The Devil Comes In Horseback

     

I just finished watching this documentary about the situation in Darfur before the country of Sudan was split into two, this is one of those documentaries which instantly grabbed my attention. Its a very powerful documentary giving you explicit details and images about the atrocities done by the Sudanese government predominantly Arab in ethnicity to its black African population. The notion of ethnic cleansing is a very serious issue and something the international community must condemn unilateraly because there's no denying that many lives were lost because of this! This documentary raises an interesting issue in the area of international relations and politics: what can the international community do if a respective government is conducting a massacre on its own people? can one intervene or is that exclusively an issue of domestic politics where the sovereign is the ultimate authority? can we really turn a blind eye to the sufferings of another in a world where universal values is existent?

Its no denying the fact that one must have witnessed humanitarian disasters throughout the world but what can we really do to help? international politics is always riddled with the conflict of egoistical  interests where does the universal norms ratified by various countries in the UN declaration of human rights come into play? it is quite depressing to see that direct actions by the international community are somewhat rare, we had already seen what happened in Rwanda where the ethnic majority Hutu literaly  tried to kill every ethnic Tutsi they could find within their country yet the world just watched and observed as these atrocities take place. i believe that the international community "DOES" have the power to intervene when these types of crisis appears but they simply chose not to! its really sad to think about the notion of morals seems to go to the trashcan whenever interest are involved, the issue faced in this documentary is still the same thing "they know yet they chose to ignore" what does it take for people to care about these issues??