By Samuel Totten —— Bio and Archives October 27, 2012
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“Never again” is a challenge to nations. It’s a bitter truth -- too often, the world has failed to prevent the killing of innocents on a massive scale. And we are haunted by the atrocities that we did not stop and the lives we did not save. Three years ago today, I joined many of you for a ceremony of remembrance at the U.S. Capitol. And I said that we had to do "everything we can to prevent and end atrocities." And so I want to report back to some of you today to let you know that as President I’ve done my utmost to back up those words with deeds. Last year, in the first-ever presidential directive on this challenge, I made it clear that “preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States of America.”“A core national interest”? “A core moral responsibility”? One would never know it. Does this president have no shame? While he spoke those words people in the Nuba Mountains were literally continuing to experience the horrible, wrenching pain of severe malnutrition and abject hunger, and the death that accompanies such. Essentially, the dictatorial government of Sudan was, once again, killing its own people, just as it did some 400,000 in Darfur this past decade and in the Nuba Mountains back in the late 1980s and 1990s. Does Obama have no sense of integrity? In one breath he promises not to allow crimes against humanity and genocide to be perpetrated and in the next he conveniently looks away from the facts on the ground in the Nuba Mountains. Sadly, and outrageously, Obama was far from through spouting splendid sounding but vacuous words to a mass of sycophants who seemed to hang on to his every word:
Now we’re doing something more. We’re making sure that the United States government has the structures; the mechanisms to better prevent and respond to mass atrocities. So I created the first-ever White House position dedicated to this task. It’s why I created a new Atrocities Prevention Board, to bring together senior officials from across our government to focus on this critical mission. This is not an afterthought. This is not a sideline in our foreign policy. The board will convene for the first time today, at the White House.What the world, and especially those facing death at the hands of a despot, does not need more of is another board, another think tank, where words lord it over action. Fortunately, Obama cannot pull a Bill Clinton regarding this matter because plenty of us know that he (Obama) knows what is going on in the Nuba Mountains. Thus, unlike Clinton who had the unbelievable gall to fly to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, and stand on the tarmac and issue his filthy lie of an excuse for not doing everything in his government’s power to halt the 1994 Rwandan genocide (“It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting in the offices, day after day after day, who did fully appreciate the depth and speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror”), Obama will have to come up with a different lie. Obama’s administration actually debated whether to try to establish a humanitarian corridor up to the Nuba Mountains despite al Bashir's warning not to do so. That was back in January of 2012 when it was well known that people in the Nuba Mountains were beginning to suffer from severe malnutrition. Now, almost a year later, the Obama Administration continues to do what it was doing then: talking. Over the past ten months, a group of genocide scholars from across the globe have sent Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice one urgent letter after another not only calling for action but providing specific plans of action that could be carried out with the least danger and virtually no military troops on the ground. The only reply from the man of words is silence. Absolute silence. The arrogance of that silence is matched, sadly, by the daily silencing of voices in the Nuba Mountains, as one innocent person after another breathes his/her last breath and is buried in the stony ground high above their beloved farms to which they have no access.
Samuel Totten, a genocide scholar at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, has conducted research in the Nuba Mountains. His latest book, Genocide by Attrition: The Nuba Mountains, Sudan