Alphecca

Darfur and Gun Control?

One (of many!) reasons the founding fathers of our country wrote the Second Amendment into our Bill of Rights was to insure that the newly created federal government could never become a dictatorship engaged in oppressing or violating the American people. The right to bear arms was an insurance policy against totalitarianism. Remember that Hitler confiscated guns in Germany after his rise to power.

Dimitri Vassilaros has an interesting commentary in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review about the consequences of gun control imposed by various international aid organizations regarding Darfur in the Sudan. Here are some quotes:

The slaughter, rape and torment of the citizens of Darfur would end if humanitarian aid included guns.

Darfur is a Texas-size region of Sudan. The Sudanese government and its militia proxies have killed roughly 70,000 civilians, raped and mutilated untold numbers of others and caused about 3 million refugees to live in camps.

Sudan could teach Serbia a thing or two about ethnic cleansing.

This carnage has been going on since 2003. The Sudan People's Liberation Army, a small band of revolutionaries from Darfur, were the only excuse the government needed to wage war on unarmed citizens in the region, who also happen to be fellow Muslims.

As I was reading story after story about the horrific treatment of the innocents by government-backed forces, I always wondered why there was no mention of the victims fighting back.

One reason he gives is that groups such as Amnesty International and the U.N. will not permit the arming of the victims being slaughtered. There are treaties prohibiting this and the defective reasoning behind them reveals itself when we hear statements such as this one:

"We at Amnesty International are not going to condone escalation of the flow of arms to the region," said Trish Katyoka, director of Africa Advocacy. "You are empowering (the victims) to create an element of retaliation.

"Whenever you create a sword-fight by letting the poor people fight back and give them the arms, it creates an added element of complexity. You do not know what the results could be."

Well, how could the possible results be any worse than they are now? Millions starving to death and suffering tremendous physical abuse at the hands of the Sudanese government? Wholesale murder of innocents at the hands of a government totally out of control?

As for "empowering (the victims) to create an element of retaliation", how about just empowering them to DEFEND themselves?

But once again, as we saw in Iraq before President Bush took matters into his own hands, we see a U.N. and various other international organizations hoping that sanctions or hollow threats will somehow, maybe through magic-dust, end the brutal conflict in Sudan. They fiddle while Darfur burns.

A perfect example of the impotence of the U.N. starts with this Reuters story:

The U.N. Security Council late on Thursday voted 11-0 with four abstentions to refer a sealed list of 51 people accused of crimes against humanity in Darfur to the ICC, after last-minute wrangling to allow exemptions for U.S. citizens. The resolution is the first referral to the ICC by the council.

The response by Sudan? From CNN:

Sudan on Friday slammed a U.N. resolution sending Darfur war crime suspects to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and signalled it would not cooperate in handing its citizens over to face justice abroad.

The National Congress Party, which dominates the government and parliament, issued a statement making clear its strong opposition, saying the U.N. Security Council position contravened Sudan's rights.

"The leadership council ... emphasises its rejection of the prosecution of any Sudanese national outside of the country."

So that's that! In the meantime, thousands more perish, unable to offer any resistance. And why? Because the U.N. is dedicated to imposing universal gun control on the world regardless of the results. Remember, they define "small arms" thusly:

Small arms are weapons designed for personal use, while light weapons are designed for use by several persons serving as a crew. Examples of small arms include revolvers and self-loading pistols, rifles, sub-machine guns, assault rifles and light machine-guns.

The very weapons desperately needed by the victims in Darfur. But the U.N. will not permit any country to begin arming these people because they think it will only exacerbate the conflict. They said at a conference a couple years ago:

Virtually every part of the UN system is dealing with the direct and indirect consequences of recent armed conflicts fought mostly with these weapons. Small arms and light weapons are increasingly used as primary instruments of violence in the internal conflicts dealt with by the UN, they are responsible for large numbers of deaths and the displacement of citizens around the world, and they consume large amounts of United Nations resources. Many of these conflicts have inflicted heavy casualties on the people involved, the vast majority of whom have been civilians, mostly women and children.

Again I ask, how could it possibly get worse in Darfur?

As Dimitri Vassilaros states at the end of his commentary, "Darfur is one more reminder that gun control is genocide's best friend. "

Posted by Jeff Soyer at April 2, 2005 07:58 AM