Is It Genocide Yet?

The death toll in Darfur is now well past the figures being bandied about by the Lancet in terms of additional deaths in Iraq, and unlike those deaths, those in Darfur have been a result of deliberate policies by Khartoum. A question for those who don't like the "g word": at what point does one get to call it genocide? How many deaths are required to qualify?

More than 180,000 people have died from hunger and disease during the last 18 months of the Darfur conflict, the United Nations said yesterday, as negotiations continued at its New York headquarters to break the deadlock on a new security council resolution to impose sanctions on the Sudanese government.

Brian Grogan, a spokesman for Jan Egeland, the UN emergency relief coordinator, said an average 10,000 Sudanese civilians were dying a month, much higher than earlier estimates. They were victims mainly of starvation or of disease in refugee camps after being driven from their villages by Sudanese soldiers and government-backed Janjaweed militiamen. The estimates exclude those killed in the fighting.

[...]

Nearly a year after the UN described Darfur as the world's worst humanitarian crisis, there is no sign the scorched-earth campaign against black African villages is over.

Hundreds of new refugees are flooding into overcrowded camps such as the giant settlement at Kalma in south Darfur, which housed fewer than 10,000 people this time last year but now houses 100,000.

I won't hold my breath awaiting the world's outrage; it's only Africa we're talking about, after all ...

Comments

[Andrew Reeves]

(Construction of blatant straw-man)

Hmmm... I think it's because a lot of the people who get Very Angry at this sort of thing have put Muslims into the "Oppressed People of Color" category. When confronted with Muslims carrying out genocide against other Muslims who are also black, the level of cognitive dissonance built up causes them to avoid the whole thing. Sort of like the conceit of certain TV shows that people who encounter vampires and live simply will themselves to forget that they've seen vampires since they "know" vampires don't exist.

(/blatant straw-manning)

[Abiola Lapite]

Andrew, I'm not sure this actually *is* a straw man. After all, I've run into people seriously making the argument that this can't be ethnic cleansing because as far as *they* can see, the Darfuris and the Arabs are the same "race."

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

It isn't genocide because calling it that would obligate people to do something. This is the classic case where relying on paper treaties to do things is exposed as useless when there is no will to enforce them. See also the NPT.

[Jim]

"Andrew, I'm not sure this actually *is* a straw man. After all, I've run into people seriously making the argument that this can't be ethnic cleansing because as far as *they* can see, the Darfuris and the Arabs are the same "race."

Good example of the uselessness the concept of race for analyzing anything.

There wasn't three geeen's worth of differenece between the Bosnians and the Serbs and that didn' keep that mess from happening.

Andrew is right about the apology for Muslims' crimes. I remember the same sort of thing as the Rwanda disaster was beginning to be reported - blank disbelief in the US that Africans could be capable etc..... But that was not the mechanism that prevented any action then and it also isn't the mechanism keeping pressure of the Sudanese government. Governments with oil can do no wrong.