Posted on: Tuesday, May 25, 2004

EDITORIAL
World must react to Sudan bloodshed

One of the most promising efforts of U.S. diplomacy has been to apply the brakes to a decades-long civil war in Africa's largest country, Sudan.

Unfortunately, even as the parties have agreed to a plebiscite in the southern part of the country that could result in peaceful partition, new and even more disturbing troubles have arisen in the country's western Darfur region.

The earlier fighting had been between Arab Muslims in the north and blacks in the south. The Bush administration's interest in Sudan appears to have been piqued because some of the southerners are Christians, and because the Khartoum government has begun to cooperate in the war against terrorists.

A complication in Sudan, observers say, is that the Khartoum government is ultimately unlikely to let the southern region secede, given that it sits upon valuable untapped oil reserves.

But given a breather from fighting in the south, the government has begun supporting janjaweed, an Arab militia that is involved in a wholesale ethnic cleansing in the Darfur region.

The victims there are also black, but they're Muslim. Perhaps a million of them have been displaced; huge refugee camps have arisen in Chad, the neighbor to the west.

The scorched-earth predations of the janjaweed, some Western observers warn, are reaching genocidal proportions. Aid workers have described raids on villages that begin by bombing runs by government aircraft, followed by horse-mounted marauders who shoot the men and boys, rape the women, throw children and animals into wells to poison the water and burn the huts.

The charitable organizations that have bravely tried to help in Darfur are frustrated by a lack of security and resources. They warn that unless international peacekeeping forces intervene, the killing may rival that in Rwanda in 1994.

Memories of Rwandan horror agonize an idealistic world, a modern civilization that embraced the slogan "Never Again."

The United States, tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan, is in no position to send troops, but it must encourage those countries that can and generously and energetically help in ways that it can.