Posted on 03/29/2006 12:01:24 PM PST by knighthawk
As the killing, starvation and rape of Darfur residents by Arab Janjaweed militias continue unabated, a growing chorus of voices is calling for action to end the genocide. On U.S. college campuses and churches, in the halls of Congress, in European cities, in Africa, an urgent plea to stop the ethnic cleansing is rising. There is, however, a region noticeably absent from the outrage: the Arab world.
This week, Sudan's government - which has both turned a blind eye and encouraged the ethnic cleansing - hosted the Arab League's annual summit. Few in the Arab media or civil society protested the choice of venue.
Unlike the campaigns sweeping the U.S., there was no student-led campaign to save Darfur at an Arab university.
Arabic cyberspace - brimming with indignation (some of it justifiable, some narcissistic) over Palestine and cartoons and the Iraq war - barely registers a blip in a war perpetrated by Arab Muslims on other Muslims and non-Muslims of African descent.
By failing to acknowledge the suffering of Darfurians, wrote the courageous journalist Abdurahman al-Rashid, Arab intellectuals have become "accomplices to genocide."
Arab governments, to be sure, have gone through the motions of summits and talk of peace, but they have mostly sided with their counterparts in Khartoum, continuing to draw a line in the sand against the use of international troops to police Darfur. President Bush has suggested NATO troops might be necessary. African Union officials have acknowledged that UN troops might be needed down the road, though they gave Khartoum some breathing room at their recent summit, allowing the decision to be delayed until further peace talks (likely to fail) are completed.
The Arab League heads of state should have used their summit to stand on the right side of history and persuade Khartoum to immediately allow a United Nations peacekeeping force to take over from the thinly stretched 7,000 African Union troops guarding an area the size of Texas.
People are dying every day as a result of the intransigence of Sudan's National Islamic Front government. By allowing them to dither further amid polite diplomatic summitry, the Arab League becomes accomplices to the genocide.
The Arab League needs a fresh start. Founded 60 years ago amid the dying embers of European colonialism and the swirling winds of Arab nationalism and self-determination, the organization of 22 Arab states gropes for relevance today. It has few answers to the swirling currents buffeting Arab societies: a demographic youth bulge hungry for jobs and economic dignity, Islamist political challenges to the prevailing order, and rising Shiite-Sunni tension arising from the Iraq war.
If the Arab League has no answer to a member state committing genocide, then it should simply close its doors and go home, or do something useful and transform itself into a Middle East development bank that might spur job-creating growth for the millions of young men and women entering the labor market each year.
Individual Arab leaders must see the larger picture here: despite all of their assurances that reform is in the air, that they are opening more spaces for political freedoms, that they are transforming their economies, the fact remains that Sudan is systematically exterminating an innocent people. If Arab leaders and societies want the world to take seriously their long list of grievances against the West, they must start by looking inward and demanding that Sudan cease the rape of Darfur.
Molavi, a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, reports regularly from the Middle East.
Ping
Just send some Special Forces in to arm and train those who are being killed.
Arabs everywhere don't have much to say about Arab atrocities around the world. BUT, let someone make a cartoon insulting Islam or let an Arab convert to Christianity and they all come unglued.
Smokin' all that Janja weed.
The reason there is no outrage is that they are ok with it.
How about the entire free world?
Thanks for the ping.
The Arab powers and Arab League don't just lack outrage on the genocide.
They SUPPORT it. This is a fight by Arabs slaughtering Black Muslims in order to grab the oil. This is another Saudi Arabia regime in the making.
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