Comes the Deluge

The wave of Sudanese immigrants crossing from Darfur into Chad to excape the army and government-backed janjaweed militias has familiar contours. In 1994, for example, waves of Rwandans fled their genocide-besotted nation for Uganda and Zaire, destabilizing both of those countries and fueling regional tensions. When some of the overwhelmingly Tutsi refugees were able to mobilize with the exiled Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) they returned to Rwanda, engaged in massive (and largely overlooked) reprisal killings, which produced another wave of refugees, this one primarily Hutu, many of whom were deeply implicated in the earlier genocide.

At the risk of being reductionist, in Africa (and probably most places) if you scratch a refugee, not so deep below the surface you will find a victim of gross atrocities (though as in the Rwanda example, you also sometimes find perpetrators). Chad is in no way equipped to handle the onrushing thousands desperate to escape the situation in Darfur. But they will keep coming, a human caravan that serves as eloquent and tragic testament of both man's capacity for evil and the world's capacity to look the other way.