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Fiery Human Rights Crusader and Obama Officia

Where is Samantha Power When the People of the Nuba Mountains Need Her Most?



At the dawn of the new year, some 200,000 thousands of people in the Nuba Mountains are huddled in caves and crevasses in the mountains in an effort to evade potential death at the hands of the Government of Sudan (GoS). Many thousands have been in the mountains since the GoS first attacked the people of the Nuba Mountains back in July, and the vast majority has gone for months without access to adequate amounts of food. One has to wonder, “Where is the Samantha Power who once lashed out at government insiders in the Clinton and Bush administrations for their silence in the face of crimes against humanity and potential genocide?” Indeed, where is her voice now that she is a heavyweight (Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs, National Security Council) in the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama?
Just this past week, aid organizations in the Yida refugee camp in South Sudan, which now contains some 23,000 refugees from the Nuba Mountains, reported that “the rate of malnutrition among newly arrived children, which was at 11 per cent, has risen recently to 15 per cent.” That, in and of itself, is alarming. But if one extrapolates that same fifteen percent figure to those 200,000 huddled in the Nuba Mountains it suggests that there may be as many as some 30,000 currently suffering from malnutrition. With each passing week that number is bound to increase. In fact, analysts and human rights activists fear that that the people of the Nuba Mountains may once again be facing what they did back in the 1990s: virtual starvation due to the policies and actions of President Omar al Bashir. During that period the Nuba Mountains people suffered what is now commonly referred to as “genocide by attrition.” Back in 2004, when the killing in Darfur, Sudan, was at its height, Samantha Power, then a professor at Harvard University, wrote the following about UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, President George W. Bush, and other top officials in the Bush Administration:

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Neither President Bush nor Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, spoke publicly about the killings in Darfur before March of this year, by which time some thirty thousand people had died as a result of ethnic cleansing. Thanks to the relentless efforts of Andrew Natsios and Roger Winter, two officials at the United States Agency for International Development, the U.S. government had begun attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Darfur in February, 2003. But the Administration’s top officials remained quiet. Cabinet members were, of course, preoccupied with Iraq, but even Washington diplomats who monitored Sudan chose not to speak out, for fear of upsetting the North-South peace process. By this time, some hundred thousand Darfurians had fled to Chad, in addition to the million or so people who had been displaced within Darfur—yet the North-South negotiations continued, as if nothing unusual were happening elsewhere in Sudan (italics added).
It is not a little ironic and sad (if not pathetic) that almost the very same words and accusations could be made against Ms. Power and her colleagues in the Obama Administration vis-à-vis their silence in regard to the disaster unfolding in the Nuba Mountains. As this new year is upon us, the people of the Nuba Mountains must wonder if anyone in the most powerful country on the globe cares about them. How could they not? Other than sending U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan Princeton Lyman to Khartoum to try to reason with al Bashir, the officials in the Obama Administration, at least as far as we all know, have done little more than wring its collective hands over the ongoing crisis in Darfur, the violence and forced starvation in the Nuba Mountains, and the attacks against the people of the Blue Nile. In the above mentioned article by Ms. Power, she indignantly wrote, “In the end, the U.S. has applied just enough pressure to get humanitarian relief to many Darfurians, but not enough to persuade the perpetrators of violence to lay down their arms.” Tellingly, the Obama Administration, which heralds Ms. Power as one of their own, has neither applied enough pressure to get humanitarian relief to the people of the Nuba Mountains nor even broached the issue of intervention to halt the GoS ground and aerial attacks on the people of the Nuba Mountains. In 2005 Ms. Power was interviewed by Guerinca magazine and therein she castigated the Bush Administration for its largely ignoring the mass killing and rape in Darfur:
When it comes to actually saying, “How the hell are we going to stop the protection crisis, how are we going to stop the killings and the rapes in the camps, how are we going to stop the destruction of what few villages are left, how are we going to ensure eventually that these people return to their homes, get a political settlement?”—there’s no leadership [within the George W. Bush Administration], that I’m aware of, no senior leadership anyway.
Again, and I realize this is beginning to sound like a broken record, the very same accusations could and should be, and now are, being said about the Obama Administration and his senior leadership (including Ms. Power) in regard to the deadly crisis in the Nuba Mountains and the Blue Nile. And for that matter, ironically, it’s equally germane to how Obama, and Power, among others, are “handling” the continuing nightmare in Darfur. In that same interview with Guernica, Ms. Power went on to note what the Bush Administration could and should do since it was not about to put U.S. troops on the ground in Darfur: “[J]ust because the U.S. isn’t going to put troops on the ground doesn’t mean it can’t mobilize NATO countries and middle-tier countries, and really ask them (because they’re not doing it on their own) that they step up.” Good advice for the Obama Administration. One has to wonder if Ms. Power has suggested it to Obama. If so, then President Obama should be held accountable for the false promises he made while running for president in regard to preventing genocide. And if she hasn’t, then it is time for Ms. Power to look in the mirror and ask herself, “What the hell am I waiting for?” Interestingly, Ms. Power coined a term for those individuals, inside and outside of government, who were (and are) willing to take a stand in the face of massive human rights violations: “upstander.” Speaking of upstanders on National Public Radio, Power said: “What's so extraordinary about a century of bystanding is the extent to which there have been upstanders, whether it's Henry Morgenthau, the US ambassador in Constantinople back in 1915, simply trying to get permission from the Wilson administration to condemn the Turks for what they were doing to the Armenians, or whether it's the State Department dissenter from the 1990s who resigned to protest the Bush administration and then the Clinton administration policy.” One cannot but ask, Ms. Power, “Is there a reason why you, today, in the face of the ongoing threat against the Nuba Mountains people, have not taken on the role of ‘upstander’?” As the old adage goes, action speaks louder than words. All of those who were so impressed with the passion (and yes, righteous indignation) Ms. Power expressed in her Pulitzer winning book, “The Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, and in her many articles about genocide in the former Yugoslavia and then Darfur, must be wondering, “When will Ms. Power, now that she has power, move from issuing words to pushing for action?” (To be fair, word has it that Ms. Power was a mover and shaker in prodding President Obama to take a tough stand on Libya. That is extremely admirable, but it does not erase her ostensible silence regarding the nightmare now unfolding in the Nuba Mountains.) Let’s hope that the Nuba Mountains people do not have to wait until the Obama Administration is out of power before Ms. Power finds her voice once again. By then, it may well be too late for literally thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Nuba Mountains' men, women, and children. References Power, Samantha (2004). “Dying in Darfur: Can the Ethnic Cleansing in Sudan Be Stopped?” New Yorker, August 30th. Samantha Power, Samantha (2002). “Samantha Power and Elizabeth Neuffer Discuss the World’s Views on Genocide in Modern Times.” National Public Radio, May 25. Whitney, Joes (2005). “Samantha Power: Witness to Genocide.” Guernica: A Magazine of Art and Politics. May. Accessed at:


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Samuel Totten -- Bio and Archives

Samuel Totten, a genocide scholar at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, has conducted research in the Nuba Mountains. His latest book, Genocide by Attrition: The Nuba Mountains, Sudan


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