Human Rights Sanctions Blocked

[Gunny]

Can you imagine if this kind of genocide got half the media attention that Abhu Grahib got what that could accomplish?

Where is Amnesty Internationl on this one?? Too busy with their heads up terrorists asses?

Yeah, it's kind of mind-boggling how these human rights organizations can get all worked up over some POW being humiliated while hardly batting an eyelash at genocide.

 

[Bonnie]

Has it? I'm not saying that there is a need to be met. Is it ours to pick up or drop? Are there not developed countries with an interest here? Should we be acting without a UN mandate, (don't bother Eddie, I know and understand and empathise with your answer)? Are there other 'developed' nations with more of a cause here, if the UN will not act?

I certainly don't think the US should go this one alone, in fact if ever there was a need for the UN it would be for just something like this,( I won't hang waiting) but it wouldn't kill us to press the issue more with other countries that do have more of an immediate interest, while ours remains one of moral principal.

 

[Gunny]

Has it? I'm not saying that there is a need to be met. Is it ours to pick up or drop? Are there not developed countries with an interest here? Should we be acting without a UN mandate, (don't bother Eddie, I know and understand and empathise with your answer)? Are there other 'developed' nations with more of a cause here, if the UN will not act?

My answer to this is it is the UN's job. It's WHY that incompetent and ineffectual organization exists.

Legally, we have no obligation to these people. No treaties, agreements, etc.

Morally, if no one else is going to act, then we should. I can't get rid of that Marine/sheepdog mentality. I see defenseless noncombatants being murdered and it is my lot in life to defend.

 

[NATO AIR]

It's hearbreaking, and we are supposed to be living in civilized times..I think the world just doesn't want to hear it, let alone petition governments to take action. This is something our government has really dropped the ball on, I know we have had our share of problems but your right someone needs to have the guts to raise the issue publicly at the very least.

I believe life is too short to live just for yourself, it should have meaning, of a sort higher than the pursuit of pleasure and material items.

But I cannot blame people for being themselves, for not paying attention, and quite frankly, the issue still hasn't reached the level of critical political mass that it would take to get more than just a few senators and represenatives involved. (this is truly been a bipartisan tragedy, but a small triumph because of the tireless advocacy of Sam Brownback, Dick Durbin, Tom Coburn and Dick Lugar).

If the president could just realize that this is an issue that could unite people, perhaps we could hope for more. Until that day, I would be estatic to see Condi Rice, John Bolton and others go on the offensive in the media and among the "elites" and label the Sudanese actions for what they are: "ethnic cleansing" or "genocide", and embarrass the Russians, Chinese and Arabs on a daily basis until it becomes too costly for them to continue their defiant support of Khartoum.

 

[Annie]

My answer to this is it is the UN's job. It's WHY that incompetent and ineffectual organization exists.

Legally, we have no obligation to these people. No treaties, agreements, etc.

Morally, if no one else is going to act, then we should. I can't get rid of that Marine/sheepdog mentality. I see defenseless noncombatants being murdered and it is my lot in life to defend.

You got me with the Sheepdog analogy. At the same time, Iran needs to be watched, while we cannot take our eyes off of NK.

I'm with some of the criticism we are spread too thin, can't imagine what UK is dealing with, less of the 'common folk' back any of it.

 

[Gunny]

I believe life is too short to live just for yourself, it should have meaning, of a sort higher than the pursuit of pleasure and material items.

But I cannot blame people for being themselves, for not paying attention, and quite frankly, the issue still hasn't reached the level of critical political mass that it would take to get more than just a few senators and represenatives involved. (this is truly been a bipartisan tragedy, but a small triumph because of the tireless advocacy of Sam Brownback, Dick Durbin, Tom Coburn and Dick Lugar).

If the president could just realize that this is an issue that could unite people, perhaps we could hope for more. Until that day, I would be estatic to see Condi Rice, John Bolton and others go on the offensive in the media and among the "elites" and label the Sudanese actions for what they are: "ethnic cleansing" or "genocide", and embarrass the Russians, Chinese and Arabs on a daily basis until it becomes too costly for them to continue their defiant support of Khartoum.

