Somebody do something Don’t let the latest genocide fade from sight, concern

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/05/2009 (6321 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The African nation of Sudan is complicated. It is both African and Arab. It is at war over resources, ethnicity, religion and power.

Its government commits genocide in Darfur, while managing a massive oil industry. The losing tribe flees over borders, while in Khartoum, the middle class frets over jobs at the Hyundai factory.

Books on Sudan are no different.

The recent release by Peter Pigott, an Ottawa author better known for his aviation books, Canada in Sudan, is a collection of Canadian support stories since just after Confederation — a discomfiting 125 years or more of providing aid to the same country. It is a well-researched, factually weighty book.

It begins with Canada’s first well-meaning but somewhat unfortunate foray into humanitarian help, where aid is actually military assistance to British colonialists.

Our nation does better further on, as former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin recounts his frustrations at trying to get the United Nations to label the Darfur atrocities as genocide.

Martin describes the indecision as bordering on immoral, stunned that “the international community struggles with definitions while the people of Darfur struggle with disaster.”

Pigott has interviewed a wide array of Canadians who’ve worked in Darfur, but dilutes the impact of their stories by either providing too little detail or by crowding the stories with an alphabet soup of the agencies they worked for. His telling becomes logistical, a kind of catologue, crowded by too many factoids.

The World and Darfur, edited by University of Western Ontario media studies professor Amanda F. Grzyb, is even heavier reading, made up of essays comparing the 1994 genocide in Rwanda to what is now happening in Darfur.

A foreword by Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Romeo Dallaire reminds of the indifference of the international response to war crimes. He scolds the West for letting genocide happen again, as it did when he was the UN commander in Rwanda in 1994.

Dallaire was left helpless by political inaction as an estimated 800,000 people were massacred in just three months. Dallaire attempted suicide upon his return to Canada and spent years in therapy for post traumatic stress disorder.

His ghost writer, Sian Cansfield, did take her own life, many feel as a result of the research and stories she helped Dallaire compile.

This book is not nearly as compelling as Dallaire’s Shake Hands With The Devil. It’s not meant to be. But The World and Darfur has its moments. Most poignant is an essay by Samuel Totten, a senior researcher at the Centre for Conflict Management at the National University of Rwanda.

The reader is sometimes struck with disbelief at his compilation of facts and figures, such as a World Health Organization report that indicated 6,000-10,000 Africans were dying of either diarrhea or murder each month in Darfur in 2004 — the same period as the 10-year anniversary of the Rwandan genocide.

He perhaps too calmly provides a list of international agencies who wring their hands but do little else, and the inaction of the UN and the U.S. should be embarrassing. With measured tone and mega-footnoting, Totten makes it clear that no one is listening.

Six Months in Sudan, the first person account of Dr. James Maskalyk, offers readers the most — an interesting story and hope of understanding such a complex situation.

Maskalyk is a Torontonian who joins Doctors Without Borders and is sent to an obscure town in the middle of Sudan, Abyei. From there, he tells of the grind of doing good.

There is war, famine, even death by measles, which plagues residents who leave, come back, leave again, depending on the ebb and flow of war. There is disillusionment, a desire to leave, and the pain of re-entry into safe, sane normal life once his tour is over.

The difference between those who write from the sidelines, and those who write from within is striking. Maskalyk takes the reader there, pulls them into his tukul (hut) and almost smothers with the realities of trying to help.

The first discomforts of heat, sand and dust, quickly succumb to the horror — mothers and their starving children, soldiers wanting their own treated first, not having this medicine or that medical instrument that could have saved a life.

Maskalyk’s writing style lends to the account. He uses short, sharp sentences during the intense telling of difficult moments, longer sentences and more depth when he has time to think, and time to process life in a war zone.

Still, there is a problem with both Maskalyk’s account, and the clinical, factual varieties offered by the other authors, no matter their differences.

The problem is the reader. Any account of Darfur, of Sudan, whether emotive and harsh, whether clinical and distant, is a difficult, disturbing read. There’s a numbness that sets in, a kind of hardcover fatigue. Shelfshock.

The reader may have a strong desire to put down such books.

That is the point. Diplomats, celebrities and politicians want Darfur to stop. By turning these pages, the reader will want the genocide to stop, too.

Books such as these are not meant to entertain and provide escape. They instead bring war, disease and famine into your home, lay them at your conscience and ask — somebody do something.

Jackie Shymanski is a Winnipeg communications consultant and a former CNN war correspondent.

Canada in Sudan

War Without Borders

By Peter Pigott

Dundurn Press, 254 pages, $35

The World and Darfur

International Response to the Crimes Against Humanity in Western Sudan

Edited by Amanda F. Grzyb

McGill-Queen’s University Press, 344 pages, $33

Six Months in Sudan

By Dr. James Maskalyk

Doubleday Canada, 339 pages, $30