The charred remains of huts rise from the fire-scarred earth. Makeshift mass graves can be found in the ditches that run along remote roadsides. Massive refugee camps are filled with malnourished and fatigued Africans. Undetonated bombs rise from the graveyards of villages that have been reduced to scorched craters—these are the images of Darfur, a region of the east African nation of Sudan.

What is happening there is genocide; a genocide largely motivated by race—groups of government-sponsored Arab militants known collectively as the janjaweed systematically attack, rape, and pillage the villages populated by the people of African descent.

Since February of 2003, their campaign of terror and death has claimed the lives of an estimated 400,000 innocent civilians, while nearly two million people have been displaced into refugee camps elsewhere in Darfur and across the border in Chad, where they slowly starve and die of disease, awaiting the next janjaweed attack.

All of these horrible acts take place as we in America sit glued to our TV sets, watching Katrina-ravaged New Orleans. So why bring up a genocidal nightmare halfway around the world while American firefighters are bodybagging their fellow countrymen down Beale Street?

Because in an era when the United States of America is considered the world’s lone superpower, its actions—and inactions—are felt far beyond its borders. One year ago this past Friday, the Bush Administration took a bold step when Secretary of State Colin Powell announced to the UN—and effectively the world—that the ongoing killings in the Sudan are, in fact, genocide. Though a monumental triumph in eyes of activists, the label rings hollow in ears of the suffering Darfurians, as the U.S. has yet to act substantially on its position.

It’s not like the U.S. lacks grounds. After all, the White House has offered the deaths of tens of thousands at the hands of Saddam Hussein as a rationale for justifying the invasion of Iraq. The janjaweed’s body count makes Baathist crimes look like amateur hour by comparison.

Land of Suffering

The Saharan Desert stretches into the north of Darfur; thick forests fill the south. The region’s center rests on an arid but fertile plateau spotted with small crop farms and herds of grazing livestock. The government has cut off much of the region to outsiders. Visitors, mostly aid workers and journalists, often encounter natives of Darfur in refugee camps in nearby Chad and Niger.

Fatima Haroun grew up in the small Darfurian village of Niripipy, and in 1998 left Sudan. She has since visited family members there, but now lives in Philadelphia. She spoke in a telephone interview with Generation this past week. “The killing in Darfur is a racial cleansing,” she said. “They are trying to devastate and assassinate the African people.”

When asked about the United States’ refusal to send intervening forces, and the American public’s indifference to her countrymen’s situation, her response was emotional. “It angers me. People discriminate on a higher level of policy. Whoever has more power, they get more attention.”

For centuries, ethnic Africans populated the lands, living mostly off agriculture while nomadic tribes of Arab descent lived in relative peace with them, helping to raise their animals and sell goods while moving from village to village each season.

This amicable coexistence was interrupted in the mid 1950s with the start of the first Sudanese Civil War. Following the shaky peace of the Addis Ababa Accords signed at the end of the conflict in 1972, a second civil war erupted in 1983 over the president’s declaration of Shari’a, or strict Muslim law in the nation’s south.

Though these wars were fought mainly between small groups of armed rebels and the government, which is centered in central Sudan in the capital city of Khartoum, the fighting began to shift in the late 1990s into a regional ethnic conflict when groups of nomadic Arabs in Darfur began to resent their transient place in Sudanese life and governance.

“Arab children stay with African families to go to school,” Haroun said. “With new generations, Arabs started thinking in a way of discrimination. Most jobs in the area go to Africans.”

Arab vs. African

According to Haroun, as friction increased, bands of militant Arabs began attacking ethnic African villages. Africans didn’t want to believe the violence against them was serious. They dismissed the accounts as rumors.

When they finally began to arm themselves and fight back, the Khartoum government stepped in, calling for the disarmament of both sides and a peaceful solution to the problem. As Haroun tells it, the Africans disarmed, but the Arabs did not. Rather than taking action against them, Haroun said, “the government gave African weapons to the Arabs. This is how the janjaweed started.”

Though janjaweed is a widely used term, it is imprecise. The word roughly translates to “evil horsemen,” and is used to describe the perpetrators of the genocide. Most Arabs in Darfur do not participate in the killings, and those who do claim not to be janjaweed.

After the failed disarmament, the attacks on Africans became worse; “they would rape the girls and women and the government wouldn’t do anything,” she recalls. “The government has a plan, and the Arabs have their own plan.”

The Arabs wanted the Africans’ land and resources. The Sudanese government was simply looking for a way to get rid of both the groups, and saw the nomadic militants as their best option. Khartoum is only interested in eliminating both sides, Haroun said. “The government is the cause of all of this and they denied that it was happening.”

The situation exploded when a small group of Africans, acting under the title of the Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA) attacked a military outpost in the northern Darfur town of El Fasher. SLA members stole weapons from the base and killed several troops. After this, as Haroun told the story, the government began working closely with the janjaweed.

She described their new methodology: the government would send bombing helicopters on the janjaweed’s call. After the janjaweed had looted and burned what remained of the village, the government would sweep in, capturing all who fled, and put them into refugee camps.

The conditions in these camps are nothing less than squalid. “The camps are without bathrooms, without food, and without water. The people are made to live like animals,” Haroun said. After being placed in these camps, the refugees are left alone to starve in the hot African sun.

Some Darfurians choose to flee to these camps of their own will. Haroun explains, “when your house is burning and your neighbors are killed, you will hate the place and you will leave.”

