Africa's Brutal Lebensraum - New York Times

Africa's Brutal Lebensraum - New York Times: "As in Rwanda or even during the Holocaust, racist ideologies sometimes disguise greed, insecurity and other pathologies. Indeed, one of the genocide's aims is to drive away African tribes to achieve what Hitler called Lebensraum: 'living space' for nomadic Arabs and their camels.

So this village is simply a window into an entire region drenched in fear. Men walk about carrying homemade spears and machetes, and parents tie amulets around their children's necks."
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As the local county leader, Saudi Hassan, puts it, "The janjaweed are using humans as targets — they kill a person as if he were a chicken." Whether the offenders are Nazis or Hutu extremists or Sudan's janjaweed, that is a crime not only against the victims but also against all humanity. You can get ideas about what you can do at www.savedarfur.org, the Web site of the Save Darfur Coalition, which is planning a major rally on the Washington Mall on April 30.

It is brutally demoralizing for people in these villages to be hunted down as if they were wild beasts, to have their children pulled from their arms and thrown into burning huts. But we should be just as demoralized by our own indifference. The shame belongs not to the good people of Darfur and Chad, but to ourselves.