Sudan: Are We Going There Next?

and some more articles/links:

http://www.iht.com/articles/524346.html

overview of the situation

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/3752871.stm

BBC correspondent on the ethnic cleansing that is happening

http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2004/05/30/sudans_human_tragedy/

With aid running low, the many refugees are facing starvation

http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2711116

More information, including why ignoring Darfur may destablize that area of Africa, helping rebel and terrorist groups to take hold.

http://www.unrefugees.org/usaforunhcr/dynamic.cfm?ID=206&code=P007

Angelina Jolie, the UN's goodwill ambassador, asking for your help if possible. Join USA for UNHCR and help it to meet its goal of 20.7 million dollars to address the refugee situation this year.

You can also pray, talk to friends, family or neighbors about it, mention it at church or work, just about anything you do is a step forward. Thank you.



Magboula's Brush With Genocide

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: June 23, 2004


LONG THE SUDAN-CHAD BORDER - Meet Magboula Muhammad Khattar and her baby, Nada.

I wrote about Ms. Khattar in my last two columns, recounting how the Janjaweed Arab militia burned her village, murdered her parents and finally tracked her family down in the mountains. Ms. Khattar hid, but the Janjaweed caught her husband and his brothers, only 4, 6 and 8 years old, and killed them all.

Ms. Khattar decided that the only hope for saving her two daughters and her baby sister was to lead them by night to Chad. They had to avoid wells where the Janjaweed kept watch, but eight days later, half-dead with hunger and thirst, they staggered across the dry riverbed that marks the border with Chad.

That's where I found Ms. Khattar. She is part of a wave of 1.2 million people left homeless by the genocide in Darfur.

Among those I met was Haiga Ibrahim, a 16-year-old girl who said her father and three older brothers had been killed by the Janjaweed. So Haiga led her crippled mother and younger brothers and sisters to Chad. But the place they reached along the border, Bamina, was too remote to get help from overtaxed aid agencies.

So when I found her, Haiga was leading her brothers and sisters 30 miles across the desert to the town of Bahai. "My mother can't walk any more," she said wearily. "First I'm taking my brother and sisters, and then I hope to go back and bring my mother."

There is no childhood here. I saw a 4-year-old orphan girl, Nijah Ahmed, carrying her 13-month-old brother, Nibraz, on her back. Their parents and 15-year-old brother are missing in Sudan and presumed dead.

As for Ms. Khattar, she is camping beneath a tree, sharing the shade with three other women also widowed by the Janjaweed. In some ways Ms. Khattar is lucky; her children all survived. Moreover, in some Sudanese tribes, widows must endure having their vaginas sewn shut to preserve their honor, but that is not true of her Zaghawa tribe.

Ms. Khattar's children have nightmares, their screams at night mixing with the yelps of jackals, and she worries that she will lose them to hunger or disease. But her plight pales beside that of Hatum Atraman Bashir, a 35-year-old woman who is pregnant with the baby of one of the 20 Janjaweed raiders who murdered her husband and then gang-raped her.

Ms. Bashir said that when the Janjaweed attacked her village, Kornei, she fled with her seven children. But when she and a few other mothers crept out to find food, the Janjaweed captured them and tied them on the ground, spread-eagled, then gang-raped them.

"They said, `You are black women, and you are our slaves,' and they also said other bad things that I cannot repeat," she said, crying softly. "One of the women cried, and they killed her. Then they told me, `If you cry, we will kill you, too.' " Other women from Kornei confirm her story and say that another woman who was gang-raped at that time had her ears partly cut off as an added humiliation.

One moment Ms. Bashir reviles the baby inside her. The next moment, she tearfully changes her mind. "I will not kill the baby," she said. "I will love it. This baby has no problem, except for his father."

Ms. Khattar, the orphans, Ms. Bashir and countless more like them have gone through hell in the last few months, as we have all turned our backs - and the rainy season is starting to make their lives even more miserable. In my next column, I'll suggest what we can do to save them. For readers eager to act now, some options are at www.nytimes.com/kristofresponds <http://www.nytimes.com/kristofresponds>, Posting 479.
 
I think the Brits and French may end up handling this on their own, with possibly logistic support from the US aircraft carrier group that is the Middle East right now (should be the non-nuke JFK). they should model their operation after Operation Provide Comfort, where NATO freed the Kurds in N. Iraq from Saddam's clutches and helped them to become self-sufficent. Northern Iraq is the only middle east success story the past ten years. Darfur may be different, but most of the same components are there. It helps that American, British and French Marines are all based together in Djibouti in France's old bases there. There are air, land and sea capabilities right out of the box there.

Tony Blair is more of a ballsy figure than Bush in many regards. Remember how he intervened in Sierra Leonne and pulled the UN's ass out of the fire, saving the peacekeeping operation there and then intelligently utilizing the same British paratroopers and Marines who first saved the day to train the mostly African, Latin American and Asian peacekeepers there, turning them into the UN's most potent fighting force anywhere. I would not be surprised if Blair asked Bush for the leadership mantle on this one, with France throwing in an assist, especially because of the growing danger to Chad, a French client state.
 
Saturday, June 26, 2004

http://chrenkoff.blogspot.com/2004/06/shame-of-darfur.html

Lots of links at the site, this is a crime!

The shame of Darfur
Your conscience can rest easy - the crisis in the Sudanese province of Darfur is only a step away from a positive resolution:


"With thousands of children in western Sudan facing starvation and millions left homeless in a crisis of ethnic cleansing, the world's wealthy nations pledged yesterday to intervene - not with aid or armed forces, but with planeloads of politicians."
The government-backed irregular ethnic cleansers will be bombarded into submission with Colin Powell, Kofi Annan and the foreign ministers of France, Italy and Switzerland. In case the diplomatic heavy guns would prove insufficient, you can always try more aid. In fact, as Fox reports, "Powell to Ask Sudan's Leaders to Allow Aid". It would only be a slight exaggeration to compare the current scenario to the Allies asking the Nazis to allow food parcels into Auschwitz.

The Fox report goes on to say that Powell, Annan and other luminaries "are headed to the Sudanese capital next week to try to bring attention to the humanitarian crisis... [Powell] also plans to tell Sudanese leaders to 'let the aid flow freely'." Three quick thoughts: 1) the crisis doesn't need more attention, it needs action; 2) it's not a humanitarian but a political crisis, in so far as the human catastrophe unfolding in Darfur is a result of the military actions of Arab militias supported by the government in Khartoum, and not of any natural disaster - the humanitarian tragedy is the symptom of the political crisis; 3) flowing from the previous point, it would make more sense for Colin Powell, instead of telling the Sudanese leaders to "let the aid flow freely", to tell them to stop the war on the people of Darfur.

