STAND missing the full issue

‘ ‘ ‘ I know that the Students Taking Action Now in Darfur, or STAND, means well. I know that… ‘ ‘ ‘ I know that the Students Taking Action Now in Darfur, or STAND, means well. I know that the students who painted the tent on the William Pitt Union lawn over the last two days believe that their actions will have a positive effect on the situation in Darfur. ‘ ‘ ‘ But naivete and baseless optimism are poor foundations for a movement to stop acts of genocide. The fact is, the turkey I drew for Thanksgiving by tracing my hand as a 5-year-old didn’t save lives in Bosnia, and the STAND tent will not affect the conflict in Sudan. ‘ ‘ ‘ When I talked to Sarah Grill, a STAND officer and an organizer of the event, she said that the main point of the tent is to raise awareness about the conflict in Darfur. Awareness is a marvelous thing, but Americans were aware of what was going on in Rwanda in 1994, too. ‘ ‘ ‘ They watched it unfold on their television screens, and yet they did nothing to stop the genocide that in the course of some four months resulted in the deaths of 800,000 people. ‘ ‘ ‘ We are all aware of the situation in Darfur. We know that people are dying daily, that they are driven from their homes and are brutalized by their government. Our leaders and the leaders of every global power know what is happening and have chosen not to act. ‘ ‘ ‘ But college students need to feel important, need to show their peers that they care about Africans and need to express their constant dismay that people don’t care about what’s going on in an African country. As Grill said to me, ‘I don’t understand why people don’t care about [Darfur].’ ‘ ‘ ‘ But my response is this: I don’t understand why people don’t care more about the actions of their own government. ‘ ‘ ‘ Since the start of the Gulf War in 1990, between 1.5 and 3 million Iraqi civilians, depending on which estimates you accept, have died as a result of U.S. policy. Where’s the outrage on campus? ‘ ‘ ‘ Yes, we’ve seen anti-war protests, but the message from student anti-war groups tends to be ‘bring the troops home,’ not ‘stop killing innocent people in the name of my country.’ ‘ ‘ ‘ That’s really my issue with students who have decided to champion the cause of Darfur. Rather than acknowledge the atrocities committed in Iraq in the name of the United States with their own tax dollars, college students tend to focus on the crimes of some third-rate dictator thousands of miles away. ‘ ‘ ‘ Omar al-Bashir doesn’t care what Pitt students think about his actions. He’s not accountable to the American people. Instead, it’s the American politicians who maintain the Cuban embargo and allocate money to the manufacture of murderous cluster munitions who are accountable to us. ‘ ‘ ‘ It’s simply easier to oppose the actions of a foreign government that has killed hundreds of thousands of its own people than it is to oppose the actions of the government of the United States, which has killed millions of Iraqis in the last two decades. ‘ ‘ ‘ When I was interviewing Grill by the STAND tent on the Union lawn, I noticed a STAND sticker that listed historical genocides that preceded Darfur. This is the list: Armenia, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and South Sudan. ‘ ‘ ‘ Where’s the mention of the genocide of American Indians that continued into the 1970s, when our government forcibly sterilized thousands of American Indian women? Of East Timor, when hundreds of thousands of East Timorese were killed in a campaign of genocide perpetrated with American arms by the Indonesian military? Or the Iraq Sanctions Regime, during which 500,000 children under the age of 5 lost their lives because Bill Clinton wanted to make Iraqis pay for the actions of their dictator? ‘ ‘ ‘ I want to see the conflict in Sudan come to an end as much as the members of STAND do. But I also recognize that the U.S. government has killed more civilians and created more refugees in the last decade than the government of Sudan. ‘ ‘ ‘ Only one of those two governments acts in my name. In only one of those two governments do I have a voice. E-mail Giles at gbh4@pitt.edu.