The Highlander

Governmental officials jockeying for power and advantage, playing fields bargaining liberty and control, debate over morality and justice. An impenetrable world clouded by misinformation, confusing lingo, and in-navigable loopholes. A world which has some measure of influence and involvement throughout the world; over lives and homes, individuals, families, and entire races. This world of words and debate has its hands all over the conflict in Darfur, Sudan. It is not merely the politics between the Sudanese Government and the guerilla rebels, or its political and financial support of the Jangaweed militia. It is not merely the Arab dominance in the Sudanese political arena with President Omar al Bashir actively promoting the mindset of genocide against Sudan's native Black Africans.

This genocide is seeped with political intentions, sure enough, but so are the moves and motives of stopping it. Why is the USA dragging its feet, when the US government was the first to recognize the conflict as genocide? Why is the Bush administration not doing everything it can to place pressure on the Sudanese government? Even England's Prime Minister Tony Blair is threatening Sudan with isolation if Bashir does not work on a renewed peace agreement. So where is the USA? We throw around words like 'genocide' but where is the action to back it up? The Associated Press puts it bluntly, "What makes a mockery of international denouncements of the conflict is the lack of political will and leadership to take the next steps: deploying the 23,000-soldier peacekeeping force that the U.N. Security Council has mandated for Darfur, curtailing the brutal militias and pressuring Sudan's government to reach a political accord with the rebels." To sum it, up our hands are tied with politics. In the 1990's AlBashir hosted Osama bin Laden for five years, so he has information on al Qaeda. "It's been a very good deal for the government of Sudan to give little tidbits of information about suspects around the world in order to blunt United States outrage over what's happening in Darfur" (CBS News).

We as a nation are caught in a tension of lives. On one side there is our own security as a nation, and the question of whether or not the information we are receiving about al Queda is truly invaluable. On the other side are the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and refugees living in nightmarish situations. The extremity of the situation was described to a CBS reporter by the one doctor employed to treat an entire refugee camp of 25,000 people, "This is bad. They go to the villages, and they burn one village after the other, then when the people come out they catch the women and gang bang, they rape them, not one guy, no ten, fifteen then they carve up the men and throw them in the drinking water to make sure that this place will never ever be used again. And you're telling me the people in America don't know this or don't want to know this. Maybe its too much to know but that's what's happening right now and its happening all over again," Dr. Brahma says. "I'm sorry to say I'm going to sit here with you in two years time and I'm gonna tell you the same sad story. People will say, 'Ich habe nicht gewusst,' which is German for 'I didn't know'" (CBS News).

And why don't we know? Because the politics involved are too touchy to allow mass education on the conflict. The American people must not know the full details of why we are not acting upon our sentiment. It would not do to have knowledge that we might be held accountable for after thousands more people are murdered. It is far better for our consciences to claim ignorance.

And so I present the question, would you rather sit back and claim ignorance for the sake of collecting information that is years old, or take action to persuade our government to get its hands dirty and push to save lives in Darfur? These are real people, real lives, real children. Can we truly ignore the problem?

To give a better picture of this issue CBS News has a segment of a 60 Minutes special done on the life of one of Darfur's refugees. Check it out by going to the website, http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/60minutes/main3415.shtml and clicking on the Searching for Jacob story.

Avoid ignorance and make a difference.

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