Daniel W. Drezner notes that this is the ten-year anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. As Nicholas Kristof writes, there’s more African slaughter in the making:
For decades, whenever the topic of genocide has come up, the refrain has been, “Never again.”
Yet right now, the government of Sudan is engaging in genocide against three large African tribes in its Darfur region here. Some 1,000 people are being killed a week, tribeswomen are being systematically raped, 700,000 people have been driven from their homes, and Sudan’s Army is even bombing the survivors.
And the world yawns.
Kristof points out an American trend on this front:
In her superb book on the history of genocide, “A Problem from Hell,” Samantha Power focuses on the astonishing fact that U.S. leaders always denounce massacres in the abstract or after they are over � but, until Kosovo, never intervened in the 20th century to stop genocide and “rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred.” The U.S. excuses now are the same ones we used when Armenians were killed in 1915 and Bosnians and Rwandans died in the 1990’s: the bloodshed is in a remote area; we have other priorities; standing up for the victims may compromise other foreign policy interests.
He adds that in instances such as this, it might not take very much American action to make a difference:
I’m not arguing that we should invade Sudan. But one of the lessons of history is that very modest efforts can save large numbers of lives. Nothing is so effective in curbing ethnic cleansing as calling attention to it.
President Bush could mention Darfur or meet a refugee. The deputy secretary of state could visit the border areas here in Chad. We could raise the issue before the U.N. And the onus is not just on the U.S.: it’s shameful that African and Muslim countries don’t offer at least a whisper of protest at the slaughter of fellow Africans and Muslims.
One would think that the self-described greatest human rights president in history would be all over this, but I’ve not heard anything from the bully pulpit, have you?
Why do I get the feeling that the Bush administration’s concern for foreign human rights is limited to those areas slated for U.S. military conquest?