New meaning to 'never again': B.C. Jews link the large-scale agonies of the Holocaust with the recent mass killings and rapes in Sudan's Darfur
Thursday, February 24, 2005
Page B2
Section: Westcoast News
By DOUGLAS TODD
Robbie Waisman is a Vancouver Jew who survived four years as a child labourer in the Buchenwald concentration camp. His parents and four brothers died during the Holocaust.
Nouri Abdalla is a Port Coquitlam Muslim who had eight relatives murdered in 2003 by machete-wielding, camel-riding Janjaweed militia in his homeland, the Darfur region of Sudan.
The African-born Muslim and Polish-born Jew, in a rare alliance, are at the forefront of a movement determined to end more than 60 years of global indifference that saw the world stand by while ethnic slaughter ravaged Nazi-occupied Europe, Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and now Darfur.
Brought together by the Pacific Region of the Canadian Jewish Congress, Waisman and Abdalla are bent on transforming their grief and rage into an interfaith effort that will pressure Canada and the world to send United Nations peacekeeping troops to stop a massacre that's so far cost at least 100,000 lives, with some human-rights
agencies saying the total may be more than 300,000.
But the pleas of people such as Waisman and Abdalla are coming up against a wall of political and military torpor, despite the United Nations calling the massacres in Darfur "the world's worst [continuing] humanitarian crisis."
Some national leaders, particularly Prime Minister Paul Martin, have expressed grave concern about the horror in Darfur.
But little is being done to stop the killing or rescue the roughly two million Muslims in the region who have been raped, tortured or forced from their homes by a militia said to be backed by Sudan's Muslim fundamentalist government.
"Eight members of my extended family in the village of Shoba Mountains were hauled out and shot and hacked to death on July 25, 2003," says Abdalla, 44, a businessman who has lived in Canada for more than a decade.
"With 170 other people, their bodies were buried in a mass grave, which is now gone. When the killings began to be investigated by Amnesty International, the militia started taking the bodies out of the mass grave and burning them. It's happening all over Darfur."
As Waisman, a 74-year-old retired accountant, drinks coffee in the Vancouver condominium of Sheila Fruman, an official with the B.C. wing of the Canadian Jewish Congress, he listens to Abdalla tell the tragic story of his relatives' murders.
Then the Holocaust survivor says: "I feel anger. I have no words to describe the anger. Then I feel saddened the world hasn't learned a thing from the Holocaust. And then I feel encouragement that there are people of different faiths coming together to care about their fellow human beings."
Many call it an ethnic genocide -- a concerted campaign by nomadic Arabs to destroy a long-standing community of indigenous blacks. The perpetrators and the victims are all Sunni Muslims. But the Darfur rivalry has ripped apart their Muslim solidarity.
Abdalla says the people of Darfur grow furious when they hear Sudan's leaders and the Janjaweed raiders dare refer to themselves as authentic Muslims.
The atrocities in Darfur have galvanized activists from many spheres: Canada's major Jewish organization, Muslims, ecumenical Christians groups, European human-rights watchdogs, labour organizations in North America, black organizations in the U.S. and the former UN forces commander in Rwanda, Canada's Romeo Dallaire.
Mark Weintraub, chair of the Pacific Region of the Canadian Jewish Congress, says there would be little point in Canada's 300,000 Jews remembering the recent 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp if they aren't determined to stop another genocide in the making.
"The Jewish mantra of 'never again' wasn't meant to protect only the Jewish community from annihilation," says Weintraub, a lawyer. The cause of anti-Semitism, he says, is about protecting all people from being scapegoated.
" 'Never again' was a battle cry for a fundamental shift in human consciousness," Weintraub says. The efforts of Jews to stop another Holocaust, he says, has already helped lead to the creation of the UN and initiated a drive for human rights throughout the latter part of the 20th century, especially in Canada.
"Unless the world utters a collective scream to stop the killing in Darfur," Weintraub says, "all the words about anti-Semitism and about the Holocaust, about Cambodia, about Kosovo, about Rwanda don't mean a damn thing."
Abdalla, who attends the Tri-City Mosque in Port Coquitlam, returned to *Darfur* in 2003. He keeps in constant touch. "You should see my phone bill."
His family of origin have so far been safe because they live in a large city, and not a vulnerable village. But Abdalla hears on a near-daily basis from family and others about unfolding catastrophes.
Given Abdalla's activism in Canada's Sudanese community, Weintraub asked him to speak last fall at a Vancouver synagogue during Yom Kippur, the most holy event in the Jewish calendar. Most Greater Vancouver synagogues devoted their Yom Kippur services to the mass murders in Darfur.
