From Srebrenica to Darfur: Humanity Under Attack

We Cannot Afford to Be Uninformed. It's A Matter of Life & Death!
It was 10 years ago, these days, when the Srebrenica massacre took place in Bosnia. [read here the account of those dreadful days in July 1995] It's named after the city that the United Nations had declared as a "safe zone" and where some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were executed by the Serbian nationalists under the leadership of the indicted war criminals Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. It was a horrible failure by the west to stop this genocide. Such shameful inaction should haunt the entire civilized world, and especially those who had the power and the opportunity to act.

Today we heard a ton of apologies from world leaders, but these leaders must feel the heat from the people. We have to demand that our government's policies reflect that human life and dignity is above politics, it transcends ethnicity, religion, race, or any other artificial division. We have to demand that the news media give us the news and not give us the world as a big informacial. We cannot afford to be ignorant because the price humanity pays is too high.

I think most Americans across the political spectrum value life. From the religious conservatives to the secular progressives there can be a common interest and course of action in preventing and punishing crimes against humanity. Words after the fact--and we've experienced so many atrocities just in the last few decades--sound hollow if we don't learn how to prevent those crimes against humanity. At least, when these crimes do take place, the world community must be quick to mobilize and act to stop them. I want to ask all those leaders who spoke on Monday about the tragedy in Srebrenica what have they been doing in Sudan's Darfur where another genocide is taking place.

In the last couple of years, 2 million people have been displaced by a campaign of terror launched by the Sudanese government and its paramilitary units which still operate (rape & pillage) right outside the UN refugee camps in Darfur today. Several estimates show that up to 400,000 people have been killed in an ongoing genocide. Foreign aid is trickling in, but nothing has been done to secure the long-term safety of the refugees. Sudan doesn't seem to be of any political or military interest to the world at large, so the will to intervene is not there. Public pressure hasn't materialized either, partly because the media is not doing their job. In the US there were more than 8,000 reports on trivial matters--like Jacko's trial, the "runaway bride" and other mindless celebrities--and only just over a hundred references to Darfur last month!

Most Americans get their news from television and radio. The mainstream media, like ABC, CBS, NBC/MSNBC, FOX, CNN seem to treat the news as a revenue source and as a vehicle to provide entertainment by appealing to the lowest common denominator. Talk radio is abysmal. It's dominated by the conservatives and the extreme right. Even the Bible-thumbers on the religious radio shows are pre-occupied with everything else but some genocide in Africa. The only bright spots are the public radio stations that are running reports from NPR, PRI, and, of course, PBS which has frequent analyses, updates from Darfur, and special in-depth documentaries on the subject.

The world has to be a witness. You, too, can Be A Witness. Demand better information. Genocide is news. Tell the media to be a witness. [click the link to learn how]