Responding to Genocide

Dear Bloggers,

Instead of blogging about intelligent design this week, I would like to take this opportunity to ask you to think about something more pressing in humanitarian terms, the current genocide in Darfur, Sudan, a country in central east Africa. In the past 2½ years, the Sudanese have suffered the slaughter of over 300,000 people and the displacement of over 2 million from their homes. Additionally, the Amnesty International website reports that “systematic human rights abuses have occurred by all parties involved in the conflict, but primarily by the Sudanese government and government-backed Janjawid militia” (www.amnestyusa.org). These human rights abuses include organized ethnic-cleansing, murder, rape, torture, and enslavement of Sudanese men, women, and children. This systematic effort amounts to genocide.

The term genocide was coined in the 20th century to refer to the mass killing of an entire people; it is derived from the words geno (Greek for race or people) and cide (Latin for killing). In the 20th century, we witnessed several events which can be labeled genocides, and we are currently witnessing the genocide in Africa. These include, amongst others, the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis in the 1930s, the Rwandan massacre of the 1990s, and the current crisis in Darfur.

Like any human phenomenon, genocides follow a pattern; although there are distinct differences between them, certain characteristics seem to pervade all of them. For instance, it is characteristic of genocides that citizens are killed en masse by their own governments, which means that the entity that is supposed to protect the people turns on them, claiming that its own people are a threat to the state. During genocides, vast numbers of women are systematically raped by soldiers and militia members, and children are often conscripted into the army or are killed. Genocides seem to occur when one group of people in a society labels another group as “other” because of racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic, political, or regional differences; for instance, the German Nazis targeted the Jews, who looked different (according to Hitler) and whose religious practices and beliefs differed from what was considered to be the norm.

One of the most troubling patterns we see as genocides develop is that the rest of the world knows about them long before it acts to stop them. In the 1930s, the United States knew about the Nazi extermination of Jews and other people long before we joined the war to stop the slaughter. In 1994, the world watched while between 250,000 and 500,000 Rwandan women were being systematically raped and up to a million Rwandans were being killed by the interahamwe militia and the Rwandan Patriotic Army. Today, we are aware of the genocide in the Sudan, but the international response has been tepid and slow at best. In most cases, the world’s reaction to the atrocities committed during genocides is sluggish and insufficient, considering the enormous scope of the human rights abuses and mass killings. Shouldn’t we be outraged enough about these events to act?

Now that you have some background on genocide in general and the crisis in Darfur in particular, I want to ask you to think about why various nations and the United Nations do not respond more quickly (or at all) to genocide. Why do genocides happen, and why do we allow them to happen? Given the horrific and unjust nature of this ongoing, wide-scale slaughter and abuse of human beings in Darfur, Sudan, what should the United States do to respond? What is our responsibility to these suffering people who live across the globe from us?

--Ms. O