Still, the Jews and Muslim sitting around the table in Vancouver worry not nearly enough is being done at the geopolitical level to force the Sudanese government to stop the killing in Darfur.
They believe the Canadian government must give much greater support to the work of B.C. Senator Mobina Jaffer, a Muslim and Canada's special envoy to Sudan, who has been desperately trying to create a workable solution for Darfur.
The Vancouver-based human-rights advocates acknowledge, however, that one of their campaign's challenges has been creating an easy-to-grasp picture of what is going on in conflict-ridden Sudan, which is the size of France and has a population of 32 million.
In early January, in a deal separate from the Darfur atrocities, Sudan agreed to a peace agreement to end a 21-year civil war between the hardline Muslim government in the north and Christians and animists in the south. That conflict left 1.5 million people dead.
The peace agreement, signed under international pressure from the U.S. government, U.S. evangelical Christians and European nations, assured Christians and animists in the south they would get some access to Sudan's rich oil reserves and the right to vote on independence in six years.
Then, in early February the UN envoy to Sudan, Jan Pronk, argued the north-south peace deal will not last unless violence is also ended in the conflict among Muslims in Darfur, in western Sudan. Darfur's troubles were sparked in early 2003 when indigenous black rebels began fighting for greater independence from Sudanese authorities, maintaining the northern government had long favoured the region's Arabs over its blacks.
Pronk has urged the UN to send more than 10,000 peacekeeping troops to stabilize Darfur. However, some permanent members of the UN Security Council, China and Russia, are balking at moving in troops or imposing economic sanctions to force an end to the Darfur massacres.
Weintraub notes that China relies on Sudanese oil, and Russia profits from arms sales to Sudan's government, which claims it has nothing to do with the marauding Janjaweed militia.
International efforts to pressure the authoritarian Muslim rulers of Sudan were further complicated in early February when a UN panel report fell short of calling the massacres a "genocide," which can be defined as the obliteration of a people because of their nationality, ethnicity or religion.
Instead, the UN report said the killings in Darfur revealed "genocidal intentions" and amounted to a crime against humanity.
An official "genocide" label would have obliged the 15-member UN Security Council to take immediate measures to stop the killing.
In addition, the UN and the U.S. disagreed in early February over how to prosecute Sudan's wrongdoers.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged that trials for those behind Darfur's atrocities be held at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands. But U.S. President George W. Bush's administration has long opposed the Dutch-based international court, fearing it could someday be used to prosecute American soldiers. The
U.S. believes prosecutions should take place at a separate court in Tanzania.
Currently, only 1,200 UN-backed African Union soldiers are stationed in Darfur. They have been ordered to do little more than observe the so-called "ceasefire." They are not allowed to stop the massacres.
That's similar to the tragic situation Dallaire found himself in in Rwanda in the mid-1990s, says Fruman, who was once communications adviser to former B.C. premier Mike Harcourt and who has worked for pro-democracy organizations in the ethnically torn Balkans.
The Rwandan disaster, which occurred 10 years ago, has been the subject of many official apologies, says Fruman. The mishandled crisis has recently been depicted in Dallaire's biography, Shake Hands with the Devil, an award-winning documentary of the same name, and the new movie, Hotel Rwanda.
"Darfur is in the shadow of Rwanda," says Fruman. "The aid always seems to come too late. We don't want the seriousness of the conflict in Darfur to be the subject of another set of apologies 10 years from now."
Waisman, remembering his dead family members and the 1.5 million children killed in the Holocaust, adds: "As a survivor, our greatest fear is that all those people will have died in vain and we won't free the world of genocide. It affects us all. Mass murder always starts with an identifiable group. But it never ends there."
The interfaith campaign being launched by Waisman, Abdalla, Fruman and Weintraub is urging Martin to capitalize on Canada's good reputation in Africa. The group has already convinced the Canadian Jewish Congress to work with the mainline Christian organization, Kairos (Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives), to make Darfur a
priority letter-writing campaign.
The Vancouver group has also sent letters to Martin urging him to press harder for 50,000 UN peacekeeping troops to be moved into Sudan and particularly Darfur. They also want Martin to insist on a no-fly zone over Darfur. That's because when the Janjaweed militia are not storming into villages on horses or camels, they fly in in government-owned, Russian-made airplanes, causing villagers to rush in panic into the forests.
"They burn everything; and they kill everything they need to," says Abdalla.
