Iraq: Our Very Own Dafur

Victims of an illegal war of choice, helpless civilians are ripped asunder by showers of bombs and bullets, while others are driven from their homes only to suffer the mortal pangs of disease and malnutrition. State-sponsored militias and killing squads swoop down into villages and ravage them, going from street to street and house to house, propelled by an extraordinary sense of revenge and right. Places of worship are rehabilitated into killing fields, where the wounded and infirm are annihilated in the presence of God. These invaders, some indigenous and some from far-off lands, do not fight for the future or for a greater good; they fight merely to avenge past wrongs and to impose an arbitrary vision of order beholden only to themselves.

This scenario, of a grave humanitarian crisis on the scale of an international emergency, can clearly describe what is happening in the Darfur region of Sudan, and it is certainly laudable that a group of Harvard students have recently begun a divestment campaign to pull University funds from investments in that country. But the portrayal above more closely describes the situation in Iraq, where American and Iraqi troops are busy uprooting and destroying entire regions of the country. Unlike the crisis in Sudan, the deaths and destruction in Iraq are the intimate responsibility of the U.S., which means that a contrived connection to our own role in the war is unnecessary. In Iraq, our own government and our own fellow citizens are responsible for carrying out the business of wholesale destruction.

While many rightly protest the staggering death toll from the Darfur conflict, which has reached almost 70,000, most of us are blind to the toll inflicted by our own government several hundred miles to the east in Iraq. Of course, this ignorance is not entirely our fault. Some of the blame rests on the official policy of the U.S. government, which suppresses the Iraqi casualty count. In an honest revelation of priorities, the U.S. government does, through the National Agricultural Statistics Service, keep meticulous data on the herd sizes and deaths of hogs, pigs, cattle, poultry, sheep, and ewes. A simple search of the Department of Agriculture can find you the number of sheep slaughtered for human consumption in Hawaii in 2002, but a similar search of the Department of “Defense” for the number of humans slaughtered for political consumption in Iraq in 2004 will bring you no information.

Thankfully, there are other ways of reconstructing the facts on the ground in Iraq. According to a study by a team of researchers from Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a direct or indirect result of the war since its start last year, half of whom are innocent women and children. Meanwhile, the attacks in Fallujah alone created over 240,000 refugees. And while President Bush and his apologists often use the “Iraq is better off with Saddam in prison” canard to silence critics, it is difficult to repeat that claim when the same study revealed that the risk of violent death is now 58 times higher than before the war.

The petition to divest University funds from companies that do business in Sudan makes the point that Harvard should not invest in any company that does business in Sudan “for as long as Sudan is in violation of international norms of human rights.” It is quite clear that our own country is in severe violation of all decent standards of human rights and the rules of war, and it is our responsibility to bring attention to this fact. Before we as Americans can preach peace and reconciliation to the world, we must make sure to enforce that standard upon our own government’s actions. Otherwise we are sure to be viewed as hypocrites, condemning the crimes of some while ignoring or even supporting the crimes we perpetrate on others. So while it is certainly important to bring attention to the crisis in Sudan, and for University ties to the violence there be scrutinized and removed, it is also necessary to train a critical and condemnatory eye to violence committed explicitly in our own name and in the same region, against similarly destitute and freedom-starved people.

Erol N. Gulay ’05, a Crimson editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Kirkland House.