I have to disagree. This issue would not unite people. If Bush was "for," the libs would be categorically "against."

And it's bad politics to call the Russians and Chinese what they are, and has been since the 70s.

 

[Bonnie]

And while this article seeps with a no blood for oil spin, there are some good points made.




War of the Future:

Oil Drives the Genocide in Darfur

by David Morse

A war of the future is being waged right now in the sprawling desert region of northeastern Africa known as Sudan. The weapons themselves are not futuristic. None of the ray-guns, force-fields, or robotic storm troopers that are the stuff of science fiction; nor, for that matter, the satellite-guided Predator drones or other high-tech weapon systems at the cutting edge of today's arsenal.
No, this war is being fought with Kalashnikovs, clubs and knives. In the western region of Sudan known as Darfur, the preferred tactics are burning and pillaging, castration and rape -- carried out by Arab militias riding on camels and horses. The most sophisticated technologies deployed are, on the one hand, the helicopters used by the Sudanese government to support the militias when they attack black African villages, and on the other hand, quite a different weapon: the seismographs used by foreign oil companies to map oil deposits hundreds of feet below the surface.

This is what makes it a war of the future: not the slick PowerPoint presentations you can imagine in boardrooms in Dallas and Beijing showing proven reserves in one color, estimated reserves in another, vast subterranean puddles that stretch west into Chad, and south to Nigeria and Uganda; not the technology; just the simple fact of the oil.

This is a resource war, fought by surrogates, involving great powers whose economies are predicated on growth, contending for a finite pool of resources. It is a war straight out of the pages of Michael Klare's book, Blood and Oil; and it would be a glaring example of the consequences of our addiction to oil, if it were not also an invisible war.

Invisible?

Invisible because it is happening in Africa. Invisible because our mainstream media are subsidized by the petroleum industry. Think of all the car ads you see on television, in newspapers and magazines. Think of the narcissism implicit in our automobile culture, our suburban sprawl, our obsessive focus on the rich and famous, the giddy assumption that all this can continue indefinitely when we know it can't -- and you see why Darfur slips into darkness. And Darfur is only the tip of the sprawling, scarred state known as Sudan. Nicholas Kristof pointed out in a New York Times column that ABC News had a total of 18 minutes of Darfur coverage in its nightly newscasts all last year, and that was to the credit of Peter Jennings; NBC had only 5 minutes, CBS only 3 minutes. This is, of course, a micro-fraction of the time devoted to Michael Jackson.

Why is it, I wonder, that when a genocide takes place in Africa, our attention is always riveted on some black American miscreant superstar? During the genocide in Rwanda ten years ago, when 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered in 100 days, it was the trial of O.J. Simpson that had our attention.

Yes, racism enters into our refusal to even try to understand Africa, let alone value African lives. And yes, surely we're witnessing the kind of denial that Samantha Power documents in A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide; the sheer difficulty we have acknowledging genocide. Once we acknowledge it, she observes, we pay lip-service to humanitarian ideals, but stand idly by. And yes, turmoil in Africa may evoke our experience in Somalia, with its graphic images of American soldiers being dragged through the streets by their heels. But all of this is trumped, I believe, by something just as deep: an unwritten conspiracy of silence that prevents the media from making the connections that would threaten our petroleum-dependent lifestyle, that would lead us to acknowledge the fact that the industrial world's addiction to oil is laying waste to Africa.

When Darfur does occasionally make the news -- photographs of burned villages, charred corpses, malnourished children -- it is presented without context. In truth, Darfur is part of a broader oil-driven crisis in northern Africa. An estimated 300 to 400 Darfurians are dying every day. Yet the message from our media is that we Americans are "helpless" to prevent this humanitarian tragedy, even as we gas up our SUVs with these people's lives.

