Last weekend, my friends and I got together to watch a movie. I brought my copies of Legally Blonde and Mean Girls
expecting that we would watch one of these lightweight chick-flick classics or something similar. When I arrived, I was surprised to find that the group had elected to watch the Oscar-nominated film Hotel Rwanda.
At first, I was reluctant to spend my downtime watching a film about horrific genocide. But by the end, not one of us had moved from our seats -and most of us were in tears.
Hotel Rwanda is the true story of Paul Rusesabagina, the owner of a five-star hotel in the Rwandan capital of Kigali. In 1994, the Rwandan president's plane was shot down, and the presidential guard was quick to blame the ethnic minority, the Tutsis. The majority Hutus, encouraged by radio propaganda and the presidential guard, began a campaign of slaughter against the Tutsis, killing 800,000 in less than 100 days. Rusesabagina sheltered 1,200 Tutsis in his hotel, bribing and negotiating with the Hutu militia in a desperate attempt to save their lives.
It was an amazing story of courage and compassion. I wanted to know more, so I went to the library and surfed the Internet. As I read, the headlines looked startlingly similar: U.N. admits Rwanda genocide failure and Clinton regrets ignoring Rwanda.
On the eve of that nation's descent into madness, the world turned their backs on Rwanda. In 2000, the U.N. Security Council admitted that its members had lacked the political will to prevent the genocide. The United Nations sent 2,500 peacekeepers, but they were withdrawn after 10 Belgian soldiers died. In the United States, President Bill Clinton did nothing and would later call his inaction the greatest failure of his presidency.
When the mayhem ended, we pledged never again-just as we had after Bosnia, Cambodia and the Holocaust. And now, just 11 years later, the international community has ignored that pledge.
Since 2003, Darfur, a region in the African nation of Sudan, has been the site of a Rwandan-scale genocide. According to the Genocide Intervention Fund, government-backed Arab militias, known as the Janjaweed, are determined to ethnically cleanse Darfur, plundering villages, employing mass rape as a military strategy and killing non-Arabs at a rate of 15,000 a month. The GIF estimates that 380,000 black Africans have been murdered. Another 3 million have been forced to flee their homes.
And once again, the international community has averted its eyes.
In fact, the United Nations has refused to even call the murder of 380,000 Darfurian civilians genocide. According to a CNN report in January 2005, a U.N. commission concluded that government forces and militias conducted indiscriminate attacks including killing of civilians torture...destruction of villages
rape...pillaging and forced displacement
but the crucial element of genocidal intent appears to be missing at least as far as the central government authorities are concerned. In other words, the United Nations denied that the Sudanese government was sponsoring genocide. This is the same United Nations that voted the United States off the Human Rights Commission and replaced us with Sudan.
While the blood of fellow humans is spilled across Darfur daily, the international community has done nothing significant to stop it. Sure, there have been meetings and peace talks. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan recently sent a list of 51 people suspected of crimes in Darfur to the International Criminal Court. However, this action is probably useless, inasmuch as the Sudanese government has announced that they will not cooperate with the United Nations.
The international community should not tolerate the rape, torture and murder for one more day. The president I voted for, George W. Bush, promised in his inaugural address to spread democracy and freedom to all corners of the world. Why not Sudan?
There should be no more peace talks or U.N. commission reports on Darfur. An international coalition should invade the region and put down the Janjaweed with force. It is the duty of the world's most powerful nations to stop genocide, especially when it targets the defenseless.
Or we can continue to turn a blind eye to genocide. Maybe, 10 years down the road, we will watch a movie called Hotel Darfur
in which a man risks his life to protect innocents from the rabid Janjaweed. The civilized world will watch and wonder how we could let Darfur happen. We will say, Never again.
And the cycle continues.
-Ashley Herzog is a freshman journalism major. Send her an e-mail at ah103304@ohiou.edu.
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