Hypocrisy, Lies and Violence in Sudan

Re “Getting Serious in Sudan,” editorial, Nov. 17: Although I commend The Times for urging action to stop the genocide in Darfur being carried out by Arab militias with the backing of the Arab government of Sudan, we need to be realistic.

This same Arab government killed hundreds of thousands of Africans over the last 20 years. Its troops murder entire male populations of African villages, rape the women and children and take the children as slaves.

How has the U.N. responded to these atrocities? With silence. I suppose that the U.N. is too busy championing Palestinian terrorists and condemning Israel for defending its citizens.

Moreover, the U.N. will never get serious with the Sudanese because China and Russia have important business interests in Sudan and both countries feel that sanctions would be “counterproductive at this point.”

Additionally, if the U.N. were to get serious and sanction Sudan for its crimes, the Arab and Muslim governments that dominate the U.N. would block any such action and scream that this is another attack by the West on Islam. This is what we get by funding and working through the U.N. -- hypocrisy, lies and more innocents being slaughtered.

Josh Baker

San Francisco

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Re “Apply the Bush Doctrine to Sudan,” Commentary, Nov. 8: I’m a Sudanese American who is fed up with hypocrisy and hypocrites.

Writers Thomas Donnelly and Vance Serchuk claimed that when the U.S. retook the Iraqi city of Samarra from insurgents this fall the Iraqi defense minister reported that 18 of the 24 foreign fighters captured there were Sudanese.

Is this a cause for Bush to send soldiers and bomb Sudan and kill more poor Sudanese? If this is a good cause to bomb Sudan, then Bush needs to bomb the Saudi kingdom, because 16 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi citizens, and those 19 hijackers killed 3,000 Americans in America.

Aladdin Zackaria

Montclair