To the Editor:

I have read Roger Sandall’s “Can Sudan Be Saved?” [December 2004] with delight; the article neatly summarizes the literature on that country’s tragic past and present.

Sudan is indeed on the verge of total disintegration, due to the failures of its own government. The most important challenges to its continued existence as a unitary nation-state include the rise of militant Islam and the insistence on establishing a theocratic state based on Islamic law (shari’a); the ruthless pursuit by the ruling elite of a policy whereby the Arabic language and the Arabized racial groups will dominate; efforts by these same elites to muzzle the voices of the supposedly marginalized areas through repression and torture, and to pit the marginalized groups against each other in escalating ethnic wars.

While a peaceful settlement of the conflict between north and south is imminent, possibly leading to southern secession after a transitional period of six years, other regions of the country—Darfur, the east, and the far north—have begun to assert their own grievances against Khartoum, including by means of armed struggle. At the moment, these groups are not fighting to break away, but if the conflicts drag on for as long as the southern wars, and if the government keeps focusing on a military solution, more and more frustrated groups are likely to opt out of the union. If Sudan is to be saved as a state, the task can only be accomplished by the Sudanese themselves.

Mr. Sandall also questions the ability of Western humanitarians to rescue the Sudanese from poverty, man-made destruction, and death; he is right to do so. Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS) is the largest, most expensive, and longest-running humanitarian project in history. Now into its 15th year, it has accumulated a price tag of $3 billion and has nothing to show for it in terms of basic services like health clinics, schools, or roads. It has not even saved that many lives. Half of the estimated 2 million deaths from the civil war have occurred during the years of OLS’s operation.

Mr. Sandall is to be commended for highlighting the sacrifices made by individual aid workers. But, as he suggests, the larger failure of the humanitarian effort is the result of government intransigence together with the particular philosophy of emergency aid that informs Western welfare programs. Precisely because of their emergency nature, such aid operations focus on the “most vulnerable,” a loose concept that is culturally out of place in Sudan; they have not invested in programs (like educational ones) with the potential to reduce violence.

Jok Madut Jok

Loyola Marymount University

Los Angeles, California

To the Editor:

Roger Sandall’s article paints a disturbing portrait of the 21st century’s first case of genocide and ethnic cleansing. I am probably not the only person to have noticed that Western leftists, quick to protest any violation—real or imagined—of human rights in Israel or the United States, have been virtually silent about what is happening in Sudan. In the racial hierarchy of “human rights” concerns, blacks being massacred by Arabs have, it seems, little value.

I partially disagree with Mr. Sandall’s conclusion that the West should not intervene at all. On television, the History Channel has documented several successful mercenary operations in African countries that have prevented the slaughter of innocent civilians. Western governments might not want to use their own resources to finance such efforts directly, but they could look the other way if wealthy private individuals did so.

The beginning of the Arab onslaught in Sudan last spring coincided with the 60th anniversary of the deportation and eventual slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews. In 1944, the Western press reported on the death trains that were moving toward Auschwitz. While the Allies were powerless to prevent most of the Holocaust, by the summer of 1944, when they had control of the air, they could arguably have bombed Auschwitz or the railroad tracks leading to it. But nothing was done. Sixty years later, we are faced with the same paralysis of will; what will the generation of 2064 be told about Darfur?

John C. Zimmerman

University of Nevada

Las Vegas, Nevada

Roger Sandall writes:

The January 2005 peace agreement between the southern rebels and the government of Sudan is encouraging. Some autonomy has now been granted, shari’a law will not be mandatory, English will be the official administrative language, and a referendum on the possible secession of the south will take place in six years’ time. As I suspect Jok Maduk Jok would be the first to agree, however, it remains to be seen how far the regime will allow any of this to be implemented.

Regarding John C. Zimmerman’s call for intervention, it seems to me there are important differences between the situation in Germany in 1944 and that of Sudan in 2005. Most of Hitler’s victims were brought together in fixed locations for their destruction. By contrast, the victims in the vast expanses of Sudan are dispersed in thousands of rural villages and towns where the slaughter is unpredictable, where something resembling civil war exists among mobile guerrilla forces, and where territorial boundaries are not always clear. I fear that in Sudan, a country as large as Western Europe, foreign soldiers ignorant of both the land and the people would mainly become victims themselves.

No one who understands the sufferings of non-Arab Sudanese can be indifferent to Mr. Zimmerman’s argument. But I strongly believe that while all necessary humanitarian aid must be rendered from the outside, the political solution should be a regional responsibility. As Mr. Jok says, the task of saving Sudan as an independent state “can only be accomplished by the Sudanese themselves.” However fragile it may prove, and however uncertain the outcome, the peace agreement recently signed in Nairobi indicates the appropriate way forward.