WaPo Editorial: Darfur Genocide, World Slow

[Annie]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3024-2004Oct2.html

As Darfur Waits



Sunday, October 3, 2004; Page B06


LIKE A RESCUE squad that hears of an accident but then stops by a 7-Eleven for coffee, the world is ambling toward Darfur, the western Sudanese province where genocide is underway. It's been months since the need for an African Union force to protect Darfur's civilians became obvious, and still there are only 300 or so African Union troops there. With each week, more women are raped and more villages attacked. On Thursday relief officials in one camp for displaced people reported 5,000 recent arrivals, the product of attacks on 10 villages by the government-backed Janjaweed militia. And still a robust contingent of foreign troops is awaited.

Why the delay? Partly because of views such as those of Pakistan's U.N. ambassador, Munir Akram. "It has to be done in a measured way," the envoy said recently of the world's response to genocide. "We shouldn't go overboard." But the delay is also made possible by the artful blurring of responsibility for bringing it about. Nobody is held accountable.

Sudan's government, which has spent weeks excluding humanitarian workers from Darfur and promising to repel foreign peacekeepers with force, now says it is delighted to welcome an African Union force into its territory. In a briefing to the U.N. Security Council on Thursday, Sudan's foreign minister insisted that his government wanted foreign troops as soon as possible, and that it would be happy to accept more than the 3,500 that the African Union is offering. What Sudan's government does not advertise is the restrictive mandate under which these troops would be deployed. The foreigners should, in Sudan's view, be restricted to monitoring a cease-fire. They should not presume to protect civilians but should report incidents to Sudan's government -- which has proved itself utterly uninterested in protecting its own civilians.

Then there is the African Union itself. Its leaders have been offering loudly to send troops to Darfur. But now that they are faced with a government that welcomes them, they say it will take another two or three weeks to win approval from all member governments for the deployment. In another measure of the African Union's urgent commitment to combating genocide, its officials recently delayed a meeting on Darfur on the ground that they had not received the per diem they thought due them.

Finally there is the role of the United States and its allies. The Bush administration is comfortable pushing resolutions through the Security Council and then calling upon the African Union to deploy: "My hope is that the African Union moves rapidly to help save lives," Mr. Bush declared in the debate on Thursday. But if he is serious about that hope, he needs to try harder to make the deployment happen. The United States needs to ensure that the mandate under which peacekeepers deploy is not restrictive. It must encourage the African Union to make haste. And it must get ready for the time when the African Union comes up with a firm deployment proposal. The African troops will need vehicles, helicopters and prefabricated housing. All this needs to be prepared now, in concert with other members of NATO. Otherwise the interminable delays in getting help to Darfur will stretch out even longer.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

 

[NATO AIR]

and women continue to be raped, and the children continue to die.. and parents must still make agonizing choices over which child to feed when there's only enough nourishment for one.

thank you world for being so expedient. :fu2:

 

[Annie]

and women continue to be raped, and the children continue to die.. and parents must still make agonizing choices over which child to feed when there's only enough nourishment for one.

thank you world for being so expedient. :fu2:

Hey, but it IS multi-lateral. (That is good, in and of itself, right?) I'm sure the mother understands...

 

[NATO AIR]

I'm sure the mother understands...

 

[Annie]

US 'hyping' Darfur genocide fears

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1318628,00.html

Peter Beaumont
Sunday October 3, 2004
The Observer

American warnings that Darfur is heading for an apocalyptic humanitarian catastrophe have been widely exaggerated by administration officials, it is alleged by international aid workers in Sudan. Washington's desire for a regime change in Khartoum has biased their reports, it is claimed.
The government's aid agency, USAID, says that between 350,000 and a million people could die in Darfur by the end of the year. Other officials, including Secretary of State Colin Powell, have accused the Sudanese government of presiding over a 'genocide' that could rival those in Bosnia and Rwanda.

But the account has been comprehensively challenged by eyewitness reports from aid workers and by a new food survey of the region. The nutritional survey of Sudan's Darfur region, by the UN World Food Programme, says that although there are still high levels of malnutrition among under-fives in some areas, the crisis is being brought under control.

'It's not disastrous,' said one of those involved in the WFP survey, 'although it certainly was a disaster earlier this year, and if humanitarian assistance declines, this will have very serious negative consequences.'

The UN report appears to confirm food surveys conducted by other agencies in Darfur which also stand in stark contrast to the dire US descriptions of the food crisis.

The most dramatic came from Andrew Natsios, head of USAID, who told UN officials: 'We estimate right now, if we get relief in we'll lose a third of a million people and, if we don't, the death rates could be dramatically higher, approaching a million people.'

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A month later, a second senior official, Roger Winter, USAID's assistant administrator, briefed foreign journalists in Washington that an estimated 30,000 people had been killed during the on-going crisis in Darfur, with another 50,000 deaths from malnutrition and disease, largely among the huge populations fleeing the violence. He described the emergency as 'humanitarian disaster of the first magnitude'.

By 9 September Powell was in front of the Congressional Foreign Relations Committee accusing Sudan of 'genocide', a charge rejected by officials of both the European and African Unions and also privately by British officials.

'I've been to a number of camps during my time here,' said one aid worker, 'and if you want to find death, you have to go looking for it. It's easy to find very sick and under-nourished children at the therapeutic feeding centres, but that's the same wherever you go in Africa.'

Another aid worker told The Observer : 'It suited various governments to talk it all up, but they don't seem to have thought about the consequences. I have no idea what Colin Powell's game is, but to call it genocide and then effectively say, "Oh, shucks, but we are not going to do anything about that genocide" undermines the very word "genocide".'

While none of the aid workers and officials interviewed by The Observer denied there was a crisis in Darfur - or that killings, rape and a large-scale displacement of population had taken place - many were puzzled that it had become the focus of such hyperbolic warnings when there were crises of similar magnitude in both northern Uganda and eastern Congo.

Concern about USAID's role as an honest broker in Darfur have been mounting for months, with diplomats as well as aid workers puzzled over its pronouncements and one European diplomat accusing it of 'plucking figures from the air'.

Under the Bush administration, the work of USAID has become increasingly politicised. But over Sudan, in particular, two of its most senior officials have long held strong personal views. Both Natsios, a former vice-president of the Christian charity World Vision, and Winter have long been hostile to the Sudanese government.

 

[Annie]

While the Guardian may not get it, some do: http://blog.rajanr.com/?itemid=439

 

[NATO AIR]

US 'hyping' Darfur genocide fears

my respect for the left continues to fade away, as do the areas i am in agreement with them in... what a shadow of themselves they've become.

i suppose liberals like nick kristof and danny glover, who have been passionately and eloquently speaking out on behalf of the horror in sudan are traitors to the liberal cause now right?

 

[theim]

Hey now, we wouldn't want to rush to anything right? These things take time. We need the UN's Special Envoy on Genocide (Yes, I can't believe the actually have a position called that) to work it out from his office in Geneva.

Know what's funny? I bet if the US sent in troops to protect those people all the lefty nutjobs would protest like no tomorrow. But none of them seem to care about the genocide to that degree.

 

[NATO AIR]

Hey now, we wouldn't want to rush to anything right? These things take time. We need the UN's Special Envoy on Genocide (Yes, I can't believe the actually have a position called that) to work it out from his office in Geneva.

Know what's funny? I bet if the US sent in troops to protect those people all the lefty nutjobs would protest like no tomorrow. But none of them seem to care about the genocide to that degree.

oh if we sent the troops, we'd be imperalists and oil greedy bullies...