MuseumDESCRIPTION:
New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof recently returned from the Darfur region of Sudan. In an interview with Jerry Fowler, he shares his observations on the current situation, the effectiveness of the African Union, what needs to be done to bring about change, and why the crisis deserves a human response.
TRANSCRIPT:
NARRATOR: Welcome to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum hosted by Jerry Fowler, Director of the Museum’s Committee on Conscience. Jerry’s guest today is award-winning New York Times Columnist, Nicholas Kristof. Mr. Kristof has written extensively about the genocide emergency in the Sudanese region of Darfur and has recently returned from a visit to that region. He spoke with Jerry about what he experienced, and offered his thoughts about the crisis in Darfur and what can be done to end it.
JERRY FOWLER: Nick, welcome to the program.
NICHOLAS KRISTOF: Thank you.
JERRY FOWLER: There are a lot of tragedies out there — natural disasters, diseases that claim a lot of lives — what is special about genocide? Why does genocide deserve people’s attention?
NICHOLAS KRISTOF: I have wondered a lot about that and I think my own feelings have evolved about it. As a reporter, I have seen a lot of dreadful things from kids dying of malaria and diarrhea to natural disasters to manmade disasters in the sense of dictators mowing down pro-democracy demonstrators. And yet, you know those are all horrible, and at some level, maybe it doesn’t matter to a mother if her child dies of random brutality from a government or a disease versus something that is targeting that person’s ethnicity. But I think to me it does matter. Where you have people — like on my last trip I talked to a mother whose two-year-old daughter was pulled off her back and clubbed to death in front of her because she belonged to the Fur tribe. And to me that seems not just another tragedy, but kind of evil. The word “evil” is sort of unfashionable, but it seems so profoundly evil and contrary to every kind of human value, that I think in turn, it particularly demands a response from other humans as one way of asserting our own humanity as well as that of the victims. And so I think that we certainly have a responsibility to try to lessen suffering of other kinds, whether malaria or whatever it might be, but I think that where you have genocide, where you have people targeted because of their skin color, or ethnicity, or religion, or whatever it is, and brutalized and wiped out for that reason, then it is particularly incumbent on everybody else to respond.
JERRY FOWLER: You just returned from Darfur; can you give us an idea of the general situation you found there, and in particular, what direction is the situation heading?
NICHOLAS KRISTOF: Right now, it’s going downhill. The situation is unstable. I don’t think it is hopeless, but compared to my last visit in May, I would say that security is definitely going downhill. There are a lot more areas that one simply cannot go on. And there are more people who aren’t getting any kind of aid because they are living in these “no-go” areas. I would say that there is also less of a sense now that some kind of a peace agreement which would actually resolve the situation is on the horizon. Attacks on villages have resumed again, even though there are not that not actually all that many villages left to burn.
JERRY FOWLER: You mentioned security. One of the main hopes for security has been the presence of an African Union (AU) force which now numbers something in the neighborhood of 7,000 soldiers. What effect is that having?
NICHOLAS KRISTOF: It’s kind of a compared-to-what question. The AU force is fantastic compared to nothing at all. Where they have gone, the Darfuris have returned to villages, they have dramatically reduced the insecurity in those places where you do have the AU troops. On the other hand, they are not nearly as effective as I think a lot of people — including me — had hoped. And also, there is a growing sense that they have been tested by all sides to the conflict and found wanting, found vulnerable. One of the big problems is that they are not well armed. They have AK-47s and a few of them have RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades]. On the other hand, the rebels and the Janjaweed both have heavy machine guns which can shoot three times as far. The AU troops go around in the backs of pickup trucks; they live in little encampments with just barbed wire around them. And now that four of them, plus two contractors, have been killed, there is a growing sense that people will be taking potshots at those AU troops unless we find some way of backing them up.
JERRY FOWLER: There was another report that just a couple more have been wounded. Did you get a chance to interact with those troops? What is their morale like?
