China and Darfur: A Legacy of Destruction

Time: 2007
Place: Darfur, Sudan, Africa, Earth, Sol Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Cluster, Universe
Event: Utter Destruction of Humanity

What were you doing on October 29th, 2006? Don’t remember? That’s alright: you can always check your electronic organizer’s records, or dip into old emails to get a rough memory. On October 28th, 2006, Mariam Abakr Yehya was, unbeknownst to her, living out her last day on earth with her three year old son Adam. The next day, as senses were tingling among many American children in anticipation of Halloween treats, the ultimate trick was about to be brutally executed upon Jebel Moon, where Adam and twenty-six fellow villagers under the age of twelve were horrifically murdered. Government sponsored militiamen brought utter destruction to a village that is no longer a village. So what exactly happened to Adam?

Fixate on the image of your little brother, your nephew, your cousin, your baby son. Fixate on the awkward walk the little tyke has at three years old, that slight waddle when he tries to run, arms extended, open eyes and soul, ready for you to scoop him up. Fixate on that image in your mind’s eye. Continue to focus on his face, and now imagine that he, a three year old baby, is being slaughtered in front of you by close range machine gun fire, and you are completely powerless to save him. This is what happened to Adam.

Welcome to Darfur, Sudan.

Yet it is necessary to leave Darfur at this point, and travel east to Khartoum, the Washington DC of Sudan. Clean streets and taxicabs characterize much of Khartoum, accompanied by cafes and construction sites for new skyscrapers, all reaching towards the sky because of money that was made by dipping it in oil. Khartoum’s economy is booming while the west of the country is slaughtered, and China bears vast responsibility for both occurrences. The economic prosperity of Khartoum is fueled (pun intended) by its growing business with China and oil (over a billion dollars for oil per year, and that figure is only rising). China is not merely guilty of needing a lot of oil because of its own rising industrial economy: it is guilty of directly furnishing the Khartoum government with immense amounts of weaponry, most of which are used against such dangers to the government as three year old Adam in Darfur. Everything from ammunition, firearms, and rocket-propelled grenades to machine guns, bombers, and Chinese-made tanks are dealt from China to the Sudanese government, mainly for use against the civilian population of Darfur.

China must be held accountable on an international scale for the atrocities it is supporting in Africa. As a rising economic power, China depends on healthy relations with the United States and European nations. It also thrives on the oil of a government which is daily butchering its own civilians, and the international community cannot allow this to carry on. It is Chinese business that affects Sudan most deeply, so it is Chinese pressure that has the best chance of saving lives in Darfur. It is the moral imperative of every single human being to stand up as one and tell China that it must stop its support of the genocide: it must either withdraw its business from Sudan entirely, or use its extreme leverage with the government to ground the mass murder, rape campaigns, and strategically enforced starvation to a halt.

How? Act out. Write letters to Chinese President Hu Jintao; send around petitions; attend a rally, or start one of your own; don’t let your U.S. representatives forget that they, too, must continue to speak out about China. China must be, to use Darfur expert Eric Reeves’s term, ‘shamed’ into taking an active role in stopping the Darfur genocide. Shame China with your one voice that will become ten, which will become a hundred, which will breed into a thousand, which will spread across the world and become a million: millions of voices, all standing up and saying ‘No. These people will not continue to suffer. Not while we’re alive’. Millions of voices, starting with just one soft tone, must rise, saying, ‘No. China must stop supporting mass slaughter with its weaponry and oil money, and tomorrow begins today’.

Fixate on that image: on the image of tomorrow becoming today, on the memory of Adam, machine gunned down at three years old, becoming a story among many millions that will not be told in vain. Fixate on the image of this baby’s death in your mind, his death and the deaths of over 400,000 others that have died in Darfur. But this time, you are armed with the most powerful weapon in the world, other than love: knowledge. Fixate on that image, and know that you are completely empowered to save them.

Welcome to Darfur, Sudan.