May 12, 2005, 8:11 a.m.
About Sudan
What has been done? What can be done?

EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece appears in the May 23, 2005, issue of National Review.

President Bush saw the movie Hotel Rwanda, twice. This is the movie that depicts the genocide in that country, and in particular the refusal of the U.N. — which had troops there — to lift a finger. Deeply interested, Bush arranged to meet the man on whose personal story the movie is based: the hotel manager, Paul Rusesabagina. They talked in the Oval Office, mainly about Darfur, Sudan. Rusesabagina said that what had occurred in Rwanda was occurring in Darfur. Bush said that he would do all he could to stop it. It is too late for some — for up to 400,000 — but not, of course, for all. We may say that it is never too late to stop genocide while there are people left standing.

It was last September 9 that the United States — in the person of then-secretary of state Colin Powell — declared that genocide was taking place in Darfur. There is now some debate across the government about whether genocide continues, although there is no doubt that extensive murder and other terror are ongoing. Is the U.S. doing everything it possibly can? The answer is no, if the possibilities include the dispatch of American troops to the region. But this is not counted as a possibility by anyone of influence. Short of troops, it may well be that the U.S. is doing all it can. The United Nations is another matter, as usual. It is hard to see how the Darfur genocide will stop anytime soon, absent much greater concerted action.

One genocide has already occurred in Sudan, of course — that is, it has already been completed. That is the genocide in the south, where Christians and animists live (or lived, we might note grimly). The Sudanese government wiped out 2.2 million, and displaced another 4.5 million. This regime, in Khartoum, is almost unfathomably evil. Led by President Field Marshal Umar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, it is a military dictatorship that is also Islamist and terroristic. According to Freedom House, “the government of Sudan is the only one in the world today engaged in chattel slavery.” Khartoum waged a long “jihad” — Bashir’s word — against the south, featuring a terror-famine of the kind seen in Stalin’s Ukraine and Mengistu’s Ethiopia. Bashir blocked the humanitarian relief that the West sought to give; the U.N., and the United States, under President Clinton, did not push very hard. Bestialities in the south included bombings, razings, concentration camps (called “peace villages”), and rape after rape after rape. That may be what is hardest about inquiring into Sudan: the constant rape, that great and ancient weapon of terror.

Sudan is so bad, it expresses an almost comic-book evil. In the southern genocide, one hospital was bombed five times; children were beheaded in front of their parents; the hungry were strafed as they gathered to await food drops. The government even ran a “death train,” in an almost willful imitation of the Nazis. . .

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