Friday, August 04, 2006

More on the Arab League and Darfur

I've already complained that expecting the Arab League to stop the killing in Darfur is like expecting the Ku Klux Klan to stop the lynching of Blacks in the US. (Yes, there are people, even Black people, who actually expect the Arab League to intervene to stop the killings.)

Now someone else seems to have picked it up:

The message seems clear: the Arab League is not as concerned with the DEPTH of the evil as they are with PERPETRATORS of the evil. Two hundred Arab civilians killed by Israel is a more newsworthy story than 20,000 Africans killed in an Arab League country. Perhaps the urge to be self-critical is unwise and bad for “Arab morale” in this time of asymmetrical warfare, entropy in Iraq and widely rampant anti-Arab sentiments. But further neglect of Darfur will be for the Arab League what Rwanda was for the UN: the grossest moral failing of its existence . . . the beginning of the end.


I don't know if Rwanda was the beginning of the end for the UN. I don't claim to foretell the future. I will reiterate that the Arab League should not be expected to intervene when Arabs kill non-Arabs. That's not why it was created. It was created to support the ethnic interests of Arabs, i.e. to foster Arab nationalism. I don't think it should continue to exist. And anyway, it can't even defend the ethnic interests of Arabs in Lebanon. It is at best impotent, at worst evil. Get rid of it.

And for humanity's sake, someone please fund an adequate African Union force, and if necessary an OIC force, to Darfur.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Who killed more of whom in the last 20 or 30 years: Arabs killing non-Arabs or non-Arabs killing Arabs?

I.e...which is the larger death toll:

The atrocities committed by Israel against Arab Palestinians, by the US in the two Iraq wars, Iraqi casualties in the Iran-Iraq War, etc.

or

The atrocities committed by the Algerian government and Islamists against native Amazigh (Berbers), by the Iraqi government against the Kurds, by the Sudanese government against the people of Southern Sudan and Darfur, etc.?

An honest answer to this question would require Arab intellectuals to reevaluate their approach to the issue of human rights. The future of human rights and democracy in the Arab World hangs in the balance.