War Crime Warrants Revive ‘Darfur Conspiracies’

The International Criminal Court in Amsterdam yesterday issued arrest warrants for a Sudanese minister and a militia leader suspected of war crimes in Darfur.The warrants against the Sudanese humanitarian affairs minister, Ahmed Haroun, and a Janjaweed leader, Ali Muhammad Ali Abd al-Rahman (also known as Ali Kushayb), detail 51 counts of murder, rape, torture, and forced displacement of villagers, among other crimes.Yet even as the genocide in Sudan officially becomes a crime against humanity, many leaders and writers in the Arab world continue to deny the facts about what is happening and foment conspiracy theories, some of them anti-Semitic, to explain international outrage over the situation.Members of the Sudanese government have taken the lead in simply contradicting news about Darfur. When the International Criminal Court prosecutors first filed charges against Messrs. Haroun and Abd al-Rahman earlier this year, President Bashir of Sudan called allegations of crimes against humanity in Darfur a “fabrication” in a March 19 interview on NBC.Other apologists for Sudan recognize that the grimness of the situation there is too well documented to deny outright. On Monday, the secretary-general of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, responded to an April 25 House resolution calling on the Arab League to recognize that the conflict in Darfur is a genocide by calling the resolution “far from reality” and expressing “great astonishment” that the U.S. Congress would demand “that the Arab League declare that the human rights violations taking place in Darfur are genocide, while no international or regional organization is using this definition.”Similarly, an influential former editor of the London Arabic daily Al-Hayat, Jihad Al-Khazen, wrote on April 13 that, while killing in the region was occurring, “the Israel lobby” was to blame for making the situation worse than it actually is.In a piece headlined “Since the Victims Are Arabs and Muslims,” Mr. Khazen wrote: “In New York, Darfur is the most important issue in the world, or at least this is what the resident or visitor sees and hears. From subway tunnels to the streets, there are thousands of posters talking about ‘genocide’ and 400,000 people killed.”But “the lobby to save Darfur,” he argued, is inflating the casualty count. “Darfur is a terrible humanitarian disaster that should not be played down. I am not doing that myself. However, the United Nations itself said that 200,000 were killed and that what had been committed there were war crimes, not genocide,” he wrote.Why would the “Darfur lobby” do this? Because, according to Mr. Khazen, “the lobby to save Darfur is just the Israel lobby renamed. The goal is to divert attention from Israel’s crimes, or the catastrophe of the war in Iraq.”An English-language apologist for the Khartoum government has echoed another version of this theory that is frequently expressed in the Arab press. Sara Flounders, who has worked on Sudanese issues for a former attorney general under President Johnson and attorney for Saddam Hussein, Ramsey Clark, wrote in Sudan Vision: “This Darfur campaign accomplishes several goals of U.S. imperialist policy. It further demonizes Arab and Muslim people. It diverts attention from the human rights catastrophe caused by the brutal U.S. war and occupation of Iraq. … It is also an attempt to deflect attention from the U.S. financing and support of Israel’s war on the Palestinian people. Most important, it opens a new front in the determination of U.S. corporate power to control the entire region.”As this column first documented in “The Darfur Conspiracy” in fall 2005, the Arab press has been rampant with conspiracies surrounding Darfur ever since news first emerged about the atrocities in Sudan. As the esteemed head of Al-Arabiya TV, Abd al-Rahman al-Rashed, wrote in the London Arabic daily Asharq Al-Awsat on June 24, 2004, the writing concocting such diversionary tactics are “intellectual accomplices in the crime.”What such Darfur apologists are condoning, according a report from the Watch List on Children and Armed Conflict released on April 20, are “unspeakable acts of violence and abuse,” including the kidnapping, rape, and torture of Sudanese children.One of the authors of the report adds, “Children in Sudan continue to endure some of the most inhumane treatment found anywhere in the world.”So, as many in the West clamor to take action to stop the genocide in Darfur, the anti-American and anti-Semitic politicians and writers in the Arab world have embraced “Darfur denial” as a means to further their agendas. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is only growing.Mr. Stalinsky is the executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute.

War Crime Warrants Revive ‘Darfur Conspiracies’

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