In high school, all of my history teachers told me that had it not been for crippling international diffidence, the Holocaust could have been prevented.
The purpose of reading all of those Holocaust memoirs in English class and going over the numbers and the gritty details in history was to remind us kids that we shouldn't ever forget how quickly and easily human ambition can spin out of control, and that as adults we have to watch out for the safety of our fellow man.
However, it's not like the Holocaust was the last example of genocide that the world has seen. Hopefully you remember the bloodshed in Rwanda in 1994, when over one million people were murdered in just about 100 days.
Despite the fact that the United Nations and the United States had intelligence well in advance of the massacre, they refused to step in and prevent it. As it continued, the crimes against humanity in Rwanda were ignored, making it probably the most damaging political situation of the 1990s and certainly the most embarrassing blunder of Clinton's term.
Right now, the first genocide of the 21st century is arguably taking place in a part of the Sudan called Darfur, where, since 2003, government-funded Janjaweed militias have been systematically murdering, raping and kidnapping hundreds of people every day. Since it began, an estimated 400 thousand people have been killed and over two million have been displaced and living in refugee camps for the past two years. The three ethnicities that are being targeted are the Fur, Masaalit and Zaghawa people.
The victims from these three groups are non-Arab Africans who are being purged from the country's population simply because the government wants the Sudan to be an Arab-only nation. The U.S. has called the situation in Darfur genocide, and not surprisingly, the U.N. prefers to use the term "ethnic cleansing."
After allowing the situation to continue for an atrocious amount of time-almost three years - the U.N. made its first attempt at offering help. They tried to send a peacekeeping force into the area last August, but it was met with threats of military action by the Sudanese government if any outsiders tried to enter the region.
Have you heard of Darfur until now? It's likely that you haven't, and it makes sense that it hasn't been getting much attention in the American news media lately. It is a little embarrassing to broadcast reports on a genocide that has been going unchecked for almost three years.
Many celebrities have stepped forward in hopes of pressuring the U.N. into action. Among them is Elie Wiesel, who wrote the Holocaust memoir that almost everyone read in school, "Night."
The Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor delivered an address to the U.N. in which he pleaded with officials to help the millions who are in danger not only of being harmed by the Janjaweed but also those who are dying every day in refugee camps from starvation and disease.
Since the address, there has been no further action, but the U.S. made the claim on the first of this month that it was trying to think of a course of action that the Sudan government would be more comfortable with. It's obvious that our government has interests in other parts of the world that are more important than saving the lives of millions of starving people who have no way to defend themselves.
When kids are sitting in classrooms 20 years from now, Darfur will exist in textbooks alongside the tragedies of Rwanda and the Holocaust. Hopefully they will realize that the world will always repeat the mistake of inaction and hesitate at the worst moments, no matter how high the cost.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
