I Fought As A Child Soldier in Sudan. And I Say Act Now on Darfur
World Leaders Made a Promise This Would Never Happen Again. Sixteen Resolutions Have Been Passed, Yet Not One Imposed
When most kids where playing soccer, watching cartoons and learning how to read and write, I was learning how to fight. I left my home when I was seven after I saw a close relative raped and people’s heads cut off by the government bombers. Death was in my face every day and I cried every day until I could not cry any more. The situation was so bad that I was forced to fight for our freedom. At the age of seven I was enlisted as a child soldier to fight in southern Sudan’s bloody war. For years I was wielding an AK47, taller than myself.
Although I was glad when the decades of fighting ended with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, my joy was tinged with unease. Though it is better than nothing, I do not trust the peace deal. While the world’s attention has been diverted by it, the government of Sudan’s campaign to ethnically cleanse has begun in earnest.
Today marks the fourth anniversary of the start of the genocide in Darfur, the perpetrators of which are members of the Janjaweed militia, known to be armed and funded by the Sudanese government. In four years as many as 400,000 civilians have been brutally killed, approximately three million forced to live in camps bereft of supplies or sanitation, and women and children raped on a daily basis.
After Rwanda, the world leaders made a promise that nothing like this would happen again. Yet they have persistently ignored warnings that Darfur would become the greatest humanitarian disaster this century, allowing the violence to spread to neighbouring Chad and the Central African Republic.
As an African, I feel the international community has much to do to prove that black African lives are worth more than profitable oil and arms deals. It must do better than what it has achieved so far in Darfur. Sixteen resolutions, including the imposition of sanctions against the Sudanese government, have been passed, yet not one has been imposed.
On Friday the UN Secretary-General gave an interview in which he said that he and President Bashir of Sudan had “decided to first of all have technical consultation as soon as possible” and asked people to be patient. I don’t know if Mr Ban has been to a war zone, but if he were to go, I think he might inject some urgency into his work.
Eighteen months ago UN member states agreed that they had a “responsibility to protect” victims of genocide, ethnic cleansing or war crimes. Yet the UN’s excuse for not dispatching a hybrid force to protect the civilians of Darfur is that it awaits a written invitation from the very perpetrators of the crimes, i.e. the Sudanese government. This isn’t good enough.
In the heart of a bloody struggle like Darfur, hunger, drought and disease will kill you if the bullet doesn’t get there first. The Sudanese government is well aware of this, which is why it has done everything possible to obstruct humanitarian access to those who need it most.
The time for excuses and platitudes has passed. Today, those of us campaigning on behalf of Darfur are calling time on our politicians worldwide. With demonstrations from London to Bahrain, we will insist that our political leaders exert whatever pressure is necessary to secure the admission of an effective peacekeeping force. Failure again is not an option.
Emmanuel Jal is a hip-hop artist. A demonstration for Darfur takes place at Downing Street at noon today.
© 2007 The Independent
Hotel Rwanda did an excellent job portraying the carnage. I am ashamed that nations with the power to act have not done so. The trafficking in arms presents the means, the cause is racism inverted on itself, legacy of European colonization of this region. The scars caused by these atrocities, the pedestrian manner in which massive killing is carried out sadly carries karmic repurcussions. My prayers are with the victims. How much blood on how many continents before we turn our weapons into plough shares?
The article by Jal looks like it was produced as part of ’save darfur’ campaign to promote US sponsored military intervention in Sudan.
Highly questionable.
Jal was a child solder by the foreign sponsored SPLA which fought AGAINST the Sudan government. Foreign sponsorship of wars to destablize government has been done all to much in Africa. It is unclear why Jal is now calling for more foreign intervention. Its unclear why Jal thinks this would help in Darfur.
According to many realistic reports from Darfur the mass killings there have ended. There is lawlessness and rebel conflict but its down to 200 dead a month. More than that died in a few days in Mogadishu.
