April 28, 2004

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Getting To Darfur

Not to be a downer or anything, but yo:

Nearly a million people have been displaced from their homes in western Sudan; many have fled into neighboring Chad. They report that militias working with the Sudanese government have been attacking villages, ransacking and torching homes, killing and raping civilians. These armed forces are supposedly cracking down on rebel groups based in the Darfur region, but in fact they are targeting the population.

The rainy season comes to western Sudan in May. If farmers don’t get back to their villages by then, the crops will not get planted this year — and that could mean mass starvation as well. But no one will go back as long as the janjaweed (literally, “armed horsemen”) militias remain in the area.

So where are the journalists?

That’s Carroll Bogert from Human Rights Watch writing in the LA Times. She goes on to talk about how Iraq has sucked the oxygen out of other international reporting.

I have to admit, it seems so far away. But we abandon human suffering to distance and difficulty at our peril; this much, at least, has been well-documented.