Darfur violence condemned again, but where’s the action?

Mustafa Ozer/AFP/Getty United Nations investigators have unequivocally condemned the Sudanese government for “orchestrating and participating” in crimes including murder, mass rape and kidnap in Darfur. Over the past four years, over 200,000 people have been killed and at least 2.5 million more displaced, yet international action to halt the crisis has been negligible. Jody Williams, ...

Mustafa Ozer/AFP/Getty

Mustafa Ozer/AFP/Getty

United Nations investigators have unequivocally condemned the Sudanese government for “orchestrating and participating” in crimes including murder, mass rape and kidnap in Darfur. Over the past four years, over 200,000 people have been killed and at least 2.5 million more displaced, yet international action to halt the crisis has been negligible.

Jody Williams, winner of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to ban landmines and leader of the team that submitted the report, called the international community’s response to this crisis “pathetic.” She added:

There are so many hollow threats towards Khartoum, that if I were Khartoum I wouldn’t pay any attention either …. It is more than a tragedy. It was after Rwanda that people said ‘never again’, and here we are again … and the world sits by.”

So why have we just sat by and let the slaughter continue and even spill over into neighboring countries?

It could come down to human psychology, according to decision-making expert Paul Slovic in FP‘s latest web exclusive. Slovic argues that the statistics of mass murder actually paralyze us into inaction, which is why we need more than just our moral outrage to stop genocide in places like Darfur and elsewhere. Check out Slovic’s insightful—and not a little bit disturbing—article here.

Prerna Mankad is a researcher at Foreign Policy.

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