Darfur vs. Lebanon
While Israel, a rogue state, is reducing its northern neighbor to a failed state, Sudan already is both. The escalating disaster in the west of that giant country, larger than Western Europe, is being totally eclipsed by the Lebanon war:
“If there hadn’t been a war in Lebanon, we would have all been up in arms over the deterioration in Darfur which has happened of late,” Egeland said.
The top U.N. envoy in Sudan, Jan Pronk, said Darfur was not forgotten but the U.N. Security Council was busy with Lebanon.
“I understand fully well that the Security Council is devoting 95 percent of its time to Lebanon,” he said.
It is not inconceivable that denizens of Darfur are less understanding.
Village torched by Janjaweed milita, Darfur.
Writes leading Darfur specialist, Eric Reeves:
Humanitarian access has been severely attenuated, and more than 25% of those the UN classifies as “conflict-affected” are beyond the reach of all assistance; in some areas the figure is much greater. This affected population in Darfur, and eastern Chad, now approaches 4 million; in other words, a million people no longer have any access to food assistance, medical care, or adequate clean water. Wholesale humanitarian evacuations draw daily nearer.
All this occurs against a backdrop of rapidly rising malnutrition rates, especially among children under five; an outbreak of cholera, this in the midst of the heaviest part of the rainy season; continuing large-scale civilian displacement; and intolerable conditions amidst many of the camps for displaced persons. The camps themselves are cauldrons of rage and despair, now often turned against the African Union (AU) forces supposedly protecting civilians and humanitarians.
But the hopelessly ineffective AU is unable to enter the vast majority of camps for fear of attack, and has mounted many fewer patrols in recent months. The AU mission is currently slated to end at the end of September, but the UN has still not authorized a successor force.
The stumbling block is oil-thirsty China, whose intransigence on behalf of its rogue client state equals that of the US on Israel’s behalf. Yet there is an asymmetry: Whereas China threatens to veto any Chapter 7 resolution authorizing an international peacekeeping force in defiance of Khartoum, the US threatens to veto any resolution that does not authorize such a force in defiance of Beirut. In other words, China wields its veto power to buttress legal state sovereignty; the US wields its ditto in contradiction thereof. About the humanitarian dimension, neither really gives a damn.
The result may very well be that an international peacekeeping force with a robust mandate is sent to occupy south Lebanon on behalf of Israel as a reward for the latter’s willful and catastrophic escalation of a low-intensity border conflict, while millions of Darfurians continue to be starved, gang raped, shot, or hacked to death by genocidal Janjaweed, abetted by the bombs of the Sudanese Air Force.
Thus the rogue regimes of Khartoum and Tel Aviv will be equally pleased.
It’s a sobering prospect for anyone clinging to the hope that in A.D. 2006, power and basic decency can mix.
For some background on the Darfur disaster, see my post from earlier this year: They sing when they rape.
