By Christopher Hitchens
Slate November 9, 2005
It looks as if the realists have
won the day in the matter of Darfur. Or, to phrase it in another way, it looks
as if the ethnic cleansers of that province have made good use of the
"negotiation" and "mediation" period to complete their self-appointed task. As
my friend Johann Hari put it recently in the London Independent: "At last, some
good news from Darfur: the genocide in western Sudan is nearly over. There's
only one problem—it's drawing to an end only because there are no black people
left to cleanse or kill."
By some reliable estimates, the Sudanese
government or "National Islamic Front" has slain as many as 400,000 of its black
co-religionists—known contemptuously as zurga ("niggers")—and expelled perhaps 2
million more. This appalling achievement has been made possible by a very simple
tactic: The actual killers and cleansers, the Arab janjaweed militias, are a
"deniable" arm of the Sudanese authorities. Those authorities pretend to
negotiate with the United Nations, the United States, and the African Union, and
their negotiating "card" is the control that they can or might exercise over
said militias. While this tap is turned on and off, according to different
applications of carrot and stick, the militias pretend to go out of control and
carry on with their slaughter and deportation. By the time the clock has been
run out, the job is done.
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