Catching the World’s Eye

As the bodies piled up, international organizations started to take notice of the atrocities. Officials in Khartoum distanced themselves from the janjaweed, painting the situation as an internal conflict between warring tribes. They have been adamant in the position that it is a domestic problem. They compare the janjaweed to the insurgency in Iraq, promising to end the violence, claiming that the difficulty lies in rooting them out.

An official ceasefire was declared in 2003, but it was a false peace. Despite internationally monitored efforts, well-armed battalions of militants continue to mow down defenseless villagers, according to numerous media reports.

Haroun dismisses the ceasefire as political maneuvering. “The government has no intentions of solving the problem,” she said. “They are just deceiving.”

Despite repeated government insistences that there is no crisis in Darfur, activists and humanitarian outfits alike began to make noise about the situation in past months and years.

Locally, the issue has garnered little interest in terms of activism on campus, but Muslim Student Association President Viqar Hussain says that his group hopes to bring in a speaker on Darfur, in conjunction with the African Student Association, in the future. He would like himself and other students to become more informed on the issue.

“Me sitting here and reading this paper, that paper doesn’t really tell me anything real,” he said. “I’d like to hear about the experiences of someone who’s actually been there, and really understands what is going on.”

Akenji Ndumu, who works for Africa Action, the oldest organization for the advancement of U.S. African policy, has been working closely with student groups trying to influence powerful groups in Washington.

His group spearheaded the creation of a petition that ultimately garnered 30,000 signatures, and sent it to Colin Powell, who stepped down from his job soon after, last summer.

The petition helped pressure the Bush administration into addressing the subject, and on September 9, 2004 in a speech before the United Nations, Colin Powell labeled the situation “by its rightful name: ‘genocide.’”

Though the step was bold on part of the Bush administration, it has done next to nothing about the situation since Powell’s speech. “They are not making this a priority,” Ndumu says. “Much like the Rwandan genocide, this has been left to mid-level bureaucrats.”

The U.S. has pledged and given monetary support to the tune of $300 million, but the money, which goes to aid the refugees living in camps, can only go so far. There are widespread reports of janjaweed raids on refugee camps, so no one can actually say how much of our aid reaches the people.

Powell’s statement and the $300 million make for a media-friendly response to a crisis, but have done nothing to curtail the rate at which Darfurians are dying. Most recent estimates place the number around 10,000 a month.

Eyes Elsewhere, Genocide Continues

Brian Steidle, a former U.S. Marine is one of three American military observers who traveled to Darfur last September along with a small African Union (AU) peacekeeping force in order to observe and report violations of the 2003 ceasefire.

In a Washington Post article from March 2005, Steidel writes of the carnage he witnessed: “Every day we surveyed evidence of killings: men castrated and left to bleed to death, huts set on fire with people locked inside, children with their faces smashed in, men with their ears cut off and eyes plucked out, and the corpses of people who had been executed with gunshots to the head.”

The most devastating moment for Steidle came last December when he watched the village of Labado burn to the ground. His team arrived to the scene in the middle of the attack and was greeted by a Sudanese general who denied any involvement, and refused to stop it.

While speaking, a group of Sudanese soldiers drove by. The general claimed they were getting water. Steidel watched as they pulled over to loot and burn a hut 75 yards away.

He describes his role in Darfur with frustration over the inability to act in the protection of the people. “The mandate for the AU force allowed merely for the reporting of violations of a ceasefire,” Steidel writes. If he had fired a single shot, the U.S. military would be committed to the conflict. With his commanding officers ordering him to observe—and nothing more—Steidle’s hands were tied.

“The observers sometimes joked morbidly that our mission was to search endlessly for the ceasefire we constantly failed to find,” he wrote.

‘Darfur, is that a perfume?’

Some 140,000 American troops are stationed in Iraq. Thousands more guard bases at home and around the world. With troop strength stretched so thin, the U.S. would be hard-pressed to muster public support behind any military action to help the people of Darfur.

But why not? The U.S. could easily show support for a UN intervention with a small troop commitment, but more importantly significant high-tech and monetary support that would put a U.S. stamp of approval on the effort. Americans are compassionate people with a sense of charity towards those in distress, no matter what the crisis. The response to Hurricane Katrina—donation boxes at every cash register, televised pleas for charitable organizations, etc.—should be proof enough of our ability to reach out. Right?

Alex Halavais, professor of communications at the University at Buffalo, says the short answer is that major American media outlets have been letting us down. Obsessed with celebrity trials and disasters-of-the-week, they don’t have time to update the nation on a humanitarian crisis in a faraway land that has changed little in the past few decades.

“Here we have something that’s very clearly an extreme case,” he said. “But we have very little media coverage.”

Halavais says there are no easy answers to the lack of media focus on the genocide in Darfur. First, putting correspondents on the ground in an atmosphere like Darfur is expensive and dangerous for any news outlet.

Secondly, though, he notes “a long-term lack of interest in the media for covering Africa.” This points to a problem recognized by many observers of the situation: as far as most people are concerned, Darfur is just Africa being Africa. Americans remember reports of tourists being kidnapped in the Congo and the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and assume that the continent cannot be saved.

“We’ve never covered the Third World well,” he said, and suggested that an inherent racism in corporate media outlets could be keeping them out of Africa. For years, he said, “international coverage was coverage of rich nations.”

Whatever the reasons for the media blackout on Darfur, one thing remains clear. Barring some drastic change in Sudanese policy, there can only be two ways the killings will end: the total removal or extermination of Africans in the Darfur region, or by the intervention of an outside force.

Either way, it seems certain that when tourists once again stroll the streets of New Orleans, the survivors are Darfur will still be praying for peace.