Even Kristof -- whose efforts as a mainstream journalist to keep Darfur in the spotlight are worthy of a Pulitzer -- fails to make the connection to oil; and yet oil was the driving force behind Sudan's civil war. Oil is driving the genocide in Darfur. Oil drives the Bush administration's policy toward Sudan and the rest of Africa. And oil is likely to topple Sudan and its neighbors into chaos.

The Context for Genocide

I will support these assertions with fact. But first, let's give Sudanese government officials in Khartoum their due. They prefer to explain the slaughter in Darfur as an ancient rivalry between nomadic herding tribes in the north and black African farmers in the south. They deny responsibility for the militias and claim they can't control them, even as they continue to train the militias, arm them, and pay them. They play down their Islamist ideology, which supported Osama bin Laden and seeks to impose Islamic fundamentalism in Sudan and elsewhere. Instead, they portray themselves as pragmatists struggling to hold together an impoverished and backwards country; all they need is more economic aid from the West, and an end to the trade sanctions imposed by the U.S. in 1997, when President Clinton added Sudan to the list of states sponsoring terrorism. Darfur, from their perspective, is an inconvenient anomaly that will go away, in time.

It is true that ethnic rivalries and racism play a part in today's conflict in Darfur. Seen in the larger context of Sudan's civil war, however, Darfur is not an anomaly; it is an extension of that conflict. The real driving force behind the North-South conflict became clear after Chevron discovered oil in southern Sudan in 1978. The traditional competition for water at the fringes of the Sahara was transformed into quite a different struggle. The Arab-dominated government in Khartoum redrew Sudan's jurisdictional boundaries to exclude the oil reserves from southern jurisdiction. Thus began Sudan's 21-year-old North-South civil war. The conflict then moved south, deep into Sudan, into wetter lands that form the headwaters of the Nile and lie far from the historical competition for water.

Oil pipelines, pumping stations, well-heads, and other key infrastructure became targets for the rebels from the South, who wanted a share in the country's new mineral wealth, much of which was on lands they had long occupied. John Garang, leader of the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), declared these installations to be legitimate targets of war. For a time, the oil companies fled from the conflict, but in the 1990s they began to return. Chinese and Indian companies were particularly aggressive, doing much of their drilling behind perimeters of bermed earth guarded by troops to protect against rebel attacks. It was a Chinese pipeline to the Red Sea that first brought Sudanese oil to the international market.

Prior to the discovery of oil, this dusty terrain had little to offer in the way of exports. Most of the arable land was given over to subsistence farming: sorghum and food staples; cattle and camels. Some cotton was grown for export. Sudan, sometimes still called The Sudan, is the largest country in Africa and one of the poorest. Nearly a million square miles in area, roughly the size of the United States east of the Mississippi, it is more region than nation. Embracing some 570 distinct peoples and dozens of languages and historically ungovernable, its boundaries had been drawn for the convenience of colonial powers. Its nominal leaders in the north, living in urban Khartoum, were eager to join the global economy -- and oil was to become their country's first high-value export.

South Sudan is overwhelmingly rural and black. Less accessible from the north, marginalized under the reign of the Ottoman Turks in the nineteenth century, again under the British overlords during much of the twentieth, and now by Khartoum in the north, South Sudan today is almost devoid of schools, hospitals, and modern infrastructure.

Racism figures heavily in all this. Arabs refer to darker Africans as "abeed," a word that means something close to "slave." During the civil war, African boys were kidnapped from the south and enslaved; many were pressed into military service by the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum. Racism continues to find expression in the brutal rapes now taking place in Darfur. Khartoum recruits the militias, called Janjaweed -- itself a derogatory term -- from the poorest and least educated members of nomadic Arab society.

