Darfur - Be Ashamed, Be Very Ashamed

I don't usually reprint newspaper articles in full but sometimes something is published that rings so true with how I feel that I feel compelled to ignore the niceties of copyright law and publish and be damned.

I've been banging on about this in private for sometime and people who have read some of my postings on the 5Live boards will know that I have brought this subject on over there without anybody giving a toss. Let's be honest, white people only care about white people most of the time, you can call it racism if you like but I tend to think of it as people sticking together with those they feel they have something in common with whether that is heritage, religion, politics or something really base like colour.

Not everybody is a political animal, some people would rather moan about radio presenters or bowlers missing line and length and there's nothing wrong with that. There is a danger that if something is 'intellectualised' too much it becomes 'boring', eyes glaze over. I'm about two hundred and fifty words in now so I expect some of you have already switched off but please don't this is an important issue as far as I am concerned.

It is important because it make me think about the whether or not on this weekend of celebrating the 50 years of the Treaty of Rome have achieved anything, whether the arguments about saying sorry about the slave trade have any viability in an age when in two African countries slavery is openly practised. The slavery apology is an open and shut case as far as I am concerned, Wilberforce said sorry for us all when he led the movement to abolish it. Any of us who has researched their family history and has come across the two words 'ag.lab' on a census return is the descendent of a slave of sorts - people who were kept on impossibly low wages, had to live half a dozen to the room, could only buy bread made with chalk instead of flour, but luckily in our cases they were able to leave the countryside and move to the City, they travelled on carts rather than below decks from one continent to another.

The following letter sums up how I feel:

Published: 24 March 2007

To the leaders of the 27 nations of the EU,

How dare we Europeans celebrate this weekend while on a continent some few miles south of us the most defenceless, dispossessed and weak are murdered in Sudan?
Has the European Union - born of atrocity to unite against further atrocity - no word to utter, no principle to act on, no action to take, in order to prevent these massacres in Darfur? Is the cowardliness over Srebrenica to be repeated? If so, what do we celebrate?
The thin skin of our political join?
The futile posturings of our political class?
The impotent nullities of our bureaucracies?

The Europe which allowed Auschwitz and failed in Bosnia must not tolerate the murder in Darfur. Europe is more than a network of the political classes, more than a first world economic club and a bureaucratic excrescence. It is an inherited culture which sustains our shared belief in the value and dignity of the human being. In the name of that common culture and those shared values, we call upon the 27 leaders to impose immediately the most stringent sanctions upon the leaders of the Sudanese regime.

Forbid them our shores, our health service and our luxury goods. Freeze their assets in our banks and move immediately to involve other concerned countries.

We must not once again betray our European civilization by watching and waiting while another civilization in Africa is destroyed.

Let this action be our gift to ourselves and our proof of ourselves. And when it is done, then let us celebrate together with pride.

Umberto Eco
Dario Fo
Günter Grass
Jürgen Habermas
Václav Havel
Seamus Heaney
Bernard Henri-Levy
Harold Pinter
Franca Rame
Tom Stoppard

Of course you can dismiss the letter as middle-class, literary, wankage but better that which brings it into the open rather than saying nothing which in effect keeps it hidden from our national conscience.