Pat Allen: The View from Right Field

Darfur: Don't Believe "Never Again"

Bernard-Henri Levy has an excellent article on Darfur in The New Republic (see here). What I found most interesting was Levy's question whether, if we are not going to stop the Janjaweed and their Sudanese Army helpers/leaders, perhaps we should at least give the Sudan Liberation Army (and others) a few weapons to defend themselves and others who would otherwise get killed. Levy compares it to Bosnia and the siege of Sarajevo, when the military embargo was imposed on both the aggressors who had plenty of weapons and their victims who did not.

But it was like that in Rwanda, too. The genocide in Rwanda was not stopped by the United Nations or the United States or anybody else who said, after World War II, "Never again." It was stopped by the Rwandese Patriotic Front, a group of Rwandan Tutsis from outside of Rwanda, who ultimately defeated the government and stopped the genocide. If it had not been for the Tutsis themselves, the genocide might have succeeded in its goal of killing all of the Tutsis in Rwanda, instead of just half.

UN Resolutions sound nice, but if I were in Darfur, I think I would rather rely on guns and myself instead of the United Nations or any of its members.

Would You Trust the UN to Protect Your Country?

On Tuesday U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan called for an international force to be established in Lebanon to end the fighting and killing in Lebanon. In addition to the approving sounds of nations far from the Middle East, there was a deafening silence from the 800,000 Tutsis killed in Rwanda in 1994 while U.N. troops in Rwanda did nothing on orders from their bosses in New York, including the head of chief of UN peacekeeping at the time, Kofi Annan. The U.N. forces did not have the right mandate, you see, so they could not intervene. *

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* See We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families by Philip Gourevitch, page 104-05.