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The genocide goes on in Darfur--but has it become passe for politicians as the issue du jour? Date published: 8/21/2005
WE SEEM TO BE just about at the point where we can file the people of Darfur, Sudan, in the "Where are they now?" category. You may remember them as the victims of a genocide perpetrated by their government and its militia allies. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000 of them have died, 2.5 million have been made homeless and countless numbers of women and girls have been systematically raped. But we haven't heard much about Darfur lately. The agenda-setting media in the United States have pretty much stopped reporting on the situation in western Sudan, deciding that the food emergency in Niger is the Africa catastrophe du jour. (You don't expect them to devote significant time and resources to more than one big Africa story at a time, do you?) The Bush administration, meanwhile, displays more interest in cementing an intelligence-sharing relationship with the Sudanese government than with ending the genocide in Darfur. How else to interpret the CIA's decision to fly one of the suspected architects of the Darfur genocide--Sudanese intelligence chief Salah Abdallah Gosh--to Washington to chew the fat about al-Qaida? This Gosh is thought to be so bad that some Justice Department officials considered having him arrested when he set foot in this country, according to The Los Angeles Times. Even conservative Republican Rep. Frank Wolf, whose 10th District includes part of Fauquier County, protested Gosh's visit, saying it sent the wrong message to the Sudanese government. But the Bush administration has introduced nuance into its foreign policy, and at least some evildoers may now be embraced. In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," Samantha Power reports that President Bush received a memo describing President Clinton's shameful inaction during the Rwanda genocide and wrote on the margin of the document: "Not on my watch." But now a genocide has happened on his watch, and although Bush has done more than any other Western leader to try to stop it, he hasn't done enough. He certainly hasn't made Darfur a priority, even though he has stated that the violence in the region amounts to genocide. The situation in western Sudan has been called "Rwanda in slow motion," and now that the dying has tapered off a bit--down from 10,000 people a month to about 6,000--it's tempting to forget about the crisis and focus on other matters.
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