Amidst the flurry of gubernatorial elections, Congress moved quickly to approve cutting $50 million in civilian protection funding in Darfur. Rather than following the lead of Senator Corzine, Congress seems to have backtracked on any actions it's taken on the genocide in Darfur.
The State Department, when faced with the question of genocide in Darfur, responded with an upgrade that puts the Khartoum government on the same level as Switzerland (yes, Switzerland, that constant abuser of human rights).
Before the genocide began in February 2003, the Bush Administration was very interested in helping the mostly Christian southern region of Sudan negotiate with the Khartoum government, who they had engaged in a civil for more than 20 years.
Once the negotiations fell through, the Bush administration lost interest - somehow, the ethnic cleansing going on in the Western region just wasn't as compelling as the civil war between the North and the South.
As Congress, the Executive Branch, and the international community continually failed to confront the government or provide substantive assistance in aid distribution or words of outrage, 400,000 people have died and millions have been displaced.
What will it take for Congress to act? Why is the Bush Administration reluctant to simply agree to allow the ICC to try the perpetrators in Darfur, and why won't they place more diplomatic pressure on the Khartoum government? Why hasn't our media done ANYTHING?
Simple: obscure national interests prove more pressing and more worthy of media coverage than hundreds of thousands of people dying.
The US won't press for the ICC because our government is afraid it will be used to try US soldiers. They won't allow the ICJ, either, since that would mean we accept their jurisdiction and would be liable for past offenses (basically, Nicaragua in the 1980s, among many others).
We won't pressure Khartoum, because we see them as being an intelligence ally in the War on Terror. Basically, we'll look the other way on genocide for information that we could get simply by improving relations with other nations.
When I had the privilege of meeting with White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card last week, he claimed that the reason Administration approval ratings were so low was because the media focuses on sensationalism. "A school opening," he said, "isn't considered to be news as much as a road-side bombing". If that's the case, Andy, then why did Michael Jackson, Tom Cruise, and the Runaway Bridge have substantially more media coverage than Darfur? Is whether Jessica Simpson is or isn't wearing her wedding ring really more sensational than the continued and systematic government-sponsored killing of hundreds of thousands of people? Is what President Bush keeps in his pockets really more substantial than Congress cutting all the civilian protection for those whose government has failed them - for a region plagued by government-sponsored genocide?
It's really hard to see where the blame should lie, since there's so much of it and so many people seem to continually ignore what should be a growing global concern. While we hear about passages from Scooter Libby's dirty novel, 200 internally displaced persons - those who have "escaped" the genocide - die each day. We have an obligation to those and to those who are victims of the genocide itself to continue to work to pressure the government and keep this ongoing genocide in the national consciousness.