As Nicholas Kristof, who for months now has almost single-handedly been trying to awaken the Western conscience to the crisis in Darfur, writes in his "New York Times" column:


"Hats off to Colin Powell and Kofi Annan, who are both traveling in the next few days to Darfur. But the world has dithered for months already."
Sadly, some have already found the culprit for the international community's prevarication. Writes Anthony Bennett of Open Democracy:


"[T]he discussion over 'humanitarian intervention' is now deeply marked by the Iraq experience. It can be argued - it was indeed predicted - that by intervening in Iraq in a reckless, mendacious and unilateral way, Washington and its supporters have made it more difficult to build 'coalitions of the willing' for intervention even when (as in Sudan) most agree that it may be essential and that American reach and might may be the best means to achieve it."
Don't be fooled by the talk of an "Iraqi fatigue" and its chilling effect on international intervention. I have three words for you: Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo - three great examples of the so-called international community's well attested willingness to intervene and stop genocide. What's that you say? They all pre-date Iraq? Funny that. But for Bennett and company it's always easier to blame America.

Besides, as Kristof writes, "[t]he U.S. is not going to invade Sudan. That's not a plausible option. But we can pass a tough U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing troops, as well as more support for African peacekeepers. If Germany, France and Spain don't want to send troops to Iraq, then let them deploy in Darfur." But that would require all the usual critics to actually do something constructive. If the sum-total of your foreign policy consists of trying to do whatever it takes to sabotage whatever the United States is doing at the moment, it makes it pretty difficult to suddenly get into a positive and pro-active mode. And so, at least for the time being, Darfur joins Rwanda, Vukovar, Srebrenica and Kosovo on the long list of the UN's shame.
 
:clap: :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap:

thank you for joining the ranks of people from all sorts of political, cultural and religious sectors that have called for action to halt the genocide in sudan. despite the efforts of some nations and groups to discredit us, we're in the right and the lord above willing, America and its allies will do the right thing.

genocide is wrong and it must be halted wherever it is occuring. talking about the problem, diplomacy, that has its merits for a time, but in the end, brute force is basically the only thing mass murderers understand and deserve.
 
Originally posted by Yurt
This guy is really a piece of work. He does not have the guts to send in UN troops to Iraq, Sudan, anywhere. Does not have the guts to back up resolutions. When is this guy going to leave or get kicked out of office.

BTW, I tried to find term limits on the UN secretary general and was unsuccessful. seems, like he stays until a vote to remove him is put before the body. Anyone know?

I think he has the job as long as he likes unless he's voted out. He has the voting bloc he needs to stay unfortunately. He and his cronies are getting rich and turning a blind eye to anything that doesnt concern his wallet. Some invesigative journalist has to shine a BIG light on this asshole. He needs to be GONE!!
 
Another piece of writing on the Sudan. I concur with his notice that everything save Kristof is coming from the right. How can that be? I thought the Dems were the party of diversity and good will?


June 25, 2004, 9:26 a.m.
Never Again?
The bloodbath in Sudan.



That old well-meaning cliché "never again" may be due for retirement. It is what we tell ourselves after every massive slaughter, whether the Holocaust or Cambodia or Bosnia or Rwanda. Now, with a new wave of genocide building in Sudan hard on the heels of the tenth anniversary of Rwanda — which brought pious expressions of regret that more wasn't done to stop the killing at the time — we are about to prove ourselves perfectly ready to accept "again."

Militias backed by the Sudanese government have forced roughly a million people from their homes in the western part of the country. In the North-South conflict that wracked Sudan for 20 years, the Muslim government's favored tool was genocide, directed against the Christian and animist south. The government is conducting genocide again, giving air cover and other support to Arab militias that are cleansing black Sufi Muslims from the western province of Darfur. The North-South war killed 2 million; at least 10,000 have died already in Darfur; and, absent immediate relief, hundreds of thousands more could die.

"The U.S. has done more than anyone else in Darfur, and the Bush administration has done more than any other administration about Sudan," says Nina Shea of the human-rights group Freedom House. The U.S. has pledged nearly $200 million in aid to the region. The European Union so far is kicking in a little more than $10 million — from all 25 countries in the EU combined. It is the U.S. that is pushing hard for a tough Security Council resolution that will call on the Sudanese government to end its support for violence and allow aid to flow into Darfur. This is consistent with the administration's history of involvement in Sudan.

Negotiations between the North and South had been bumping along ineffectually for years, until Bush appointed former senator John Danforth — now the U.S. representative to the U.N. — as his special envoy to the country. High-level Bush officials were engaged in the peace talks on a daily basis, and finally a ceasefire was forged this May. The Sudanese government has repeatedly proven itself susceptible to international pressure over the years, which is why there is hope for Darfur — if only the world can be bothered to create the pressure.

There is as yet no "CNN effect" — the sense of urgency that comes from international media attention — in Darfur. The press has mostly been AWOL, with the exception of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, whose searing reports have made him a one-man call-to-action. The Muslim world has reserved its outrage for the prison abuses at Abu Ghraib, even though a spoonful of the same condemnation applied to Sudan could help save hundreds of thousands of Muslim lives. As for the U.N., it recently welcomed Sudan onto the U.N. Human Rights Commission, where, with China and Cuba, it will have lots of nasty company.

Unfortunately, Sudan doesn't fit comfortably into the Bush-bashers' international-relations categories, or we might hear more about the issue. For the president's critics the word "diplomacy" means one thing: strong-arm Israel. And "multilateralism" tends to mean only appeasing France. So the administration's diplomatic achievement in Sudan might as well not exist, and its effort to muster other international actors — from the U.N. to Europe — behind a multilateral diplomatic and humanitarian-aid initiative in Darfur is ignored. And even though China is obstructing diplomatic pressure on Sudan because of its oil business there, there are, unsurprisingly, no cries of "blood for oil."

In Darfur people are being pushed from their homes and raped and brutalized by death squads, the so-called Janjaweed. They are huddled in makeshift camps that will become dens of death as the rainy season begins, if the Janjaweed isn't called off and if adequate humanitarian supplies aren't allowed to be delivered. If "never again" is to mean anything, it must mean something now.

— Rich Lowry is author of Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.
http://www.nationalreview.com/lowry/lowry200406250926.asp
 
that is a searing point, the dems have been mainly silent. although kerry (after a shot from kristof) did condemn the violence in sudan.

we have US/French/British forces in Djibouti, why can't we stop this today? the UN i used to believe in is a joke on these matters now, so **** them. we have to do what we have to do.

these guys have never tasted true defeat before, never tasted 21st century warfare. let's bring it to them, and see them for the murderous cowards they really are. seperate them from the darfur region until they can learn to behave and we help the survivors rebuild their villages and ways of life.
 
We'll see during this next week. Here is a roundup, each point has links:

June 26, 2004
Weekly Summary of events re: Darfur genocide and the US response

1. The government of Sudan continues to deny there is a problem. But in the US there is new focus on stopping the genocide in Darfur.
[Click on the image at right to see one small example of satellite pictures that document the destruction of villages.]

2. US Secretary of State Colin Powell will visit Sudan the middle of next week, at the same time that United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan will be in the country.

3. Powell is reportedly poised to take a much stronger stance than Annan, including threatening Sudan with sanctions and with war crimes prosecutions of the leaders of the genocide.

4. The US government position is backed by satellite images showing destruction in Darfur that is targeted only at blacks, and not on Arabs, hard data consistent with "ethnic cleansing" and genocide.

