What's Fueling the Genocide in Darfur?

By Nat Hentoff, Village Voice. Posted October 19, 2004.

A woman and teenage girl who were raped and abducted by soldiers in western Darfur have claimed that the Sudanese army organized airlifts of sex slaves to serve as the "wives" of government soldiers in Khartoum. . . . "Each of us was raped by between three and six men," said Bokur [Hamis, 21]. "One woman refused to have sex with them, so they split her head into pieces with an axe in front of us."

– Benjamin Joffe-Walt, Sunday Telegraph, London, September 19

None of the [oil] companies operating in Sudan can reliably ensure that they and their operations, singly or collectively, do not facilitate or benefit from human rights abuses. Indeed, they operate in the midst of the abuses. – Sudan, Oil, and Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, pages 694-695

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George W. Bush, in his September 21 speech to the United Nations, urged the formation of a Democracy Fund within the U.N. that "would help countries lay the foundations of democracy by instituting the rule of law in independent courts, a free press, political parties, and trade unions." As old-time labor organizers used to say of companies claiming that their "fully protected workers" didn't need unions, the president is talking of "pie in the sky."

Structurally, the United Nations is utterly incapable of assuring the rule of law and human rights in many of its member countries. Human rights abusers Russia and China, for example, have veto powers in the Security Council. And of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, composed of many unremitting human rights abusers, Sudan itself is a proud member.

My own fantasy of "pie in the sky" is a parallel, independent, international coalition of countries that would be alert to genocide emerging anywhere in the world – and then, unlike the U.N., move in to stop it. But where are those countries?

In real life, real time, and real mass murders and rapes in Darfur, Professor Eric Reeves of Smith College, who has long chronicled the Khartoum government's deadly crimes against its black subjects, is exactly right.

Amid the weak, hortatory criticisms of Khartoum's genocide by the U.N. Security Council, Reeves writes, "Khartoum may not be happy with current world attention, but has yet to hear a clearly articulated threat – one that will change its behavior fundamentally."

Reeves continues, "The regime seems to be banking on an eventual drifting of international attention . . . away from the catastrophe in Darfur (which will become simply a chronic 'humanitarian problem'). . . . In order to disabuse Khartoum of this notion, international pressure on the regime clearly must include both near- and long-term economic pressure and punishment, and a vigorous divestment campaign offers one means of achieving this."

For more information on this divestment campaign, there is a new website: divestsudan.org.

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