GENOCIDE IN DARFUR: The Arab League's Impotence

by Mik Awake

Formed by seven countries in 1945, the Arab League is now a powerful political and economic alliance of twenty-two nations – twenty-three if you include the East African country of Eritrea. The mission statement of the Arab League reads something like this:

Serve the common good of all Arab countries, ensure better conditions for all Arab countries, guarantee the future of all Arab countries and fulfill the hopes and expectations of all Arab countries.

Since 1956, Sudan has been a member of the Arab League, and since early 2003, a murderous outbreak of Muslim-against-Muslim violence has gone on unabated in the country’s Darfur region while the Arab League has sat by, silent and impotent. It is a sign of the deep cynicism and misplaced morality of the Arab League that they have failed for the past three years to organize a significant and concerted outcry – let alone policing force – against the crisis in Darfur.

Neither is this a novel claim. In 2004, Human Rights Watch urged the Arab League to intervene. (Today they're doing the same thing again.) As tens of thousands of Sudanese lost their lives – hundreds thousands more their homes – the Arab League penned indignant press releases decrying Israeli arrogance. You will hear their outrage at Israeli-Palestinian violence. Or at American-Iraqi colonialism. Perhaps such claims are justified, but in Darfur, where Arab Muslims are murdering African Muslims en masse, the Arab nations – and most of their media outlets – have remained unforgivably silent.

As part of the recent Arab League summit held earlier this year in Khartoum, only one paper was delivered on the Darfur issue and in it, though there is ample mention of the Darfur rebel groups and their anti-governmental (read: anti-Arab) activities, there isn’t so much as one mention of the Janjaweed, which is perhaps tantamount to discussing the Holocaust without mentioning the SS.

Since the victims are Africans, not Arabs, it seems not to interest the Arab League, and perhaps the Arab media as well. On the Aljazeera website this week, there isn’t mention anywhere of the recent spate of attacks that have sent 25,000 Darfurians into exile. In the Darfur conflict, there is no symbolism to play up, no underlying inflammatory tension – only the cold, new reality of an ongoing human disaster.

The outcry from the Arab media over the recent horrors in Lebanon might strike a more cynical observer as being fiercely strategic, hypocritical and even racist. The sad reality of Arab indignation is that it has, in its obsession with American and Israeli hegemony, neglected African ills and reinforced a racial hierarchy that is as fierce and pernicious as that found in the our own mainstream media. The Africans in Sudan, though Muslim, continue to be ignored by the Arab world.

The message seems clear: the Arab League is not as concerned with the DEPTH of the evil as they are with PERPETRATORS of the evil. Two hundred Arab civilians killed by Israel is a more newsworthy story than 20,000 Africans killed in an Arab League country. Perhaps the urge to be self-critical is unwise and bad for “Arab morale” in this time of asymmetrical warfare, entropy in Iraq and widely rampant anti-Arab sentiments. But further neglect of Darfur will be for the Arab League what Rwanda was for the UN: the grossest moral failing of its existence . . . the beginning of the end.

(Photo of the Arab League headquarters in Cairo from flickr.)

Comments

[henok zeremariam]

I am surprised at your mention of Eritrea as probably the 23rd member of the Arab League.
I can only wonder what the writer wants to impress upon readers?
It's very clear that western media that seem apparently free are infact always working to instill and justify western goals.
and Eritrea has been one of the lambs all the time... so this mention is probably another attempt at a crack to undermine eritrea!

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I think it is thr right time for Eritrea to join the Arab league,because of it's citizen.Eritrea have more than 50% Muslim so it is the right step to join the unity,same culture and traditon.

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