The pro-government militia has been accused of torching villages, systematically raping women, throwing babies into fires, singling out men and boys for execution and torturing fathers in front of their families.
The Vancouver-based human-rights advocates want Martin -- who during a fall visit to Sudan urged President Omar al-Bashir to protect Darfur's refugees -- to inject more bite into the arguments he made before the UN last September.
That's when, addressing the UN General Assembly, Martin went further than most heads of state. He said the attacks on civilians in Darfur show that the world, under the auspices of the UN, must sometimes override the traditional sovereign rights of a country by sending in troops to intervene to stop massacres.
Although the activists sitting around the table in Vancouver regretted that Canada is now ranked only 37th in the world in terms of its commitment to peacekeeping troops, Weintraub is convinced the globe-trotting Martin is the prime minister who will launch a new era in Canada's foreign policy.
"Canada has often been able to punch above its weight" in global influence, says Weintraub.
Weintraub envisions Canada returning to the era of former Liberal prime minister Lester Pearson, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 for brokering a deal that avoided armed conflict over access to the Suez Canal.
If Canada fails to raise enough pressure to end the slaughter in Darfur, Weintraub worries Jaffer, as the country's special envoy, will "have to bear the cost of a vast humanitarian crisis."
Why do so many in the West seem indifferent to Darfur, or at least to making something happen to stop the deaths of an estimated 10,000 people each month?
Dallaire says the developed world virtually ignored the murders of 900,000 Rwandans for two basic reasons: Because they were black, not white; and because their land and resources were of no economic significance to the superpowers.
The people of Darfur suffer similar invisibility, say the Vancouver activists.
They are largely indigenous black subsistence farmers, victimized by nomadic Arabs bent on forcing them out of their villages so they can control their land and use it for grazing their animals.
Former British colonialists helped create Sudan's problems through their map-making. Just as they did throughout much of the Middle East, British rulers gave Sudan virtually unworkable borders, which allowed antagonistic groups to assume power over each other.
Even though Western colonialists have guilt on their hands in Africa, Fruman says, people in the West tend to write off Sudan's problems. They shake their heads and blame the troubles on Africans, saying the continent is such a mess nothing can be done about it.
Unlike some genocides-in-the-making of the 20th century, however, Fruman maintains that this time, leaders and citizens of the West can't honestly say they didn't really know what was going on in Darfur.
Modern communication technology, she says, has kept the world informed about Darfur's atrocities, whether we like it or not.
"We really have no excuse," she says. "Every day we know somebody is dying because we're not doing enough."
Nouri Abdalla is a Port Coquitlam Muslim who had eight relatives murdered in 2003 by machete-wielding, camel-riding Janjaweed militia in his homeland, the Darfur region of Sudan.
The African-born Muslim and Polish-born Jew, in a rare alliance, are at the forefront of a movement determined to end more than 60 years of global indifference that saw the world stand by while ethnic slaughter ravaged Nazi-occupied Europe, Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and now Darfur.
Brought together by the Pacific Region of the Canadian Jewish Congress, Waisman and Abdalla are bent on transforming their grief and rage into an interfaith effort that will pressure Canada and the world to send United Nations peacekeeping troops to stop a massacre that's so far cost at least 100,000 lives, with some human-rights
agencies saying the total may be more than 300,000.
But the pleas of people such as Waisman and Abdalla are coming up against a wall of political and military torpor, despite the United Nations calling the massacres in Darfur "the world's worst [continuing] humanitarian crisis."
Some national leaders, particularly Prime Minister Paul Martin, have expressed grave concern about the horror in Darfur.
But little is being done to stop the killing or rescue the roughly two million Muslims in the region who have been raped, tortured or forced from their homes by a militia said to be backed by Sudan's Muslim fundamentalist government.
"Eight members of my extended family in the village of Shoba Mountains were hauled out and shot and hacked to death on July 25, 2003," says Abdalla, 44, a businessman who has lived in Canada for more than a decade.
"With 170 other people, their bodies were buried in a mass grave, which is now gone. When the killings began to be investigated by Amnesty International, the militia started taking the bodies out of the mass grave and burning them. It's happening all over Darfur."
As Waisman, a 74-year-old retired accountant, drinks coffee in the Vancouver condominium of Sheila Fruman, an official with the B.C. wing of the Canadian Jewish Congress, he listens to Abdalla tell the tragic story of his relatives' murders.
Then the Holocaust survivor says: "I feel anger. I have no words to describe the anger. Then I feel saddened the world hasn't learned a thing from the Holocaust. And then I feel encouragement that there are people of different faiths coming together to care about their fellow human beings."
