I would like to start my officially first article on the Darfur crisis. As I was a co-organizer of “Bowl for Darfur,” which was a bowling fundraiser event to raise the awareness of this tragic situation of the region, I have been greatly interested in the ongoing conflicts of the region.
I first would like to talk about what this Darfur crisis is about. I realized that although numerous people have been told that there have been endless bloodshed as a result of the brutal war of the region, Darfur, no one exactly knows the general storyboard of the crisis.
So basically, Darfur is a small region of Western Sudan, and Darfur crisis is an ongoing military conflict within the area. In other words, the war in Darfur is a type of civil war within Sudan. One side of the conflict is an Arab militia group, Janjawad, under the support of the Sudanese Military, and the other side is a group of various non-Arab rebel organizations like Sudan Liberation Movement or the Justice and Equality Movement.
It all started in February of 2003, when a historical drought hit the entire country of Sudan. When the natural calamity eliminated their water sources, the Arab Baggara tribes of the north moved to the south, where was originally occupied by non-Arab communities, in the search of water. While cultural and religious differences completely separated the Arab and non-Arab tribes, limited food and water because of an unfortunate natural disaster, was a great catalyst to put both parties into a boundless turmoil and start an irresolvable disputes. To make the matter worse, the Arab government of Sudan has secretly assisted the Arab communities’ “army” as the government’s ideals fall under common Arab principles.
As a result of this tragic blood-spray, 200,000 to 400,000 casualties occurred and most of them were civilians, who happend to be caught in the middle of an unexpected warfare. Children have not been the exception of this brutal massacre and still right now, uncountable innocent lives are being mercilessly killed with not only bullets or bombs but also hunger, as most of the food supplies have been used for the soldiers on war.
Though endless non-government organizations have given hands to stop such ridiculous tragedy of the region, such effort has been a drop in the ocean and the tragic genocide, as many call it, has not been stopped. Moreover, UN seems hestiant to be involved in a crsis that does not really affect our global village. In addition, the world’s super-power nation, who spent billions and trillions of dollars on the war to find “the weapons of mass destruction,” which found to be non-existent has not done much to stop the brutal murders of thousands of Children in Darfur compared to their tireless effort in Iraq.
If the world maintains current ignorant attitutde towards this serious matter of Darfur crisis, we might end up with the statistic of half-million casualties by next year. Then we will surely need to come up with some good excuses to explain our children about what we were doing while 500,000 innocent lives were bleeding to death. As the UN websites clearly says, the purpose of UN is “to bring all nations of the world together to work for peace and development, based on the principles of justice, human dignity and the well-being of all people.” I believe that, the situation in Darfur satisfies every single criteria of UN to be qualified to become a major project of UN. Instead of filling our own stomaches for our own egocentric interests, it is now time for our entire global society to take actions to bring peace back to this chaotic region.
Our world has neglected this issue for enough time. Enough blood has been spilt and now we have had it enough. To avoid being shameful of ourselves to our children in ten to twenty years for simply ignoring such endless unaccetable massacre happening in our world, it is now time for all of us to put our hands together to stop this insanity.
