The year is 2025. Students at North Eugene High School are studying a modern history textbook that tells horrifying stories of the genocide that took place in Sudan at the beginning of the century. The young students are visibly upset when they hear stories of humans raping and killing other humans in massive numbers. The textbook has a scanned image of a column by Nicolas Kristof that ran in The New York Times on Nov. 29, 2005. The article tells the story of two sisters who belonged to the Fur tribe in Darfur. The girls watched a janjaweed commander behead their father when the father begged for the commander to let his daughters go.
One student asks, “Why do we have to learn about this? We can’t do anything about it now – it already happened.”
The teacher patiently explains that we must learn about history to avoid repeating it.
Another student asks, “But in the early 1990s, didn’t the same thing happen in Rwanda?”
People are disheartened about the Sudanese genocide in 2025. There is a best-selling novel out that tells the story of one brave woman who was able to hide from the janjaweed militia and survive, and it makes people sad. The movie “Camp Darfur” recounts the story of heroic members of the African Union who risked their lives to protect women from being raped when they left the refugee camps to gather firewood, and it makes people sad, just as people were sad in 2004 after watching “Hotel Rwanda.”
In 2005, people are shaking their heads and asking, “How could the U.S. government abandon the people in Rwanda? Didn’t they see that there were people there who couldn’t defend themselves?”
In 2025, people will shake their heads and ask, “How could the U.S. government abandon the people in Sudan? Didn’t they see that there were people there who couldn’t defend themselves?”
In 2025, college students in coffee shops ask each other hypothetical questions like, “If you were walking by a parking lot at night and saw a woman being raped, wouldn’t you stop to help? How could you just walk by and do nothing? That’s exactly what the United States did while women were being gang-raped in Sudan in 2005.” The college students are glad that the United States has learned from history and won’t let that sort of thing happen again.
In 2005, it’s time to stop talking about learning from history. It’s time to actually learn from it by working to prevent this hypothetical future – one where people are ashamed of the United States’ apathetic attitude toward yet another case of genocide in a far away country.
Despite recent news reports that brutal violence in Darfur is worsening as peace talks deteriorate, the Bush administration has not taken the necessary steps to help people who cannot defend themselves.
Government negotiators from the United States and other countries on the ground in Sudan are growing frustrated while our government pays only lip service to this crisis. Real people with homes, families, hobbies, nicknames, favorite hangouts and photo albums are being raped, beaten, tortured, enslaved and murdered. We cannot avert our eyes anymore. It is time to start paying attention and take action.