New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof began his presentation to the overflowing crowd in 150 Columbia by showing images of people he met under trees he walked past when he first visited a refugee camp for those displaced by the genocide in Darfur, Sudan.
The first was a man who had been shot in the face and left for dead in a pile of bodies, two of which belonged to his parents. The man’s brother found him in the pile and carried him for 49 days to the refugee camp.
The fourth was a woman whose husband had been killed before her eyes, whose two small children were stripped from her arms and killed in front of her, and who was repeatedly gang raped alongside her two sisters, the two of whom were killed in front of her. Her attackers, Sudanese government sponsored Janjaweed militiamen, then scarred her leg to permanently and publicly stigmatize her as a rape victim.
Kristof said after hearing this story, he stood and saw trees like these ones all round him in every direction. That experience, he said, has kept him writing about “the first genocide of the 21st century.”
Darfur consists of a large area of mostly arid land in western Sudan. The conflict that has led to the genocide has pitted Arabs, who are generally lighter-skinned nomadic herdsmen, against non-Arabs, who are generally darker-skinned settled farmers, Kristof said. Conflict has simmered between these groups for centuries for a variety of reasons including competition for water and forage land, and climate change has exacerbated the conflict by spreading the desert and making water more scarce.
But, Kristof said, this is not a genocide caused by climate change. The devastating effects of climate change are evident in the neighboring countries of Chad and Niger. What’s fundamentally different in Sudan is that actors in the government have devised a policy of mass murder.
It began when anti-government insurrectionists rose in southern Sudan, and rational and pragmatic actors in the government decided to employ Arab militiamen to raid several of their villages to kill men and rape women, setting an example for future uprisings. This tactic devolved into policy and then a war, the peace accords of which were signed in 2005. But Janjaweed militiamen are still raiding villages in Darfur and the raids are spreading into the neighboring states of Chad and the Central African Republic.
In the average Janjaweed raid, 200 to 300 people attack a village and kill about 50. Most of the raiders feel a grudge against the villagers (complaints range from theft of water to encroachment on foraging territory to the occasional theft of livestock) but most are in it for the loot. Pillage from a raid can vastly improve one’s holdings in Darfur. Most Janjaweed will just shoot in the air, Kristof said, but there are some – maybe a couple dozen – who are more pathological. Sudan emptied its prisons to fill the ranks of the Janjaweed, Kristof said.
In the early stages of the conflict, women who told authorities they were raped were arrested for adultery. Now, women who leave the refugee camps to find firewood are raped regularly.
When he asked a local man why women get the firewood instead of men, the man told him “when men go, they are killed. When women go, they are only raped.”
“This is not rape as a byproduct of chaos,” Kristof said. “This is really a government policy of rape.”
The genocide is continuing because global political powers are allowing it to continue, Kristof said.
The Chinese government is propping up the Sudanese government, Kristof said in a panel discussion earlier Monday. Sudan exports 60 percent of its oil to China, and when Janjaweed shoot kids in Darfur, Kristof said, they do so with Chinese-made AK-47 assault rifles.
Kristof said American leadership has failed throughout history in stopping genocide. When Armenians were being slaughtered in 1915, President Woodrow Wilson looked the other way. During the Nazi Holocaust, President Franklin D. Roosevelt refused to bomb rail lines that were bringing people to the death camps. During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, President Bill Clinton refused to even use the term genocide because doing so might hold him responsible.
Because of lobbying efforts by evangelical Christian anti-genocide activists, President George W. Bush knew of the genocide early and aspired to use his power to put an end to it, Kristof said. But Bush’s aspirations haven’t translated into reality. He’s been pretty good about sending medical relief aid, Kristof said, but after four years of doctors carving bullets out of kids, continuing to fund the bandages has proven ineffective at stopping the genocide.
The media aren’t helping either, he said.
During the Nazi Holocaust, The New York Times published 24,000 articles on its front page. Only seven of them were concerned with the Nazi’s treatment of Jews, Kristof said. Additionally, he said, the three major broadcast networks showed 45 minutes of footage relating to Darfur, while dedicating 55 minutes of footage to the false confession in the JonBenet Ramsey murder case.
The staggering annual numbers of deaths from malaria and diarrhea and the late-1990s, early-2000s war in Congo – the most deadly conflict since World War II – are expensive stories to cover. News executives are less inclined to send a crew to Congo when their rival will cover a cheaper story about a runaway bride that will beat them in the ratings, Kristof said.
Kristof said he’s “not terribly optimistic about this being improved.”
Addressing the audience, Kristof said if the genocide is going to stop, “It’s gonna have to come from you and people like you.”
In Darfur, Kristof said, “there’s no doubt about it – you see evil – you feel evil.”
“The only thing we can do in response is to try and assert our humanity and stand up to it,” he said.
In the wake of Iraq, Kristof said, sending ground troops into oil-rich Sudan will not help end the genocide. It may even help Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir by allowing him to play the victim. President Bush should instead invite survivors of the genocide to the White House, have a primetime speech about Darfur, bring together global leaders for a summit on how to end the genocide, put pressure on the Sudanese government, work with regional Arab powers to pressure the Sudanese government, and send Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to speak with Sudanese leaders. Any or all of these would help, he said, because the situation is getting worse.
Individuals can help, Kristof said. People can call the White House, write letters to their congressmen, and write letters to local and foreign newspapers. The political pressure activists have put on the White House has already saved hundred of thousands of lives, Kristof said. The genocide will stop only as a result of the concerted efforts of many different actors working together, Kristof said, but it’s possible.
University student Natasha Compton, who watched the lecture on a live video feed in 123 Pacific, said she heard about the event from a friend. Now, Compton said, she’s planning on writing a letter of her own.
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