OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Secret Genocide Archive
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Photos don't normally appear on this page. But it's time for all of us to look squarely at the victims of our indifference.

These are just four photos in a secret archive of thousands of photos and reports that document the genocide under way in Darfur. The materials were gathered by African Union monitors, who are just about the only people able to travel widely in that part of Sudan.

This African Union archive is classified, but it was shared with me by someone who believes that Americans will be stirred if they can see the consequences of their complacency.

The photo at the upper left was taken in the village of Hamada on Jan. 15, right after a Sudanese government-backed militia, the janjaweed, attacked it and killed 107 people. One of them was this little boy. I'm not showing the photo of his older brother, about 5 years old, who lay beside him because the brother had been beaten so badly that nothing was left of his face. And alongside the two boys was the corpse of their mother.

The photo to the right shows the corpse of a man with an injured leg who was apparently unable to run away when the janjaweed militia attacked.

At the lower left is a man who fled barefoot and almost made it to this bush before he was shot dead.

Last is the skeleton of a man or woman whose wrists are still bound. The attackers pulled the person's clothes down to the knees, presumably so the victim could be sexually abused before being killed. If the victim was a man, he was probably castrated; if a woman, she was probably raped.

There are thousands more of these photos. Many of them show attacks on children and are too horrific for a newspaper.

One wrenching photo in the archive shows the manacled hands of a teenager from the girls' school in Suleia who was burned alive. It's been common for the Sudanese militias to gang-rape teenage girls and then mutilate or kill them.

Another photo shows the body of a young girl, perhaps 10 years old, staring up from the ground where she was killed. Still another shows a man who was castrated and shot in the head.

This archive, including scores of reports by the monitors on the scene, underscores that this slaughter is waged by and with the support of the Sudanese government as it tries to clear the area of non-Arabs. Many of the photos show men in Sudanese Army uniforms pillaging and burning African villages. I hope the African Union will open its archive to demonstrate publicly just what is going on in Darfur.

The archive also includes an extraordinary document seized from a janjaweed official that apparently outlines genocidal policies. Dated last August, the document calls for the "execution of all directives from the president of the republic" and is directed to regional commanders and security officials.

"Change the demography of Darfur and make it void of African tribes," the document urges. It encourages "killing, burning villages and farms, terrorizing people, confiscating property from members of African tribes and forcing them from Darfur."

It's worth being skeptical of any document because forgeries are possible. But the African Union believes this document to be authentic. I also consulted a variety of experts on Sudan and shared it with some of them, and the consensus was that it appears to be real.

Certainly there's no doubt about the slaughter, although the numbers are fuzzy. A figure of 70,000 is sometimes stated as an estimated death toll, but that is simply a U.N. estimate for the deaths in one seven-month period from nonviolent causes. It's hard to know the total mortality over two years of genocide, partly because the Sudanese government is blocking a U.N. team from going to Darfur and making such an estimate. But independent estimates exceed 220,000 - and the number is rising by about 10,000 per month.

So what can stop this genocide? At one level the answer is technical: sanctions against Sudan, a no-fly zone, a freeze of Sudanese officials' assets, prosecution of the killers by the International Criminal Court, a team effort by African and Arab countries to pressure Sudan, and an international force of African troops with financing and logistical support from the West.

But that's the narrow answer. What will really stop this genocide is indignation. Senator Paul Simon, who died in 2003, said after the Rwandan genocide, "If every member of the House and Senate had received 100 letters from people back home saying we have to do something about Rwanda, when the crisis was first developing, then I think the response would have been different."

The same is true this time. Web sites like www.darfurgenocide.org and www.savedarfur.org are trying to galvanize Americans, but the response has been pathetic.

I'm sorry for inflicting these horrific photos on you. But the real obscenity isn't in printing pictures of dead babies - it's in our passivity, which allows these people to be slaughtered.

During past genocides against Armenians, Jews and Cambodians, it was possible to claim that we didn't fully know what was going on. This time, President Bush, Congress and the European Parliament have already declared genocide to be under way. And we have photos.

This time, we have no excuse.




[b]Are we going to sit by and let it happen? I encourage everyone to pass along these website addresses to all of your email contacts. Please take action on this![/b


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/23/opinion/23kristof.html?hp

There are petitions at the websites mentioned in Kristoff's editorial. Please sign the petitions and contact your Congressional Reps.

Thanks for posting this. This op-ed ought to be pinned.

There is also a video about Darfur put together by Kristof on the same page of the original editorial. It should be on the right-hand side. It is also worth watching.

