GLOBE EDITORIAL
Horror in DarfurIN THE Darfur province of western Sudan, a slow-motion genocide has been taking place while the rest of the world either pretends not to notice or finds excuses for refusing to intervene. The uprooting and expunging of the Fur, Massaleit, and Zaghawa peoples is the deliberate, systematic doing of the National Islamic Front that rules Sudan. Government planes bomb the non-Arab villages of Darfur, and then the regime's collaborators, Arab militias known as the Janjaweed, ride in to murder men and boys and rape women and girls.
The Darfur atrocities have been going on for 16 months. If they are not stopped immediately, the world will witness a human calamity on the scale of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions told the UN News Center recently that the number of black Africans killed by Arab militias in the Darfur region is "bound to be staggering."' There are more than a million displaced people within Darfur. At least 200,000 more have fled across the border to Chad. Human rights groups and others gripped by the horror of Darfur know what needs to be done to save these refugees from death by starvation or from the cholera and malaria that will inevitably rage through their crowded camps. The Khartoum regime, however, has been denying access for humanitarian relief efforts. Recently, as the National Islamic Front has come under pressure generated by visits to the region by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and Secretary of State Colin Powell, it has made promises to allow 60 African Union monitors into Darfur and to permit the delivery of relief supplies. But Khartoum's pattern is to impede, obstruct, and delay. The killers' intent is to prevent any intervention from outside that could save the 2.2 million non-Arab peoples of Darfur who need food aid immediately. The regime is hardly threatened by sanctions in a proposed US resolution at the United Nations that would ban arms purchases and international travel by Janjaweed leaders. Those local commanders do not travel abroad and don't need more guns. Inside Darfur, the same Janjaweed who razed the farming villages of refugees are now "guarding" concentration camps where those refugees are gathered. These camps have to be liberated. The people in them have to have food and medical care delivered to them. And then they have to be returned to their villages and protected while they revive their agricultural way of life.
There is no way to stop the Darfur genocide other than a humanitarian military intervention. In accord with the 1948 Convention on Genocide, the UN Security Council should pass such a resolution and invite a coalition of willing life savers to enter Darfur and rescue a million fellow human beings. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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