In short, the Islamist regime has manipulated ethnic, racial, and economic tensions, as part of a strategic drive to commandeer the country's oil wealth. The war has claimed about two million lives, mostly in the south -- many by starvation, when government forces prevented humanitarian agencies from gaining access to camps. Another four million Sudanese remain homeless. The regime originally sought to impose shariah, or Islamic, law on the predominantly Christian and animist South. Khartoum dropped this demand, however, under terms of the Comprehensive Peace Treaty signed last January. The South was to be allowed to operate under its own civil law, which included rights for women; and in six years, southerners could choose by plebiscite whether to separate or remain part of a unified Sudan. The all-important oil revenues would be divided between Khartoum and the SPLA-held territory. Under a power-sharing agreement, SPLA commander John Garang would be installed as vice president of Sudan, alongside President Omar al-Bashir.

Darfur, to the west, was left out of this treaty. In a sense, the treaty -- brokered with the help of the U.S. -- was signed at the expense of Darfur, a parched area the size of France, sparsely populated but oil rich. It has an ancient history of separate existence as a kingdom lapping into Chad, separate from the area known today as Sudan. Darfur's population is proportionately more Muslim and less Christian than southern Sudan's, but is mostly black African, and identifies itself by tribe, such as the Fur. (Darfur, in fact, means "land of the Fur.") The Darfurian practice of Islam was too lax to suit the Islamists who control Khartoum. And so Darfurian villages have been burned to clear the way for drilling and pipelines, and to remove any possible sanctuaries for rebels. Some of the land seized from black farmers is reportedly being given to Arabs brought in from neighboring Chad.

Oil and Turmoil

With the signing of the treaty last January, and the prospect of stability for most of war-torn Sudan, new seismographic studies were undertaken by foreign oil companies in April. These studies had the effect of doubling Sudan's estimated oil reserves, bringing them to at least 563 million barrels. They could yield substantially more. Khartoum claims the amount could total as much as 5 billion barrels. That's still a pittance compared to the 674 billion barrels of proven oil reserves possessed by the six Persian Gulf countries -- Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Iran, and Qatar. The very modesty of Sudan's reserves speaks volumes to the desperation with which industrial nations are grasping for alternative sources of oil.

The rush for oil is wreaking havoc on Sudan. Oil revenues to Khartoum have been about $1 million a day, exactly the amount which the government funnels into arms -- helicopters and bombers from Russia, tanks from Poland and China, missiles from Iran. Thus, oil is fueling the genocide in Darfur at every level. This is the context in which Darfur must be understood -- and, with it, the whole of Africa. The same Africa whose vast tapestry of indigenous cultures, wealth of forests and savannas was torn apart by three centuries of theft by European colonial powers -- seeking slaves, ivory, gold, and diamonds -- is being devastated anew by the 21st century quest for oil.

Sudan is now the seventh biggest oil producer in Africa after Nigeria, Libya, Algeria, Angola, Egypt, and Equatorial Guinea.

Oil has brought corruption and turmoil in its wake virtually wherever it has been discovered in the developing world. Second only perhaps to the arms industry, its lack of transparency and concentration of wealth invites kickbacks and bribery, as well as distortions to regional economies.

"There is no other commodity that produces such great profit," said Terry Karl in an interview with Miren Gutierrez, for the International Press Service, "and this is generally in the context of highly concentrated power, very weak bureaucracies, and weak rule of law." Karl is co-author of a Catholic Relief Services report on the impact of oil in Africa, entitled Bottom of the Barrel. He cites the examples of Gabon, Angola and Nigeria, which began exploiting oil several decades ago and suffer from intense corruption. In Nigeria, as in Angola, an overvalued exchange rate has destroyed the non-oil economy. Local revolts over control of oil revenues also have triggered sweeping military repression in the Niger delta.

Oil companies and exploration companies like Halliburton wield political and sometimes military power. In Sudan, roads and bridges built by oil firms have been used to attack otherwise remote villages. Canada's largest oil company, Talisman, is now in court for allegedly aiding Sudan government forces in blowing up a church and killing church leaders, in order to clear the land for pipelines and drilling. Under public pressure in Canada, Talisman has sold its holdings in Sudan. Lundin Oil AB, a Swedish company, withdrew under similar pressure from human rights groups.

