ABSTRACT

In August 1939, Adolf Hitler assured his Nazi colleagues there would be no international response if he made good on his plan to destroy European Jewry. He said, “Who after all speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” 1 Unfortunately, Hitler’s cynical assessment was correct. The same now applies to Sudan’s two and a half million Nuba people, victims of little importance whose uncertain future barely registers on the agendas of decision-makers around the world. The absence of action to stop state-sponsored violence and atrocities in Sudan’s South Kordofan and Blue Nile states reveals the weakness of the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine. Having congratulated itself for confronting its failures after the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the debacle in Bosnia in the 1990s, the international community has lapsed into its default mode: appeasement, punctuated by action only when our national or regional self-interest finds common ground with our perception of the hierarchy of suffering.