Op-Ed: Khartoum's genocidal despot

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By Nat Hentoff

Mia Farrow, now a persistent human-rights activist, won world attention when, in the Wall Street Journal last year, she described China's forthcoming time of glory in August as "the genocide Olympics" because China is a prime buyer and investor in Sudan's oil as well as an arms supplier to that government's continuing genocide in Sudan. It is also a protector of Sudan at the U.N. Security Council from serious accountability for its horrifying atrocities in Darfur.

On May 28, the former actress, who has become a world-class exposer of nations' crimes against their citizens, wrote a letter to President Bush that began: "I have just returned from my ninth trip to the region affected by the Darfur tragedy, now in its sixth year. I am writing to urge you to use the remaining months of your presidency to end the genocide in western Sudan and to make lasting peace in the region a legacy of your administration." She continued by giving justified credit to the Bush administration's "essential role in securing the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) formally ending Sudan's (20-year) North-South Conflict (with 2 million dead)." That peace agreement, she told the president, is "fast unraveling and in urgent need of attention."

As is his brutal custom, Lt. Gen. Omar Bashir has steadily failed his obligations under that treaty, with a covetous eye on the south's oil-rich region. As Miss Farrow noted in her letter, recent attacks by Sudan's army and its rapacious Janjaweed militia on Abyei in the south have torn more than 100,000 from their homes and may presage a second north-south war.

Turning to Darfur, her letter informed Mr. Bush that: "Government bombing campaigns continue apace, with tens of thousands of terrified survivors joining the more than 2.7 million already displaced. On my recent trip, I once again held broken people in my arms, and once again they told me to tell the world that if something is not done, they will all die ... not only from the violence, but also from starvation and disease. The aid workers tasked with delivering food and medicine are being targeted and killed." Moreover, ensuring more deaths, Gen. Bashir has so obstructed the full deployment of the United Nations & African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) peacekeeping mission authorized by the U.N. Security Council nearly a year ago that, as Miss Farrow's message to the president pointed out, "only a fraction of the peace-keeping mission is deployed and little of its essential infrastructure is in place."

Most tellingly, she added that "U.N. officials have expressed fear that as things stand, the peacekeepers in Darfur will be unable to protect themselves, let alone Darfur's traumatized civilians and the humanitarian workers struggling [to] sustain them." With the United States taking its turn in assuming the presidency of the U.N. Security Council this month, Miss Farrow urges President Bush to seize this "unique opportunity to hold an open meeting a pledging conference" that "can facilitate the pairing of nations with capable armies to train, equip, sustain those African (Union) battalions in Darfur (and the wholly inadequate UNAMID forces) in need of assistance." Miss Farrow is very mindful of the fact that Mr. Bush was the first world leader to publicly call what she accurately describes as "the immeasurable suffering" in Darfur by its horrendous rightful name: genocide.

"Mr. President," Miss Farrow ends her letter, "you have an opportunity to end this tragedy. The world will long remember who ended the Darfur genocide. The global community is in need of your moral leadership." I expect Miss Farrow is hoping that her letter will reach that deep inner voice of conscience in the president. It manifested itself soon after he took office when he was reading about the deadly silence of the United Nations' then-head of peacekeeping, Kofi Annan, and President Clinton when they had the opportunity to stop the genocide in Rwanda but averted their eyes.

In the margin of the page he was reading on those two world leaders' failure of conscience, Mr. Bush wrote: "Not on my watch!" Much has happened since to blight the legacy of Mr. Bush's presidency, but Miss Farrow is right. If he can directly engage himself and his administration to bring the UNAMID peace mission in Darfur to full force - and to confront Gen. Bashir directly with the charge, as is being heard in devastated Abyei, in southern Sudan, that he is preparing for "a final solution" in the South - the Bush legacy will be considerably brightened.

Like Miss Farrow, I believe Mr. Bush has this capacity within him not only to strengthen his legacy, but more deeply meaningful to him, to answer the renewed call of his conscience and save many thousands of lives in Darfur.

Nat Hentoff's column for The Washington Times appears on Mondays.