School: Darfur
I'm taking International Criminal Law this semester, and one of our first topics is genocide - its legal definition, how to prove it, who prosecutes it, and examples from recent history. It's common knowledge that the 20th century is full of instances of the systematic killing of ethnic and racial groups. The tragedy in the Darfur region of Sudan illustrates that the 21st century may not be all that different.
If you're unfamiliar with the whole mess, I don't blame you. What started out as a low-level guerilla movement and civil war (not exactly surprising given the history of the region) eventually grew to the point where hundreds of thousands of people died and more than 1.6 million people were displaced (the population of the Darfur region was about 6 million, by the way). The facile explanation for the violence is to blame it on attacks of Jingaweit (Arab/nomadic) militia and the government of Sudan, whose efforts at rooting out African rebels in the western region of the country, combined with famine conditions, led to an ever-spiraling cycle of suffering.
From the U.S. Department of State:
Another woman recounted how five Jingaweit men held her for a week against her will and repeatedly raped her in front of her nine-month old daughter. At one point, the woman was allowed to pick up the crying baby. When the baby continued to cry, one of the men grabbed the child and hit her with the butt-end of a rifle. The mother and child escaped and made their way to a refugee camp in southern Chad.
How do men turn into monsters?
posted by Mulliga @ 10:10 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
How do men turn into monsters?
You've got it backwards.
Ask most people who have worked in law enforcement and they'll tell you the same thing. Human beings are vicious, terrible creatures. Killer apes who get a hard on when they get a chance to do what comes naturally.
Humans don't turn into monsters, that is their base state. You chain up the beast to make a man.
Society is formed to make people toe the line. Indoctrinate the young. Instill in them a sense of civic responsibility, shame, pride, religious morality. Whatever works, so long as they decide that it's a better idea to get with the program than to do what they really want when the neighbors start to play their music too loud and the boss is riding their butt.
Those yahoos in Darfur weren't acting like monsters, they were acting like men after the restraints imposed on them by society have fallen away.
James
I agree, James. People in their base state are probably pretty disagreeable.
I suppose the real problem over there is that it's hard to tell the difference between civilization and the lack of it sometimes. It's weird seeing barbarism perpetrated in large part by organized military units - but then I guess that's no different from a tribe going out to hunt.
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