This is exactly how I've been feeling lately...
The Register-Guard
Eugene, Oregon
Katrina moved us to act, so why not Darfur?
By Paul Slovic
Published: Monday, September 12, 2005
Hurricane Katrina, the most devastating natural disaster in American history, has left thousands dead and hundreds of thousands homeless along the Gulf Coast.
Who among us has not witnessed the terrifying and heartbreaking images of destroyed cities and destroyed lives? The media have done a remarkable job of covering this tragic event from every angle, beginning with newscasters risking life and limb in the midst of the storm, and continuing with almost nonstop coverage of the personal, social, economic and political impacts.
Such vivid reporting has triggered what President Bush has called "a tidal wave of compassion" in this nation and around the world. The aid that flows from this compassion will be sorely needed to help cities to recover and their residents to rebuild their lives.
This tragic event gives us the chance to reflect on great humanitarian crises and our response to them. Consider a disaster in which every village in an entire region is destroyed, hundreds of thousands of people killed, and close to 2 million displaced persons interned in refugee camps, threatened with death from famine and disease.
The disaster I'm referring to is not caused by nature's fury, but by man's.
It is the current crisis in Darfur, Sudan, where gangs of assassins called Janjaweed, supported by the Sudanese government, systematically have been exterminating the population.
Unlike Katrina, which lasted less than a day, the Darfur crisis has gone on for over a year.
Unlike Katrina, where refugees are free to leave their camps and rebuild their lives as opportunity and aid become available, the refugees in Darfur are virtually imprisoned in the camps, unable to venture outside the boundaries without being assaulted.
Unlike Katrina, the destructiveness of which has been graphically portrayed in constant media reports, the ongoing fury in Darfur gets almost no media attention. CBS carried only three minutes of coverage last year, about one minute for every 100,000 deaths. NBC had five minutes.
Not surprisingly, nearly invisible events are treated with apathy by governments and their citizens. President Bush has been virtually silent on Darfur, even after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell visited there in 2004 and informed him of the genocide that was occurring. The president can get away with ignoring this massive humanitarian crisis because the American public is uninformed and apathetic.
Of course, great dissimilarities between Katrina and Darfur can account for and perhaps even justify the vastly different responses.
Katrina hit close to home; Darfur is distant. This distance didn't stop us from vividly portraying last December's tsunami in South Asia and rallying to aid its victims. But tsunamis and hurricanes are acts of nature; they have clear endpoints after which recovery can begin, unhindered by the messy political issues that surround intervening in the government-sanctioned slaughter in another country.
Intervention also can be dangerous; recall the loss of 18 American soldiers in Somalia in 1993. But this political and military danger has not deterred us in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I am not necessarily arguing for U.S. military intervention in Darfur. What does seem inexcusable is the failure of the media and our government to bring the atrocities there to our attention with the same vividness and intensity accorded to extreme natural disasters.
Genocide in Darfur is real. But due to its invisibility, no serious consideration is given to supporting the efforts by NATO, the United Nations or the African Union to address this massive humanitarian crisis.
In the absence of similarly detailed coverage of Darfur (or any coverage, for that matter), perhaps we can use the imagery of Katrina and its victims as a proxy. All the heart-wrenching emotions we have seen among Katrina's victims must surely be present among the victims of the Janjaweed. All the despair and squalor among those we have seen spending the night in the Superdome or the Astrodome must surely be present in the refugee camps of Darfur.
Early relief efforts after Katrina, heroic as they were, were characterized by President Bush as "unacceptable." What should one say about the humanitarian efforts in Darfur?
Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian general in command of the halfhearted U.N. effort to prevent the slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans in 1994, asks: "Are we all human, or are some more human than others? If we believe that all humans are human, then how are we going to prove it? It can only be proven through our actions."
As we act to aid the victims of Katrina, should we not act, as well, to aid the victims of Darfur?
Paul Slovic is a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and president of Decision Research, a nonprofit institute that specializes in the study of risk and decision making.
this stuff is tearing me up
cya guys
-Dave
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1 comment:
I am not saying that this writer is necessarily wrong, but there are several questions that need to be answered.
