Nick Cohen, on Rowan Williams’ trip to Sudan:
Fashion matters and today the fashion is to ignore genocide. Quite rightly, the crimes of American, British, European and Israeli democracy are dissected and denounced. But an intellectual blockage – a Chinese wall in the mind – prevents the critics applying universal principles to far greater outrages.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, made my point for me in Sudan last week. Anyone who had heard the Church of England’s censure of Israel might have expected to see a primate filled with righteous wrath. Consider his opportunities. While he was there, the genocide was continuing in Darfur. The victims were black Muslims, but strangely, the Muslim world has not revolted against the Islamist murderers and torched Sudanese embassies.
In the name of inter-faith solidarity, Dr Williams might have found the words of reproach they lacked. If he didn’t want to talk about Darfur, there was the decades-long civil war, which has seen the enslavement of the Christian Dinka tribe in the south and two million dead, more than in Bosnia, Rwanda and Kosovo combined.
On a visit to a church in Khartoum, the fearless archbishop told the congregation: ‘It will be a joy to share with fellow Christians in Britain what… I have learnt from you.’ What he had learnt was a history of massacre, slavery and second-class citizenship, but he didn’t mention it.
The next stop was the Sudan Inter-Religious Council in Khartoum. This might have been the place to lay into the dictatorship’s murder and persecution of Sudanese Christians. Instead, he confined himself to saying: ‘We are at peace with God when we face our failings with honesty.’ And so it went on. He travelled through a country torn by religious mania and genocide without mentioning religious mania and genocide.
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