Many call it an ethnic genocide -- a concerted campaign by nomadic Arabs to destroy a long-standing community of indigenous blacks. The perpetrators and the victims are all Sunni Muslims. But the Darfur rivalry has ripped apart their Muslim solidarity.
Abdalla says the people of Darfur grow furious when they hear Sudan's leaders and the Janjaweed raiders dare refer to themselves as authentic Muslims.
The atrocities in Darfur have galvanized activists from many spheres: Canada's major Jewish organization, Muslims, ecumenical Christians groups, European human-rights watchdogs, labour organizations in North America, black organizations in the U.S. and the former UN forces commander in Rwanda, Canada's Romeo Dallaire.
Mark Weintraub, chair of the Pacific Region of the Canadian Jewish Congress, says there would be little point in Canada's 300,000 Jews remembering the recent 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp if they aren't determined to stop another genocide in the making.
"The Jewish mantra of 'never again' wasn't meant to protect only the Jewish community from annihilation," says Weintraub, a lawyer. The cause of anti-Semitism, he says, is about protecting all people from being scapegoated.
" 'Never again' was a battle cry for a fundamental shift in human consciousness," Weintraub says. The efforts of Jews to stop another Holocaust, he says, has already helped lead to the creation of the UN and initiated a drive for human rights throughout the latter part of the 20th century, especially in Canada.
"Unless the world utters a collective scream to stop the killing in Darfur," Weintraub says, "all the words about anti-Semitism and about the Holocaust, about Cambodia, about Kosovo, about Rwanda don't mean a damn thing."
Abdalla, who attends the Tri-City Mosque in Port Coquitlam, returned to *Darfur* in 2003. He keeps in constant touch. "You should see my phone bill."
His family of origin have so far been safe because they live in a large city, and not a vulnerable village. But Abdalla hears on a near-daily basis from family and others about unfolding catastrophes.
Given Abdalla's activism in Canada's Sudanese community, Weintraub asked him to speak last fall at a Vancouver synagogue during Yom Kippur, the most holy event in the Jewish calendar. Most Greater Vancouver synagogues devoted their Yom Kippur services to the mass murders in Darfur.
Still, the Jews and Muslim sitting around the table in Vancouver worry not nearly enough is being done at the geopolitical level to force the Sudanese government to stop the killing in Darfur.
They believe the Canadian government must give much greater support to the work of B.C. Senator Mobina Jaffer, a Muslim and Canada's special envoy to Sudan, who has been desperately trying to create a workable solution for Darfur.
The Vancouver-based human-rights advocates acknowledge, however, that one of their campaign's challenges has been creating an easy-to-grasp picture of what is going on in conflict-ridden Sudan, which is the size of France and has a population of 32 million.
In early January, in a deal separate from the Darfur atrocities, Sudan agreed to a peace agreement to end a 21-year civil war between the hardline Muslim government in the north and Christians and animists in the south. That conflict left 1.5 million people dead.
The peace agreement, signed under international pressure from the U.S. government, U.S. evangelical Christians and European nations, assured Christians and animists in the south they would get some access to Sudan's rich oil reserves and the right to vote on independence in six years.
Then, in early February the UN envoy to Sudan, Jan Pronk, argued the north-south peace deal will not last unless violence is also ended in the conflict among Muslims in Darfur, in western Sudan. Darfur's troubles were sparked in early 2003 when indigenous black rebels began fighting for greater independence from Sudanese authorities, maintaining the northern government had long favoured the region's Arabs over its blacks.
Pronk has urged the UN to send more than 10,000 peacekeeping troops to stabilize Darfur. However, some permanent members of the UN Security Council, China and Russia, are balking at moving in troops or imposing economic sanctions to force an end to the Darfur massacres.
Weintraub notes that China relies on Sudanese oil, and Russia profits from arms sales to Sudan's government, which claims it has nothing to do with the marauding Janjaweed militia.
International efforts to pressure the authoritarian Muslim rulers of Sudan were further complicated in early February when a UN panel report fell short of calling the massacres a "genocide," which can be defined as the obliteration of a people because of their nationality, ethnicity or religion.
Instead, the UN report said the killings in Darfur revealed "genocidal intentions" and amounted to a crime against humanity.
An official "genocide" label would have obliged the 15-member UN Security Council to take immediate measures to stop the killing.
In addition, the UN and the U.S. disagreed in early February over how to prosecute Sudan's wrongdoers.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged that trials for those behind Darfur's atrocities be held at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands. But U.S. President George W. Bush's administration has long opposed the Dutch-based international court, fearing it could someday be used to prosecute American soldiers. The
U.S. believes prosecutions should take place at a separate court in Tanzania.
