Roger Sandall, writing in this month’s Commentary, on “Can Sudan Be Saved?”
A recent “Sudan Situation Report” prepared for the United Nations reads as follows:
On 12 October IDP’s from Uma Kasara reported that their village was burned down by unidentified gunmen on 2 October, displacing approximately 650 families from their village, and from two adjacent villages of Gendoul and Goz. . . .
But what is an IDP? One answer might be that it is a way of using the vocabulary of social work to neutralize the horror of what is happening and the fate of the people concerned.
An IDP is an Internally Displaced Person — as if we were dealing with someone mildly disoriented and needing help to get home.
There is also a collective term issuing from the UN and its agencies that similarly needs glossing. In the aggregate, tens of thousands of IDP’s become “conflict-affected populations.”
That is no doubt true; but English provides better ways of describing those in Sudan whose villages have been burned, whose crops have been destroyed, whose children have been massacred, and whose men and women have been savaged and slain.
Let us call them the stricken and the doomed.
Sandall’s article makes it clear Sudan is a story of political, religious and historical catastrophe at least as shocking as the humanitarian crisis the United Nations — formed precisely to stop this from occurring again — has barely tried to stop. But in the meantime:
[T]he frontline workers of the humanitarian agencies must . . . be helped to do all in their immediate power for the stricken and the doomed — relieve distress, minister to the sick, displaced, and dying, and save those it is possible to save.
Valley Beth Shalom, backed by Sinai Temple, Stephen S. Wise Temple, Kol Tikvah, and UCLA Hillel, has formed Jewish World Watch to help (click on “Never Again,” and then on “Action”). It is urgent.
