Crisis in Darfur – Who will bell the cat?

French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy on the crisis in Darfur quoted in Guernica, June 2008:

…I was there (in Darfur)…just one year ago nearly to the day, smuggling myself across the border with Chad, crossing 500, 600 kilometers of a devastated Darfur. And I must say what I saw then, what I experienced there never left my mind and my heart since. I was deeply shocked in the most intense sense of the word by this experience, even if I lived many others in my life since my youth in Bangladesh, in Pakistan. What I saw in Darfur in a way bypassed, overwhelmed a lot of things which I experienced before.

I would like to sum up the conclusion I did draw from this journey. My first conclusion was and still is that we should stop speaking of the crisis of Darfur or even the war in Darfur. It is not a crisis. It is not a war. A war presupposes of course a frontline, presupposes organized battles, and presupposes, even more, two real armies. It is not a war between two armies. It is a war by an army against civilian populations. It is not a civil war, it is a war against civilians.

…My second conclusion, which I drew from this journey, is that we should get rid of at least … part of the myth of the Janjaweed. There are a lot of big stories about the Janjaweed, these horsemen of the devil, ill-equipped themselves, arriving in the villages burning the huts, spreading fear, like in the Middle Ages. What I saw is not exactly that. I saw huge holes in the ground, craters from bombs which were the result of a bombing…This is not Janjaweed. This is a real bomber. What everybody told me is that these Janjaweed when they arrive, generally in lorries, in trucks, they are commanded by people in uniforms or have uniforms that happen to belong to the Sudanese Army.

…Another thing which I never saw to this extent (and which makes the polemic about genocide completely outrageous and frivolous) is the impossibility of giving the real number of dead. Nobody knows if it is 200,000 dead, the number which has been given on and on for years, if it is, which is my evaluation, closer to 300,000 or 350,000; some human rights organizations—serious ones—say 400,000, maybe 500,000. From 200,000 to 500,000—nobody being able to decide which is the right figure? Which means that there might be in Darfur hundreds of thousands of children, women, men, raped, killed, burnt without any memory, without any inscription anywhere, without graves, without a face, without a name, without a number.

The question now is to know why. My last, or nearly last remark: why? And why is the international community so passive? For more than 4 years [facing] this situation, why this passivity? Why this inability to [make] decisions or, when they are made, to make them respected? Of course, there are some obvious reasons: the regime in Khartoum, the regime of murderers has some oil.

…You have also the reason (which is true) that the Khartoum regime managed to make the Western countries, and especially America, believe that they had a card to play, they—Khartoum—in the war against terrorism.

…And to end, what can we do facing that? Facing this devastation? Facing this uncomparable mass murder?

First of all, of course to try to make it visible…

Number two: we can and we should, and it is possible, to ask for real sanctions on the state of Sudan, despite the oil…

…And last but not least, there is one weapon which we have pleaded for, Mia Farrow in America and myself in Europe, for months and months. There is one actor in this terrible game, who has huge power, and can do a lot if it wants. This actor is China.

…China provides the weapons. China buys a big portion of the oil. China protects the Sudanese regime in the Security Council of the United Nations.

So the real pressure, the most efficient pressure should be and is still today the pressure on China.

And we have a tool, as you know, on China. We have a real weapon, which would prove to be very efficient if we tried. It has been tried for a few days about Tibet. It has already given results: the resuming of the dialogue with the Dalai Lama. It should be implemented [against] the Darfur tragedy, [and it] is the weapon of a boycott of the Olympic Games. …If we accept going to Beijing for the games, it will be—like in Berlin in 1936—games of blood and shame.

…all this should prevent us from saying that we are impotent, unable, that there is nothing to do. There is a lot to do to save what is still savable in Darfur.

Here are some shocking photographs of the tragedy.

The question is who will bell the cat?

Related Posts:

China’s investments and expansion in Africa… 

India and China: Apples and Oranges 

P.S. As many of you would know, China’s role in Sudan is well documented and its critics range from the George Clooney to Steven Spielberg…