Against a tide of evil, it can seem overwhelming to be even a single drop of good.
The first genocide of the 21st century happened in a region of Sudan. The mass killing of the people of Darfur is an atrocity most people can’t fathom. The number of casualties, as far as the United Nations can report, ranges from about 178,000 to 461,000 people since 2003. The Sudanese government estimates 450,000 people have been displaced as refugees of this civil war.
Genocide is a particular kind of evil. As Mukesh Kapila said in a recent reading at the Miami Book Fair International, it is an orchestrated ill of the past, present and future.
Kapila said a recent visit to the Holocaust museum and memorial in Paris shows that these crises are frighteningly similar from continent to continent, decade to decade, disregarding culture, socioeconomics and political leadership.
Kapila wrote “Against a Tide of Evil: How One Man Became the Whistleblower to the First Mass Murder of the Twenty-First Century” as a revealing expose of the state of Darfur in 2003, when he was stationed there as the United Nations resident and humanitarian coordinator and UN resident representative for Sudan. It is a personal account of what he saw there in 13 months before he was transferred out of Khartoum before finishing his assignment.
In the book, he has a particularly poignant recollection of a Darfuri woman who tells him about the kidnapping and violation of women and children from her village. As she was silenced by Sudanese men who deemed her story a lie, Kapila said he felt powerless. A man with veteran experience in handling humanitarian crisis and the world’s strongest conflict resolution institution at his disposal felt he could do nothing.
It was his designation of Darfur as the “world’s greatest humanitarian crisis” in 2004 that spurred the media coverage of the conflict.
The atrocities in Darfur had similarities to the conflict less than a decade old in neighboring Rwanda, from mass killings to the rape of women as a tactic of war to the exploitation of children as armies. But the world gained the Internet during those years, making Darfur the first genocide to have an online presence. The “Save Darfur” campaign that involved more than 100 organizations became a global success in informing the public about what was happening, partly thanks to leaders like Kapila who spoke out.
When the conflict doesn’t touch us directly, we don’t act. Even if we know what is happening through a social media campaign and the proliferation of mainstream media, there is even less happening in reality to prevent or stop the “tide of evil.” Surely, these campaigns were well-intentioned, but they allow us as citizens to feel good about something that simply comes with our generation: connectivity and information. At our fingertips, with the press of a few keys, we can at once find out, accept and dismiss a cause that deserves so much more attention.
We then continue to place blame on the government, on the institutions that organize our world order and “the way things are.” But Kapila makes an interesting, albeit self-deprecating point in his book: It is the failure of individuals, both good men in power and good people who care, that allows Darfur and other tragedies to continue.
Those who strive to be watchdogs for the people by keeping tabs on the government should press on and hold them accountable for individual actions.
But they must also have the agency to take action themselves.
Daniela Guzman is a UF journalism senior. Her column runs on Mondays. A version of this column ran on page 6 on 11/25/2013 under the headline "We must do more to stop the ‘tide of evil’"
