A personal note: I have seen children dying of AIDS and hunger; I have had malaria and been chased through the jungle by militias. I want the G-8 to address all the aspects of global poverty, yet nothing affects me as much as what I have seen in Darfur.
I tilt obsessively at the windmills of Darfur because, quite simply, its people haunt me: the young woman who deliberately made a diversion of herself so the janjaweed would gang-rape her and miss her little sister running in the opposite direction; the man whose eyes were gouged out with a bayonet; the group of women beaten with their own babies until the children were dead.
After what you have just read, there is only one sentence left in the column by Nicholas Kristof entitled The Pain of the G-8’s Big Shrug. I will add a few words of my own.
You really should read the column. In it Kristof takes to account the apparent unwillingness of the G-8 to do anything about Darfur except wring its hands. He acknowledges that a coherent argument can be made about how there are other more serious problems, problems that cost more lives. He even acknowledges his own temptation at times to think that way. Further, given that those suffering in Darfur are in the main Muslims, he calls to task the Islamic world, asking
Do dead Muslims count only when Israel is the culprit? Can’t the Islamic world muster one-hundredth as much indignation for the genocidal slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Muslims as it can for a few Danish cartoons?
He argues that genocide is something different, beyond the mere numbers who may die. He reminds us that Bill Clinton acknowledges his greatest foreign policy failure was Rwanda, that Armenia still festers, that what happens in Darfur can be destabilizing, leading to all-out civil war in Sudan. He even cautions that the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court may issue an arrest warrant in connection with Darfur,
and his past statements suggest that it may be for the Sudanese president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, for genocide. That would be a historic step requiring follow-through.
Kristof explains why, despite other experiences in his own life, Darfur and its genocide effect him so much.
And yes, in his list of previous genocides, he mentions the Holocaust of the 30s and 40s of the last century. He starts with that. And it is here that I must interject myself.
My name is Bernstein. On my mother's mother's side, the family was from Bialystok. My maternal grandmother and her father left that city in the midst of a mini-pogrom hidden in a hay wagon, with the rest of the family following shortly thereafter. A few cousins also got out before the Great War occurred. But many cousins were left behind. My maternal great-grandmother tried desperately to get at least some of her relatives here in the very late 1930s. Webelieve some were shot by the Nazis in 1941. The rest were part of the liquidation of the Ghetto in 1943. We know of none who survived.
And even were there no direct blood connections, I grew up with survivors in Larchmont NY. I realized that regardless of my own religious orientation or lack thereof, had I or my immediate family been in the grasp of the Nazis we too would have been killed, precisely because of our Jewish heritage.
I am an American. Our nation has never fully confronted its own brushes with genocide, however small-scale in comparison they may have been. Did Lord Jeffrey Amherst really give small-pox infected blankets to Native Americans? What about King Philip's War in 17th Century New England? Or the attitude that the only good Indian is a dead Indian? Certainly the Sand Creek Massacre might qualify as a genocidal act, and in today's terminology it is at least a crime against humanity.
A part of me screams when I perceive any action moving towards genocide at which the world remains silent. Perhaps looking back at the last Century gives me pause. Henry Morgenthau tried desperately to tell the world about the 1915 Ottoman treatment of the Armenians. And as Hitler began to ramp up the pressures on and discrimination towards the Jews, it is not as if the world did not see the direction things were heading. When Alan Cranston, after seeing the English language version was expurgated and hid much of what was offensive in Hitler's writings, did an accurate, annotated, and complete translation of Mein Kampf the strongest reaction that occurred in this country was that he was successfully sued by Hitler's publisher for copyright infringement. Before and during the war, people knew what was happening, at least to some degree. British Intelligence knew, and in 1942 Jan Karski provided irrevocable evidence.
It would be appropriate to quote Pastor Martin Niemoller here about the effects of remaining silent when one witnesses the mistreatment of others: for too many of us it is far to easy to think "at least it is not me or mine" and to rationalize our silence, our averting of our eyes.
I am a Quaker by choice. That means I am strongly opposed to the use of military force - in most circumstances. I am not an absolute pacifist because I believe that sometimes one must act in a fashion that would otherwise be evil because the alternative, not to act, would be a greater evil.
I am also strongly opposed to the US using its military power merely to gain economic benefit. At a lower level, there are times when the use of our economic power for geopolitical ends can cause great human suffering, as one might argue the economic boycott of Iraq after the Gulf War did, costing the lives of perhaps half a million Iraqi children.
But mere wringing of one's hands and offering words of lament are insufficient when there are other actions available, some economic, some political, and if necessary military. Kristof rightly criticizes Bush for not even attempting a no-fly zone in Darfur after five years of slaughter, and extracting nothing from the Chinese - say, a suspension of military spare parts and equipment - in return for his attendance at the opening of the Olympics.
To me this is a moral issue as great as the failure of our Congress to stop the erosion of our Constitutional protections, about which I wrote yesterday in a somewhat impassioned fashion.
Let me close with three more sentences from Kristof, each from a different part of the essay. The last will be his final sentence, which comes immediately after the two paragraphs I quoted to begin this diary. Please ponder. And then ask yourself - can we rest in peace when we know that elsewhere genocide is happening and we are doing nothing?
What is horrifying about Anne Frank’s diary is not so much the death of a girl as the crime of a state.
... the G-8’s collective shrug today about the Darfur genocide — because the victims are black, impoverished and hidden from television cameras — will be a lingering stain.
Yes, genocide truly is "that bad."