Another Voice / China and Sudan
Olympics provide an opportunity to focus on Darfur
Recently, the Beijing Olympics started off spectacularly under the banner of “One World, One Dream.” While it is easy for all of us to get drawn into the hype and spectacle of such an event, what’s happening in China masks the genocide in Darfur, one that we have all certainly heard about, but that is by no means going away.
As most readers are aware, since 2004 the government of Sudan has embarked upon a scorched-earth campaign against its citizens of Darfur, purposefully killing more than 300,000, raping countless women and girls and displacing close to 2 million people to neighboring refugee camps.
Labeled genocide by Colin Powell and President Bush, the situation in Darfur recently received the unprecedented support of a joint resolution by the presidential candidates, hopefully cementing it as the broad, bipartisan issue of our time.
What’s the connection to China? While Sudan itself is resource rich, the government there receives roughly 70 percent of its arms and ammunition from Beijing, in return for the exchange of roughly 70 percent of its oil. This means that the genocide in Darfur would not be happening without China’s support, and could stop almost immediately if its leaders put pressure on Sudan.
China’s lack of support is especially galling given that this month is the one-year anniversary of U. N. resolution 1769, which authorized 26,000 international peacekeepers to Darfur. While this agreement at one point seemed so promising, President Omar al-Bashir has systematically stonewalled its implementation, knowing that China will cover its behavior in the Security Council.
With this in mind, the Beijing Olympics and its slogan seems cruelly ironic, with its propaganda reminiscent of the 1936 Games in Nazi Germany. But while countries breaking human rights protocols is nothing new, what is groundbreaking is that ordinary citizens like ourselves have played a huge role in putting pressure on our government, the United Nations and China to actually do something on Darfur.
Readers of The News are likewise encouraged to write letters, get their school groups or churches involved or make donations to help the refugees. In his last few months in office, the president could be reminded to rekindle the peace process by visiting one of the refugee camps in Chad, or even by chairing an international conference on Darfur, perhaps located symbolically in Rwanda.
In the end, the more one looks at genocide, the more one realizes that if violence to others goes unchecked overseas, it will eventually spread here. Through the lens of the Olympics, Darfur is staring at us in the mirror, begging us to actually make the earth one world, one dream.
Andrew Beiter teaches eighth grade social studies in Springville and is on the board of the Holocaust Resource Center of Buffalo, as well the group Buffalo for Africa.
