“There is no excuse on the face of the Earth to ignore what is happening in Darfur,” said Stephen Lewis last Thursday in the OISE auditorium. Lewis, the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, delivered the lecture as part of Hillel’s Holocaust Education Week. Entitled “Never Again: The Crisis in Sudan,” his talk was a moving plea for assistance in an ongoing tragedy which may have already claimed as many as 300,000 lives.
“It’s not all that complicated,” Lewis said. The current conflict in Sudan, he said, is largely the result of decades of government suppression which has left the people of the western Darfur region politically and economically marginalized. Although the local people have long been in a struggle with the central government for political power, the situation drastically worsened in the past year when persistent droughts in the north forced Arab tribes further south, precipitating a conflict over land.
The Sudanese government saw the conflict as an opportunity to rid itself of its opponents in the area, and to that end began supporting the now-infamous Arab militias known as the Janjaweed, which have been terrorizing inhabitants of Darfur.
Lewis, who recently visited Sudan, said the atrocities being committed in the country are “almost beyond the capacity of the human psyche to absorb.” As a result of Janjaweed campaigns of murder, rape, and kidnapping, at least 70,000 people have been killed and two million more have been displaced. Six to ten thousand people die of disease every month in refugee camps, which are surrounded by militias known to attack anyone who ventures out in search of supplies. The situation outside the camps is almost as dire, and Lewis says a great number of people in the countryside are dying of malnutrition.
The world’s attention has been fixed on Darfur since September 9 of this year, when US Secretary of State Colin Powell told the UN that the Janjaweed attacks amounted to a campaign of genocide against non-Arab Muslims in Darfur.
Although his lecture was part of Holocaust Remembrance Week, and comparisons to the 1994 Rwandan Genocide have been made in the media, Lewis says it is unclear whether or not the crisis in Darfur should be seen as genocide.
“But I’m not sure, frankly, if it matters,” he said. “Why be paralyzed by descriptive language?” In his view, the scale of suffering alone warrants international intervention in Sudan, preferably in the form of a peacekeeping force operated by the African Union and funded by the world’s richer nations. But instead, Lewis said, the UN has been passing “namby pamby resolutions” which he called “heartbreaking.”
He lamented that the “political constellation” of the United Nations hinders decisive international action, but he speculated that there is a more disturbing reason the developed world has not come to the aid of the Sudanese people: “There is a pretty ugly strain of subterranean racism at work,” he said, which allows policy makers in Europe and North America to “write off whole chunks of the African continent.” Lewis said he has encountered similar attitudes in his current work as the UN Envoy on HIV/AIDS.
Ending his speech with visible emotion, Lewis declared it was up to ordinary citizens like those in the audience to bring about a change in Sudan because “the governments that are in place…are not prepared to rescue the human condition in Africa.”
