It Depends On What The Meaning Of The Word "Genocide" Is

Our progressive friends in Europe aren't going to fret over Darfur, because it's---wait for it---not a genocide. Nope, it's just a case of "widespread, silent and slow killing and village burning of a fairly large scale" which has so far claimed 30,000 lives and resulted in 1,000,000 expulsions.

Why not agree, as the US House of Representatives did by a 422-0 vote, that "there is no other term for the systematic slaughter, rape and expulsions"? Because calling it a genocide would---wait for it again---force the EU countries to do something about it: "[According to the terms of the genocide convention], [i]f governments accept events in Darfur amount to genocide they would be obliged to intervene." Can't have that, now can we. If the governments of western Europe were forced to do the right thing now, why (heaven forfend!) they might have to do the right thing in the future. At least for now we can dispense with the fiction that Europe is, on the whole, attuned to human rights crises among Muslims.

Other institutions shying away from the G-word: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Bush administration [is that last one a humanitarian NGO?--ed.].