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If Not Darfur - Save Darfurians
Darfur, Sudan: Displaced Persons camp in the city of Nyala.
Two years and six months ago, our Secretary of State called it a genocide. If the genocide in Darfur, which has claimed about 500,000 lives, had occurred in Europe, we would have dropped whatever we were doing to save lives using our military force. In Darfur, since we refuse to use “first-choice” military options to stop the genocide, we had better pursue a less-desirable option: helping the people of Darfur to escape – all of them.
Major foreign policy thinkers proposed last September that we could use naval and air force power to force Sudan to stop the killing. That would be my first choice.
It did not happen. Worst yet, the endless negotiations have included us making empty threats of “Plan B” actions against Sudan’s genocidal government.
So I propose Plan C: to save Darfurians by permitting massive migration far away from west Sudan. Today, we are keeping people huddled into camps within their genocidal country, when we should help many more people to escape.
Advocates say that refugees have a “right to return” to their homes – but no one asks if they really have a desire to return to their homes. We should remember that in Darfur, there is no home to return to. A series of years with little rainfall has made good land hard to find – and that was one of the main causes of the conflict between “Black” agriculturalists and “Arab” nomadic groups.
How many refugees from Darfur has our own country taken in? How many have Darfurs’ neighbors such as Egypt, Kenya, and Ethiopia taken in?
The only people who seem to have escaped this place have wound up in camps in Chad – not the friendliest place for refugees. The heavy emphasis on helping people in “Internally Displaced Persons Camps” is due to the fact that we do not have an outpouring of countries ready to take Darfurians in. It all sounds too familiar – the western world might have prevented the Holocaust, for example, if it had opened the door for Jews to massively migrate to their own countries.
The US government, in light of this major policy failure, should work to secure a safe path for mass migration of all Darfur’s people.