Natsios said the State Department and USAID purchased commercial satellite photos showing 576 villages, including 300 that have "been completely destroyed" and 76 that have been "severely damaged. The rest are fine, and they are all Arab. It's clear that ethnic cleansing is going on here," Natsios said. (Washington Post, subscription required)
5. On Wednesday the US Senate passed an aid measure for Darfur, co-sponsored by Senators DeWine and Durbin. A similar measure had already passed the US House of Representatives.

6. Also on Wednesday, Pierre-Richard Prosper, Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, gave testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives, International Relations Committee, Subcommittee on Africa that included the names of the Janjaweed leaders who the US believes are directly leading the genocide, as well as the following statement: (Full text available from AllAfrica.com)

There is the question of whether this is genocide. We see indicators of genocide, and there is evidence that points in that direction. However, we are not in a position to confirm. To do so, we need Darfur to be opened up.
I have requested a visa to travel to Darfur and personally examine the situation. Despite this request having been submitted weeks ago, it is still pending. In the meantime, we have told the Sudanese that we are appalled by what is happening in Darfur and have indicated that there is evidence of continued Sudanese Government support of militias and knowledge of the abuses.


7. Wednesday, Senators John McCain and Mike DeWine had a very strong co-authored editorial published in the Washington Post.

8. Wednesday, the US Congress' Congressional Black Caucus joined with NGO Africa Action to call for US intervention in Sudan and for labeling the crisis a genocide.

9. Thursday the US Holocaust Museum shut down in order to bring attention to Darfur, as did its sister organization in the UK.

10. On Saturday two US Senators with long concern for Sudan and Darfur, Senators Brownback of Kansas and Wolf of Virginia, arrived in the capital of Sudan and are expected to go to Darfur on Sunday.

11. Saturday leaders of the US and the European Union nations issued a joint statement on Sudan, from their summit in Ireland.

12. Because of the Powell trip, major news organizations can be expected to run stories on Darfur this weekend and next week. Here is a good summary on MSNBC. One of the best editorials is by Nicholas Kristoff in the New York Times today, which starts off:

Dithering as Others Die
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

The New York Times: June 26, 2004

LONG THE SUDAN-CHAD BORDER — The ongoing genocide in Darfur is finally, fortunately, making us uncomfortable. At this rate, with only 250,000 more deaths it will achieve the gravitas of the Laci Peterson case.

Hats off to Colin Powell and Kofi Annan, who are both traveling in the next few days to Darfur. But the world has dithered for months already. Unless those trips signal a new resolve, many of the Darfur children I've been writing about over the last few months will have survived the Janjaweed militia only to die now of hunger or diarrhea.



One of the really impressive things is the non-partisan nature of the growing support for Sudan. Right and left, all colors, all faith communities.

Of course, nothing really matters except progress on the ground. For a feeling of the reality in the field, read Marcus Prior's Darfur aid worker's diary. All our talk is worthless unless action is taken.

Expect the talk to heat up next week, with more leaders speaking up as people of all persuasions grasp the enormity of the tragedy in Darfur. I pray that this leads to decisive action, soon.

[Apologies for not covering Africa, Asia, the UK and Europe in this review, but Daniell is off. If readers will do surveys or send important items, by way of the comments or email, I will be very thankful!]
 
here's the whole kristof article (its worth posting, this guy has been amazing the past few months)

OP-ED COLUMNIST
Dithering as Others Die
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/26/o...l=1&adxnnlx=1088431276-WXOswILkBEEWAa1RnnfIfw

Published: June 26, 2004

LONG THE SUDAN-CHAD BORDER - The ongoing genocide in Darfur is finally, fortunately, making us uncomfortable. At this rate, with only 250,000 more deaths it will achieve the gravitas of the Laci Peterson case.

Hats off to Colin Powell and Kofi Annan, who are both traveling in the next few days to Darfur. But the world has dithered for months already. Unless those trips signal a new resolve, many of the Darfur children I've been writing about over the last few months will have survived the Janjaweed militia only to die now of hunger or diarrhea.

I've had e-mail from readers who are horrified by the slaughter, but who also feel that Africa is always a mess and that there's not much we can do. So let me address the cynics.

Look, I'm sure it's terrible in Darfur. But lots of places are horrific, and we can't help everyone. Why obsess about Sudan?

The U.N. describes Darfur as the No. 1 humanitarian crisis in the world today. The U.S. Agency for International Development estimates that at best 320,000 more people will still die of hunger and disease this year - or significantly more if we continue to do nothing.

Moreover, apart from our obligation to act under the Genocide Convention, acquiescence only encourages more genocide - hence the question attributed to Hitler, "Who today remembers the Armenian extermination?"

Haven't we invaded enough Muslim countries?

The U.S. is not going to invade Sudan. That's not a plausible option.

But we can pass a tough U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing troops, as well as more support for African peacekeepers. If Germany, France and Spain don't want to send troops to Iraq, then let them deploy in Darfur. And we must publicly condemn the genocide.

What good is a speech in the U.N.? Why would Sudan listen?

Governments tend to be embarrassed about exterminating minorities. In Sudan, a bit of publicity about Darfur coupled with a written statement from President Bush led Sudan to agree to a cease-fire in April and to improve access for aid agencies. More publicity prompted it to promise to disband the Janjaweed raiders.

Sudan lies and wriggles out of its promises, but its genocide is still calibrated to the international reaction. Likewise, it is still denying visas and blocking supplies for emergency relief, but pressure has led it to improve access.

So, Mr. Bush, if a single written statement will do so much good, why won't you let the word "Darfur" pass your lips? Why the passivity in the face of evil? You could save tens of thousands of lives by making a forceful speech about Darfur. Conversely, your refusal to do so is costing tens of thousands of lives.

If the Sudanese were notorious pirates of American videotapes, if they were sheltering Mullah Omar, you'd be all over them. So why not stand up just as forcefully to genocide?

Mr. Bush seems proud of his "moral clarity," his willingness to recognize evil and bluntly describe it as such. Well, Darfur reeks of evil, and we are allowing it to continue.

What can ordinary Americans do?

Yell! Mr. Bush and John Kerry have been passive about Darfur because voters are. If citizens contact the White House or their elected representatives and demand action, our leaders will be happy to follow.

Readers can also contribute to one of the many aid agencies saving lives in Darfur. (I've listed some at www.nytimes.com/kristofresponds, Posting 489.)

Be realistic. We don't have our national interest at stake in Darfur.

But we do. Sudan's chaos is destabilizing surrounding countries, especially Chad, which is an increasing source of oil for us. Moreover, when states collapse into chaos, they become staging grounds for terrorism and for diseases like ebola and polio (both have broken out recently in Sudan).

In any case, America is a nation that has values as well as interests. We betrayed those values when we ignored past genocides, and we are betraying them again now.

In my last three columns, I wrote about Magboula Muhammad Khattar, a 24-year-old woman struggling to keep her children alive since her parents and husband were killed by the Janjaweed. Each time I visited the tree she lives under, she shared with me the only things she had to offer: a smile and a bowl of brackish water.

