The Unknown Candidate: Shrugs for the Dead

Monday, August 07, 2006

Shrugs for the Dead

By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times

This is the tale of two military interventions, of which one happened and the other didn’t.

Three weeks ago, with President Bush supplying the weaponry and moral support, Israel began bombarding Lebanon. The war has killed hundreds of people, galvanized international attention and may lead to an international force of perhaps 20,000 peacekeepers.

Three years ago, Sudan began a genocide against African tribes in its Darfur region. That war has killed hundreds of thousands of people, and it is now spreading. There is talk of U.N. peacekeepers someday, but none are anywhere in sight.

The moral of the story? Never, ever be born to a tribe that is victim to genocide in Africa.

Arabs have often argued that Americans have a double standard in the Middle East: We are more solicitous of casualties in Israel than in Gaza or Lebanon. I think they’re right, for a variety of reasons. (One is that terror attacks are particularly newsworthy; another is that journalists are more likely to live in Jerusalem than Gaza).

But if we have double standards, so do Arabs. I sympathize with their horror at what is happening in Lebanon, but I wish they were just as outraged when Muslims slaughter Muslims in Darfur.

Even the world as a whole has double standards. The U.S. and European countries are working frenetically on a U.N. solution in Lebanon, and there is talk of rapidly sending European peacekeepers to stop the bloodshed. In Darfur, there is nothing like as much interest in what is often considered the ultimate human crime: genocide.

The Tyndall Report, which monitors television network evening news programs, says that since the bombardment of Lebanon began, the crisis there has received more minutes of coverage on average each week than the Darfur genocide has received in total since it began in 2003.

Meanwhile, Darfur continues to drift toward chaos, and the contagion is spreading into Chad and Central African Republic. We may remember Darfur as only the beginning of a much broader calamity in all three countries that ended up claiming millions of lives.

There is , of course, no direct connection between the events in Lebanon and those in Darfur. But indirectly there is : the Arab president of Sudan is manipulating the anti-American feeling sweeping the Arab world to bolster his own authority and defy peacekeeping efforts. In this crazy world of ours, the bombardment of Lebanon has become one more reason to kill African villagers.

So what do we do with these two messes?

In the case of the Middle East, it’s time to use the crisis to push for a major settlement between Israel and Lebanon, even if that means Israel gives up Shebaa Farms and the U.S. engages in direct talks with Syria. Also, President Bush should put much more energy and initiative into the Israeli-Palestinian peace effort.

Sandy Berger, the former national security adviser, says that when he was flying by helicopter to the Israeli-Palestinian talks at Camp David in 2000, President Clinton turned to him and said, “We’re either going to succeed or get caught trying.” In other words, even if the effort to achieve a Middle East peace failed, there would still be a payoff for the U.S. in the court of global public opinion.

“We used to get criticized all the time for being too tough on the Palestinians, on the Arabs,” said Dennis Ross, a Middle East envoy for both President Clinton and the first President Bush. “But nobody ever accused us of not being passionate about trying to resolve the conflict. We got enormous credit for that, because we showed we weren’t indifferent to a core grievance in the region. It’s been an enormous mistake in the last few years to send a message of indifference.”

In the case of Darfur, what we need is precisely the attention that the Lebanon conflict has been getting in the last few weeks; a high-level U.S. envoy would be a start. And while we’re working to get U.N. peacekeepers into Darfur itself, we need to send an international force to the Chad side of the Sudan-Chad border, to stop the genocidal marauders who are invading Chad and destabilizing that country. Chad wants such a force — and it just might keep the catastrophe from spreading across the region.

Both of these cataclysms demand our attention. The killing of children is a tragedy even when they lack geopolitical significance, even when they are simply part of a knotty African genocide that doesn’t make the television news.

Photo credit: Nicholas D. Kristof. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)