Currently, only 1,200 UN-backed African Union soldiers are stationed in Darfur. They have been ordered to do little more than observe the so-called "ceasefire." They are not allowed to stop the massacres.
That's similar to the tragic situation Dallaire found himself in in Rwanda in the mid-1990s, says Fruman, who was once communications adviser to former B.C. premier Mike Harcourt and who has worked for pro-democracy organizations in the ethnically torn Balkans.
The Rwandan disaster, which occurred 10 years ago, has been the subject of many official apologies, says Fruman. The mishandled crisis has recently been depicted in Dallaire's biography, Shake Hands with the Devil, an award-winning documentary of the same name, and the new movie, Hotel Rwanda.
"Darfur is in the shadow of Rwanda," says Fruman. "The aid always seems to come too late. We don't want the seriousness of the conflict in Darfur to be the subject of another set of apologies 10 years from now."
Waisman, remembering his dead family members and the 1.5 million children killed in the Holocaust, adds: "As a survivor, our greatest fear is that all those people will have died in vain and we won't free the world of genocide. It affects us all. Mass murder always starts with an identifiable group. But it never ends there."
The interfaith campaign being launched by Waisman, Abdalla, Fruman and Weintraub is urging Martin to capitalize on Canada's good reputation in Africa. The group has already convinced the Canadian Jewish Congress to work with the mainline Christian organization, Kairos (Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives), to make Darfur a
priority letter-writing campaign.
The Vancouver group has also sent letters to Martin urging him to press harder for 50,000 UN peacekeeping troops to be moved into Sudan and particularly Darfur. They also want Martin to insist on a no-fly zone over Darfur. That's because when the Janjaweed militia are not storming into villages on horses or camels, they fly in in government-owned, Russian-made airplanes, causing villagers to rush in panic into the forests.
"They burn everything; and they kill everything they need to," says Abdalla.
The pro-government militia has been accused of torching villages, systematically raping women, throwing babies into fires, singling out men and boys for execution and torturing fathers in front of their families.
The Vancouver-based human-rights advocates want Martin -- who during a fall visit to Sudan urged President Omar al-Bashir to protect Darfur's refugees -- to inject more bite into the arguments he made before the UN last September.
That's when, addressing the UN General Assembly, Martin went further than most heads of state. He said the attacks on civilians in Darfur show that the world, under the auspices of the UN, must sometimes override the traditional sovereign rights of a country by sending in troops to intervene to stop massacres.
Although the activists sitting around the table in Vancouver regretted that Canada is now ranked only 37th in the world in terms of its commitment to peacekeeping troops, Weintraub is convinced the globe-trotting Martin is the prime minister who will launch a new era in Canada's foreign policy.
"Canada has often been able to punch above its weight" in global influence, says Weintraub.
Weintraub envisions Canada returning to the era of former Liberal prime minister Lester Pearson, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 for brokering a deal that avoided armed conflict over access to the Suez Canal.
If Canada fails to raise enough pressure to end the slaughter in Darfur, Weintraub worries Jaffer, as the country's special envoy, will "have to bear the cost of a vast humanitarian crisis."
Why do so many in the West seem indifferent to Darfur, or at least to making something happen to stop the deaths of an estimated 10,000 people each month?
Dallaire says the developed world virtually ignored the murders of 900,000 Rwandans for two basic reasons: Because they were black, not white; and because their land and resources were of no economic significance to the superpowers.
The people of Darfur suffer similar invisibility, say the Vancouver activists.
They are largely indigenous black subsistence farmers, victimized by nomadic Arabs bent on forcing them out of their villages so they can control their land and use it for grazing their animals.
Former British colonialists helped create Sudan's problems through their map-making. Just as they did throughout much of the Middle East, British rulers gave Sudan virtually unworkable borders, which allowed antagonistic groups to assume power over each other.
Even though Western colonialists have guilt on their hands in Africa, Fruman says, people in the West tend to write off Sudan's problems. They shake their heads and blame the troubles on Africans, saying the continent is such a mess nothing can be done about it.
Unlike some genocides-in-the-making of the 20th century, however, Fruman maintains that this time, leaders and citizens of the West can't honestly say they didn't really know what was going on in Darfur.
Modern communication technology, she says, has kept the world informed about Darfur's atrocities, whether we like it or not.
"We really have no excuse," she says. "Every day we know somebody is dying because we're not doing enough."
