MB Civic

By BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY
April 13, 2006; Page A12
Too bad for the TV networks in the U.S. and Europe, but the event of the moment is neither the crisis of regime in France nor Berlusconi’s defeat. It is not even the latest casualties and the latest vicissitudes of the war in Iraq. Rather, it is the news coming from Darfur indicating that the war there, already three years old, and nearly half a century old in the whole of Sudan, is on the verge of the utmost savagery and horror.

We already knew that villages are being leveled by planes from bases in Obeid and Port Sudan. We knew that the Janjaweed (“armed men on horseback”) come, after the bombers, to finish off the survivors by hand. We also knew — as I myself attested in 2001 after a stay with John Garang’s guerrilla army — of the use of mass rape, as in Bosnia, as a weapon of war and conquest.

Finally, we were not unaware of the racist, purely racist, nature of a conflict that no longer has the “excuse” of a religious war — since the Zaghawa and Massalit tribes rebelling against Khartoum are also Muslim — but simply offers the image of a war whose sole motive is the hatred, on the part of the North’s Arabs, of a population whose crime is having skin that is too black.

But there are new elements that we do not know so well: the way the Khartoum regime at the last minute banned a visit by the top U.N. relief official; the harassment of European NGOs, especially the Norwegians, who were keeping the humanitarian pipeline open against all odds and have been forced to pack their bags; the cynicism with which the militias enforce the Feb. 20 law prohibiting any “foreign organization” whose activities constitute an “interference” in Sudan’s “internal affairs” and thus encroach upon the “sovereignty” of a state that claims the right to exterminate as it pleases.

The new development, in short, is the frightening warning from Juan Mendez, the U.N.’s special adviser on the prevention of genocide, that this policy of the forced withdrawal of NGOs could signal that the regime has embarked on the last stage of its plan, where there cannot and must not be any witnesses.

And this is when there are those who, faced with the atrocity of a massacre and perhaps genocide, denounce the very principle of an intervention which they condemn in advance as “neocolonial”: Such is the case this week of the Arab League.

There are those who are plainly uninterested in this war at the end of the world, this war of faraway peoples, that does not pit the rich wicked West against the impoverished meek of the Third World. Ah, these neoprogressives who are so talkative when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict! Ah, these anti-imperialists who have nothing at all to say when it comes to a war with 500 times more deaths but where neither Israel nor the West has the least role!
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There are, in the U.S. as in Europe, organizations who, though presumably having the duty and speciality of defending black minorities against discrimination or historical denial, are conspicuous by their silence. Is it because this war between Arab and non-Arab Muslims complicates, yet again, the old schema? Is it because the war is a terrible confirmation, by fact and fire, of the historians’ thesis that the massacre of African blacks was an African and especially an Arab crime as well as — and before — being a Western crime? In sum, there are all those who each have a different reason for feeling inconvenienced by this drama in Sudan and who would therefore like President Omar El Bashir to do whatever he has to do quickly, and in silence.

But what about the others? All the others? What about all those ordinary people who, like you and me, had sworn “Never again Auschwitz” and then “Never again Bosnia” and then “Never never again the shame of Rwanda”? What about Kouchner, my friend Bernard Kouchner, who invented the right to intervene? And Mandela, the great man in whom human conscience and nobility were incarnated? And the United States? And France and its African diplomacy? And all those everywhere who have made themselves advocates of the cause of blacks and from whom we so much want to hear?

I acknowledge that the problem is not simple.

But it also must be acknowledged that it is a hundred times less complicated than the removal of Saddam Hussein. Telling Khartoum to stop would not take more effort than was required 10 years ago, after five years of procrastination and cowardice, to stop Milosevic.

What, then, are we waiting for? Every day that goes by is a day of shame and defeat.

Mr. Lévy is the author, most recently, of “American Vertigo” (Random House, 2006). This piece was translated from the original French by Hélène Brenkman.