According to President Obama’s special envoy to Sudan, retired Air Force Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration, the Sudanese government is no longer engaging in a “coordinated” campaign of mass murder in Darfur. This is a change from previous characterizations of the violence there as an “ongoing genocide.”
I suppose it is possible to try to make much of this shift. But to my mind the importance of declaring something a “genocide” is that doing so is supposed automatically to trigger a response from a global community that in the wake of the Rwanda genocide in 1994 had promised “never again” (again). Short of fueling action, the nomenclature debate is simply a matter of semantics. Tortured (sorry — enhanced interrogated) language is uninteresting if it is not tied to policy. So if this change is an attempt to recognize changes circumstances on the ground, it has some descriptive utility. If it is simply a change to try to shift our gaze away from Darfur, to downgrade the facts on the ground rather than honestly address them, then it strikes me as craven. And if the new language elides the possibility that the genocide is no longer in play because Khartoum has accomplished most of its goals, obviating the need for murder on a mass scale, well, shame on us for years of relative inaction.
