Never again (6): This is our watch

Maybe I’ve been in the news business too long - grown irrepressibly outraged. It’s hard to focus on Michael Jackson’s troubles when thousands of women are being gang-raped in Darfur, Sudan, their heads or hands branded to advertise their violation.

It’s difficult to empathize with American’s obesity problem when nearly
400,000 Darfurians will starve to death by Christmas if the international community does not intervene against their government’s predations.

Worst of all, it’s impossible to understand why the humiliation of a few dozen Iraqi men – however unconscionable – could blunt the thunder of a vast human catastrophe: the ongoing genocide of the Sudanese people.

Perhaps we’ve become numb to the "G-word." The U.S. Government and dozens of organisations working in the region have used the term appropriately to describe the systematic slaughter of black Africans in Sudan. Yet, no movement is in sight from the international community. Though it protests loudly, the U.S. has spread itself thin militarily. The major EU countries voice quiet condemnation of the Khartoum regime, perhaps nervously guarding their commercial interests in the exploitation of Sudan’s vast oil reserves. The African Union has voted Sudan power broker on the UN Human Rights Commission. The United Nations rings it hands, but Kofi Annan, the Director of Peacekeeping Operations during the Rwanda genocide, evidently cannot muster the moral authority to direct Security Council action. Indeed, the crisis represents brilliant timing and political calculation on the part of Sudan’s National Islamic Front government to prosecute its final solution with little interference.

One million people died in Rwanda in 1994 during one hundred days of international dithering. By comparison, Sudan is a slow-motion genocide; the daily death toll is now estimated at 1000 to 2000 human beings. That number will escalate wildly the longer the regime is allowed to act with impunity.

The media has essentially ignored what many are calling "the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today." Admittedly, images from the scene are hard to come by. The Khartoum regime has blocked and/or controlled access for every kind of investigator. Can we allow this to militate against coverage? How long do we wait for a galvanizing image? Who will be brave enough to break from the lockstep of domestic navel-gazing to provide extensive, continuing coverage of this cataclysm?

We urgently need journalists, editors and producers to reveal this genocide for the horror it is. This is our watch. We have an opportunity to put steel into the values we claimed to embrace with the slogan "Never Again." Or will we remain more comfortable covering genocide anniversaries than the genocides themselves?