60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

280 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
holocaust without mercy. It was deliberate, it was planned and it was
overseen. But to this day, the killers have gone unpunished. 1
Is there some selectivity at work when it comes to remembering and
labelling – Jews yes, Arabs no? That would seem to be true. If it were
not, we would not have to tell the Tale of Two Genocides: Congo
and Darfur.
Possibly a quarter of a million people have lost their lives in Darfur.
The US government screams its head off in denunciation of genocide.
But in the case of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC),
as many as 5 million have died since 1994 in overlapping convulsions
of ethnic and state-sponsored massacres – and not a word of reproach
from Washington. A human death toll that approaches the scale of the
Nazis’ annihilation of Jews in World War II, an ongoing holocaust
without a whiff of complaint from the Superpower.
Why is mass death the cause of indignation and confrontation in Sudan,
while exponentially more massive carnage in Congo unworthy
of mention? The answer is simple: in Sudan, the US has a geopolitical
nemesis to confront: Arabs, and their Chinese business partners. In
the Congo, it is US’ allies and European and US’ corporate interests
that benefi t from the slaughter. Therefore, despite 5 million skeletons
lying in the ground, there is no call to arms from the US government.
It is they who set the genocidal Congolese machine in motion.
Both holocausts are crimes against humanity, but only the smaller
one, Darfur, is a fi t subject for inclusion in the US political debate.
During the CNN Democratic debate of 3 June 2007, moderator Wolf
Blitzer demanded that the candidates raise their hands if they supported
the imposition of a no-fl y zone in Darfur – an act of war
against the Khartoum government according to international law.
Only Kucinich and former Senator Mike Gravel declined to endorse
the violation of Sudanese sovereignty.
The US Congressional Black Caucus follows the same script. They
lobby and demonstrate against the Sudanese regime, to the applause
of the corporate press, but they never say a word, as a body, about the
carnage in Congo. It is a taboo subject, too close to ‘vital American
interests’. But the Sudanese confl ict is fair game.
1 Karkar, Sonja (2007), ‘Sabra and Shatila: On Massacres, Atrocities and Holocausts’,
JUST Commentary, vol. 7, no. 10 (October). Karkar is the president of Women for
Palestine.