Over at Teekay’s

Sorry to be boring. The beauty is, if you’re just following my rants on my blog you can simply opt out, close your browser, disconnect. (I realize the last one is very 1990s but we’re still on dial-up here.)

Nicholas Kristof has been rather dogged in bringing this up again and again. From his column in today’s Times:

If President Bush wants to figure out whether the U.S. should stand more firmly against the genocide in Darfur, I suggest that he invite Mr. Steidle to the White House to give a briefing. Mr. Steidle, a 28-year-old former Marine captain, was one of just three American military advisers for the African Union monitoring team in Darfur - and he is bursting with frustration.

“Every single day you go out to see another burned village, and more dead bodies,” he said. “And the children - you see 6-month-old babies that have been shot, and 3-year-old kids with their faces smashed in with rifle butts. And you just have to stand there and write your reports.”

This is awful, but it’s not more awful than the stuff we’ve know for what, a year now? And has anything really moved, other than that we now have observers who monitor the slaughter? But as angry as I am about all this, I’m also a bit disturbed by the cavalierly attitude Kristof seems to be taking to the question whether this is genocide:

So is it really genocide?

“I have no doubt about that,” Mr. Steidle said. “It’s a systematic cleansing of peoples by the Arab chiefs there. And when you talk to them, that’s what they tell you. They’re very blunt about it. One day we met a janjaweed leader and he said, ‘Unless you get back four camels that were stolen in 2003, then we’re going to go to these four villages and burn the villages, rape the women, kill everyone.’ And they did.”

That doesn’t sound like genocide to me. I’m not saying what’s going on in Darfur isn’t; I’m saying this specific incident, and what the dude with the gun tells Steidle, doesn’t sound like it to me. This sounds like a local grievance — genuine or cynically opportunistic — that finds room to grow into murder and pillage and rape because the conditions in Sudan, perhaps created on purpose, allow for it. In order to determine whether this is genocide, we would need to know who created these conditions and with what intention.