Thanks. It is pinned now.

Here are the photos that Kristoff used on the editorial page.

Here is the transcript from the video.

October 18, 2004
TRANSCRIPT
A Promise Unkept

he following is a transcript of a special Op-Ed report by Nicholas D. Kristof about the Darfur region of Sudan.

1: Why Should We Care

It was so frustrating early in the year to have all this energy devoted to marking the 10-year anniversary of the Rwandan genocide and everybody solemnly proclaiming that this can never happen again, and meanwhile it was happening again in Darfur.

Darfur is a huge area in the west of Sudan. And there's been a long-time competition between Arab nomads and African tribesman who are mostly farmers. There's a competition for water, for forage, for their livestock. And it burst into greater contention in early 2003 when a low-level rebellion began.

Around the end of last year the Sudanese government apparently decided it was going to resolve the problem once and for all. And it armed Arab raiders called the Janjaweed and they went around Darfur and began wiping out villages. And the result was that more than 1.5 million people were forced away from their homes. The U.N. describes it as the world's worst humanitarian crisis today.

I've been to the Darfur area now three times. I don't normally go repeatedly to the same place, but after I went in March, you know, I felt there is really something profoundly evil going on that you have a government trying to wipe out a people, and that the world has had a lot of experience with genocide, and that this time there is something we can do to block it if we just kind of jump up and down and point it out.

I think there's a tendency for Americans to think: Look, this a long way away, I'm sure it's really sad, but Africa's always a mess, people are always killing each other - Why should we do anything?

I think one answer is that America has values as well as interests. But we also do have a real interest in an Africa that is stable. We're going to be getting more and more of our oil from West Africa, including Chad. And the mess in Darfur is already infecting other countries around it.

And at the moment we have a window to lean on the Sudanese government and the rebels to try to reach a peace agreement. Otherwise we're going to be looking after and funding the lives of the people from Darfur for decades to come.

2: America and Genocide

Two of the people that I really wanted to find on this trip were Nijah and Nibraz, the two orphans that I introduced in that opening video clip. I asked all around the camp where they might be. Finally on my last day in the camp I found them. Now Nijah and Nibraz are just much healthier than they were before. They look great. Their needs are fundamentally being met now.

One of the more horrifying cases is Zahra Abdel Karim. She told me about how the Janjaweed had shot to death her husband, Adam, and her 7-year-old son, as well as three of her brothers. And then they grabbed her 4-year-old son and slashed his throat. Then they took her and her two sisters away, gang-raped them. They shot one of her sisters and cut the throat of the other. And then they discussed how to mutilate her. They told her: ``You belong to me. You're a slave of the Arabs and this is the sign of the slave,'' and then they slashed her leg with a sword and then let her hobble away stark naked.

When I met her in June she was hungry, without any shelter, trying desperately to look after her young children. This time I met her again, she has a tent, her child is in much better shape. She said that now she has food, she's got clean water and there's medical care for her and the child.

One of my favorite people that I've met from the Darfur area is Magboula Muhammad Khattar, who's a young woman whose husband and mother and father and nephews were all killed by the Janjaweed. I met her under a tree where she was trying desperately to keep her youngest son alive. I thought he was going to die at that point.

In October I met her again in the camp. We had a better reunion and she's in much better shape now. She has a tent. She's got food. She's got clean water. Her son survived and is now playing around the tent. And she doesn't know whether she'll ever be able to go back to her village, but it's a sign of what a dedicated international effort can achieve - that it really can keep people alive.

3: In the Safety of the Camps

I wanted to find out what is happening in the areas that international community has not had access to. We know that the relief agencies have been able to get to about two-thirds of the two million people affected by the Darfur disaster. But that leaves an awful lot of people who aren't getting any kind of help.

Sudan has refused to give me a visa to go into Darfur, so I ended up hiring a pickup truck and crossing a shallow creek and roaming part of Darfur. Furawiya is a market town that is important because it has the only water for about 20 miles around. Everybody, even hiding in hills, they have to come down to Furawiya to get water. And that was something that the Janjaweed used very effectively. I talked to one family where seven men had been killed successively when they went desperately at night to try to get water to save their families, to keep their families alive.

The area around Furawiya is loosely controlled by one of the rebel armies, the Sudan Liberation Army. The rebels, while they're not well-equipped or armed, they're very dedicated because in many cases their families have been killed by the Janjaweed. They feel like they're fighting for their lives, for their family lives and for their own villages.