Interested readers can see Alex De Waal, Mahmood Mamdani and Menard/Smith (”Darfur needs peace, not peacekeepers”) for more factual and less sensationalistic information and suggestions.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n05/mamd01_.html
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n23/waal01_.html
http://www.twf.org/News/Y2007/0414-Darfur.html
“Never again” was the slogan in 1945!! The Rwanda genocide has been carefully orchestrated by various Western politicians, credited with leadership to make this genocide possible has been Madeleine Albright supported by the Prayer Breakfast network in DC.
The present hype about Darfur is a cheap attempt to cover up how Darfur today relates to the US policy in 1993 of declaring Sudan an enemy state, followed by the killings in Rwanda and Congo 1994ff (several million deaths).
The destruction of many countries in Africa since 1993 has to be seen in connection: Sudan-Somalia-Rwanda/Congo-Uganda, not in isolation as a ‘Darfur problem’.
The Sudanese government certainly shares blame, but it is not the origin of the crisis.
The second comment gets more to the point, but it might go further by saying that what’s going in Darfur and that region is no worse, and actually less so than what the Columbian dope pushing oppressive, corrupt regime is carrying out against its own people. It’s a full scale reign of state terror backed up by US taxpayer’s dollars. To my knowledge US taxpayer’s dollars aren’t subsidizing what’s happening in Darfur. We ought to be going after stopping what the police state of Columbia is doing first, before we jump into Darfur. Not only that, but US taxpayer dollars are funding other attrocities else where.
The real solution in Darfur as well as else where is for either UN or regional organizations such as the OAU intervening if the USA and the EU will get the hell out of the way. The regional organizations of these respective regions and the UN should be doing this, not the USA or anyone else unilaterally and from the outside that region. We haven’t been appointed by God to be this world’s policeman, and it’s long past time we deal with that!!
Unless if I missed it, Emmanuel Jal did not once mention the US, but did mention the UN. The OAU has to be part of the solution, but is limited by what it’s presently allowed to do, as well as what it’s able to do (in terms of numbers). Unfortunately, international intervention is exactly what is needed.
I agree that the underlying causes of these crises are foreign involvement and intervention, but to use that as justification for refusing to get involved at any later time is to condemn to death those we have helped put in harm’s way. To me, the morality of that view is “highly questionable”.
Supporting diplomacy and the UN to resolve the crisis in Sudan is being involved, but in a way that will produce positive if people work at it. However, supporting unilateralist military by the USA or any other country isn’t at all part of the solution, but actually is part of the problem, and it has been time and again in one country after another, resulting in more loss of lives, blood, property, etc than had already been the case.
Furthermore, African contacts I have in here in the USA tell me that the USA, and they have to mean through military intervention in Somolia and else where, is keeping the OAU and the UN from coming in to resolve the crisis, and actually neither the UN nor the OAU, which might some chance of resolving the crisis, won’t come in until the USA gets its military out of the way, as the USA is creating much of the problem in Africa just as it is in much of the rest of the Third World, and perhaps elsewhere as well.
Let’s give diplomacy, the UN, and or OAU a chance to resolve the crisis with less loss of life, blood, property, etc by tell the USA to get out, and while at it start paying its UN dues instead of being such a rich dead beat.
CLARIFICATION–”results” should go between the words “positive” and “if” above. Also “action” should come in between the words “military” and “by.’ Furthermore, “will” should replace the word “won’t” in between the words “crisis” and come to avoid a double negative. Moreover, “telling” would have been better diction than the word “tell” between the words “by” and “the.”
To rsterling1, shocking Menard/Smith’s article made it to the LA Times, right in the home of the hollywood stars that wants to do go out and fight for justice in which the American interventionists were ready to bring them on board. Strange how they are always quiet on American imperialist adventures like East Timor, Somalia, Palestine, Lebanon, Cuba, Iraq embargo, etc and only pick up on issues that’s not unpatriotic to pick sides.