Is a cold shoulder all we have to offer in return?
 
i've learned the french have an airbase in chad... we can augment the french aircraft there with a NATO air wing out of Italy or Turkey, and send in troops from Djibouti. The air wing could focus on a no-fly zone over Darfur, and also on hitting Sudanese airbases and the HQ's of the horsemen raiders who are carrying out the majority of the genocide.
the troops will patrol the ground and allow aid workers and agencies to treat the victims, as well as rebuild the villages, plant new crops and design new wells.

basically a carbon copy of operation provide comfort from n. iraq but with more teeth.

JOHN MCCAIN AND MIKE DEWINE ON SUDAN
http://mccain.senate.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=Newscenter.ViewOpEd&Content_id=1295

IT'S HAPPENING AGAIN By : Sens. John McCain and Mike DeWine

June 23, 2004 - The Washington Post - Imagine that we could rerun the events that occurred in Rwanda 10 years ago. With the certain knowledge of horrific events to come, would the world's great nations again stand idle as 800,000 human beings faced slaughter? If the recent expressions of grief and regret from world leaders are any indication, the answer is no -- this time things would be very different.

Yet, in 2004, just as in 1994, the international community is on the verge of making a tragic mistake. Mass human destruction is unfolding today in Sudan, with the potential to bring a death toll even higher than that in Rwanda.

Darfur, a Texas-size region in western Sudan, is the site of the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today. Since December the largely Arab Sudanese government has teamed with the Janjaweed, a group of allied Arab militias, to crush an insurgency in Darfur. The methods that the government and the Janjaweed have employed are nothing short of horrific. They are slaughtering civilians in a systematic scorched-earth campaign designed to "ethnically cleanse" the entire region of black Africans. By bombing villages, engaging in widespread rape, looting civilian property, and deliberately destroying homes and water sources, the government and the Janjaweed are succeeding.

The numbers are appalling. Some 1.1 million people have been driven from their homes, and as many as 30,000 are already dead. The U.S. Agency for International Development estimates that, even under "optimal conditions," 320,000 may die by the end of this year, and a death toll far higher is easily within reach. In the face of this catastrophe, the government and the Janjaweed continue to block humanitarian aid, and widespread killing and destruction persist. While civilians flee, the government's Antonov bombers target water wells, granaries, houses and crops, clearing villages so that the Janjaweed can enter and take over. In the meantime, famine looms.

The administration has rightly spoken out against the atrocities in Sudan and taken admirable steps, including the provision of financial support and increased diplomatic pressure. The State Department has also made clear that the Sudanese government is sorely mistaken if it believes it will get a free pass in Darfur in exchange for brokering peace with rebels in the south. But as the rainy season approaches and threatens to hinder the delivery of aid, time is running out. We must do more, and we must do it immediately.

The U.N. Security Council should demand that the Sudanese government immediately stop all violence against civilians, disarm and disband its militias, allow full humanitarian access, and let displaced persons return home. Should the government refuse to reverse course, its leadership should face targeted multilateral sanctions and visa bans. Peacekeeping troops should be deployed to Darfur to protect civilians and expedite the delivery of humanitarian aid, and we should encourage African, European and Arab countries to contribute to these forces.

The United States must stand ready to do what it can to stop the massacres. In addition to pushing the U.N. Security Council to act, we should provide financial and logistical support to countries willing to provide peacekeeping forces. The United States should initiate its own targeted sanctions against the Janjaweed and government leaders, and consider other ways we can increase pressure on the government. We must also continue to tell the world about the murderous activities in which these leaders are engaged, and make clear to all that this behavior is totally unacceptable.

It took concerted international pressure to achieve an end to the 20-year war between the north and south in Sudan, and even greater intensity is required to save lives in Darfur. Some Americans, understandably preoccupied with events in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, may think that these measures are too difficult or too expensive. Dealing with ethnic strife is never easy, and it is tempting to turn our heads. Yet 10 years ago we looked the other way when Americans were unfamiliar with the Hutu and the Tutsi, and 800,000 deaths now stain our conscience.

A survivor of the Rwandan genocide named Dancilla told her story to a British humanitarian group. She said: "If people forget what happened when the U.N. left us, they will not learn. It might then happen again -- maybe to someone else." All Americans should realize one terrible fact: It is happening again.

Mike DeWine is a Republican senator from Ohio. John McCain is a Republican senator from Arizona.
 
BBC: Darfur War Threatens Sudan Peace Deal

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3845789.stm

(at least its not the Sudanase gov't threatening, its one of the main rebel leaders from the south, and he's doing so for a good reason, i would not be surprised if intervention seemed close that the gov't would start threatening to back away from the peace deal)

Darfur war 'threatens Sudan deal'


Many thousands are starving in Darfur, aid workers say
The conflict in Sudan's western region of Darfur could endanger the peace deal in the south, a senior southern rebel commander says.
Abdel Aziz Adim told the BBC that the SPLA would refuse to join a coalition government that "crushes" Darfur.

The SPLA and the government are putting the final touches to a deal to end 21 years of war in the south.

About one million people have fled Darfur, where Arab militias are accused of targeting black Africans.

Both conflicts pit black African groups against the Arab-dominated government but they have been largely separate.

'Genocide'

"We will not be party to a government that will crush the people of Darfur," Mr Adim said.

"They have a just cause and I personally will not be ready to work with such a government."

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Some human rights campaigners say the pro-government Janjaweed militia are conducting a genocide against Darfur's black African population.

US war crimes envoy Pierre Prosper has said there is evidence of a possible genocide, but UN Secretary General Kofi Annan refuses to use that description.

At least 10,000 people have been killed and aid workers say that may more will die from hunger in refugee camps, where food has run short.

United States Secretary of State Colin Powell is due to visit Sudan on Tuesday and Wednesday and is expected to travel to Darfur.

On Sunday, talks between the SPLA and the government resumed in Kenya.

After two years of talks, they have agreed to set up a power-sharing government, with autonomy for the south for six years.

A referendum is then due to be held on whether the mainly Christian and animist south should secede from the Muslim-dominated north.

Both sides of the conflict in Darfur are Muslim, but rebels accuse the government of ignoring the region.
 
from BBC Africa's Correspondent

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/3840427.stm

Screams of Sudan's starving refugees


By Hilary Andersson
BBC Africa correspondent


The 15-month long conflict in Sudan's western province of Darfur has produced what the United Nations is calling "the worst humanitarian crisis in the world".

A pro-government Arab militia, known as the Janjaweed, is accused of carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the African Christian population there. Hilary Andersson has been to one of the Darfur refugee camps.


Children are starving in Darfur's refugee camps
It is very disturbing to be a me or a you and to see what is happening in Darfur.

To see humanity stripped to its barest bones. To see people so traumatised that they stutter from their memories, or wail at night, and now so destitute that they simply have nothing.

Not a blanket, not shelter, not water, not food, not basic health. Nothing. And the prospect of things getting worse.

I spoke to so many displaced Darfurians that my notebook is jammed with endless identifying scribbles like woman in red headdress; starving child with crinkled face like old man; pathetic-looking child leaning against mother - and next to them name after name.

Stories that relay horror piled on horror. And stories that are all very similar.

