On Our Watch: Why Media Attention Hasn't Stopped the Genocide in Darfur

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All this gives Darfur a morbid sort of distinction. No genocide has ever been so thoroughly documented while it was taking place. There were certainly no independent filmmakers in Auschwitz, and the best-known Holocaust memoirs did not achieve a wide audience until years after the war. The world more or less looked the other way as genocide unfolded in Cambodia, and the slaughter in Rwanda happened so quickly—a mere hundred days—that by the time the public grasped the extent of the horror, the killing was done.

But here is Darfur, whose torments are known to all. The sheer volume of historical, anthropological, and narrative detail about the genocide that is available to the public is staggering. In the case of the genocide in Darfur, ignorance has never been possible. But the genocide continues. We document what we do not stop. The truth does not set anybody free.

Radical evil has become commonplace in Darfur. It is impossible to reach any other conclusion. There are simply too many government-sponsored men who show up in these narratives solely for the purpose of committing almost incomprehensible acts of cruelty. The sadism knows no bounds.

Heart of Darfur, Lisa French Blaker’s memoir of her time in the region as a nurse with Doctors Without Borders, describes the fate of a 19-year-old pregnant woman named Miriam whose husband was killed six months before. One afternoon Janjaweed—Arab militias unleashed by the government to terrorize civilians—entered her home, and one of them tapped her pregnant belly. “What have you got in there?” he asked. “I think she’s got money inside,” said another. And so they “beat her with their guns, pushed her to the ground, and kicked, punched, and whipped her. They laughed as she rolled, made bets as they joked who would get the money, wondering how much she had inside. When they tired of their game some time later, her baby was dead and Miriam went into labor.”

Stories such as this one should disgust us, and they do. But one effect of the extraordinary amount of knowledge we have about Darfur is that these stories eventually run together and gradually lose their power to shock. Horrors become tropes; repetition numbs the moral imagination.

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