by Allen Lang, 5/15/06
Driving through the countryside of Darfur
produces no shortage of images that could haunt a person for the rest of their
life.
Reactionary Janjaweed militiamen maraud through the region, leaving a
trail of villages burnt to the ground. Orphans are left to wander the
countryside. A mass exodus of two million people have been forced to flee their
homes only to be terrorized by Janjaweed bandits who wait outside of refugee camps
to kill people. Rape is routine. Starvation is widespread. Foreign
photojournalists recount stories of watching the sun go down and looking out
along the horizon to see hands and heads sticking out of the mass graves that
dot the countryside.
This is Darfur. This is a war-torn
region of the country of Sudan
in Africa that is plunging deeper into a humanitarian
crisis and is a world of horrors for much of the population. The conflict has
been a central focus of many human rights organizations and has been taken up
as an urgent issue by thousands of students who are deeply concerned about the atrocities
being committed.
The movement to save Darfur has generated
many positive sentiments of people ranging from students to Hollywood
celebrities to Congressmen, who are looking out beyond the U.S.
borders and are being moved to speak out against oppression.
That is why it was both bewildering and outrageous to see
placards that read: ‘U.S. Out of Iraq, Into Darfur’
peppered through the recent April 29th anti-war demonstration in New
York City.
For those who can see the extreme suffering in Darfur
and then simply turn to U.S.
intervention as a solution, ask yourselves this:
(1) What is the history of the U.S.
foreign military intervention?
and
(2) What are the Bush Administration’s real interests in the
Sudan?
Since September 11th the U.S.
has claimed that it is fighting a ‘War on Terror,’ when in reality it has been
waging a War OF Terror, and of destruction and mass murder on the people of Afghanistan
and Iraq. Bush,
Rumsfeld and other key players in the invasion of Iraq
are guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Period. I don’t fault
Bush for unsuccessfully dominating a country through brutal terror anymore than
I would complain that the Janjaweed militias and Sudanese government are
incompetent.
Look at the cold hard facts:
-since the U.S.
military has invaded Iraq,
close to 300,000 Iraqi people have been killed and morgues in Bagdad
experience an overflow of dead bodies from anywhere between 150 to 200 dead
bodies a day [1]
-shocking pictures from Abu Ghraib that reveal U.S.
soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners–inhumane acts consistent with polices in
all U.S.-run prisons in Iraq.
-the Bush Administration’s defense of General Jerry Boykin,
a top ranking military official who toured churches in the U.S. where he made
statements like, “Satan wants to destroy this nation, he wants to destroy
us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army, they will only
be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus” and organizes religious
conventions on military bases in North Carolina.
-America’s
‘liberation’ of women in Afghanistan
can be seen by the fact that 65% of girls in Afghanistan
still do not attend school and courts sentence women to be stoned to death for
adultery.
-U.S.
military commanders knowingly placed large numbers of U.S.
troops to guard Oil infrastructure as flames raged through Iraqi museums,
destroying one of the oldest known copies of the Koran and 5,000-year-old
tablets bearing some of the earliest known writing went missing
Does this sound like the kind of military you want to throw
into the mix of a country wracked with massive human rights violations and
ethnic cleansing?
The U.S.
will not simply have a change of heart and go into Darfur
with a different military policy or a different set of economic interests
guiding its aims.
When disaster strikes and a sense of urgency and desperation
hits, many Good-hearted people seek to end the chaos and look to their leaders
for help. There is a problem with that: the rulers of this society are criminal.
Look at Iraq.
Look at New Orleans.
You cannot petition monsters to solve humanitarian crises.
Yes, Bush might come out from behind the gates of his Texas
mansion and shed some calculated crocodile tears for ‘those people over
there.’ But while many people look at Darfur
and see a genocide that must end, the Bush regime looks at the region with a
different set of glasses, with a different set of interests.
What do you make of an administration who talks of regime
change in an oil rich country, pours funds into Christian missionaries led by Jerry
Falwell, and strips a nation bare of condoms as part of a crusade to institute ‘abstinence-only’
programs in an area of the world suffering from a pandemic of HIV/Aids?
Newsflash: Bibles do not prevent AIDS and oppressors cannot
be liberators.
As people rightfully oppose the state-sponsored genocide of
the people of Darfur, step back and look squarely at your government, whose imposition
of abstinence-only programs, distortion of science, restriction of affordable
medicine and enforcement of the ‘gag-rule’ for medical facilities that provide
abortions in Africa is deadly and genocidal.
While it is still unclear when the crisis in Darfur will end
and what the appropriate steps to take are, it is painfully obvious that any involvement
of the U.S. in Darfur will worsen the situation, and in no way bring about a
positive resolution for the people of Darfur.
‘U.S.
out of Iraq and
into Darfur’: It’s no different than saying ‘let’s turn Darfur into the next Fallujah.’
[1] Reason for Their Death Is Known, Dahr Jamail