Our glib pledges to prevent genocide
Sir: "Why should Europeans protect Israel?" asks Robert Fisk (26 August). Why should Europe try indefinitely to compensate for its failures to prevent the Holocaust? Why indeed? Or any holocaust? Why should we even bother to try to make good the pledge, "Never Again!" It is made after every genocidal episode, and with increasing glibness and ever less likelihood of being honoured.
While the latest nightmare in Lebanon was unfolding, a genocidal process was restarted in Darfur. The Western media, ably spearheaded by Robert Fisk himself, was concerned with reporting events south of the Litani, and so nobody noticed - or particularly cared - about Sudan, possibly because they imagined that there were no strategic interests at stake. If they did they would be wrong.
As the US is Israel's backer in the "war on terrorism", so China, with oil interests in the southern Sudan, is the Khartoum government's backer in Islamic fundamentalism's "holy war" on "rebels" infidels, apostates and "Western interference".
Four UN observers were killed by Israeli shellfire in Lebanon; so many aid workers have been killed in Darfur in the same period that all aid work has now stopped. The West makes the same familiar noises as it does in the Middle East and everywhere else about "both sides" needing to negotiate, thus failing to acknowledge that while the default setting for the African population of Darfur is survival, the default setting for the Arab dominated Khartoum government is elimination.
More than two million African Sudanese are starving to death in camps. More than two hundred thousand African Sudanese have been butchered. No food production is possible because the people who would be trying to grow it are either dead or in those camps. It is another Final Solution. But why should Europeans protect Africans?
NICHOLAS WOODESON
LONDON W4
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