Darfur

Like a lot of people, I can only take so much bad news. There are times when I just can't tolerate any more stories about 54 more people who were killed in an outdoor market in Iraq, or how easy it is to smuggle a nuclear weapon into New York harbor, or how some deranged maniac killed a bunch of innocent Amish schoolgirls. Each story seems more depressing than the last, and there is a saturation point that, once achieved, can turn even the most compassionate person into a detached, ambivalent zombie. In the age we live in, with 24-hour news coverage, things can get pretty overwhelming and downright depressing if one does not take pains to control the news intake valve.

I guess this is why I have not bothered to focus very much on the genocide that is happening in Darfur, Sudan right now, other than to read the occasional New York Times or Time magazine article. Every time I have listened to a talking head discuss this issue, it has always seemed like there are two sides to this story and things are not as simple as some would believe. Maybe if I bothered to pay attention and took more of an interest, things would be slightly more clear.

Well tonight, Darfur and one of my favorite shows, 60 Minutes, intersected, so finally I was a captive audience for a discrete story about Darfur called "Searching for Jacob." This particular story certainly did not make it seem that there are two sides to the Darfur genocide, only one.

The 60 Minutes story began with a team of journalists who were visiting the United States Holocaust Memorial museum in Washington, D.C., which, besides cataloguing the history of the Holocaust, collects artifacts of victims of genocide all over the world. Included among the exhibits at the museum were several schoolbooks and notebooks from a young Sudanese boy named Jacob. A few years ago, these were found in the ashes of Jacob's burned out house in Hangala, a small village in Darfur. Hangala was one of many villages that have been destroyed by the Janjaweed, a racist Arab militia that is acting as a proxy of the Sudanese government to exterminate or expel non-Arabs from Darfur. Their tactics are ripped from the genocidal playbook: kill all the men, gangrape the women, and orphan or kill the children.

At the outset of the story, we don't know if Jacob is alive or dead. But Scott Pelley, a 60 Minutes reporter sets out to try and find Jacob in Darfur.

Not surprisingly, the Sudanese government is trying to keep journalists out of Darfur in order to minimize reports of the genocide. So Pelley had to sneak into the area via Chad, flying in on a small, prop plane, and then soliciting help from a bunch of Sudanese rebels who call themselves the National Redemption Front. It is the families of these rebels who are being exterminated. We see Pelley and the rebels drive through the desert for 13 hours in old, white trucks with open cabs. Pelley sits in the back of one of the trucks, giving his narrative to a camera man nearby. He is surrounded by the rebels, who are shrouded in white coverings and carrying machine guns with rocket propelled grenades. When the trucks get stuck in the muck, Pelley gets out of the truck to help the rebels push his truck out of the mud. Stories like this always give me a healthy respect for journalists who venture into dangerous places they really shouldn't go.

After a long trek through the desert, Pelley and the rebels finally reach Hangala. At one time, Hangala had 500 inhabitants. Now it has no inhabitants. The before and after pictures of Hangala shown on the television reveal that where there used to be a small group of little thatched huts and a little town, now there are just burned out, empty shells. Circular walls marking where homes used to be, and nothing more. The rest of the town is ashes, except for an occasional piece of pottery that appears in the middle of the rubble. These are the only things left in an original state of wholeness. Here is a picture I found that looks similar to what I saw on 60 Minutes:


An escapee from the massacre at Hangala tells 60 Minutes that the Janjaweed came to Hangala and set the houses on fire. Then, working with Sudanese government soldiers who were sitting on the outskirts of the village, they shot and killed as many of the men as possible and gangraped the women. Only a few people managed to escape.

Why is the Sudanese government doing this, you rightfully ask? Based on the little that I have read, the answer seems pretty simple: they are using genocide as a means to try and gain control of the country. The racist Arab government that is currently running Sudan -- and which not too long ago, gave shelter to Osama bin Laden and his buddies -- is trying to kill off or expel any non-Arab inhabitants of Darfur simply because they are not Arab. When you deliberately kill people because of their racial, ethnic, or cultural status, that's genocide. While the world watches with its thumb up its collective ass, more than 300,000 people have been killed in Darfur, and there are now more than two million refugees living in camps in the middle of the desert.

Pelley visits a refugee camp nearby Hangala and meets Ashis Brahma, a doctor who is caring for about 25,000 refugees by himself. Pelley asks Dr. Brahma what he thinks people don't understand about what is happening in Darfur. Here is Brahma's response:

"This is bad. They go to the villages, and they burn one village after the other, then when the people come out they catch the women and gang bang, they rape them not one guy, no 10, 15 then they carve up the men and throw them in the drinking water to make sure that this place will never ever be used again. And you’re telling me the people in America don’t know this or don’t want to know this. Maybe its too much to know but that’s what’s happening right now and its happening all over again . . . I’m sorry to say I’m going to sit here with you in two years time and I’m gonna tell you the same sad story. People will say, 'Ich habe nicht gewusst,' which is German for 'I didn’t know.'"

This quote sent chills up my spine, not just because of the atrocities Dr. Brahma described, but when he said that people in America don't know or don't want to know about what is happening in Darfur, and his allusion to the head-in-the-sand attitude of everyday Germans while Jews were being exterminated during the Holocaust. How many of us want to know about this problem? Want to care?

Miraculously, they manage to find a man at the refugee camp who recognizes the books Pelley brought with him and the name Jacob. The man says he was Jacob's teacher and that Jacob is alive. He takes them to a part of the massive camp where he says Jacob is.

When we finally meet Jacob, he looks much older than I thought he would -- he's actually 19 years old now. When he talks to Pelley, he comes across as educated, serious, articulate, and thoughtful. He looks at his books with some amazement that they have come back into his hands from across the world. Like a message in a bottle he threw into the ocean, never thinking he would see it again. He tells Pelley of how he doesn't know where his family is and how the Janjaweed killed his 4 year old brother because he tried to run away. Jacob's voice shakes a little when he says this, but otherwise, he is steely and unemotional.

Rather than keep his books and notebooks -- reminders of a normal life that he will probably never have again -- Jacob tells Pelley to bring them back to the Holocaust museum so that the whole world can see what is happening in Darfur. Poor Jacob actually has hope that the world will do something about his plight.

The little backstory to this is the current American policy towards the Sudanese government, led by dictator Omar AlBashir. As previously stated, in the 1990s, AlBashir and the Sudanese government hosted Osama bin Laden. After 9/11, the government agreed to play ball with the U.S. AlBashir has a lot of dirt on bin Laden, given their prior association. Apparently, Sudan's intelligence service has been sharing a lot of information with the CIA about bin Laden, and 60 Minutes was told by U.S. officials that the information we have obtained from Sudan has been "substantial." This ostensibly has complicated our ability to complain or do anything about the genocide in Darfur.

Same old story, it seems. We are willing to dance with dictators, even if they are committing genocide, as long as it supports our short-term foreign policy goals. We slept with all kinds of sick bastards when we were fighting communism, and it looks like we are making the same mistake now against the latest bogeyman, terrorism. Where will it end?

Seriously, our congenial approach to genocidal dictators like AlBashir makes me wonder whether the United States would accept Hitler as an ally today as long as he was helping us fight terrorism.