Essentially, the strong ones who can make the walk have all fled to Chad. And those you find now are the weak, the frail, the old, the young, the infirmed, those who can't get out. And their stories are just heartrending.

One family I met was a woman called Zahra Mochtar Muhammad. She's a 25-year-old woman whose husband was killed by the Janjaweed. And in the commotion of the gunfire and the burning huts her children all scattered in different directions. Later she found the bodies of her 4-year-old and her 2-year-old. They had run away together, apparently the 4-year-old was looking after the 2-year-old. They hid. And they died of thirst together. So now she's looking after her four remaining children with no blankets, no food, no house to live in.

I was asking Zahra why she didn't go to Chad. And she said that she didn't have transport. But she also said: Look, why do I have to go to Chad? Why not bring the food here?

The answer, unfortunately, is that it is awfully risky to travel around Darfur, and aid workers have been targeted. The people working for those aid agencies are enormously dedicated and are doing difficult and dangerous work. They're real heroes. But there still are limits to what they can do.

I was only able to see one tiny part of Darfur. But if you multiply the stories of the people that I met by hundreds of thousands you begin to get some sense of scale of the problem.

4: Beyond the Reach of Help

After all those months when Washington was simply not paying attention to what was going on in Darfur, I just can't tell you how satisfying it was to see the first presidential debate between President Bush and Senator Kerry and to see them talk about the Darfur crisis. It was really important to have President Bush firmly describe what was going on as genocide and say that was the policy of the U.S. government.

The long history of genocide has been that the U.S. has done almost nothing while genocide has gone on, and then years afterward has belatedly acknowledged that we should have done more. President Bush, in my view, hasn't done nearly enough on Darfur. But he has done more than any other world leader and he did way more than President Clinton did during the Rwandan genocide. I wish that he would declare a no-fly zone. I wish he would lean on the Sudanese government more. But I also think it's really important to acknowledge that he has brought the administration around very firmly against what's going on. He has vastly increased humanitarian aid and he has saved a huge number of lives in Darfur.

Senator Kerry began speaking out very strongly in July about what was going on. In the debate it seemed to me that he reached a real milestone by saying that in addition to the African Union forces, he would be prepared to introduce American troops.

Politically I don't actually think that is feasible. In the U.S. right now there is very little appetite for sending U.S. troops somewhere else. But I also think that was just so important to recognize the seriousness of the situation and to acknowledge that if we can help in some way by introducing some modest number of troops that it's worth doing that. Genocide is an issue that it is worth intervening to try to stop.

5: What Can We Do?

Well, what can we do? The immediate need is obviously to keep people alive. And we have to improve humanitarian support. The U.S. has done a very good job so far.

Maybe the most important thing, though, is that we have to apply pressure on the Sudanese government. People tend to say, well, why would the Sudanese government listen to us? The reason is that the Sudanese authorities, they're not the Taliban, they're not these wild ideologues. They're survivors. They're pragmatists. They want to stay in power.

And I really believe that they made a calculated decision. They had a headache in Darfur. They had conflicts between Arabs and non-Arabs. It's an Arab government. And so it decided that the simplest way and the most cost-effective solution was genocide.

And if we raise the cost of that genocide so that they have to back off and rethink that analysis, then I think we can change their policy. And I don't think it'll take all that much to do that. And in the past we've leaned on them and twisted their arms and we got them to cut their ties with terror organizations. And if we're willing to apply pressure on them for those purposes we should also be willing to apply the same pressure to stop a genocide that has already killed 100,000 people.

If we look back at how we dealt with the Rwandan situation, President Clinton later said that his biggest regret was not responding to the genocide there. I think that we're going to look back at what happened in Darfur and feel tremendously guilty as well that we didn't do more early enough to save the 100,000 lives that are already lost and the 10,000 more that are being lost each month.

But we still have a window. The bottom line is that there are going to be many tens of thousands of people more who are going to die even in the best of situations. But we can save hundreds of thousands if we act quickly and if we're willing to act firmly against the genocide that is underway here in Darfur.

Thank you for joining me at this look at the Darfur crisis. You can follow these links to my columns about Darfur, to information about how you can help, to other avenues of information about Darfur. And as always, we welcome your comments. For The New York Times, I'm Nicholas Kristof.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/18/opinion/...print&position=

Writing to major newspapers is another way of bringing the world leaders attention to the importance of peace and protection for the people of Darfur. Unfortunately Congo seems to be in a similar position because of the intertribal wars. In that case it is even more difficult to stop the fighting. You can put sanctions on a government that is harming its people but you can't stop different warlords from fighting amongst themselves as in the Congo.