Child death

Out of all of them, the first displaced woman I spoke to in Darfur sticks in my mind, though her name is lost to me.

She sat on a small mat with her nine-month-old boy who was gaunt and famished. His name was Abdul Rahim.

One morning, before dawn at 0400, Abdul's mother was sleeping in her village - Shattay - when they came. The Janjaweed. A word that carries tremendous fear.

It is a play on the local, roughly spoken Arabic and translates as "evil men on horseback with guns".

This was the dawn when the so-called evil ones set fire to her village.

She heard chaos breaking out and ran with her children.


Adam's mother walked for 10 days after their village was burnt
The Janjaweed were firing, killing men and, so she and others said, shooting and hurting children too.

Her husband fled also. She does not know if he was killed.

The next day, children in tow, she began her three-day journey to Kalma, in searing Saharan heat.

On her way to the camp her seven-year-old child could not cope - and he died.

She told this part of the story in a matter-of-fact sort of way.

I suppose she knows that Abdul, her youngest, might die of hunger - and she has no house now, no shelter, no blanket.

'Better than dying'

"How do you find it here?" someone asked her.

She answered without hesitation and quietly. "It is better than dying," she said. Perhaps you have to have seen the horror of death in Darfur to make a statement like that.

For outsiders it is hard to see anything redeeming about life for the displaced people.

In the past two weeks I have met families with no food at all in their shacks.

It makes you want to scream to see it

I have seen a family's one bowl of rotting food crawling with insects. Seen a starving child being washed in water dirtied with his own blood. Seen stick-thin infants covered in excrement and throwing up their food because they are too weak to eat it.

Starvation is a horror. It is a slow and painful way of dying.

Mothers have to watch their children suffering terribly in the process.

It makes you want to scream to see it.

Except you cannot because it is not your trauma, it is someone else's and they do the screaming.

It happens at night.

I say that because we kept hearing it. We stayed in a camp called Mornei for three nights, right next to a small tent.

The tent served as a clinic for the worst cases of children with severe malnutrition.

Some of the children who came into that tent daily looked barely alive.


Strangely, if you looked at any one of them for long enough they would look back with large, penetrating, angry eyes. It was haunting.

The tent stank. The temperature was over 40C (104F).

When the sun went down there came a slight relief.

But it was the minute drop of heat in the evenings that was killing the weakened children - their bodies too traumatised to cope with any change at all.

And so, after going to bed, at two or three in morning the darkness and silence would be abruptly cut through with the sound of an awful scream of anguish as a mother mourned her child's passing away.

That, at this awfully lonely hour, would start it all off. The donkeys would let rip tortured moans, the famished dogs would begin to howl.

And if ever there was a reason or place for the imagination to start working, it was this.

Terrifying thought process

One night when the wailing began, the stories from the day began circling in my head and I realised that these must be the same screams heard in the villages at the moment of attack by the Janjaweed - these were after all the same noises of catastrophe from the same people.

I began to imagine the gut-wrenching fear that the mothers must have felt when - having heard for months of villages nearby being burned - their turn came.

They are refugees, but they have found no safe refuge

All the houses on fire, their neighbours screaming and running, their children scattering in the chaos, running past dead bodies on their way out of the village, not knowing if their husbands were alive or dead.

Sleeping perhaps under a tree. Walking the next morning with no shelter, no family in the middle of a desert.

Then ending up in the nearest town, only to find everyone else there half-starved.

It is a terrifying thought process - made all the more real because, not a few hundred metres from where we slept, where the refugees sleep nightly, are the Janjaweed.

The very men who are tormenting the civilians by driving them from their villages are right in the middle of the camps, patrolling them by day, terrorising the women by night.

If the women try to go out of the camps to get food they face the real prospect of being killed, beaten or raped.

No-one has documented it precisely but probably thousands of women have been raped so far.

Can you imagine how frightened these people are? They are refugees, but they have found no safe refuge.

Hard facts

There is a lot more to said about Darfur. But one of the most galling thoughts is this.

These people do not have to be starving. There is not a major drought, there is a war.

This situation has been brought about by men.

The men involved are the Janjaweed militia and the Sudanese government which has admitted to backing the militia in parts of this war - though the government also says it cannot control them.

It is not a war as we know it; it is the mass punishment of the people

Either way, the destruction of Darfur is a massive reprisal against a black Darfur rebel group - the Sudanese Liberation Movement (SLM) - which is fighting for greater representation for the region.

Fair enough, fight the rebel group - you might say. Governments cannot just ignore rebellions on their territory, and militias will be militias.

For the sake of argument, let us be generous to the armies here - that is war.

But why take it out on the mothers, the children, the old men, the civilians?

That is the evil of what is happening in Darfur.

These are the facts: children are starving to death because of a fight between a group of powerful, well-armed, dirty fighting men - who are grown-ups.

And many more will die before this is over.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Wednesday, 23 June 2004 on the BBC World Service.
 
one more for the road...

here's Sudan's government trying to deny most of what's happening, and the consequences of their crimes
"In Darfur, there is no hunger. There is no malnutrition. There is no epidemic disease," Mustafa Osman Ismail, the foreign minister of Sudan said in an interview. Yes, he conceded, there is "a humanitarian situation." But the hunger, he said, was "imagined" by the media."
YEAHHH!! did this guy go to the same public relations school as BAGHDAD BOB?

from the washington post via msnbc http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5305453/

washingtonpost.com Highlights

In Sudan, death and denial
Officials charged with concealing crisis as thousands starve

Emily Wax / The Washington Post
Mornay refugee camp - Mohammed Ishaq, father, tries to comfort his dying son, Zohar. Nine-month old Zohar is dying of lack of food and malaria. His family escaped fighting in Darfur.
By Emily Wax

Updated: 11:30 p.m. ET June 26, 2004MORNAY, Sudan - There are tents here that no parent wants to visit. They are called feeding centers, shady rectangular units where children fight death. Sitting on a mat and holding his son's frail hand, Mohammed Ishaq and his wife, Aisha, have been here five days, nursing 9-month-old Zohar on drops of water from a large pink cup, praying that somehow he will survive.


Zohar spits up the water. His cough is rough, and his thin skin clings to his ribs. His withered left arm is connected to an IV. He is suffering from malaria, complicated by malnutrition. Near him, other parents rock, nurse and pray for their babies, who are passed out or moaning, their eyes rolled back as they vomit emergency rations of corn and oil.

Six hundred miles to the east in the capital, Khartoum, Mustafa Osman Ismail, the foreign minister of Sudan, stretched back in his plump leather chair in an air conditioned office overlooking the Nile.

"In Darfur, there is no hunger. There is no malnutrition. There is no epidemic disease," he said in an interview. Yes, he conceded, there is "a humanitarian situation." But the hunger, he said, was "imagined" by the media.

Both hunger and denial are weapons in Sudan, according to U.N. officials and international aid workers. After charging the government with imposing a policy of forced starvation against the people of Darfur, they now say that official attempts to conceal the crisis are endangering efforts to prevent famine among an estimated 1.2 million people.

