Who will save Darfur?

The rocky road to solidarity slips through Phuket, Thailand and Banda Aceh, Indonesia among other places, while avoiding the dusty Darfur roads in Sudan, and other parts of Africa.

Since 1954 the Comboni Missionaries have been serving in the region of Darfur. They are now witnesses to genocide, while the international community turns a blind eye just as it did during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

“I have noticed that people are paying less attention to Darfur,” said Comboni Father David Bohnsack, a nine year veteran of service in Darfur. “So far I don’t think any of the multi-purpose centers funded by the Cincinnati nonprofit Embrace the Children have been destroyed, but it is too dangerous to travel to them.”

The Darfur genocide has claimed 400,000 lives and displaced 2 million people, according to Smith College Professor Eric Reeves of Northampton, Massachusetts.

If these figures are correct, they dwarf the recent tsunami in Southeast Asia. The Voice of America, however, sticks to smaller estimates: 50,000 lives lost and slightly more than 1.6 million displaced. This lower estimate of dead does not account for people who died from malnutrition and treatable diseases because the insecurity hindered access to food and healthcare.

This genocide, according to experts like Anthony Lake and John Prendergast, is unfolding in “slow motion” in contrast to Rwanda, when the ruling Hutus killed more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in a 100-day bloodbath. Both Lake and Prendergast worked for the Clinton administration: Lake was National Security Advisor and Prendergast was Director, African Affairs, National Security Council.

The historical roots to the conflict in Darfur are long and deep, but the current atrocities date back to February 2003—then a few hundred were killed each month. Now an estimated 35,000 persons are dying every month. If assistance is not able to reach the people because of continued violence, this figure could rise to 100,000 per month, according to the U.N. Office for Humanitarian Affairs.

Since nearly everyone involved is Muslim, religion is not the driving force of this new genocide. It is cultural and ethnic racism.

The government of Khartoum armed the Arab militias with the intent to destroy the Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit ethnic African groups, even though they are practicing Muslims. While the American fundamentalist Evangelical-Pentecostal churches, characterized by a blind, gut-level, anti-Islamic mind-set, were vociferous about war against the “Christian” Southern Sudan, they are less vociferous regarding this genocide.

“I knew Sudan would fade from the headlines when it was finally decided that Darfur was not a genocide as first reported, and so it has,” Father Bohnsack told Comboni Mission Newsletter.

The Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur to the United Nations Secretary-General, released January 2005, concluded that “the Government of Sudan has not pursued a policy of genocide,” because, the report continues: “the crucial element of genocidal intent appears to be missing, at least as far as the central Government authorities are concerned.”

Since the U.N. report did find that the Sudanese government has committed major crimes under international law, including killings, mass murder, rape, pillage and forced displacement “on a widespread and systematic basis,” Salih Booker, Executive Director of Africa Action, asserts in a press release: “The U.N. Commission Report masks the truth and contradicts itself.”

Lest Darfur and all of Africa die on the vine, good people must act on the testimony of Comboni Missionaries (see account also in this issue) and many other non-governmental organizations.