The Devil Came on Horseback

I watched the documentary The Devil Came on Horseback this week. Wow. It's about the ongoing genocide happening right now in Darfur, which is in western Sudan. After I got over the first wave of shock, my first thought was, "How could I not know this?"

I explained the whole thing to Gary, and he said, "How could I not know this?" I said, "Because Americans have a short little span of attention."

It did make it into the media, complete with horrible, gruesome photos. And a description of the intentional burning of entire villages hut by hut, brutal murders of hundreds of thousands of people at the hands of the Arab government and their flunkies, and the use of rape as a tool of war because it breaks up families. People were outraged for a while (a few days? a few weeks?). Then we moved on to other news. Wow.

The matter was referred to the United Nations, who referred the matter to the International Criminal Court. The Sudanese ambassador to the UN actually smiled when asked if he would turn over those people the ICC determined were most responsible for the crimes. Wow.

So I went to the website http://www.savedarfur.orgto see what I could do. "I'll write letters to my Congresspeople," I thought, until I couldn't figure out what I would say. "Kill those evil people," was the first thing that came to mind. But then I wondered, "What next?" How can we build an infrastructure in the entire continent? That's what would be necessary to give them the economic self-sufficiency they need to recover from the fragmentation and devastating effects of slavery and destruction of their society wrought by British and French colonization.

I'm not sure what I can ask my Congresspeople to do. Murder the bad guys and leave a country with no government and no militia to protect its people? Right, so they can be prey for the next armed group who wants their piece of land? But how can we just stand by while they continue to rape, murder, and pillage?