The Numbers Game
The widely-cited number of 70,000 dead in Darfur is clearly wrong, but no one is quite sure what the actual number is. 300,000? Less? More?
The only major study of deaths in Darfur so far has been conducted by the UN's World Health Organisation which estimated that as many as 70,000 people had died of disease and malnutrition caused by the conflict between March and October 2004.
So the number doesn't count those individuals killed in the violent strikes by the Janjaweed. But there are many countries and international organizations who have a stake in seeing the number remain "low." The Sudan, for one. The African Union. The UN. As long as the number does not reach the proportions of "genocide" (which, suprisingly, the U.S. has already acknowledged has occured in Darfur), there is little obligation on the part of the international community. With the larger numbers, the hundreds of thousands, the international outcry may be a little louder, on the level of a Rwanda, and may require a response.
But does it matter? 70,000 or 300,000 -- what, truly, is the difference? Why are we not outraged by this, by the fact that our governments are doing nothing and watching it happen? The tsunami caused an outpouring of generosity from the American people; the slaughter of innocents on this scale should at least cause us to ask our leaders why more is not being done.
Please write a letter, send an e-mail, call your Congressman. Send a message to the U.S. and the U.N. that we will not let this happen. Never again.
posted by Sammy @ 6:25 PM
5 Comments:
I'm not sure why the informal logic of this argument wasn't accepted by the peaceniks during the prelude to the removal of the Iraqi Ba'athists? The factual situations are strikingly similar.
Activists were opposed to the Iraq war because the reasons for going to war had little to do with the human rights violations that had occurred there. And motivations are an important aspect of the war, particularly when the winning state becomes the occupying power. I doubt that if we had gone to war to stop the atrocities of the Hussein regime, Abu Ghraib would have happened.
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I do not believe that the situations can be considered "strikingly similar." There were no pogroms being carried out in Iraq, nor was there mass starvation. I do not dismiss the plight of Iraqi citizens under Saddam, but there was no incipient humanitarian crisis there in 2002 in the same way there is now in Darfur.
... and? Are you suggesting that these "peaceniks" are illogical or hypocritical?
As to the former, many of the "peaceniks" who objected to the Iraq war did so out of empathy for the Iraqi people - honestly believing that the war would cause more harm than good. Time will tell whether or not they were right, but the logic ("will this war cause more harm than good?") being applied is the same in both cases. The difference in the position on both wars is the difference in the situations in Iraq and in Sudan, which is more substantial than your post suggests.
And even if there are "peaceniks" who rejected that logic in terms of Iraq and now support it, isn't that a good thing? Don't we want people to support intervening in genocides? To put it another way, it may be hypocritical, but that *doesn't* mean it's wrong.
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