Michael Klare suggests that oil production is intrinsically destabilizing:


"When countries with few other resources of national wealth exploit their petroleum reserves, the ruling elites typically monopolize the distribution of oil revenues, enriching themselves and their cronies while leaving the rest of the population mired in poverty -- and the well-equipped and often privileged security forces of these 'petro-states' can be counted on to support them."
Compound these antidemocratic tendencies with the ravenous thirst of the rapidly growing Chinese and Indian economies, and you have a recipe for destabilization in Africa. China's oil imports climbed by 33% in 2004, India's by 11%. The International Energy Agency expects them to use 11.3 million barrels a day by 2010, which will be more than one-fifth of global demand.

Keith Bradsher, in a New York Times article, 2 Big Appetites Take Seats at the Oil Table, observes:


"As Chinese and Indian companies venture into countries like Sudan, where risk-aversive multinationals have hesitated to enter, questions are being raised in the industry about whether state-owned companies are accurately judging the risks to their own investments, or whether they are just more willing to gamble with taxpayers' money than multinationals are willing to gamble with shareholders' investments."
The geopolitical implications of this tolerance for instability are borne out in Sudan, where Chinese state-owned companies exploited oil in the thick of fighting. As China and India seek strategic access to oil -- much as Britain, Japan, and the United States jockeyed for access to oil fields in the years leading up to World War II -- the likelihood of destabilizing countries like Sudan rises exponentially.

more here

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0819-26.htm

 

[Annie]

And while this article seeps with a no blood for oil spin, there are some good points made.




War of the Future:

Oil Drives the Genocide in Darfur

by David Morse

more here

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0819-26.htm

Thanks Bonnie, that falls within the sheepdog analogy offered earlier.

 

[Gunny]

You got me with the Sheepdog analogy. At the same time, Iran needs to be watched, while we cannot take our eyes off of NK.

I'm with some of the criticism we are spread too thin, can't imagine what UK is dealing with, less of the 'common folk' back any of it.

I would deal with this the same way we effectively dealt with Saddam and the Kurds and Sunni and Shia. Set up a wall of lead between the two parties and anyone that tries to cross the line gets blown up.

Then tell the UN to come up with a solution or I'd withdraw ALL support.

We are spread a little thin, but I bet if we pulled out of Europe we could ease that up a bit. First, the USSR no longer exists, and second, I don't really care if Russia invades Germany at this point. But we still have a lot of military manning antiquated Cold War lines.

 

[Annie]

I would deal with this the same way we effectively dealt with Saddam and the Kurds and Sunni and Shia. Set up a wall of lead between the two parties and anyone that tries to cross the line gets blown up.

Then tell the UN to come up with a solution or I'd withdraw ALL support.

We are spread a little thin, but I bet if we pulled out of Europe we could ease that up a bit. First, the USSR no longer exists, and second, I don't really care if Russia invades Germany at this point. But we still have a lot of military manning antiquated Cold War lines.

Ok, going with what you are saying. If we pull out, short term, of Europe, Japan, China/Taiwan, we'd scare the shit out of Sudan.

 

[Gunny]

Ok, going with what you are saying. If we pull out, short term, of Europe, Japan, China/Taiwan, we'd scare the shit out of Sudan.

LOL, well no. Perhaps I didn't explain that well.

The realignment fo forces comment was in response to your saying we are spread too thin.

The no-fly zone idea would be in response to the situation in Darfur.

 

[Annie]

LOL, well no. Perhaps I didn't explain that well.

The realignment fo forces comment was in response to your saying we are spread too thin.

The no-fly zone idea would be in response to the situation in Darfur.

Dang, now what am I supposed to say? Stay out of Darfur?

 

[Gunny]

Dang, now what am I supposed to say? Stay out of Darfur?

The wiser course of action since we currently are fighting a war on two fronts would be to not open another front.

 

[Annie]

The wiser course of action since we currently are fighting a war on two fronts would be to not open another front.

I understand. I believe that I read the US is going to ask for sanctions to be imposed this week. Don't know how that will really help, but it shows 'action' instead of 'no action.'