[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Saying No to Killers

[Barbara Siomos]

What a courageous man Carl Wilkens is, I am sure every person he helped
save in Rwanda will remember him.... one person does count.

I am proud to say a local democratic Congressman Joe Hoeffel looking to
replace Sen. Arlen Spector in the senate for my area was arrested
yesterday by the secret service with his wife protesting outside the
Sudanese Embassy.... what a hero. I had been planing to vote for Spector
because he has supported some things I have asked of him but now Hoeffel
gets my vote. What is going on in Sudan is a disgrace....

barbara
>Saying No to Killers
>July 21, 2004
>By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
>PORTLAND, Oregon
 
So what would you do if, like Carl Wilkens, you were caught in the
middle of a genocide? 
Mr. Wilkens, a Seventh-day Adventist missionary, was living with his
wife and three small children in Kigali, Rwanda, in 1994. Then a Hutu
militia began to slaughter the Tutsi, beginning with prominent figures
like his banker neighbors, who threw their two youngest children to
safety over a back fence before they were executed. Mr. Wilkens and his
wife, Teresa, tried to distract their children from the carnage by
playing a variation of musical chairs in which you could move only when
there was no gunfire nearby.
 
U.S. officials and church leaders ordered Mr. Wilkens to join an
emergency evacuation of foreigners from Rwanda, and relatives and
friends implored him to go.
 
He refused.
 
Ms. Wilkens and the children left, but Mr. Wilkens insisted on staying
in Kigali to try to protect Tutsi friends. His father warned him that
even if he survived, his insubordination might end his career in the
church. In the end, every other American left Kigali, but Mr. Wilkens
remained through the entire genocide. 

"It just seemed the right thing to do," he recalled in an interview here
in Oregon, where he is now an Adventist pastor in the small town of Days
Creek. "I could take my blue passport and go, and moments later my
housegirl and night watchman, both identifiable Tutsis, were going to be
butchered." 
One evening the militia came to kill Mr. Wilkens and his Tutsi servants,
but Hutu neighbors praised his humanitarian work and the militia went
away. Death threats piled up, but Mr. Wilkens spent his days talking his
way through roadblocks of snarling, drunken soldiers so he could take
water and food to orphanages around town. The Raoul Wallenberg of
Rwanda, he negotiated, pleaded and bullied his way through the
bloodshed, saving lives everywhere he went. 

This continued for three months as 800,000 people were slaughtered.
During all this time, President Bill Clinton and other Americans
dithered, and there was an utter moral failure around the world. 
But Mr. Wilkens plodded on each day, saving lives on a retail scale.
Survivors describe him as extraordinarily courageous, not only for
staying in Rwanda but also for venturing out each day into streets
crackling with mortars and gunfire and pushing his way through
roadblocks of angry, bloodstained soldiers armed with machetes and
assault rifles.
 
Of course, Mr. Wilkens managed to save only a tiny number of Tutsi in
Kigali, and Americans sometimes ask if his work wasn't like spitting
into the ocean. That's true, he acknowledged, adding, "But for the
people you help, it's pretty significant." 
Ten years later, it's a useful exercise to wonder how many of us would
have the courage Mr. Wilkens showed. Yet we don't have to wonder idly
how we would respond to such an African genocide - one is unfolding,
right now, in the Darfur region of Sudan, and once again we're doing
next to nothing. The World Health Organization estimates that 10,000
people are dying there each month, and again the response around the
world has been abject moral failure.
 
Colin Powell's visit to Sudan was an excellent first step, but President
Bush has remained passive. As for John Kerry, he averted his eyes from
Darfur for months, but last week he finally demanded action against what
he termed genocide. 

The U.S. needs to send massive aid shipments and take much tougher
steps, like issuing an ultimatum that will lead to a no-flight zone over
most of Darfur until the Sudanese government disarms the genocidal
Janjaweed militia. That would get Khartoum's attention. 

To respond to this genocide, we don't need to stand up to drunken
killers with machetes and AK-47's, as Mr. Wilkens did. Yet we, as
individuals or as a nation, still can't muster the will to take minimal
steps to save lives, like providing adequate food, water and medicine,
and browbeating Sudan into halting the killing. 

If readers want to help, I've listed some actions they can take on
www.nytimes.com/kristofresponds, Posting 520 (but please don't send
money to me). Moral choices lie not only with those who, like Carl
Wilkens, risk death to help others, but also with the millions of
ordinary people who are spared the risks but still face a basic
decision: Do we try to save lives, or do we simply turn away? 
E-mail: nicholas at nytimes.com 
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/21/opinion/21kris.