GENOCIDE IS not being committed in Darfur. This is not a popular position, I know. But to call what's happening there "genocide" when it's not is unlikely to help the people of Darfur -- and could even make it harder to mobilize the public to respond to similar crises in the future.
For 25 years, I've studied and written about conflicts, human rights catastrophes and humanitarian emergencies in Africa. I'm all too familiar with the many official excuses for inaction that can be given while millions of civilians die. Sadly, one of the reasons I prefer working as an attorney for prisoners on death row, rather than as a foreign policy analyst, is that I find it far less depressing than trying to change U.S. policy toward Africa.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday May 21, 2006 Home Edition Current Part M Page 3 Editorial Pages Desk 0 inches; 21 words Type of Material: Correction
Darfur: A May 14 article in Current about Darfur said the provinces are in eastern Sudan. They are in western Sudan.
The debate about what to do in Darfur -- and the use of anti-genocide rhetoric to arouse public concern -- has only deepened my misgivings about the way the United States responds to African crises.
From September 2004 to July 2005, I worked as Human Rights Watch's interim advocacy director for Africa, helping to publicize the organization's findings in Darfur. Beginning in February 2004, Human Rights Watch researchers documented horrifying abuses and released evidence that the Sudanese government was responsible for them.
There are no reliable estimates of how many Africans have died in Darfur. Including those killed in attacks and those who have died from disease or malnutrition, the total could be as high as 200,000.
As with so many tragedies in Africa, no one had heard of Darfur until U.N. humanitarian organizations began reporting that hundreds of thousands of civilians had been driven out of their villages. If the world had noticed and responded in early 2003, when the Sudanese government first armed groups of Arab nomads, known as \o7janjaweed\f7, and ordered them to attack villages suspected of harboring antigovernment rebels, the question of genocide would have never arisen -- and thousands could have been saved.
But it wasn't until December 2003 that U.N. relief officials warned about an impending humanitarian disaster in Darfur. Soon after, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reported that \o7janjaweed\f7, in concert with Sudanese military units, were slaughtering and displacing villagers.
