Posted by
KsReaganite on Wednesday, March 25, 2009 12:00:00 AM
In stark defiance of the indictment and subsequent arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court in The Hague over the weekend, Sudanese President Omar Bashir headed to his state visit to Eritrea today. Later in the week, he is scheduled to go to the Arab League meeting in Doha where he has been assured a red carpet welcome rather than the handcuffs that international law mandates for him. The irony of this man, a prime accused of the Darfur genocide, prancing around in the capitals of the Arab world is hardly lost on observers of history. Especially this week.
The night of March 25th marks the thirty eighth anniversary of what London Times’ columnist Anthony Mascarenhas called the ‘ugliest genocide’ in modern history after the Holocaust: the wholesale massacre of ethnic Bengalis by the Pakistan Army in 1971. It was a massacre that Mascarenhas, a Pakistani journalist himself, saw at close quarters as a war correspondent. By the time Pakistan was defeated and Bengalis free, more than a million had been killed (and some of their hidden graves are being discovered even today as I write), two hundred thousand women raped, entire libraries and museums gutted, and university dormitories turned in torture chambers. Then, as today, the perpetrators of genocide were feted by Arab leaders, and their war machine funded by the petro-dollars earned by squeezing money out of American pockets at gas stations. The bullets which killed Bengali children were fired by Pakistani troops but underwritten by Arab oil money. Like the Sudanese junta today, their Pakistani counterparts too were engaged not just in mere genocide, but in an unholy attempt to eradicate from the face of the planet an entire people and their ancient culture. The Pakistani military succeeded no more than the Sudanese will.
But look at the price. How many times will we have to go through the same thing? When do we mean it when we say ‘never again’? We said it in 1945, we said in 1971, we said in Rwanda in 1994….and yet it goes on. Perhaps President Obama will 'hope' that this time it will be truly never again.