Rwanda redux?

Rwanda redux? Samantha Power draws much needed attention to the current program of government sponsored ethnic cleansing now ongoing in Sudan in this New York Times Op-Ed. Since this week marks the ten year anniversary of the Hutu-led genocide of Rwandan Tutsis in 1994, the potential parallels are crucially important. Power writes:

On this anniversary, Western and United Nations leaders are expressing their remorse and pledging their resolve to prevent future humanitarian catastrophes. But as they do so, the Sudanese government is teaming up with Arab Muslim militias in a campaign of ethnic slaughter and deportation that has already left nearly a million Africans displaced and more than 30,000 dead. Again, the United States and its allies are bystanders to slaughter, seemingly no more prepared to prevent genocide than they were a decade ago.

The horrors in the Darfur region of Sudan are not "like" Rwanda, any more than those in Rwanda were "like" those ordered by Hitler. The Arab-dominated government in Khartoum has armed nomadic Arab herdsmen, or Janjaweed, against rival African tribes. The government is using aerial bombardment to strafe villages and terrorize civilians into flight. And it is denying humanitarian access to some 700,000 people who are trapped in Darfur.

Human Rights Watch has a detailed report of the crisis here (and a summary here).

It is banal to remark here that the fact that news of this has not made the international headlines is hardly surprising, given the far more important (sic) US presidential campaign and continuing American losses in Iraq. The United States under Bush seems less like a, in my opinion, welcome global policeman, and more like a homegrown vigilante with international reach. The world’s real trouble spots, most of Africa, Afghanistan, the Korean Peninsula, and much of South-East Asia, do not receive a fraction of the attention accorded to an anarchic black hole in the Middle East created by the present Administration. For more on this, read Power’s Pultizer Prize winning account of American non-response to genocide in the twentieth century.