Liberal Talk Radio

I guess I don’t feel bad for missing out on last month’s Dining for Darfur night now that some are arguing that perversely, we may be making matters worse:

Darfur was never the simplistic morality tale purveyed by the news media and humanitarian organizations. The region’s blacks, painted as long-suffering victims, actually were the oppressors less than two decades ago — denying Arab nomads access to grazing areas essential to their survival. Violence was initiated not by Arab militias but by the black rebels who in 2003 attacked police and military installations. The most extreme Islamists are not in the government but in a faction of the rebels sponsored by former Deputy Prime Minister Hassan al-Turabi, after he was expelled from the regime. Cease-fires often have been violated first by the rebels, not the government, which has pledged repeatedly to admit international peacekeepers if the rebels halt their attacks.

. . .

Advocates of intervention play down rebel responsibility because it is easier to build support for stopping genocide than for becoming entangled in yet another messy civil war. But their persistent calls for intervention have actually worsened the violence.

The rebels, much weaker than the government, would logically have sued for peace long ago. Because of the Save Darfur movement, however, the rebels believe that the longer they provoke genocidal retaliation, the more the West will pressure Sudan to hand them control of the region. Sadly, this message was reinforced when the rebels’ initial rejection of peace last month was rewarded by American officials’ extracting further concessions from Khartoum.

For some reason, I don’t think Nicholas Kristof will agree . . . especially with this:

Rather, we should let Sudan’s army handle any recalcitrant rebels, on condition that it eschew war crimes. This option will be distasteful to many, but Sudan has signed a peace treaty, so it deserves the right to defend its sovereignty against rebels who refuse to, so long as it observes the treaty and the laws of war.

Just as long as you avoid war crimes . . . but then again, this is coming from a guy who had the balls to contrary* conventional wisdom on Rwanda — years after the fact!

*That’s a verb now, just so we’re clear.

6/1 Update — Kristof responds:

The author of today’s op-ed claims that it would be better if Westerners didn’t demand military intervention, because that just bolsters the rebels. That is absurd. First, far and away the biggest problem in Darfur is the Sudanese government — both its attacks on villages and its refusal to allow aid workers into remote areas. And there’s plenty of history to show that the only time Sudan bends is when it’s under great pressure.

After all, Darfur is in many ways a replay of a movie we saw in southern Sudan. First, Khartoum mobilized irregular militias to wipe out villages and kill civilians. And then it supported a proxy rebel movement to invade a neighboring country (then Uganda, now Chad). In the absence of demands for intervention, that war in the south went on for 20 years. In part because of the possibility of a UN security force, Sudan agreed to this tentative peace settlement in Darfur after only a few years. Otherwise, Darfur would have lingered for 20 years — and then Sudan would have started all over again in its east, on the border with Eritrea.

You can see a pattern: Whenever the international community focuses attention on Darfur, the slaughter subsides a bit. Then the world gets distracted, and Sudan steps up the killing. Besides, what about Chad? The discussion usually focuses only on Darfur, but there is a real risk that the entire nation of Chad will collapse into chaos, provoking a new civil war that will duplicate Darfur but on a much larger scale.

The bottom line is that genocide is the worst thing that humans can do to each other. It tears at the fabric of humanity. And the only way that we here, in the US, can assert our own humanity is to stand up to genocide, even a distant one. To look the other way as babies are tossed onto bonfires, because of their skin color and tribe, is an abdication of our own citizenship in our species.