Dafur Disaster

The death of Sudanese Vice-President John Garang DeMabior in an aircraft crash is yet another disaster in the long series of disasters (the two decades that include both the Dafur genocide and Sudanese civil war). (Conflicting reports identify the aircraft as a helicopter and an airplane.) The plane had crashed Saturday evening in a mountain region in Southern Sudan, and on Monday the government confirmed that Garang.

It should be clearly stated that Garang is no angel, having been the leader of the SPLM, a Sudanese rebel group fighting with the Khartoum government that had been persecuting southern Sudanese for two decades. However, he signed a peace deal in January to end the 21-year-old conflict in Southern Sudan, but that step did little to stop the genocide in Dafur.

As part of that deal, Garang became the Vice-President of a reconciliation government. One of his roles was negotiating an end to the janjaweed genocidal raids in Dafur. His death throws those efforts into chaos.

Double toothpicks has more. This is the kind of issue that should be an above the fold story at the mainstream media. Instead, it gets buried in the news, behind Natalee Holloway, shark attacks, and Rafael Palmiero being suspened for 10 games for violating the MLB substance abuse policy (and for the record, he claims it was an inadvertent violation - as if he didn't know what could or couldn't be ingested? - he simply didn't care).

The NYT reports that Sudan turns deadly after Garang's death was reported. That's utter nonsense. Sudan was hardly peaceful before his death; the genocide had killed more than 200,000 in the last year and change. That's a couple hundred a day. Do the math. Yet, it is Garang's death that caused this latest violence. What an utter perversion of reality.

Let us recall that the last time that African leaders died under somewhat mysterious circumstances in a failed state, 800,000+ Rwandans were slaughtered in 1994's genocide all while the UN didn't bother to check the black boxes that it mysteriously rediscovered in a supply closet last year. Garang was defending the interests of those who had been the focus of the janjaweed slaughter, and now the whole process is a mess, but the Times focuses on the wrong side here (as usual).