Looking outside of America, I see many people all over the world existing in instability. At times is seems as if all the continent of Africa is warring. Crimes being committed there on a daily basis are so horrific and hateful that our bad-news hungry media will not put them to ink. In high school we studied the Holocaust and the senseless insufferable genocide of by most counts, 5 to 6 million Jewish people. The shameful truth is that humanity continues to allow this level of remorseless violence to spread across the African continent.
In my lifetime I have seen pictures and read news-feeds about how there were so many people killed in warring Rwanda, that the rivers ran red with blood and bodies pooled and piled up along river banks. It is estimated that 400,000 people died before President Clinton and the rest of the western world noticed and took a halfhearted action to end this genocide. At the end of this 4 1/2 year conflict, British sources put the total murdered at 4.7 million people.
The recognition of such pain and suffering challenges ones belief in humanity and divinity. How could this happen without some type of intervention? On our watch, entire ethnic races of people are being systematically hunted down and killed in the most nightmarish manner. Bands of Sudan “lost boys” walk the African continent in search of family or anything that can give them hope of a better day. Their families were murdered and their homes and villages were burned; as they fled to the jungles only to be prayed upon by lions and other dangerous predators. They walk until they drop and when they drop they die.
My disappointment cannot be measure in America’s response to the ongoing violence. In Darfur, the UN and other world organizations have tried to protect 2.5 million refugees from genocide. They setup refugee camps to house the gushing flow of refugees trying to escape the killing. In shocked horror, those providing help could do nothing as bands of subhuman soldiers swept into these camps, burned and killed everyone and everything; and humanity turned it’s head away and let it happen. 200,000 to 400,000 people were slaughtered in Darfur before Secretary of State Colin Powell would publicly acknowledge genocide was happening.
Why is the West so slow to help stop the killing in Africa? Is it because many of these nations are Muslim? In Europe, we invaded the former warring Yugoslavia and stopped the Christian Serbians from killing the Muslim Bosnians. Why have we not done the same for Africa? Many would say America has no lineage to the nations of Africa. That’s only true if you ignore the 37 million African Americans of these United States.
By all counts, the world is about to enter a period of difficulty and we will all need to work together if we are to better the world. In times not so long gone by, the West colonized Africa, stripping it of it’s wealth and ability to self govern. As the British Empire, the French, the Dutch, and others were driven out of Africa, they left a void that in many cases was filled by warlords and marauding armies. It’s pass time that the West help make this right. It’s time we stop turning our heads away from the problem and start helping put out the flames of war that are steadily consuming Africa.