On April 24, 2005, the U.S. Senate passed the Darfur Accountability Act, which adds $90 million for humanitarian aid to Darfur. It also calls for sanctions against the government of Sudan and demands that the genocide stop. The House of Representatives has not yet voted on similar legislation. But Congress has already urged President Bush to call what is happening in Sudan “by its rightful name – genocide.” He has yet to do so.

Senator Jon Corzine (D-NJ), one of the sponsors of the Darfur Accountability Act, said, “If we are committed to saying never again with regard to the killing fields of Cambodia or the genocide of Rwanda, or even the kinds of actions that took place in World War II, we need to react to what is happening now. We can’t have a review of our actions and history showing that we stood on the sidelines when we could have taken a stand on a moral issue.” (www.wnbc.com, 4/22/05)

Unfortunately, that is what the United States and other countries have done repeatedly – “stood on the sidelines.” The U.S. deplored the genocide of Armenians during World War I, Jews during World War II, as it did genocide in Cambodia in the 1970s, genocide against the Iraqi Kurds in the 1980s, and genocide against Bosnians and Rwandans in the 1990s.

Will the same pattern repeat itself in a new century?

The signs are ominous. Recently, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick visited Sudan and dramatically understated the number of deaths in Darfur, saying the State Department estimated them to be 60,000 to 160,000. But those who have studied closely what is happening in Darfur – among them the Coalition for International Justice, John Hagan of Northwestern University, and Eric Reeves – put those numbers close to 400,000.

As the Washington Post commented editorially (4/24/05): “Mr. Zoellick deserves credit for visiting Sudan and declaring that ‘what has gone on in Darfur has got to stop.’ He may feel that the precise mortality numbers don’t matter. But his international partners will continue to drag their feet unless they are forced to confront the full horror of the killings. If they are allowed to believe that the death toll is one-third of its real level, the Russians and Chinese will pursue their commercial interests in arming Sudan’s government and extracting its oil; Europe will make inadequate humanitarian gestures; the Arab world will ignore the murderous policy of a fellow Muslim government; and the African Union, which has a peace monitoring force in Darfur, will not step up its intervention enough to stop the killing. Mr. Zoellick needs to shake everyone awake.”

Another ominous sign was the response of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice when asked by the Washington Post (3/25/05) how many peacekeepers are needed to stop the genocide in Darfur. “I can’t give a number,” she said. The reporter persisted, saying that the UN Humanitarian Coordinator had said that “if the deterioration of humanitarian access continued, he could imagine 100,000 dying a month.” Secretary Rice responded, “I just can’t judge.”

Eric Reeves commented, “Rice’s response tells all too much about the Bush administration’s refusal to consider humanitarian intervention, even as it becomes increasingly clear that without such intervention, Mr. Bush will oversee precisely the genocide of which he declared early in his administration: ‘not on my watch.’” (“Humanitarian Intervention for Darfur: Does the International Will Exist?” on www.sudanreeves.org)

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called Darfur “little short of hell on earth.” But the best the UN has been able to do is to ask the International Criminal Court to investigate war crimes there. As a New York Times article declared (4/29/05), ‘the UN has done so not only in the hope of ending the bloodshed but also, some diplomats say, because it would allow the Security Council to postpone direct intervention and nonetheless appear to be taking action.”

In her book “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” Samantha Power explains why the U.S. and other nations have done so little in the past to stop genocide (from the Armenian genocide of World War I through the Rwandan genocide if 1994). “The most common response is, ‘We didn’t know.’ This is not true. To be sure, the information emanating from countries victimized by genocide was imperfect…But although the U.S. officials did not know all there was to know about the nature and scale of the violence, they knew a remarkable amount.

“A second response to the question of why the United States did so little is that it could not have done much to stop the horrors…[But] for all the talk of the likely futility of U.S. involvement, in the rare instances that the United States did act, it made a difference….A Rwandan hotel owner credits a U.S. diplomat’s mere phone calls with helping convince militias not to attack the Tutsi inhabitants of his hotel during the genocide….

“The real reason the United States did not do what it could and should have done to stop genocide was not a lack of knowledge or influence but a lack of will. Simply put, American leaders did not act because they did not want to. They believed that genocide was wrong, but they were not prepared to invest the military, financial, diplomatic, or domestic political capital needed to stop it. The U.S. policies crafted in response to each case of genocide examined in this book were not the accidental products of neglect. They were concrete choices made by this country’s most influential decision –makers after unspoken and explicit weighing of costs and benefits.”

Power charges a series of American presidents with failing to respond adequately to genocide: Woodrow Wilson (the Armenian genocide); Franklin Roosevelt (the Jewish genocide); Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter (the Cambodian genocide); George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton (the Bosnian genocide); Bill Clinton (the Rwandan genocide).

But these presidents and their administrations are not solely to blame. Where were the American people. And where are President George Bush and the American people today?

The United States ratified the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, in which Article I declares: “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.”

If President Bush were to call what is happening today in Darfur by its right name – genocide – the United States would be obliged to “undertake and punish.”

Power concludes her study with the following words: “George Bernard Shaw once wrote, ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’ After a century of doing so little to prevent, suppress, and punish genocide, Americans must join and thereby legitimate the ranks of the unreasonable.”

Please respond to the following questions:

3.   What is the Darfur Accountability Act? What is your opinion of it? Why?

4.   What signs have there been that the Bush administration is not inclined to declare that genocide is occurring in Darfur? Why?

5.   What reasons does Power give for the U.S. failure to act aggressively during previous genocides?

6.   What do you think ordinary American citizens might do to get its government to act?