NICHOLAS KRISTOF: I only interacted with them peripherally because the AU is terribly bureaucratic and so I could not get permission from on-high, but in Kalma camp I did. The Janjaweed was busy burning fields right around Kalma, and so I dropped by and chatted with them and wanted to see if I could get a ride over there so that I might not get shot by the Janjaweed and they declined, but we did talk for a little while. I would say that the Rwandans in particular really feel a sense of mission in Darfur; they have been through genocide, their armed forces are also a little more alert and on the ball than maybe the Nigerians, but the latest incidents involving the attacks on the AU troops and the kidnappings as well, I think have really sobered them. They are very vulnerable and they have difficulty communicating with local people because they have very few people who can speak Arabic. They really feel like they are out there and not getting nearly as much support as they had wanted or hoped to get.
JERRY FOWLER: I was going to ask, is there the sense that there is support coming from other countries — from the United States, from European countries — to better arm them and give them better communications equipment?
NICHOLAS KRISTOF: People were really demoralized when the United States cut out the 50 million that was supposed to go to them. On the other hand, the rumor mill has it that the AU will be formally asking the West for more help, for the AU force there and I think if they make that request there will be some kind of effort to try to figure out ways of helping. It sure seems to me that that’s an ideal moment for NATO or the UN to step in and figure out a way perhaps of embedding troops from other countries into those AU Units.
JERRY FOWLER: You mention Kalma camp for displaced people; it is one I have read about a lot. Can you just describe when you are standing in Kalma, what do you see? What do you hear? What do you smell? What is it like?
NICHOLAS KRISTOF: It is vast. And maybe that is the starting point. We do not even know how many people are in it. When I was there in May people were talking about maybe 130,000 people being inside it; now the current estimate is 87,000 people. The reason for the change is not that people have left; it is just that people have recounted. It is a huge collection of little makeshift huts composed of anything people can find. It is not tents; it is really makeshift huts. In general, people in each tribe tend to live near each other. People from each village tend to live near each other under the control of the sheiks for that area. There is decent water. Depending on what sector you are in, there is a certain amount of food. But people are profoundly demoralized because they are in one big prison. They need firewood for example; they need extra sources of income. The moment they leave that camp, they are vulnerable, if they are men to being shot, and if they are women to being raped and beaten up. One man was killed just 72 yards outside the border of the camp, and women continue to be raped. When I was there we heard gunshots outside of it, and that is a constant threat hovering over the whole camp.
JERRY FOWLER: When they are attacked outside, are they being attacked because of a situation of lawlessness, or is this part of the campaign of the Janjaweed and the government that drove them from their homes in the first place?
NICHOLAS KRISTOF: I think that the government gets way too much credit with its argument about lawlessness. Sure, it is lawless, but it is lawless because the government is encouraging that. One of the things that just struck me the most on this trip was, I was coming back on the pass to Nyala road, from a massacre site. There were troops on that road and we passed a convoy of Janjaweed, and the soldiers paid no attention whatsoever, even though those are the guys in that area that are busy burning villages in that area and massacring people. On the other hand, at one check point, when I was stopped, the secret police dragged off my interpreter, took him to an interrogation hut and then told me, “You go on. We are just going to hold him for investigation.” He was just terrified. When I protested and said I certainly was not going to leave him behind, then they pulled me into their interrogation hut as well. After a while they let us go again, but it is clear that the authorities do control the situation, and if they simply applied the same rules to the Janjaweed that they apply to foreign journalists, then the genocide would be over in a moment.
JERRY FOWLER: One of your most searing columns from this recent trip was about rape, and the use of rape. How do you relate this use of rape to the idea of genocide, targeting a particular group? And how is it related in Darfur?
NICHOLAS KRISTOF: Sure. What is going on is a really calculated effort by the Sudanese government to get rid of a problem. There have been long-term tensions in Darfur between two groups of people, essentially, and then it culminated with the rise of a rebellion and an insurgency in the area. The government in Khartoum I think decided that the easiest way of getting rid of this headache was to de-populate large areas of Darfur, and that there would be a certain number of objections from the West, but that it was a remote area, it would take people a while to notice, and that the objections probably would not be too loud. On a cost-benefit scale, this was the best way to go about it, the best way of getting rid of this headache. From the same point of view, one of the most effective ways is rape. If you kill people, then bodies will turn up, that will particularly infuriate the international community. On the other hand, when the Janjaweed go around raping women, then the victims usually keep silent because of the stigma. On the other hand, everybody in the community knows what has happened, it terrorizes people, it drives them away, and so it is a very shrewd and effective weapon to terrorize people and drive them out. In the case of Kalma camp that is what is happening. The government is very unhappy with all these displaced people in Kalma because it is near Nyala; it is right near the Nyala airport. It has tried to put pressure on Kalma to drive people away. It has found that the most effective way of doing that is to rape women when they leave the camp.
