Wednesday, March 31, 2004

Kristof does his part -- yet another genocide

Op-Ed Columnist: Starved for Safety:
... African and Western leaders should try much harder to stop civil wars as they start. The world is now facing a critical test of that principle in the Darfur region of Sudan, where Arab militias are killing and driving out darker-skinned African tribespeople. While the world now marks the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide and solemnly asserts that this must never happen again, it is.

Some 1,000 people are dying each week in Sudan, and 110,000 refugees, like Mr. Yodi, have poured into Chad. Worse off are the 600,000 refugees within Sudan, who face hunger and disease after being driven away from their villages by the Arab militias.

'They come with camels, with guns, and they ask for the men,' Mr. Yodi said. 'Then they kill the men and rape the women and steal everything.' One of their objectives, he added, 'is to wipe out blacks.'

This is not a case when we can claim, as the world did after the Armenian, Jewish and Cambodian genocides, that we didn't know how bad it was. Sudan's refugees tell of mass killings and rapes, of women branded, of children killed, of villages burned — yet Sudan's government just stiffed new peace talks that began last night in Chad.

No-one will be able to say we weren't warned. The black Sudanese should convert to evangelical Christianity immediately. (I assume they're not Christian, if they are then Kristok is not doing them any favors by failing to mention that.)

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