Last night I watched with tremendous sadness the rerun of this week’s Now with Bill Moyers, which focused, in the latter half of the segment, on the genocide currently being perpetrated in western Sudan. The story had previously caught the corner of my eye over the past few months.
The powerful interview with Julie Flint (link above takes you there) detailed how the Darfur region of Sudan (a country about the size of Texas) has been entirely depopulated, razed, destroyed, denuded and made “uninhabitable.” The government of Sudan in coalition with local militas have systematically murdered and turned over whole Muslim villages to ensure that that part of the country can no longer rise again.
According to the interview with Ms. Flint, the Sudanese did not just uproot villages — they carefully tore out whole fields, destroyed any water and food supplies and raped women daily.
I ask myself what happened when we, after Rwanda, said (more or less) Never Again; when the UN said it will be ever more vigilent against mass murder; when the world took Bosnia at its word and brought soldiers like Wesley Clark into the maelstrom; when 320,000 dead innocents (at the minimum) would constitute the State Department’s edict of “genocide” and not some mealy-mouthed “internal strife” or somesuch; when ethnic cleansing is staged without benefit of cameras and microphones.