A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

The aid pledged by Kuwait to American hurricane victims is orders of magnitude greater than the aid given by all Arab countries put together to the Darfuri victims of the Arab government of Sudan.  Without minimizing in any way what Gulf Coast residents have gone through during the last ten days, they have not had to endure mass killings, gang rapes, or forced relocations into desert refugee camps.  The people of Darfur have had to endure all of these, inflicted by their own government, for over two years now.

I have written elsewhere on the subject of Arab responsibility to act against Arab genocide.  It isn't just a moral responsibility, though since Darfur's victims are mostly Muslims it might certainly be presented that way to Arab Muslims.  The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina underlines a cold fact of international life -- the United States cannot intervene effecitvely everywhere, even against the worst kind of atrocities.  It has other calls on its resources, and so do other developed nations.  Unless other countries step up to share the burden, uncounted thousands will continue to suffer and die, in Darfur and elsewhere.

In Darfur at the moment, a critical need is security.  What there is is mostly being provided by a contingent of about 7,000 troops sent from countries in the African Union, covering an area roughly the size of France.  Governments like Kuwait's and Qatar's (to say nothing of Saudi Arabia's) could fund a substantial increase in that force.  After years of indifference -- considering the close relations most Arab governments have with the government in Khartoum "indifference" is probably a generous description -- it is the least they could do, and with oil's market price well north of $60 a barrel they could do it easily.

Darfur, along with most other overseas news, has been off American front pages for a while now, and this is likely to be the case for some time.  With large areas of Darfuri land already having been seized by Arab janjaweed militias supported by Sudanese government forces, the level of violence in the province is less than it was a year ago.  We can still expect to hear from time to time denunciations of the Bush administration for not doing more to alleviate the enormous human suffering in the region -- denunciations that will miss the point if they do not include calls for Arab countries to forego their solidarity with the murderers in Khartoum, and put their resources at the disposal of the international community's efforts to aid Darfur's victims.