Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

COLUMN: Spare Darfur
By Cyrus Hadadi
The Diamondback (U. Maryland)
06/15/2006

(U-WIRE) COLLEGE PARK, Md. — Three years after the beginning of President Bush's grand delusion to topple Saddam Hussein and transform Iraq into a democracy via guns and bombs, any sane and reasonable American has surely been shocked and awed into understanding - as our founding fathers grasped more than two centuries ago - America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. Yet lately I find myself accosted by "Save Darfur" posters defacing our campus, urging us to take action and "support a stronger multi-national force" to end alleged "genocide" in Sudan. With one failed misadventure in the Middle East in mind, it's with some trepidation that I reflect on the parallels between Iraq and Darfur. Another complex Middle Eastern conflict that doesn't involve our country has been essentialized into a cultural narrative where only the United States military can stop the evil, violent Arab Muslim. Ironically, the "Save Darfur" propagandists who claim they only want to prevent violence are actually trying to drag America into a new war. Do they think we've learned nothing?

First of all, a few objective facts about Darfur: The United Nations, the European Union and the African Union have all investigated and made it clear that, unlike Rwanda or Bosnia, the conflict in Darfur is not genocide. Darfur is also not an instance of Arabs or Muslims oppressing Christians or Africans. Both sides, the government-sponsored janjaweed militia and the rebels, include ethnically black Africans; Muslim and many on both sides are culturally Arab. But the most important fact about Darfur, the one the "Save Darfur" propagandists don't want you to know, is that the members of the rebel forces have been linked to Hassan al-Turabi, Sudan's attorney general and a follower of America's No. 1 enemy, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

The Sudanese government offered sanctuary to Osama bin Laden after he was expelled from Saudi Arabia in the early 1990s. However, by 1996 the government got nervous due to international pressure and forced him to leave. From Afghanistan, bin Laden encouraged his followers in Sudan to overthrow the government and create a new Taliban-like state instead. After bin Laden's follower Hassan al-Turabi tried to lead a coup but failed and was imprisoned, he began to encourage the conflict in Darfur by backing one of Darfur's leading rebel groups, the so-called Justice and Equality Movement. Bin Laden has actually threatened a new jihad in his global guerrilla war against the United States if a UN peacekeeping force comes to Darfur.

So let me try and get the "Save Darfur" propagandists straight: They want us to invade - wait, I'm sorry, "support a multi-national force" in - another Middle Eastern country, get stuck in the middle of another bloody war, and make even more enemies across the moderate Islamic world. Why? To support a rebel movement in Sudan with links to Osama bin Laden?

The "Save Darfur" propagandists must take honest Americans for real suckers to try and fool us with the same trick used to lure America into Iraq three years ago. But I guess it's easy for them to urge us into another war when they won't be the ones doing any of the actual fighting or dying. They can leave that to poor country boys from the Midwest and South.

Incidentally, I don't see a single "Save Darfur" activist shedding crocodile tears over a horrible crime that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands more civilians throughout the 1990s than the conflict in Darfur ever will; the United Nations estimates that Western sanctions on Iraq killed more than half a million Iraqi children. But the "Save Darfur" lipstick liberators only pretend to care about saving lives when it fits their political agenda - urging the United States into more invasions and more wars in the Middle East. The next time you have the misfortune to run into a gang of "Save Darfur" propagandists on the campus, remember the words of our president: "Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."

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