Sep 20, 2006

Sudan's President

The African Union's 7,000-strong mission in Darfur, which was scheduled to end in two weeks, was recently extended until the end of the year. BBC reports that Sudan's resolute leader has "totally rejected" replacing the AU with United Nations forces, claiming that it is "a Zionist plot." Several months of his repeated ranting has convinced his population that the UN's objectives include re-colonization to exploit Sudan's resources.

We often need names and faces to whom we can assign guilt -- despots and tyrants to represent the crime. Leaders like Kim Jong-Il, Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic became part of our lexis for their respective country's horrors. For all the press and charity that Darfur has garnered, Sudan's president has somehow been spared the universal infamy he deserves for silently presiding over a humanitarian crisis that has killed approximately 200,000 and displaced 2 million more. Somehow his name just doesn't stick (Apply the test to yourself now to see if you can remember), nor is it pronounced with the same contempt that we reserve for other dictators. Perhaps, the international community is partly to blame - politicians, diplomats and journalists - for not making Field Marshall Omar Hasan Ahmed al-Bashir's name synonymous with the endemic brutality he has allowed to ripen in the eastern region of his country.

Words and phrases such as 'genocide' and 'ethnic cleansing' cease to inspire the same spine-shuddering chill they once used to. The cold facts are more arresting - that a campaign of savage cruelty has been unabatedly executed by the janjaweed. al-Bashir's government denies links to the Arab militia (in fact, he has even referred to the janjaweed as "thieves and gangsters") yet his reaction to the slaughter carried out in their name against black Darfuris has been shamefully deficient. He has even been so callous as to suggest that the situation in Darfur has been exaggerated.

Little has convinced Mr. al-Bashir to use his authority to intervene and terminate the conflict between rebels and militia or to prevent the rape, violence and disease that flourishes in the refugee camps. Mounting pressure and the threat of sanctions is of little interest to a leader who still has faithful Islamic allies in the Middle East and an oil-hungry, veto-wielding China, countries whose reputations for morality have been, at best, ambiguous.

A couple of lines from Erasmus Darwin are worth remembering here: "He, who allows oppression, shares the crime." So, whether Mr. al-Bashir has given the janajaweed his blessing is irrelevant. It is time to be more forthright in associating the name with the offences in Darfur. Omar Hasan Ahmed al-Bashir is guilty of either actively sponsoring thousands of deaths or his neglect is criminally, and incomparably, profound.