TO THE GENOCIDE IN DARFUR
BY BRIAN STEIDLE WITH GRETCHEN STEIDLE WALLACE
PUBLIC AFFAIRS, 256 PAGES, $24.95
It has been a year since the United Nations replaced its discredited Commission on Human Rights with the new Human Rights Council and the promise of reform. At the time, Louise Arbour, the top U.N. human-rights official, hailed the “dawn of a new era,” while Amnesty International celebrated a “victory for human-rights protection.” But a year later, one finds that the “reform” resulted in more power for the Islamic and Third World blocs, with democracies playing defense and losing.
Out of 192 nations, the council has seen fit to condemn only one country—Israel—while granting immunity to Hamas and Hezbollah. Violators like Burma, China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe go ignored. The one possible exception is Darfur. Former Secretary-General Kofi Annan shamed the council into holding a session on the Sudanese province last December.
Yet the texts adopted at that meeting and at a subsequent March gathering were toothless, raising the question: If the foremost U.N. human-rights body can’t bring itself to condemn the worst violations known today—more than 200,000 murdered, mass rape of women and girls, displacement of millions—how can anyone expect it to take action anywhere?
The council is failing to do the minimum against the maximum crime: genocide. It’s failing the Darfur test.
For too many council members, genocide is not something to fight but to deny. In plenary speeches, the 56-strong Islamic Conference “commends” Sudan for its “unceasing efforts to ameliorate the situation in the Darfur region.” Algerian Ambassador Idriss Jaziry, speaking for the African group, challenges “the alleged links” between the Khartoum regime and the Janjaweed, which “have yet to be objectively documented.” Nothing could be more necessary or timely, therefore, than Brian Steidle’s “The Devil Came on Horseback,” a powerful first-hand account of the Darfur genocide.
The author, an ex-Marine who was an observer in Sudan with the African Union forces, documents the gruesome attacks by government-sponsored Arab militias against innocent civilians whose dark skin, they are told, renders them “dirty.” Based on extensive e-mails sent to his sister, Gretchen, the book’s co-author, Steidle recreates his conversations with Sudanese perpetrators and victims alike. Some of the dialogues are flat, but the value of this cri de coeur is less literary than moral and, with hope, legal.
Steidle’s narrative is a desperate attempt to awaken the world’s conscience to atrocities that Sudan desperately seeks to hide. Like Mia Farrow—whose recent op-ed on China’s “Genocide Olympics” scared Beijing into dispatching an unprecedented mission to pressure Khartoum—individuals like Steidle are achieving more for Darfur’s victims than all the exertions of the U.N. Human Rights Council combined. Elections earlier this month resulted in new seats for Angola and Egypt, joining Fidel Castro, Hu Jintao and the House of Saud. Darfuris will wait in vain for their long nightmare to be broken by the promised dawn.
Hillel Neuer is executive director of UN Watch in Geneva (unwatch.org).
