Few people want to be reminded of the ongoing genocide in Darfur, just as they didn’t want to hear about Rwanda. It’s too frightening and depressing. So Nicholas Kristof deserves support for his strong oped in the NYT this morning – The Secret Genocide Archive. The photographs alone are stomach-turning.
So why has the world largely ingored this? Kristof offers this solution:
What will really stop this genocide is indignation. Senator Paul Simon, who died in 2003, said after the Rwandan genocide, “If every member of the House and Senate had received 100 letters from people back home saying we have to do something about Rwanda, when the crisis was first developing, then I think the response would have been different.”
Yes, of course. We should all do what we can. But this shouldn’t be an exclusively American problem. It is a world problem. The United Nations, which was formed in the wake of genocide and was supposed to make the repetition of such horrors its number one priority, has not nearly done its job here, just as it did not in Rwanda. Why? Maybe there just isn’t any money it.
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