Mornay is the largest refugee camp in the region. It is a labyrinth of suffering, where one child in five is acutely malnourished, aid workers say, where for six months, 75,000 people have lived on less than half the food they need to survive, where six people die every day, mainly children and the elderly, mainly from hunger and disease.

In the town of Mornay near the camp, there is a market with no food. There is a tiny mosque where no one is praying, because 3,000 people are crammed in its dank and fetid corners. There is farmable land outside the camp, but food cannot be gathered because militiamen on horseback, clad in government uniforms, roam the scrubby landscape. Assault rifles are balanced on their laps, and whips hang from their belt loops. Women are trapped inside the camp, unable to forage for firewood or food.

There are 129 such camps across Darfur, 31 of which are inaccessible because they are in areas held by the government or the rebels in the region, which stretches along the border of Chad. More than a million people live in the camps, many of which lack water, supplies and sanitation, and operate without any feeding centers.

The people in the camps were driven from their villages and farms by pro-government Arab militiamen, a rag-tag collection of traditional tribal fighters and criminals known in Arabic as Janjaweed, which means "men who ride horses and carry G3 guns." The Janjaweed fighters have terrorized and killed, witnesses say, and are also accused of rapes and beatings.

Tensions in Darfur have simmered since the 1970s, when drought and competition over scarce resources sparked clashes between largely nomadic cattle and camel herders, who view themselves as Arabs, on one side, and the more sedentary farmers, who see their ancestry as African. Both groups are Muslim.

The situation flared in February 2003, when groups of students and political activists from three of Darfur's African tribes started a rebellion against the government, complaining that the Arab ruling elite had failed to develop the area.

The Darfur groups thought it was time to press their case when a peace deal finally began to come to fruition in an unrelated conflict between the Islamic government in the north and rebels based in southern part of the country, a region that is largely animist and Christian, after 21 years of war and more than 2 million deaths.

The first major victory of the Darfur groups was the capture of the military town of El Fashir in a battle last year. They killed 75 government soldiers, stole weapons and destroyed four gunships and two Antonov aircrafts, government officials said. In response, the government began to arm local militias to boost the army and also launched an aerial bombardment of villages, witnesses say.

Over the past 16 months, more than 10,000 people have been killed and thousands driven from their homes by the Arab militiamen. Human rights and aid groups accuse the government of carrying out an ethnic cleansing campaign, targeting three tribes: the Fur, Massaleit and Zaghawa.

Sudanese authorities tightly restrict access to the region. But this week, NASA satellite photos still being reviewed provided a clearer view: 56,000 houses, with conical-shaped roofs known as tukels, have been destroyed in nearly 400 villages.

Aid workers predict that many more people will die, and that the U.N. World Food Program will be able to reach only 800,000 of the 1.2 million displaced people because of continuing violence. Aid workers are also concerned the rainy season will slow or stop food shipments. And water-born diseases in crowded camps with no latrines will increase the number of deaths, they said. The U.S. Agency for International Development estimated that at least 350,000 people will die of disease and malnutrition over the next nine months.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell plans to visit Darfur next week to urge the Sudanese government to disarm the Arab militias or face U.N. sanctions. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has also scheduled a visit.

Aid workers and analysts say they hope the visits will push the United States to lead an intervention that will provide airlifts of food and medicine. The U.S. military is considering sending a team to Chad to assess conditions for a possible humanitarian mission that would help refugees who have fled Sudan, State Department officials said.

The aid workers also hope the attention will knock down a crucial obstacle in stopping the famine: government denial. Headlines this week in a government newspaper, Sudan Vision, read: "Situation in Darfur Under Control" and "Ethnic Cleansing Sheer Fabrication."

A U.N. report issued in May on conditions in the village of Kailek in western Darfur accused local government officials of ordering "a policy of forced starvation" by insisting the villagers faced no problems, even as militias prevented food deliveries. Nine children in the area were reported to die from malnutrition every day.

At the same time, the government has also restricted access to humanitarian workers and journalists, granting travel permits infrequently and allowing only a small part of the affected areas to be visited. Last week, Jan Egeland, the U.N. emergency relief coordinator, said the government was holding up visas for non-U.N. relief workers and delaying the shipment of necessary equipment.

Pacing inside a Doctors Without Borders compound in El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, Jean-Hervé Bradol, president of the group, said he was angry at the Sudanese government and the United Nations for their slow response after officials toured feeding centers in Mornay. He puffed frantically on a cigarette, his face ghostly, his brown hair strewn wildly.

"This is the attitude that accelerates crisis. If you deny there's a problem, you don't have to address it," Bradol said. "We asked for food planning. We asked for trucks- they say they will come-yes-in six months, when it's too late. I am hoping I am wrong. In the meantime, thousands will die."

"By denying that there is a humanitarian crisis, the government can continue phase two of its ethnic cleansing campaign," said John Prendergast, a former Clinton adviser on Africa and an analyst for the International Crisis Group, an international research organization based in Brussels. "Phase one consisted of driving people out of their villages. Phase two is designed to use starvation and disease to finish the job started by the government-supported Janjaweed militias."

"If Khartoum is pressured to remove the obstacles, and the U.S., EU and U.N. vastly increase the airlift and delivery capacity for moving humanitarian supplies, hundreds of thousands of lives will be saved," he said. "Rarely in the history of these kinds of humanitarian emergencies is the choice so stark, so simple."

Not safe to go home
On a recent afternoon, the Sudanese government's commissioner general for humanitarian affairs, Sulaf Din Salih, visited Western Darfur and told aid workers that refugees should be encouraged to return home. Aid workers said that similar orders to return were being issued across Darfur.

In Zalingei, a camp about 50 miles southeast of Mornay, elders from the village of Zulu told aid workers that officials said the villagers would be paid to return home, in the hopes that others would follow. When they journeyed back, they said they found 40 corpses of their relatives rotting in the sand, the aid workers said. They returned immediately to the Zalingei camp, where a food shortage is raging.

On a recent visit to the city of El Geneina, the governor told French foreign ministry envoy Renaud Muselier that, "Everything is fine. No problem. Everyone can go home."

A trip with the French official down a dirt track road, however, exposed a war zone where gunmen roamed. Sun-burned men rode on camels, guns saddled on their laps, just steps from Mornay camp. One held a whip. Others herded hundreds of sheep, cattle and camels, smiling and waving as visitors passed, animals that aid workers and the displaced people in the camp said were stolen.

Rapes and attacks continue around the edges of the camp every night, women there said, as they rocked sickly babies with hollow eyes. Each week in Mornay at least five women and girls as young as 12 have been raped when they left the camp, according to a report by Doctors Without Borders. The real figure is thought to be far higher because many women are reluctant to report attacks.

Stalked by disease
With her 8-month-old malnourished twins at her breasts, Khadija Mohammed, 32, did not know how to help her children. Habiba was crying, and Hussein was passed out, unable to drink her milk. He has malaria, fevers at night, diarrhea and vomiting, his medical chart shows. His weight is half of what it should be.

She came to the Mornay camp six months ago from her village in Ber Medina, 3 miles south. Her 6-year-old son and two brothers were killed.