JERRY FOWLER: It is insidious. One of the things you do so well is making this huge catastrophe personal, telling personal stories; a lot of your columns have had these stories. Is there one in particular that stays with you?
NICHOLAS KRISTOF: It feels strange for me to be going back to the same place over and over, because that is not what a columnist normally does, but it is precisely some of those people, that do have me go back. Maybe the specific thing that I always think is that is not exactly one person, but it was on one of my earlier trips — and this was along the Chad/Sudan border — a huge number of people had just fled burned villages and they were at a wadi, an oasis, and they were sheltering under trees. I got there and I just went kind of randomly from tree to tree talking to people under them. The first tree I went to, there were two brothers who had both been shot, and the less wounded one had carried his more wounded brother for 49 days on his back to get to this place, to get to safety. In the next tree there was a woman whose parents had been massacred with other people in the village, and then her parents had been thrown in the well to poison it. Under the next tree there were two orphans, a four-year-old girl, carrying her one-year-old brother on her back. Their parents had been killed by the Janjaweed. Under the next tree was a woman called Zachara, her husband had been killed, her two children murdered, she had been gang-raped and then mutilated. What really got to me was that as far as I could see in every direction, there were more trees, and more people under them with stories just like those. The idea that this should be going on in this century, I just could not get that out of my mind.
JERRY FOWLER: And that was a number of months ago, on one of your earlier trips, that you saw this?
NICHOLAS KRISTOF: Right. That was on my second trip around June of last year [2004].
JERRY FOWLER: Did you think then that the situation would still be as bad as it is here at the end of 2005?
NICHOLAS KRISTOF: Two things have surprised me about this. If on my first trip in particular you had told me that people would know where Darfur is, what is signifies, I would have been amazed. Frankly, an awful lot of awful things happen in places in Africa, and they never get attention. I think it has surprised me pleasantly that people do know about Darfur, and that the President has called it genocide. On the other hand, if you had told me that the President would call it genocide, that it would become an issue, and that still nothing would be done, I would have been flabbergasted and also just kind of horrified that even when we acknowledge that this is genocide, that we would still avert our eyes.
JERRY FOWLER: If you talk to government officials, one response you might get is, “It is horrible, but we are doing everything we can.” Do you have some ideas about things that are not being done, that plausibly could be done, that would hold hopes of improving the situation?
NICHOLAS KRISTOF: Yes. The same argument has always been made at every juncture. There is never any great solution and invariably, because there is no perfect solution, and there is no maximal solution, so we end up doing nothing at all. The same arguments were made from Armenia through Bosnia. In this case, one of the essential elements has to be to provide security, and the African Union was a step in the right direction but it is too small, it is too lightly armed, it does not have enough of a mandate. I think that probably the best way to get a change in that quickly, and in a way that is practical, that can actually happen soon, would be to “blue-hat” the African Union force, in other words to put it under the auspices of the United Nations while keeping its core built around the AU and to bring in ideally, NATO troops, but at least major armed forces, maybe to embed them in AU units. I think that would make a huge difference in providing security on the ground. The other thing that I think would be enormously helpful is just to yell and scream. Again, one of the lessons I think of the past is that one of the best ways to counter these kinds of outrages is to just bellow one’s outrage and in fact, we are not bellowing, we are whispering. Finally is a third element. Ultimately what we need to do to stop this is to have some kind of a peace agreement in Darfur. I think we need a new international initiative. I think that one of the reasons why peace negotiations have failed is that they tend to involve two recalcitrant parties: the government and the rebels. The sheiks that do really represent considerable moral authority in the area have been left out and I think we need some kind of a new international envoy, ideally a prominent American — Colin Powell would be great — to lead that effort and to involve the sheiks in negotiations. Will all this work? I do not know, but it is certainly worth trying.
JERRY FOWLER: Nick, thanks so much for being with us today.
NICHOLAS KRISTOF: My pleasure.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about the genocide emergency in Darfur, visit our web site at www.committteeonconscience.org.
