Carter says Darfur not genocide

Media Credit: DANIELLE DESNOYERS / THE EAGLE DARFUR DISCUSSION - Jimmy Carter speaks to students and community members in the Abramson Family Recital Hall in Katzen Art Center Wednesday. Although tickets were gone within minuets after the event was announced, there was still a handful of empty seats at the event.

Although rebel militants have killed nearly 200,000 black Darfurians, the conflict in Sudan is by no means genocide, former President Jimmy Carter told the AU community Wednesday.

"That's an atrocity that's only been demonstrated two times in my lifetime," Carter told approximately 200 audience members. "The first was Adolph Hitler's persecution of the Jews ... and the other [was] Rwanda, when the Hutus decided to kill the Tutsis. That's not the case in Darfur. There has been no effort on the part of the central government [in Khartoum] to kill all of the black people of Darfur."

Carter's speech, held in the Katzen Arts Center's Abramson Family Recital Hall, marked the end of the Elders' Mission to Sudan, a fact-finding endeavor organized by AU Vice President of International Affairs Robert Pastor, according to a press release.

A group of 10 former political leaders comprise the Elders, including Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. They assembled in July to tackle the world's most pressing and intractable issues, Carter said.

"I was asked to participate in an exciting, promising, helpful organization ... a group of political has-beens," Carter joked with the audience. "We are very grateful that in this first phase, AU has played a key role ... the staff here have been superb."

Yet Jacob Locke, a freshman in the School of International Service and a member of AU's Darfur Action organization, said he slightly doubted Carter and the Elders, since both failed to address the conflict in Darfur as genocide.

"As much as I respect what he's done, genocide is the systematic and targeted killing of an ethnic group," Locke said. "That's exactly what the government has done - it has to be addressed first."

Instead, Carter emphasized the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, a treaty signed between the Sudanese government in Khartoum and rebel leaders in the south. The agreement was the "best President Bush could have done" to prevent another war, he said.

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