No Genocide in Darfur!!!

Three months ago, I asked a friend of mine in Sudan to tell me what he knows about that genocide in Darfur. He told me that he, personally, went there and there is no genocide whatsoever. The whole “GENOCIDE” thing is a lie. Though, I really trust that friend, I had doubts. I told myself may be he didn`t analayze the situation well or something. I had those doubts for the past three months till I read the following news story today:

“If you read the law textbooks … you’ll see very clearly that it’s not genocide,” said Carter. CAIRO — The United States is exaggerating when it described the Darfur conflict as “genocide,” former US president Jimmy Carter has said, warning that the use of the term was legally inaccurate and “unhelpful,” The Christian Science Monitor reported Friday.“There is a legal definition of genocide and Darfur does not meet that legal standard. The atrocities were horrible but I don’t think it qualifies to be called genocide,” said Carter, a member of the group of Elders who visited Darfur and included Archbishop Desmond Tutu, rights advocate Graca Machel, and entrepreneur Richard Branson. Nobel laureate Carter, whose charitable foundation, the Carter Center, worked to establish the International Criminal Court (ICC), said: “If you read the law textbooks … you’ll see very clearly that it’s not genocide and to call it genocide falsely just to exaggerate a horrible situation I don’t think it helps.” Carter said the problems in Darfur need a political solution and called on participants at crucial peace talks in Libya on October 27 to be patient. Washington is almost alone in branding the 4 1/2 years of violence in Darfur genocide. Khartoum rejects the term, European governments are reluctant to use it and a UN-appointed commission of inquiry found no genocide. The World Health Organization has further said the term is much hyped, but said there is a humanitarian catastrophe in the troubled region. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race. The term, derived from the Greek genos (“race,” “tribe,” or “nation”) and the Latin cide (“killing”), was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-born jurist who served as an adviser to the U.S. Department of War during World War II. Pampering   Brahimi said the West has “pampered” Darfur rebels a lot.  Carter’s criticism of the West’s handling of the Darfur crisis was joined by veteran UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, who accused the West of “pampering” the rebels. “The international community has acted rather irresponsibly on all this in the past by pampering a lot of these people around – not really wondering whether they really represented anybody and whether they were acting responsibly,” said Brahimi. Brahimi warned that the West needs to ensure that the people of Darfur are properly represented at the talks. Brahimi also urged a comprehensive peace in Sudan, Africa’s largest country. “We cannot solve Darfur if the CPA (comprehensive performance assessment) is crumbling,” he said. Brahimi’s and Carter’s comments come at the end the Elders’ two-day mission to Sudan. Wrapping up their visit on Thursday, October 4, the Elders called for the rapid deployment of a joint UN-African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur. “It’s quite clear to us that the crucial element to end the suffering of the people of Darfur is for the hybrid force to be deployed as soon as possible,” Tutu told reporters in Khartoum. His comments followed an attack on African Union peacekeepers in Darfur last Saturday that left 10 African troops dead, the bloodiest yet on the struggling AU force. The mission is the first for “The Elders”, a group launched by fellow Nobel laureate and former South African president Nelson Mandela. They went to experience first hand the suffering of the people of Darfur and find ways to end violence in a region plagued by four years of civil war that has left an estimated 200,000 people dead, according to UN estimates. Sudanese authorities say only 9,000 people have died.