Imagine a world where the threat of death is almost palpable. Imagine a world where your own government is funding the rebels who just killed your brother and systematically raped his wife and daughter. Imagine a world where your only source of food and water is on the other side of a row of semi-automatic rifles. Imagine a world where the #1 cause of premature death is starvation.
Now imagine a world that doesn’t really care.
That’s the current state of affairs in Darfur, a region in western Sudan where almost 2,000,000 have been displaced from their homes and nearly 200,000 have died over the past 18th months. There are no tsunamis in Darfur. There are no tourists in Darfur. There are no cameras in darfur. And consequently, there are no western politicians even remotely interested in Darfur.
Well…almost no politicians.
Last week, in the midst of his biggest political crisis so far, Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin pledged almost $200 million toward helping ease the suffering of those impacted by the country’s chronic civil war. The aid package hopes to provide ‘niche capabilities’ to the African Union, such as strategic planning, military intelligence and detailed mapmaking.
detailed mapmaking?
That may sound like a really thoughtful contribution, but given that nearly 1.2 million people are still starving in Darfur while the predominantly “arab” government continues to clear out its “African” citizens with almost complete international impunity, the offer was token at best. It should be noted that both warring factions share the same religion (Islam), but have clashed for centuries over the region’s strategic natural resources.
More recently, the country’s arab majority has risen to power, given the relative favour of the resources it held (among other natural assets, this rise was aided by the discovery of oil in the south during the 1970s). As a result, the post-collonial equalization of the country’s two major ethnic groups began to fall apart, and the oil-rich Arab majority began to flex its petroleum-fueled muscles, ushering in an era of unprecedented political genocide in the sub-Saharan republic.
In the face of all this conflict, a lone Canadian politician stepped up to the plate for the innocent victims of violence in the Sudan, imploring his parliamentary colleagues to take interest in the countless thousands of lives that will undoubtedly be lost if action wasn’t taken to restore peace and order to the war-torn country. That politician was none-other than Mr. David Kilgour, an independent MP in Canada’s elected commons. In what amounts to the only real display of power an independent representative can have within the country’s archaic constitutional monarchy (a system which is virtually despotic under a majority government), Mr. Kilgour implored the leader of the weak minority government to do something to help stop the violence in Darfur before it’s too late.
In desperate need of votes to maintain his tenuous grip on legislative power, Prime Minister Martin tried to win the favour of this do-gooder independent MP and his all-important vote with the proposed aid package (a package Mr. Kilgour himself criticized as “too little too late”). As it turns out, payments from the proposed package wouldn’t reach the Sudan for quite some time, and as the rogue MP was quick to point out, another 50,000 could die “by late summer” if aid isn’t provided right away.
a question of ‘race’
“If these were white families [in Darfur],” said Mr. Kilgour, “would we even be having this debate?” Perhaps not. But the more interesting ‘race’ in this case isn’t necessarily the ethnic ‘background’ of the oppressed sudanese civilians, but the actual political ‘race’ that lead Mr. Martin to pledge all that money in the first place.
Searching frantically for any last-minute support to stave off a vote of non-confidence in his government’s minority leadership, the PM exposed us all to the nastier side of Canadian politics, one that places personal political gain over the will of constituents, and one that plays tricks with the numbers to make self-interest seem like unbridled generosity.
And yet, in the shadow of all this posturing, the people of Darfur continue to suffer. Hundreds of thousands of Fur, Zaghawa, Massalit, Jebel and Aranga natives are being dragged from their homes and robbed, tortured and starved on a daily basis, while first-world politicians continue to banter back and forth about words like “compromise” and “quid pro quo” in the comfort of their first-world homes.
thanks, but no thanks
In what might be considered the only “bright spot” of this entire African tragedy, Sudanese President Omar Hasan al-Bashir took the issue by the reigns and flat out rejected Mr. Martin’s one-sided and self-serving offer. Ambassador Faiza Hassan Taha said in a press release that the Prime Minister rushed to make the announcement on thursday before anyone from the Canadian government even asked the Sudanese whether they agreed. “While the sudanese would welcome any Canadian assistance,” said the press release, apparently they would “prefer to be consulted” before any unilateral aid package is announced.
This may have something to do with the fact that Mr. Kilgour was asking for more aid than Martin eventually pledged to the cause, but the whole exchange smacks of political wrist-slapping. “Help us, but don’t use us” was the one Sudanese request; at once both a welcome breath of honesty in the almost toxic environment of modern foreign affairs, and at the same time a sad reminder of the type of despotic power that some African leaders still exert over their impoverished fifedoms.
relieve tsunami relief
In the end, both sides are at fault for the critical state of affairs in western Sudan. Neither western politicians nor African peacekeeping forces could ever do enough ease the tremendous suffering of the people of Darfur. But with the right media coverage and a global call to arms, more can certainly be done to stem darfur’s starvation epidemic. If billions of dollars can be raised around the world to help people recover their coastal homes from the destruction of the latest tsunami to wreek havoc on the shores of Indonesia (and, co-incidentally, preserve one of the most popular travel destinations on the planet), the least we could do as a species is help to out some of our other less fortunate brothers and sisters who have as their adversary something a little more tangible than sliding tectonic plates.
But maybe that’s just it. Maybe the fact that Mother Nature is on nobody’s side makes the whole tsunami relief effort that much more politically palatable. Maybe the fact that the West doesn’t buy it’s oil directly from her bountiful bosom actually relieves us of any partisan preference (and therefore, opens up our western wallets to the victims of her unfortunate destruction). Maybe we help the tsunami victims because there’s no actual “bad guy” hiding deep beneath the Indian Ocean. Earthquakes, of course, have no political affiliation. There’s no despotic leader to chastise for human rights abuses. There’s just a really big wave, and a bunch of really nice beaches.
Maybe that’s all Darfur needs before the real foreign aid begins to flow: a few sandy beaches and five-star hotel (or a few billion barrels of light sweet crude). Until then, Africa will always play second fiddle to the world’s other humanitarian crises because it still suffers, of all things, from a lack of western media support.