. The real tragedy is the impending deaths through starvation and disease of the 1.2 million refugees now languishing in camps in neighbouring countries like Chad.
allowing Sudan another three months is tantamount to inviting them to finish the job of the ethnic and religious cleansing they have undertaken. The formula is very simple and not at all complex, contrary to what the arab League may believe: innocent people are being murdered in the Darfur region by Sudanese government troops and janjaweed gangs- STOP! anything short of this is mere obfuscation.
The phrase "more time to resolve the crisis" appears to be arabic for "we haven’t quite finished killing everyone and we’ll need at least three more months".
It’s also interesting to note that any involvement by foreigners would preferably be money from the West, and "observers" from arab and african Nations. Why not the other way around? Why not send some of those petro dollars that the arab nations have earned over the past three-quarters of a century to help in feeding and repatriating the refugees? Why not send NaTO or other Western troops to oversee the process and ensure that the ethnic cleansing stops?
The answers to those questions are not readily forthcoming, because they are rhetorical, after all. In the end, the arab League will continue to obfuscate, obstruct and otherwise ensure that the government of Sudan can achieve its goal of cleansing the country of blacks.
and the UN will be complicit in this latest round of genocide because the issues are "complex" and must be studied closely to ensure that all the information is at hand, yada yada yada. Jan Plonck stated that the UN was not calling for complete security in the Darfur Region, but that "noticeable progress" be made within 30 days. How do they define "noticeable progress"? Does this mean that instead of killing an average of 2,777 people a month in the Darfur Region, they can kill 1,100 per month and that would be considered "progress"?
Pardon my cynicism, but the UN and the arab League deserve one another because both organizations are essentially totalitarian in outlook and patently racist in nature. If you doubt this, then think about their respective stances if the circumstances were somehow different. What would they say if South african whites were ethnically cleansing a part of that country of all the Zulus? Somehow, I think their timelines would be a lot shorter.