December 10, 2007 is the culminating Torch Relay for Darfur. This day is the International Day of Human Rights. So, in Washington, D.C. the final national Torch Relay is taking place.
In the HBO documentary Sand and Sorrow, that aired last Thursday, December 6, a statement by Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times was: that during the holocaust of the 24,000 front page articles, 6 were about the holocaust. And that regarding the current genocide on the Darfuri people, the real failure has been television. ABC News had 16 minutes in the nightly news casts all last year. NBC had only 5 minutes and CBS had 3 minutes. (I’m not sure the exact year this statement was made. It may have been 2005 ~ but it makes no difference the year, because the media coverage has not increased about Darfur. In the city of Providence, the Providence Journal didn’t cover our statewide Torch Relay at all and only one television station came to our Torch Relay.)
Further, Nicholas Kristof said “You know, if the Michael Jackson trial had been held in Darfur, they would have figured out a way of getting there and they would have sent several camera crews. So we have missed the story. As a result genocide has been allowed to drag on, to go unnoticed and unresponded to.
Khartoum, the Sudanese government knows we will do nothing, so it keeps supplying the Russian antonov planes, the Chinese weapons, vehicles and giving the orders to the janjaweed to continue burning, gang raping, gouging the eyes out, murdering all of the men ~ all unarmed people. So it is no civil war because only one side is armed.
The story is genocide is not being covered by the media. And President Omar al-Bashir has his files on Osama bin Laden to dangle as carrots to the Bush administration, which has been working so well for the Sudanese government.
“Hunger and disease soon replaced the janjaweed as Darfuris’ number one killer. The emboldened leaders were (and are) getting away with murder.” George Clooney
When the George Bush administration proclaimed that the human crisis was and is genocide, “it was a pretty masterful case of a government appearing to do something by characterizing violence in a certain way, while not actually developing policy tools commensurate with that characterization”. Samantha Power
“The declaration of genocide in Darfur wasn’t used to spur action in Darfur, but as a substitute for it.” Nicholas Kristof
“…what we have is unmitigated failure.” Eric Reeves
“Silence, acquiescence, paralysis in the face of genocide is wrong,” Senator Barack Obama and Presidential Candidate.
Targeting non-combatants as has been the case of the Darfuri people is wrong no matter what the measuring or rationale. This is a clear case of what is right and wrong.
But because it has been allowed to go on without accountability, the rebellion by the Darfuri factions have gotten more splintered and more difficult to bring together. Genocide and rape as a tool has a way of undermining trust.
This is the third batch of pictures taken by Tegan Nelson with my camera of our Providence, Rhode Island Torch Relay on October 27, 2007, that was snubbed by ABC, NBC and The Providence Journal. We did have an Associated Press photographer, Channel 12's CBS News, The Newport Daily News, Newport This Week and the East Bay papers cover the Rhode Island Torch Relay on behalf of the Darfuri people.
US RI Representative James Langevin
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