"The nomads said, 'Lie down on the ground.' One pointed his gun toward me. Then he aimed his gun up and started firing," she said.

Her 5-year-old daughter, Arfe, who has a halo of curly braids, was hit in the buttocks but survived. "Now she sometimes gets fever, she sometimes gets headaches. She has trouble walking," her mother said.

Arfe tried to help her mother with the twins and struggled to help lift Habiba. Her mother shook her head no and lifted her daughter's frayed yellow dress to show nine stitches, a scar and a bullet lodged in her right buttock.

"We are hungry here" she said. "But where else can we go? I am afraid."

Others in the camp also said they would not leave. Mohammad, the father of tiny Zohar, said he couldn't leave, even if he wanted to, because his son is too ill to be moved.

"I am very much afraid for my son," he whispered, looking at his child's hand, each tiny finger clinging to his. "I can't love him. He is too sick."

In the noon heat, Sandrine Normand, an exhausted looking doctor with Doctors Without Borders, ran her hand over Zohar's mother's back. She then took the pink cup from her hands and gently, drop by drop tried to make the baby swallow the water.

There will be many funerals here soon, Normand said, crouching down to sit with Zohar's parents.

© 2004 The Washington Post
 
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0630/p09s02-coop.html?s=hns

let's do this thing kosovo style


Commentary > Opinion
from the June 30, 2004 edition

In Sudan's Darfur: action, not just aid

By Joseph Siegle

WASHINGTON – The Sudanese government's genocidal campaign to expunge African tribes from its western provinces ripples with impunity. More than 1 million people have been uprooted from their homes, 30,000 have been killed, women have been systematically raped, children kidnapped to be used as slaves, farms burned, villages looted, and water sources contaminated with decomposing corpses. The brutality punctuates the unmistakable message: Don't come back.
The situation is going to get worse. The approaching rainy season threatens to strand large numbers of the displaced without access to food, medical supplies, and other basic necessities in a barren land soon to be an impassable slop. Aid agencies estimate that 350,000 to 1 million people could die from starvation and disease, conveniently advancing the government's aims while masking culpability - a technique Khartoum has perfected from its decades-long conflict in the south. Besides, time is on the unelected government's side: A prolonged displacement of black Africansprovides the opening for Darfur to be Arabized, as nomadic Arab tribes move into the area.

Obviously, there is cause for international action. But let's be clear about the goal: This crisis is entirely politically generated - and demands a political solution.

Much effort has focused on getting emergency supplies to refugees in the desolate border area with Chad. While meritorious, this is, in effect, treating the symptom. The objective of international engagement on Darfur should be to get the displaced back home - immediately. An early return provides them with a better chance of survival. It gives them access to their salvageable crops, wild foods, jobs, and repairable water and sanitation systems; traditional social and trading networks can also be recreated. Extended exposure to the overcrowded, unhygienic, and insecure conditions in centers for refugees and displaced persons is a recipe for death and despair - not to mention a Herculean challenge for humanitarian organizations. Moreover, once Arab settlers have moved in, resolution becomes far more difficult.

The US and other international actors have called on Sudan to rein in the Arab "Janjaweed" militias responsible and to provide security for the displaced. This is the political equivalent of imploring the fox to guard the henhouse. The Sudanese government has been directly involved in the killings. And it has a long history of sponsoring local militias to destabilize regions of the country and, for that matter, neighboring African countries, with which it is at odds. This "outsourcing" of military operations provides the government a low-cost and plausibly deniable device for advancing its political aims. Counting on the government to ensure the security of a population it wants to exterminate is reminiscent of recent government-sponsored pogroms in Kosovo, Kurdish northern Iraq after the Gulf War, and East Timor.

The upshot: by the predatory and abusive violation of its citizens, the dictatorial government of Omar Hassan al-Bashir, like those of Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, has relinquished its claims of sovereignty in Darfur.

So international efforts should aim at compelling the government to vacate the region, making Darfur a UN protectorate for the moment. A "no-fly zone" should be declared for the region. World leaders have done this in other cases of forced mass displacement - and a less vigorous response in Sudan raises questions of why they turn a blind eye to genocide only in Africa.

The Bashir government has one advantage over the likes of Milosevic and Hussein, however. Khartoum knows how to read the writing on the wall: In the face of overwhelming international condemnation, Khartoum has a history of adapting its egregious behavior. It expelled an increasingly notorious Osama bin Laden in the mid-1990s, made amends with its neighbors when its complicity in the assassination attempt of Hosni Mubarak in 1995 was publicized, and has positioned itself on the side of the US in the war on terror following the Sept. 11 attacks.

The key for the international community, therefore, is to make sure the writing on the wall is clear in the case of Darfur. Secretary of State Colin Powell's planned visit to Darfur Wednesday is a vital opportunity to drive home this point.

As with the other instances of the international community rolling back ethnic cleansing, decisive action is required: Action from the US - and, indispensably, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the European Union, and the African Union (AU). Politically, all of these actors must unambiguously and forcefully condemn the ethnic cleansing in Darfur. Having violated the terms of membership, Sudan should be prevented from voting in the UN. And its leaders must be held personally accountable. International travel by senior government officials and their families should be barred, their personal assets frozen, and the prospect of war-crimes charges against General Bashir and his ruling clique brandished.

The two black African rebel groups against whom the Sudanese government ostensibly launched its campaign must also be compelled to desist completely from any further aggression - which Khartoum has used as a pretext for their mass murder.

Economically, pending resolution of war-crimes charges, claims can be made against Sudan's oil exports for compensation to the victims in Darfur - as well as to reimburse the international community for the humanitarian resources expended to ameliorate this manufactured crisis. Simultaneously, sanctions against Sudan's oil exports can be instituted. Shippers caught transporting Sudanese oil would lose their tankers and cargo. The skyrocketing premiums on insurance and freight charges would surely add pressure on Sudan's primary customers - China, Malaysia, and South Korea - to curtail these purchases even if moral suasion alone would not.

Security, of course, is the major issue in returning displaced populations. While the AU has 120 peace monitors on the ground, this is inadequate to cover a region the size of France. Closer to 20,000 peacekeepers are required - backed by a UN resolution. Most could come from Africa. However, contributions from other regions would also be needed - ideal candidates being India, Britain, Canada, Australia, and the EU. The US, currently absorbed in Iraq and Afghanistan, should still provide logistical and financial support.

"Never again," is the mandate forever etched into our collective consciousness by the Holocaust. Yet, without an established international protocol for responding to genocide, honoring this mandate is never automatic - as we saw in Rwanda. Preventing it this time depends on a quorum of global leaders acting in unison. By so doing, they can prevent this disaster from becoming a catastrophe and forever staining their places in history.

• Joseph Siegle is the Douglas Dillon fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is coauthor of the forthcoming book, 'The Democracy Advantage: How Democracies Promote Prosperity and Peace.'
 
The U.S. has pledged nearly $200 million in aid to the region. The European Union so far is kicking in a little more than $10 million — from all 25 countries in the EU combined.

We Americans sure are heartless, unenlightened, warmongering bastards, aren't we?