1) Why did our government officially declare that "genocide" was occuring in Sudan? There are scores of nations in which there are civil wars and secessionist or irredentist conflicts taking place (and there likely always will be). Genocide is defined in a specific way by international law, and certain criteria need to be met - and according to certain international bodies, they have not been. I am disturbed by news reports that I recently saw asserting that the main reason that the Sudanese situation was declared as "genocide" was to curry favor in the presidential election with Christian voters. This week, former Secretary of State Powell has been asked by Sudan to retract the characterization mentioned in this article. The way that the pertinent bill went through the U.S. Congress is also questionable.
2) There is already such a widespread belief, in much of the Islamic world - as well as, to some degree, in our country - that our government's foreign policy interventions have been motivated by economic and corporate interests, particularly those related to oil. Even some Iraqis who like the fact that our government chose to remove Saddam Hussein from power have been suspicious about its motives for doing so.
Sudan has oil. If our government intervenes in Sudan, how will we know whether that was a pivotal factor motivating the decision? And even if it isn't, couldn't the appearance of that as a motive further inflame the Islamic world, and further assist with the recruitment of militant extremist groups? And wouldn't this also make the Christians who live in predominantly Islamic regimes (in Africa, in Arabia, and elsewhere), even more endangered? (I deal with that issue more in my next point below.) This questioning of the motive behind a potential Sudanese intervention is a real possibility, considering that in the Congo, which neighbors Sudan, there had been a great deal of internal unrest and killing - possibly more than in Sudan.
3) And if we intervene in Sudan, will we have to intervene in the Congo too? And what about the numerous other nations, in Africa alone, where there are mass killings or tyrannical regimes (such as Zimbabwe or Uganda)?
4) The CIA World Factbook states that the relgious breakdown of Sudan is the following:
-- Sunni Muslim 70% (in north)
-- indigenous beliefs 25%
-- Christian 5% (mostly in south and Khartoum)
Darfur is in west-central Sudan, by the way (not in the area where the Christian population is concentrated).
Civil war has been taking place in Sudan in about 40 out of the 50 years that that nation has been in existence. Becoming involved in the internal conflicts within foreign nations is something we have to be very cautious about, especially considering the complex history, multiple and diverse groups, and varying perspectives among each of them, often rooted in history.
If we were to get involved to stop the killings of Christians, then we may have to take one side in this civil war. What affect would that have on the stability (or lack thereof) in Africa, and in the world?
Could U.S. intervention, on behalf of the Christians in Sudan, endanger the minority Christian populations of other nations? This has already happened, to some degree, in the aftermath of the Iraq war.
It is dangerous to advocate intervention in foreign situations, without considering the "side effects" and potential negative consequences that those actions could have on the people of other nations. Oftentimes with our government's foreign interventions, the end results turn out worse than the original situation.
5) It has been well-known that our military is stretched to the limit... This has been a crisis facing our armed forces since the Clinton administration. (I blogged about this a couple of years ago.)
There has been a great deal of discussion about bringing back the draft, something that may return to our nation a situation like there was in Vietnam.
The head of the National Guard has acknowledged that the fact that guard units were in Iraq delayed the arrival of troops to the South (the U.S. South, that is), to assist with Hurricane Relief. I think an appropriate question would be - Iraq moved us to act, but why not Louisiana? (and Alabama, and Mississippi?)
6) The author of this piece says that he is not suggesting military intervention in Sudan - something that I believe could create more problems than it will solve. Well then, what specifically is he advocating?
7) Is foreign aid, from our federal government, the answer? Aid to Africa has sometimes actually made their problems worse... And how could we ensure that the monetary aid goes to the right people? (And who would the "right" people be, in this conflict that spans decades [at least]... if not centuries?)
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, everyone has been talking about Washington's budget. Tom Delay has irked conservatives by saying that there is nowhere that Washington's budget can be cut, to offset the costs of Hurricane relief. Our national debt has skyrocketed - the federal treasury is bankrupt as ever. President Bush may end up raising taxes during his second term... But that won't help much with this problem. We are truly operating in the red - both financially, and militarily... This is the same situation that the prevailing "empires" and superpowers have faced, throughout the 19th and 20th Century, which has ultimately led to their downfall.
It is going to take all of our best efforts to prevent that from happening to us.
Reading for today:
The Serenity Prayer
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