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Let Europeans save Sudanese
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Maybe what is happening in the western Sudan province of Darfur doesn't meet, as Secretary of State Colin Powell says, "the definition of genocide," but reports from journalists and aid workers make it clear that something gruesome is going on.
While Darfur lacks the methodical slaughter of Rwanda in 1994, the figures are alarming enough, according to Western estimates: 30,000 dead, 1 million made refugees and 300,000 more likely to die this summer of starvation and disease.
The violence, sadly, is not new in Sudan, where there has been a running civil war between the Islamic and Arab north and the Christian and animist black south. Periodically, truces are announced and then broken. The largely Arab central government promises to end the fighting but never does.
The latest depredations are by Arab militias, called the Janjaweed, against impoverished black villagers whom they seem determined to expel or kill. The central government seems unable to stop them and, according to some aid workers, may even be complicit.
Both Powell and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan were in Sudan this week. They got the usual government promises of action and reform, but Annan forthrightly said it might take international troops to disarm and disband the militias — and there is a draft U.N. resolution pending to authorize that.
If the Sudanese government can't or won't act, and the threat of international sanctions (the U.S. already has sanctions in place) doesn't work, then troops it must be. The ideal solution would be to use troops drawn from the region, but they don't seem to have sufficient numbers and training. Thus, once again, the world will be standing around, waiting to see what the United States does.
However, we already have two foreign military projects — Iraq and Afghanistan — that really ought to be finished up before we take on anything new. But there are major nations fresh and rested from sitting on the sidelines that can and should take the lead.
How about it, France and Germany? The criteria you said you'd need to justify intervention — a clear humanitarian crisis and a U.N. resolution — are there. We'll hold your coats.
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