A wound that won't heal

Darfur continues to scream.

Just last week, Reuters reported how Sudanese troops and rebels in Darfur attacked each other in a renewal of open violence.

"The SLM (Sudan Liberation Movement) attacked a government convoy on Saturday. ... That is confirmed. ... Three (government) military personnel were killed in the attack," said an AU [African Union] official who did not want to be named.

A Sudanese official previously told Reuters the government responded to the attack on its convoy on Saturday with an assault the next day on nearby rebel camps.

Rebels deny that the government's helicopter-based bombings were on rebel camps; they insist the targets were villages and seven civilians were killed.

The charges and counter-charges came just days before Louise Arbour, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, released a report charging the government of Sudan with maintaining "a climate of impunity" for

Sudanese police and soldiers [who] still rape helpless civilians in Darfur - and often are tacitly protected by authorities despite government promises to punish those responsible for sexual violence....

Victims and witnesses are routinely threatened and sometimes charged with crimes if they come forward with allegations of rape, according to the report. Authorities also intimidate humanitarian groups investigating the claims.

Arbour briefed the UN Security Council prior to the release of the report, telling the members that

complaints against military and other law enforcement personnel were delayed indefinitely or dismissed outright.

"The government appears either unable or unwilling to hold them consistently accountable," Arbour said....

What's more, the attacks also came just a few days after

the commander of the African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur, Festus Okonkwo, told the BBC that there had been no major attacks in the region since January and that there had also been a reduction in attacks on villages.

But even good news is bad news in Darfur, it seems:

Violence in Sudan's Darfur region has diminished greatly over the past year, partly because militia have run out of targets after razing countless villages, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said.

His report to the U.N. Security Council, obtained by Reuters on Wednesday, said active combat had been replaced by intimidation and fear, perpetuated by an ever-present militia when homeless people leave refugee camps. [emphasis added]

Annan's sentiment was echoed by top US aid official Andrew Natsios, who said last week that the reductions in attacks on villages was chiefly because there were no villages left to burn down. Apparently Tacitus's description "they made a desert and called it peace" didn't only apply to Carthage.

Despite a "declaration of principles" signed by the government and the two chief rebel groups earlier in July,

[a]nother analyst said the fighting ... showed there was a lack of commitment [among the] groups toward peace talks being held in the Nigerian capital Abuja.

"The world wants to see Darfur resolved ... but people are corralled into attending Abuja when the commitment from both sides just isn't there," said Andrew Marshall, deputy director of the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue based in Geneva.

I have to say I fear he is right. I ended an earlier post on Darfur this way:

Isn't there a point, isn't there a time, and dammit, isn't that point and time here and now, when you look at what's around you, when you look at the hunger and death and fear and blood and exhaustion and pain and cruelty - when you stop and say "What is worth this?" I don't care which side you're on, isn't there some moment when you say "My cause is not worth the price?" When comes that moment, when comes the labored breath that simply says "Enough!" and turns to burying the dead?

That's the question I ask both sides now - is it worth it? Or, more exactly, how can it be worth it?

It seems there are still those on both sides for who conscience remains a convenience and going for justice is equated with going for the jugular. So the screaming continues.

Footnote: July 22 was the anniversary of the date Congress declared the conflict in Darfur to be a case of genocide.

If you have the feeling that in the time since then what was once called the world's worst humanitarian crisis has dropped off the radar screen at least in the US, you have good cause. The website BeAWitness made an actual count of news segments devoted to Darfur by the six big networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox) in June. The results are shocking: Cumulatively, the "runaway bride," Michael Jackson, and Tom Cruise were covered in 65 times as many segments as was Darfur. In the period covered, CBS ran 614 segments on Michael Jackson and none on Darfur. MSNBC averaged a Michael Jackson story every 22 minutes, 24 hours a day, seven days a week - but could find time for just 23 mentions of Darfur in the whole month.

I recall saying to someone some years ago that while it's true that, as media moguls will proclaim at the least provocation, the media can't control what people think, they do have a great deal of influence over what people think about. If an issue isn't covered, it ceases to exist. And thus for Darfur.