Comment is free: Darfur: the awful silence: "Brian Brivati wrote here yesterday on the disappointing near-silence where the ongoing massacres in Darfur are concerned. And while not everyone is silent, we're certainly not hearing much.
Nat Hentoff wrote on this a few days ago, and observed:
With the number of corpses in Darfur steadily mounting, and President Bush again seriously involved in confronting what he has accurately called the genocide there, Mr. Bolton has been pressing hard to get the United Nations moving against the resistance of the government of Sudan, the perpetrator of the genocide.
Among Mr. Bolton's goals is sending a UN force, with possible NATO components, into Darfur to bolster the present small, beleaguered African Union contingent. He is also proposing targeted UN sanctions against some of the chief organizers of the genocide in the Sudanese government. (Britain is also working on a resolution that could lead to warrants from the International Criminal Court against the architects of the genocide.)
The three members of the UN security council blocking Mr. Bolton's proposed measures are Russia, China and Qatar. Qatar -- home of the Al Jazeera TV network but also with strong military ties to the United States -- represents the Arab states in the decision-making UN security council.
As Mr Avni reports, although UN secretary-general Kofi Annan recently spent a weekend in Qatar, he did not even discuss Sudan during his visit.
Annan, of course, is uninterested in offending China, which has substantial oil interests in the Sudan. And the United Nations, as has become clear, is only interested in human rights when they can be used as a political weapon against the West, and particularly America. A genocide in which Arab Muslims are killing black African Muslims doesn't fit into that category and doesn't push the right buttons among many Western 'human rights' activists for that matter.
Saudi blogger The Religious Policeman recently noted that the Muslim world isn't very interested either:
This is the big meeting of the OIC, the Organization of the Islamic Conference. So are they finally going to resolve the Darfur conflict, the brown-Muslim-on-black-Muslim genocide that has already claimed an estimated 300,000 lives?
Well, actually, no.
Professor Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, secretary-general of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, is contacting member states for an emergency meeting of their foreign ministers shortly to discuss major issues including the repercussions of the sacrilegious Danish cartoons.
Silly me, I should have realized. Cartoons are far more important than a "few dead darkies". We already learnt that after the 2006 Makkah Stampede.
It seems clear that nowadays you can get away with war crimes and genocide without even attracting much comment -- so long, at least, as the hand that performs the unspeakable acts can't be connected to the West.
There's a rather negative take on what can actually be done about Darfur here, from military analysts Jim Dunnigan and Austin Bay. But we should at least be talking about it much more than we are."
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