[Mb-civic] Never Again (?)

[George R. Milman]

Sorry, the link calls for membership, so here is the article


 

Never Again, Again

By BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY
April 13, 2006; Page A12

Too bad for the TV networks in the U.S. and Europe, but the event of the
moment is neither the crisis of regime in France nor Berlusconi's defeat. It
is not even the latest casualties and the latest vicissitudes of the war in
Iraq. Rather, it is the news coming from Darfur indicating that the war
there, already three years old, and nearly half a century old in the whole
of Sudan, is on the verge of the utmost savagery and horror.

We already knew that villages are being leveled by planes from bases in
Obeid and Port Sudan. We knew that the Janjaweed ("armed men on horseback")
come, after the bombers, to finish off the survivors by hand. We also knew
-- as I myself attested in 2001 after a stay with John Garang's guerrilla
army -- of the use of mass rape, as in Bosnia, as a weapon of war and
conquest.

Finally, we were not unaware of the racist, purely racist, nature of a
conflict that no longer has the "excuse" of a religious war -- since the
Zaghawa and Massalit tribes rebelling against Khartoum are also Muslim --
but simply offers the image of a war whose sole motive is the hatred, on the
part of the North's Arabs, of a population whose crime is having skin that
is too black.

But there are new elements that we do not know so well: the way the Khartoum
regime at the last minute banned a visit by the top U.N. relief official;
the harassment of European NGOs, especially the Norwegians, who were keeping
the humanitarian pipeline open against all odds and have been forced to pack
their bags; the cynicism with which the militias enforce the Feb. 20 law
prohibiting any "foreign organization" whose activities constitute an
"interference" in Sudan's "internal affairs" and thus encroach upon the
"sovereignty" of a state that claims the right to exterminate as it pleases.

The new development, in short, is the frightening warning from Juan Mendez,
the U.N.'s special adviser on the prevention of genocide, that this policy
of the forced withdrawal of NGOs could signal that the regime has embarked
on the last stage of its plan, where there cannot and must not be any
witnesses.

And this is when there are those who, faced with the atrocity of a massacre
and perhaps genocide, denounce the very principle of an intervention which
they condemn in advance as "neocolonial": Such is the case this week of the
Arab League.

There are those who are plainly uninterested in this war at the end of the
world, this war of faraway peoples, that does not pit the rich wicked West
against the impoverished meek of the Third World. Ah, these neoprogressives
who are so talkative when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict! Ah,
these anti-imperialists who have nothing at all to say when it comes to a
war with 500 times more deaths but where neither Israel nor the West has the
least role!


* * *


There are, in the U.S. as in Europe, organizations who, though presumably
having the duty and speciality of defending black minorities against
discrimination or historical denial, are conspicuous by their silence. Is it
because this war between Arab and non-Arab Muslims complicates, yet again,
the old schema? Is it because the war is a terrible confirmation, by fact
and fire, of the historians' thesis that the massacre of African blacks was
an African and especially an Arab crime as well as -- and before -- being a
Western crime? In sum, there are all those who each have a different reason
for feeling inconvenienced by this drama in Sudan and who would therefore
like President Omar El Bashir to do whatever he has to do quickly, and in
silence.

But what about the others? All the others? What about all those ordinary
people who, like you and me, had sworn "Never again Auschwitz" and then
"Never again Bosnia" and then "Never never again the shame of Rwanda"? What
about Kouchner, my friend Bernard Kouchner, who invented the right to
intervene? And Mandela, the great man in whom human conscience and nobility
were incarnated? And the United States? And France and its African
diplomacy? And all those everywhere who have made themselves advocates of
the cause of blacks and from whom we so much want to hear?

I acknowledge that the problem is not simple.

But it also must be acknowledged that it is a hundred times less complicated
than the removal of Saddam Hussein. Telling Khartoum to stop would not take
more effort than was required 10 years ago, after five years of
procrastination and cowardice, to stop Milosevic.

What, then, are we waiting for? Every day that goes by is a day of shame and
defeat.

Mr. Lévy is the author, most recently, of "American Vertigo" (Random House,
2006). This piece was translated from the original French by Hélène
Brenkman.

 

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