Darfur now and then

Editorial

Last August, when the United Nations' regional commander, Gen. Martin L. Agwai, said war in Darfur was over, there was anger from activists worldwide and aid workers on the ground, who have struggled for years to ensure that the plight of Darfuris does not go unnoticed.

This week, after Daniel Augstburger, the director of the African Union-United Nations humanitarian liaison office in Darfur, said essentially the same thing, there was little opposition. Now, it seems, there is general agreement. The threat of imminent genocide in Darfur has passed for now. For the first time in years, farmers are planting crops. People are trickling out of the refugee camps that, a few months ago, were the only safe refuge from the lawless rapists and slaughterers known as "janjaweed" militias, who operated with the implicit if not enthusiastic endorsement of the Sudanese government in Khartoum.

No need for rejoicing. There is no happy ending. There are still 2.7 million Darfuris in refugee camps. The United Nations says 300,000 have died in this conflict. But the possibility that peace has come may be the best news the people of Darfur and those who care about them have heard in a violent decade. And while Darfur may seem a long way from Vancouver, this may be the moment for some close-to-home truth and reconciliation.

It is a source of great pride that the invisibility of the Darfur genocide was taken up by Jewish Canadians, a fact that had a profound impact on bringing this to the world's attention. Clement Apaak, a student at Simon Fraser University, started Canadian Students for Darfur. He and his cause came to the attention of West Coast Jewish activists, on the basis that "Never Again" means never again for Jews and non-Jews alike. Robbie Waisman, a member of the Canadian Jewish Congress board, and other Holocaust survivors, spoke out and brought the Darfur reality to the eyes and ears of many Canadians who had never even heard of the place.

Canadian Jewish Congress, Pacific Region, took up the cause, which went national, finding an ally in B.C. Senator Mobina Jaffer, who would become Canada's special envoy to the peace process in Sudan. Canadian leadership on this issue helped raise the attentions of Washington and the world.

Yet, more than three years ago, the founder of Canadian Students for Darfur, Apaak, gave an interview that has still not had the resonance it deserves.

In the interview with Terry Glavin that appeared in the Georgia Straight (Sept. 28, 2006), Apaak warned that the left broadly, and "peace activists" and "social justice" activists specifically, were largely ignoring the Darfur crisis.

His first assertion, which is incendiary only for those who have not being paying attention, was that the left did not take up the cause of Darfur because of their dislike for the former United States administration – the same government that opposed the Sudanese regime in Khartoum that has incited and supported the janjaweed militias. That the Canadian left would remain nearly silent – or do anything short of screaming bloody murder – is as grave a sin imaginable for people who call themselves progressive. But this is in a context where the left is almost unanimous in wanting to draw Canadian troops out of Afghanistan, Afghani women and girls be damned. These are the same peaceniks who want the Allied forces out of Iraq, regardless of the incipient civil war and possible humanitarian catastrophe such a vacuum would leave. In the context of the left's insouciance about the lives of non-Palestinian millions worldwide, their nonchalance toward the Darfur genocide is not as surprising as it should be, albeit no less appalling.

The real bombshell Apaak lobbed during the Glavin interview was the suggestion that the left wasn't active on Darfur because it was a cause taken up by Jews.

The Sudanese president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, since last March a wanted man facing charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity from the International Criminal Court, rests his case on a familiar enemy. The entire Western interest in what is happening in Darfur, he has said, is part of an attempt to "redraw the region ... in order to protect the Israelis, to guarantee the Israeli security." As ludicrous as this despot's defence may be, the outcome has been catastrophic.

Remember, while the global left has been braying about Israel, accusing the Jewish state of perpetrating genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and holocaust against Palestinians, actual genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and holocausts have been taking place elsewhere, struggling to be heard by a world with limited interest, overcome with "compassion fatigue" and over the din of "pro-Palestinian" activists screaming genocide every time an Israeli military vehicle start its engine.

If peace is at hand in Darfur, maybe it is time to direct our energies toward the Canadian and global "progressives" and remind the world how the left fiddled while Darfur burned.

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