Putting a face to the crisis

As Zara walked for ten days carrying her one-year-son through the harshest climate in the world, the driest part of the Sahara, she was forced to think back over the destruction she had just experienced.

“They attacked us very early in the morning, some militiamen on horseback and camels and some soldiers in military vehicles,” she told CBS News. “They burned my village, they killed my people, they slashed their throats and captured others.”

Zara’s husband, along with two of her children, two sisters and three brothers, were brutally murdered by insurgents. Yet Zara was spared, only to live displaced from her home and in constant fear that she would be next.

Zara is a victim of what has been reported by the Human Rights Watch to be the worst genocide and calculated campaign of displacement, starvation, rape, and mass slaughter of this generation, alongside the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

A disputed 200,000 to 400,000 native Sudanese have been murdered over the past three years. Millions more have been displaced from their homes and their country in an attempt by an Islamic militant group, the Janjuweed, to ‘ethnically cleanse’ the Darfur region in Sudan of the rebelling native tribe.

Yet for the past four years, this massive loss of life was apparently not enough of a priority to keep the rest of the world from ignorantly ignoring the morbid fate of the native Sudanese people. Despite the signing of a three-phase international force proposal within the Darfur Peace Agreement, which proposed to deploy the largest mission of UN and AU peace keeping troops in history, very little has actually changed. Most of these past four years, a mere 7,000 African Union (AU) troops have been deployed to Darfur, a region the size of France. Their attempts at maintaining peace have been insignificantly brushed aside by the insurgent forces and insignificant in reducing the violence.

Just a few days ago, on Sept. 29 an AU base in Hasakanita, South Darfur was attacked by militant forces killing at least 10 AU peacekeepers, wounding at least seven others and leaving 50 unattended for. This represents the worst incident against neutral peacekeeping troops since the AU mission began in 2003.

If rebel forces have already violently slaughtered over 200,000 people, how can the international community believe that only 7,000 will be capable of creating peace and stability? It seems this small number of peacekeepers would be forced to expend more energy protecting themselves than protecting the people.

Yet the world continues to sit back and watch as they encourage the small force of AU peacekeepers to stop the Janjaweed from continuing to clear the countryside of all civilization, burning any sign of life that once existed to the ground.

If establishing a democratic government and removing a brutal totalitarian dictator is enough reason to forcefully invade Iraq to “establish peace and justice” then motivation to save hundreds of thousands of innocent lives in Darfur should inspire intervention as well. (I’m not calling for a declaration of war, I am merely making a point of international priorities.) If the ground beneath the feet of Zara as she was forced to walk for days through the harshest climate of the Sahara only to seek refuge in camps infested with cholera or hepatitis which only pick up where the Janjaweed leave off, if that land was rich in oil would U.S. attention be different? Should international interest be more important than life? Maybe if political leaders could put a face to this conflict, they would see things differently. A face, Zara’s face, that represents life that should not be taken in vain.