Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Consider the horror

Christopher Hitchens writing in Slate quotes Johann Hari:

At last, some good news from Darfur: the genocide in western Sudan is nearly over. There's only one problem - it's drawing to an end only because there are no black people left to cleanse or kill.

Then, in his last paragraph he nails it.
Nonintervention does not mean that nothing happens. It means that something else happens. Our policy in Darfur has not just failed to rescue a stricken black African population: It has actually assisted the Sudanese Islamists in completing their policy of racist murder. Thank heaven that we are tough enough to bear the shame of this, and strong enough to forgive ourselves.

Something so evil has gone on quietly yet unabashed while the guitars were strummed at Live8 and the UN shmoozed Mugabe, that in a strange way black humour - the laughter in the dark epitomised by words like Hari's - is, perhaps the only way to approach the horror without abandoning faith in the human race.

"Sudan Must've Worked Itself Out", The Onion laughed through the tears in June. I smirked that "Sudan and Wales Protest" back in March, but now I feel ashamed.

I read and researched and concluded that nothing had changed.

Sometimes I just feel like I want to dig a hole in the garden and bury my heart in it.

I would like to be able to vote that we should intervene; intervene directly and militarily. Does that sound naive or even neo colonialist? Who cares?

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