The Pain of the G-8’s Big Shrug

Is genocide really that bad?
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As President Bush and the Group of 8 leaders who are meeting in
Japan again shun their responsibilities in Darfur, there is a serious
argument to be made that genocide is overrated as an international
concern. The G-8 leaders implicitly accept that argument, which goes
like this:
Genocide is regrettable, but
don’t lose perspective. It is simply one of many tragedies in the world
today — and a fairly modest one in terms of lives lost.
All
the genocides of the last 100 years have cost only 10 million to 12
million lives. In contrast, every year we lose almost 10 million
children under the age of 5 from diseases and malnutrition attributable
to poverty. Make that the priority, not Darfur.
Civil
conflict in Congo has claimed more than 5.4 million lives over the last
decade, according to careful mortality surveys by the International
Rescue Committee. That’s at least 10 times the toll in Darfur, but
because Congo doesn’t count as genocide — just as murderous chaos — no
one has paid much attention to it.
Does
a mother whose child dies from banditry, malaria or AIDS grieve any
less than a mother whose child was killed by the janjaweed?
The
world has been trying to pressure Sudan to stop slaughtering Darfuris
for nearly five years, yet the situation in some ways is worse than
ever. In contrast, we know how to combat malaria, child mortality and
maternal mortality. The same resources would save far more lives if
they were used for vaccinations and bed nets.
So
instead of pushing President Bush to worry about Darfur, where it’s not
clear he can make a difference, get him to focus on bed nets or
deworming or iodizing salt in poor countries or stopping
mother-to-child transmission of the virus that causes AIDS or so many
other areas where his attention could have a humanitarian impact.
Genocide is horrific, but that doesn’t make it a priority.
This is a coherent and legitimate argument, and there are moments when I catch myself sympathetic to it.
Yet
in truth, genocide has always evoked a transcendent horror, and it has
little to do with the numbers of victims. The Holocaust resonates not
because six million Jews were killed but because a government picked
people on the basis of their religious heritage and tried to
exterminate them. What is horrifying about Anne Frank’s diary is not so
much the death of a girl as the crime of a state.
There are also
practical arguments, for genocide can create cycles of revenge and
displacement that make it far more destabilizing than any famine or
epidemic. The Darfur genocide may well lead all Sudan to fragment into
civil war, interrupting Sudanese oil exports and raising oil prices.
The
Armenian genocide still festers after nearly a century; and former
President Bill Clinton has said that his greatest foreign-policy
mistake was his failure to respond in Rwanda. In the same way, the
G-8’s collective shrug today about the Darfur genocide — because the
victims are black, impoverished and hidden from television cameras —
will be a lingering stain.
After five years of genocide,
President Bush still hasn’t taken as simple a step as imposing a no-fly
zone or even giving a prime-time speech about it. He gave Beijing a
gift, his pledge to attend the opening ceremony of the Olympics,
without pushing hard for China to suspend military spare-parts and arms
deliveries to Sudan.
The Islamic world has been even more
myopic, particularly since the victims in Darfur are all Muslim. Do
dead Muslims count only when Israel is the culprit? Can’t the Islamic
world muster one-hundredth as much indignation for the genocidal
slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Muslims as it can for a few
Danish cartoons?
This coming Monday, the prosecutor of the
International Criminal Court is expected to seek an arrest warrant in
connection with Darfur, and his past statements suggest that it may be
for the Sudanese president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, for genocide. That
would be a historic step requiring follow-through.
A personal
note: I have seen children dying of AIDS and hunger; I have had malaria
and been chased through the jungle by militias. I want the G-8 to
address all the aspects of global poverty, yet nothing affects me as
much as what I have seen in Darfur.
I tilt obsessively at the
windmills of Darfur because, quite simply, its people haunt me: the
young woman who deliberately made a diversion of herself so the
janjaweed would gang-rape her and miss her little sister running in the
opposite direction; the man whose eyes were gouged out with a bayonet;
the group of women beaten with their own babies until the children were
dead.
Yes, genocide truly is “that bad.”