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War with the Cockroaches Nearly three weeks ago I wrote to tell you, at the beginning of my mission, what I had intended to do with my time here in Eastern Chad. Since then I have fulfilled my personal obligations for coming. I have documented Sudanese people displaced by genocide extensively on both sides of the border between Chad and Sudan. I have been in the company of refugees and rebels. I have contributed some to the mass media’s coverage of the Darfur Crisis and helped to uncover secret records documenting the arming of the Janjaweed (those responsible for much of the actual slaughter and displacement) by the government of Sudan (the minority group in power guilty of the planning and conducting campaigns of genocide for more than 22 years). I may have even accidentally stumbled upon the psychosocial roots of explaining why Genocide exists in our world, or at least in Africa, through a personal microcosmic experience. I would like to share that with you now. Just after dusk, to close a fairly uneventful day a couple weeks back, I was trying to make conversation with Father Joel Roumeas, the French Jesuit Priest who started the mission in Abeche where I have been based for the majority of nights on the floor of an old school room. We were trudging through the language barriers addressing the fact that he is the only Christian set up in an astoundingly massive geographical expanse of hard-line Islamic Central Africa. Suddenly an outburst of frantic French was coming from outside and getting louder as Cecile, one of the other aid worker guests at hotel Joel, came running with arms raised into the office of the surly Priest. She focused her disgruntlement towards us with a panicked look and a heavy accent she spouted about bugs while pointing to the picture of a cockroach on the can of Raid (or the Chadian equivalent). The very reason she came to the Father’s office now was clear. I volunteered to investigate further so Joel could finish the remainder of his bookwork and join the group for dinner. I walked over with the bug juice can in hand to the community bathroom in the Father’s house. There I discovered a sight to make most people’s skin crawl. Cockroaches indeed were just teeming on most everything in the bathroom. I made my way in to gas the buggers and with hasty aim the massacre began. How natural a coordinated plan of attack took place, but yet with so much disgust, urgency and haste. Realizing I was out numbered with the can feeling quite light, I backed my way out of the infested room to quarantine it and to let the medicine work away at our problem. With the door closed I breathed a sigh of relief feeling my work was done. Then a swarm of the pests came from under the door in a mass exodus trying to escape the fumes. A bit defeated, I grabbed the nearest object I could find and took my post to squash the rebellion. Using an old Le Monde newspaper, curled up as if to hit a dog, I smashed away at anything moving from under the well-guarded crack between the bottom of the door and the floor. Then it struck me, "How ironic is it that here I have come half way around the world to document a genocide taking place and now I have become the Grim Reaper of Cockroaches?" My thoughts interrupted… "But
there is still one!!!" shouted Cecile watching with horror at the
struggling, but persevering little creatures, as I sweep the remainder
of the corpses onto the very blood stained media responsible for the
under-publication of this atrocity – the mass media – again
the irony hit. Just then Father Joel enters for dinner saying jokingly
"no photos – no photo," perhaps not wanting the images
of the tattered and dirty Le Monde to get out as evidence that there
was ever cockroaches in his establishment. After a bit of soap and water I too was ready for dinner. Ready to move on as if the event never occurred – and why should killing a bunch of bugs register as anything more than a blip on the radar of the evening? It was so natural to consider extermination as my first method of solving the problem. In fact, I considered no other course of action after death. This was the place I was to take a shower in an hour or so. This is where I needed to use the toilet. I didn’t want these pests around when I did these nightly activities and it is barely worth mentioning that Cecile did either. They were in my way and in my space – so I killed them – I killed them all. What is happening in Sudan is not much more complicated, on some levels, than the depiction I have just recounted for you. There are many ingredients common to most premeditated massacres. These elements are clearly evident within the Darfur Crisis. Often differing lifestyles creating territorial problems that simmer until they boil over. The arming and training (at least psychologically) of a force with the erasing of a mutual enemy in mind is a first step to a violent solution. That leads to campaigns of coordinated attacks on the target group and the blocking international observes to obscure the truth and protect the guilty with the impunity. Genocide is defined by the planned and systematic wiping out of a group of people identified by race, religion, or ethnicity through certain acts, when committed "with intent to destroy" a targeted group, in whole or in part. The specified acts include killing members of a group, causing severe bodily and mental harm and deliberately inflicting on a group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction, in whole or in part. The government
of Sudan was allowed to get away with this kind of behavior for more
than 22 years during their campaign of terror, trauma, and insecurity
on the marginalized people of South Sudan, which only recently culminated
in a peaceful resolution held now by the vigilant accountability of
an international community late to respond. The international community
must respond with the same forcefulness – now - to let the desperate
minority government of Sudan that their conduct needed to rule their
country will not be tolerated. We must say that the marginalized people
of Sudan are indeed human beings protected by international human rights
laws and not merely cockroaches, which is what we, the international
community will be saying about them if we do not lift a finger or raise
an eyebrow to correct the situation. The now displaced people of Sudan
are beautiful members of our collective human condition, but their plight
is now an awful stain on that shared condition deteriorating by the
second as we delay coming to their aid with the mean available to us
in surplus. In Rwanda we said never again… …where is that
promise now… …Caught on the tips of our tongue? Let us talk
with conviction of the heart and hold nothing back to change our world
bound in chains. More:
Read Reed's dispatches from Chad to his friends back home. For
more information on the Sudan, go to: Useful
sources for more information: |
