One segment of Peter Tatchell’s piece on Darfur (excerpted at Harry’s Place) rings false for me:
If these massacres were happening to white people in Surrey or Sweden, you can be sure there would be swift intervention to halt the killing. One cannot help wonder whether the global indifference to the slaughter in Darfur has anything to do with the fact that the victims are black.
This is such a tired line. The most significant feature, surely, is that the killings are taking place in an avowedly Islamist state. If there was a Christian, or secular, regime in Khartoum – and certainly if it was Western-backed – the uproar from the Muslim world would be deafening, and the Left would have mobilised in force by now in countless demonstrations and conferences. As it is, any feasible ending to the suffering – in terms of UN action – is opposed by Khartoum as neo-colonialism, and would almost certainly be greeted by violent condemnation across the Muslim world as yet another crusade by the West against Islam. Muslims being killed is only a problem if the perpetrators are non-Muslims.
For much of the Western Left Darfur simply doesn’t push the right anti-American buttons. Mind you, I see from the comments to Tatchell’s article that strenuous efforts are being made to incorporate Darfur into a more familiar story:
The UN fact-finding commssion that exhaustively investigated the situation in Darfur, as opposed to pulling things out of your bum as you are doing, explicitly stated that there was NO GENOCIDE and gave several reasons why this was not so.
It said yes, most of the rights violations were committed by the government forces but these were committed in the context of counterinsurgency warfare, such as the far more egregrious atrocities being committed by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, and not with any sort of genocidal intent.
The reason for the suffering in Darfur is the Western-armed and -financed insurgency whose only purpose is to grab Sudan’s vast oil wealth away from China and hand it to Chevron.
The insurgency in the south, fomented by US christian evangelists in Uganda, started for the same reason. As soon as Khartoum solved that, the US started one in Darfur and another one in the north, with French and Israeli help, using Chad and Eritrea for training and supply bases.
Phew – it is the West’s fault, after all.
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