The world fails to act on another slaughter: Rwandan nightmare is relived in Sudan

The world fails to act on another slaughter
Rwandan nightmare is relived in Sudan

Paul Rusesabagina, Sunday, April 16, 2006


Twelve years ago in Rwanda, I saw things I never dreamed could be possible. I saw people I thought were my friends picking up machetes and matter-of-factly killing their neighbors. I saw children executed on the street because they happened to have been born to the wrong set of parents. I saw otherwise intelligent people justify these acts with some of the most hollow patriotic rhetoric you could imagine. And I saw the rest of the world close its eyes and let it all happen, because to have stepped in and done something would have carried some minor political risk.

The passage of time has made it easy to say the holocaust in Rwanda should have been stopped with military intervention. We all say never again in comfort. It costs us nothing to be morally judgmental about the past, and it makes us feel good, too.

But the same nightmare of genocide that descended upon Rwanda has now come to the Darfur region of Sudan -- and the world's response is exactly the same as it was 12 years ago: silence, foot-dragging and stunning ineptitude. More than 400,000 people -- about the population of Oakland -- have died so far. The dithering continues, even as Darfur chokes on its own blood. It almost feels like the United Nations and the great Western powers are waiting for the granite memorials to go up and the Sudanese national holidays to be established before they demonstrate that the routine slaughter of innocent people in Africa is an issue worth caring about.

Here are the facts: When the British departed their colony of Sudan in 1956, they left a place five times the size of Texas, containing hundreds of ethnic, tribal and linguistic groups. The main point of tension, however, was always between the wealthy elite, who govern from the capital in Khartoum, and the destitute residents of the remote Darfur region.

When a revolt broke out in Darfur in 2003, the government began arming citizen militias, known as the Janjaweed, and sent them to intimidate and bring order to the rural villages. But just as we saw in Hitler's Germany, or Pol Pot's Cambodia, or my own country of Rwanda, these "law enforcement measures" have turned into mass slayings of unarmed civilians. Women are systematically raped and called "slaves" by the Janjaweed, with their husbands forced to watch. Babies are ripped from their mother's arms and killed on the spot. Those people who aren't directly attacked by the mobs are being starved to death by the destruction of their crops.

The United States has already officially branded Darfur "a genocide," and it deserves credit for at least calling this disaster by its right name. But meaningful action has been almost nonexistent.

There are at present about 7,000 peacekeeping soldiers from the African Union in Sudan, but they are powerless to do anything. They are like a small-town police department assigned to fight a world war. They have no helicopters to respond to village attacks, no sophisticated weapons to take on the Janjaweed, and no clear sense of their own mission.

The United Nations is drowning in inertia. Each member of the Security Council has a reason for not acting. The Chinese don't want to offend the oil-rich government in Sudan, the Russians don't want to set a precedent of intervention that might expose them in Chechnya, the United States and Great Britain fear they have tried their citizens' patience enough with overseas military adventures.

And so the best the United Nations has been able to offer is a statement that it might take over the mission by the end of the year. The end of the year! How many more people will have died by that point? How can you explain this bumbling and yawning to the people who will be slaughtered by mounted strangers tomorrow?

What is needed -- and needed now -- is for the United States and its allies to stand up to genocide by sending in NATO troops the way they did in the former Yugoslavia. We cannot afford to wait for the United Nations. An American detachment made up of one-twentieth of the current personnel stationed in Iraq could easily halt the killings in Darfur. It could do it next week.

I urge you to send a message to Congress to do just that. Sign on to http://www.savedarfur.org for information on what you can do to create a world without genocide.

San Francisco, the birthplace of the United Nations and a place with a long history of tolerance and compassion, ought to take the lead in calling for the world community to show it will no longer remain quiet in the face of politicized mass murder.

In 1998, four years after the Rwandan genocide, President Bill Clinton stopped in our airport for three hours and apologized for America's failure to do anything when it might have mattered. "Never again must we be shy in the face of the evidence" of genocide, he told us.

Never again. We have heard this statement before. Our actions toward Darfur will show whether this high-sounding sentiment is actually one of the greatest lies of our time.


Paul Rusesabagina, whose actions during the Rwandan genocide were portrayed in the movie "Hotel Rwanda" is the author, with former San Francisco Chronicle reporter Tom Zoellner, of the new autobiography "An Ordinary Man."