While most American attention is focused on the war in Iraq and the upcoming presidential election, one of the worst humanitarian crises in recent years is playing out with little attention, or intervention, in the Darfur region of Sudan. Humanitarian crises and incidents of genocide have a horrifying way of reaching the ears and eyes of Americans after the fact, but this is an instance where intervention could save hundreds of thousands of lives.

Darfur residents die by the invisible hand of disease, starvation and the all too visible hands of the Arab Janjaweed militia forces, which have been killing and raping African villagers on a massive scale. Thirty thousand have died already. Human Rights Watch has reported that more than 1 million people have been displaced from their homes by the violence and are living in disease-ridden camps. The U.S. Agency for International Development estimates that if the situation continues, at least 350,000 people will die of starvation, disease, and malnutrition.

Where does the blame fall? The Washington Post recently said, “Darfur is a tragedy with many authors,” but the media have ignored one author’s participation. That author is the United States of America, a nation that, on Aug. 20, 1998, used cruise missiles to destroy a pharmaceutical plant in southern Sudan. Then President Clinton said the strike was ordered because the “the factory was involved in the production of materials for chemical weapons.” U.S officials also believed the plant had links to Osama bin Laden, who had ordered the bombing of U.S embassies the week before. Investigators later found no evidence of any sinister operations at the factory.

The incomparable Noam Chomsky discussed the bombing at length in a 2001 interview, citing many articles illustrating the horrific costs of the strike. The factory, named Al-Shifa, “produced 90 percent of Sudan’s major pharmaceutical products,” The Boston Globe’s Jonathan Belke reported a year after the strike. Germany’s ambassador to Sudan wrote in the Summer 2001 edition of the Harvard International Review that “it is difficult to assess how many people in this poor African country died as a consequence of the destruction of the Al-Shifa factory, but several tens of thousands seems a reasonable guess.” James Astill of The Guardian reported that the Al-Shifa factory was the “only one [in Sudan] producing TB drugs – for more than 100,000 patients, at about 1 British pound a month.” Costlier imported drugs were too expensive for an impoverished nation trying to pull itself out of a then 15-year-old civil war.

While no price can be put on the thousands of lives lost as a result of the destruction of Sudan’s primary medical production facility, what may be the greatest cost of the attack was the destabilization of Sudan’s fragile political establishment. While there is no clear evidence that the current humanitarian crisis in Sudan is the result of the Al-Shifa bombing, consider this: the month after the bombings, the Financial Times reported that the bombing “appeared to have shattered the slowly evolving move toward compromise between Sudan’s warring sides.” Astill, in his Guardian piece, wrote that the attack “overnight [plunged Sudan’s capital Khartoum] into the nightmare of important extremism it had been trying to escape.”

Without the U.S. bombing, and the subsequent “nightmare of extremism,” would the current bloodshed be taking place?

While it is fair to say the bombing of the Al-Shifa factory was responsible for tens of thousands of innocent lives lost, it may as yet be unfair to say that the U.S bombing caused the current humanitarian crises in Sudan. It is hard to argue, however, that the attack did not lay the groundwork for it, fueling tribal and ethnic strife as well as violent fundamentalism. These are always the necessary ingredients for genocide and widespread humanitarian tragedy.

We have gained nothing by bombing Sudan on that August day six years ago. But for hundreds of thousands of Sudanese, everything has been lost. The cruise missile that sentenced so many Sudanese to death was paid for by our tax dollars. That sobering fact should make people reassess their definition of “terrorist.”

Josh Keefe is a Bangor Daily News intern.