"There Is No Genocide In Darfur"

Saturday, 06 October 2007
TurkishWeekly

CAIRO — The United States is exaggerating when it described the Darfur conflict as "genocide," former US president Jimmy Carter has said, warning that the use of the term was legally inaccurate and "unhelpful," The Christian Science Monitor reported Friday.

"There is a legal definition of genocide and Darfur does not meet that legal standard. The atrocities were horrible but I don't think it qualifies to be called genocide," said Carter, a member of the group of Elders who visited Darfur and included Archbishop Desmond Tutu, rights advocate Graca Machel, and entrepreneur Richard Branson.

Nobel laureate Carter, whose charitable foundation, the Carter Center, worked to establish the International Criminal Court (ICC), said:

"If you read the law textbooks ... you'll see very clearly that it's not genocide and to call it genocide falsely just to exaggerate a horrible situation I don't think it helps."

Carter said the problems in Darfur need a political solution and called on participants at crucial peace talks in Libya on October 27 to be patient.

Washington is almost alone in branding the 4 1/2 years of violence in Darfur genocide.

Khartoum rejects the term, European governments are reluctant to use it and a UN-appointed commission of inquiry found no genocide.

The World Health Organization has further said the term is much hyped, but said there is a humanitarian catastrophe in the troubled region.

According to Encyclopedia Britannica, genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race.

The term, derived from the Greek genos ("race," "tribe," or "nation") and the Latin cide ("killing"), was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-born jurist who served as an adviser to the U.S. Department of War during World War II.

Pampering:

Carter's criticism of the West's handling of the Darfur crisis was joined by veteran UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, who accused the West of "pampering" the rebels.

"The international community has acted rather irresponsibly on all this in the past by pampering a lot of these people around - not really wondering whether they really represented anybody and whether they were acting responsibly," said Brahimi.