It sucks, but our plate is full right now. It's a grim fact. We can't take on another major military operation, and that's what it's going to take here.
 
Originally posted by NightTrain
We Americans sure are heartless, unenlightened, warmongering bastards, aren't we?

It sucks, but our plate is full right now. It's a grim fact. We can't take on another major military operation, and that's what it's going to take here.

The UN is a shambles with corruption and attempted cover-ups. NATO is also floundering via Chirac. Either we will do this or it's not going to get done, Natoair is spitting in the wind with a call for Kosovo style op. Kosovo too was heavily US and we did not belong there. Sudan is different, but I fear you're right Nighttrain, we can't afford the manpower.
 
we belonged in kosovo, to not intervene in kosovo would have been tantamount to letting a fascist dictator get away with murder twice... we didn't even let saddam get that chance, why should we have let slobodan?

they're both where they belong, behind bars.

now we do have the manpower, we've got a french airfield in chad we can use, deploying a navy or air force air wing from italy or turkey to chad for the no-fly zone. we've got troops in djibouti (british, american and french) and the africans, with the right push from pres. bush, would probably deploy the vast majority of the peacekeepers... when i mean do this kosovo style, i mean don't give the sudanese more than one chance to lie and mislead us... we gave the serbs one shot at the peace accord talks in france, they balked and we bombed.. kosovo was very flawed but in the end it was successful to a reasonable degree, mostly because of the belief in the mission that wesley clark had to get it done and stop the serbs.

intervention in darfur would be more similar in style and operation to OPERATION PROVIDE COMFORT, where we saved the kurds from saddam and helped them to be self-sufficent and autonomous.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0630/p01s04-woaf.html?s=hns

Why Sudan has become a Bush priority

Secretary of State Colin Powell arrived Tuesday in Khartoum.

By Abraham McLaughlin | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA – The last time a US secretary of State visited Sudan was 1978, when Jimmy Carter's envoy, Cyrus Vance, stopped to refuel his plane.
But in a sign of Sudan's growing significance, Colin Powell arrived Tuesday for a high-profile two-day visit. The trip is the latest evidence of a major shift in US policy toward the Muslim-led state that once harbored Osama bin Laden.

The visit is primarily aimed at halting the suffering and violence in Sudan's western region of Darfur, home to the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

But analysts say it may also fulfill other White House goals. If the Bush team can bring Sudan back into the family of nations, as it did this week with Libya, it would gain a diplomatic victory for the war on terror. It could also fire up its Christian-conservative base by securing a peace deal in Sudan's other war, a 21-year conflict between the Muslims in the north and the largely Christian south. And it could keep critics from having another issue with which to pillory its foreign policy if it can prevent a repeat of Rwanda's 1994 genocide in Sudan.

"People are starting to use the term genocide" in connection with Darfur, says Jennifer Cooke of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington. "That accusation, especially in an election year, and particularly after this administration has put so much effort" into a north-south peace agreement, "is not something they want to deal with." Furthermore, she says, if they can strengthen ties with Sudan's government, "they could make the case that, 'Our strong confrontation against terror has been productive not only in Iraq, but we've also brought some rogue states back into the fold.' "

Using satellite images

The US motives for engaging in the Darfur crisis may not be entirely altruistic, observers say, but the Bush team's passion about Sudan also helps ensure that serious relief may actually arrive for Darfur's at-risk masses.

In comments just ahead of the trip, Andrew Natsios, head of the US Agency for International Development, who was traveling with Mr. Powell, said up to 1 million Sudanese refugees could die this year due to government-supported ethnic cleansing.

In a measure of the administration's commitment on the issue, Mr. Natsios took the unusual step last week of using satellite images to highlight the destruction of some 300 villages by Arab Janjaweed militias, which are apparently backed by Sudan's government. The Janjaweed have been killing, raping, and robbing mainly black villagers, who are ethnically - and perhaps politically - connected to two rebel groups that began an antigovernment struggle in 2003.

Another US official, war-crimes ambassador Pierre-Richard Prosper, also said recently that the US had found "indicators of genocide" in the region, which is about the size of Texas. The United Nations says that 30,000 people have died so far and 1 million have been displaced.

Prodded by the Bush team, Sudan's government and southern Christian rebels have been inching toward a comprehensive peace deal for about two years. The war broke out in 1983 after the south took up arms against Khartoum. Insurgents are looking for more equitable treatment of southerners and a share of the country's oil wealth. Negotiators are currently meeting in Kenya to work out details on peacekeeping and demobilization of troops. Another round of talks is set for later this year.

Such a deal would end Africa's longest-running civil war. It would also be a trophy the White House could hand to its Christian-conservative base, which became outraged over northern Arabs kidnapping and enslaving southern Christians during the war. And it would enable the US to proceed with lifting sanctions against Sudan and restoring formal diplomatic ties, which the US did on Monday with Libya, another Muslim country with past ties to terrorism.

At one point in January, a north-south deal was so close that Sudanese leaders from both sides began applying for visas to go to the White House for a signing ceremony. But recently, southern rebels have said they won't join with Sudan's government if it's involved in genocide in Darfur.

Human rights and other liberal-leaning groups have begun exerting pressure on the US to deal with growing abuses in Darfur. Amid 10th-anniversary commemorations of the Rwanda genocide in April, the chorus became stronger.

Politically, the Darfur issue is "easy for Bush, since he wins from the left and the right," says Robert Rotberg, an Africa scholar at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.

But finding a real solution may be harder. Despite growing desire in the administration and Congress for action on Darfur, there's little willingness to put US boots on the ground to stop the killing or keep the peace. Republican Senators like Mike DeWine of Ohio and John McCain of Arizona have advocated paying for other nations' troops - perhaps via a UN peacekeeping mission. But there's reluctance in the UN Security Council - reportedly among nations like China, Pakistan, and Algeria - to get too involved in Darfur.

UN Secretary- General Kofi Annan is also in Sudan this week to assess the situation. He's expected to meet up with Powell.

Distrust over Iraq

Also, there appears to be deep Sudanese suspicion about Powell's visit - a fear that's tied to US actions in Iraq. "The fear is that there is a premeditated plan to destabilize Sudan," says Abdul-Rahim Ali Mohamed Ibrahim, head of the Khartoum International Institute of Arabic Language. "We don't see what's happening in Iraq as all that different from what's happening in Sudan."

But the pressure does appear to be having some effect. Sudan's president recently ordered his military to disarm the Janjaweed militias, although it's not clear the order has been followed.

• Material from the wire services was used in this report.


TOM BROWN - STAFF
 
Hey Natoair, you already know I agree with you on Sudan. I just will be very surprised if it happens, given our committments in ME and duties elsewhere. EU is not going to pick up slack, France won't even help in Afghanistan via NATO. Britain like the US is getting stretched thin, both militarily and financially. Those that could help aren't. :(
 
true

my concern is that these bastards will achieve a diplomatic solution with US pressure and get away with their crimes...

i do think its going to get resolved somehow, but sadly not without miiltary force, which is greatly warranted in this situation

did you see the washington post article about how they're raping the women and impregnating them intenonally?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5327445/

they're trying to wipe out the tribes
 

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