Is the death toll between 60,000 and 160,000, as Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick told reporters during a recent trip to the region?No one has any idea of how many have died thus far, but I know this much. The toll is far too high, and sadly it continues to rise because no one - not the US, not the EU, and not the supposedly moral UN have lifted a damn finger to help. Well, that's not entirely correct.
Or is it closer to the roughly 400,000 dead reported recently by the Coalition for International Justice, a Washington-based nongovernmental organization that was hired by the United States Agency for International Development to try to determine whether the killing amounts to genocide. (Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell called the Darfur killing genocide last year, but Mr. Zoellick has studiously avoided the issue.) The State Department has said the higher mortality figures offered by some groups are "skewed" by overestimates of the number of deaths from violence in Darfur, rather than from disease and other causes.
Those trying to tally the terror are engaging in guesswork for a cause. They say they are trying to count the deaths to shock the world into stopping the number from rising higher than it already is. Sudan has not issued an estimate of its own, although officials in Khartoum label the numbers floating around as propaganda.
With death certificates nonexistent, census figures hopelessly out of date and much of Darfur's population uprooted from its home villages and scattered into makeshift settlements and camps, the only feasible way to count is through broad-brush statistical analysis.
The UN has written strongly worded statements condemning all the sides. The EU looks on as the macabre scene continues to unfold like a slow motion Kosovo. The US has actually provided logistical and technical support to African Union troops, but the AU troop contingent is too small and undermanned to provide a deterrent to the Janjaweed and Sudanese militias that continue to ravage the countryside.
So, the Dafur genocide is nothing more than a statistical exercise to determine body counts that should never have been allowed to pile up.
Technorati: Human Rights, Genocide
1 comment:
It's not that Darfur's ignored -- it's that the genocide is being used as a political football.
Kofi Annan used Darfur to get Bush to agree to take the situation to the ICC. It's not "genocide" you know.
The African Union is using the Darfur situation to "milk" the west. I.E., while Canada has offered military advisors, the AU has refused, but will take all the "logistic support" they can get.
Oh, and the New York Times gets mileage out of this editorial last week basically pointing out Bush isn't doing enough.
And, while everyone's grandstanding ... Darfur Christians and animists are dying ...
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