Self-Doubt, Language, and Darfur

When I was a senior in college I organized a rally to remember the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. We read names of the victims, and read some harrowing first-person accounts gleaned from the Internet -- all from the steps of the Duke Chapel. At the time, April 2004, we proclaimed "Never Again" they same way they did before the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Yet even then, we were aware of the conflict in Darfur, although I have to admit that personally I knew little about it, except that some right-wing activists had called for divestment from Sudan, mainly as a counterpoint to the Israel divestment campaign.

Darfur continued to be a low-attention news story for a while, then reached its peak of publicity when the Secretary of State Colin Powell officially described it as a genocide. That was September 9, 2004; he resigned nearly a month later. Was that a last-ditch effort to do some rhetorical good before leaving an administration condemned for being too hawkish?

What it reminds me of is seeing all those documentaries about Rwanda, which revealed the linguistic hoops the Dept. of State jumped through specifically to avoid labeling what was happening in Rwanda as a genocide. Then Sec. of State Warren Christopher and spokesperson Christine Shelly relied heavily on the phrase "acts of genocide," and when pressed to clarify, it became clear that the State Dept. was reluctant to use the word "genocide" since its legal definition would require international intervention under the UN Genocide Convention. Article I of the document states:

The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and punish. (UN Genocide Convention)

Anyway, all this makes me wonder how this debate fell completely under the radar in 2004 (exactly 10 years later) and how this issue of language has not been used to make a further case for international intervention in Sudan. These thoughts were inspired by today's NPR piece on Darfur of which I caught the tail end. Why has this issue which once seemed important to me --and to our nation-- faded into obscurity? Perhaps the best explanation was put forth by one of the guests on the show: because when faced with a tough, uncertain decision which cannot guarantee a successful outcome, people would just prefer to do nothing. So that is largely what I have done and what the U.S. has done (although they did help broker the recent peace deal, which one of the experts said has little chance of succeeding).

Do we really believe it when we say "never again"? No, of course not. I guess we mean never again will we let it happen to ourselves, or at least to a people whose lives we value significantly.