African Tragedy & Iraq - Hypocrites Abound

[mikescott]

I never pretend to be a do-gooder but let's see the do-gooders write and do something about this one, rather than all the anti-Western rubbish that we get from the Belgarion, Wonker with the little willy, Aspex, Marcer etc.....

Come on, boys - your chance to shine.

A land left for deadJuly 4, 2004

Pity the thousands of dead and dying in Africa. They just cannot seem to get our attention, writes Gideon Haigh.

In western Sudan, more than a million people have been uprooted. Hundreds of thousands will die of disease and starvation over the next six months, adding to the tens of thousands already murdered by their government and its proxies.

Unfortunately for them, they have not featured in a film by Michael Moore, a stirring address by Tariq Ali, an acerbic tract by John Pilger, or a bloated mea non culpa by Bill Clinton; no one left the Big Brother house demanding sanctions against the al-Bashir regime; Australian cricketers were not planning a tour there; Arab Janjaweed militias are not protesting a McDonald's drive-through policy that discriminates against camels.

In short, Darfur's humanitarian crisis meets none of the criteria that might engage citizens considering themselves socially concerned. Lest this be thought gratuitous liberal bashing, it tweaks few conservative consciences either - if such there be.

This isn't surprising. We are as silent where Africa is concerned as we are noisily sophistic about the Middle East. Last November, the United Nations solicited aid for a list of 21 pressing international crises. There were four more or less familiar names: Chechnya, Gaza, North Korea, Tajikistan. The other 17 were African. Western intervention in Iraq may go awry; Western non-intervention in Africa has.

Darfur is a good aperture through which to study Africa's plight. Observe the images from the refugee camps. These aren't the swollen bellies and empty eyes of the malnourished - though they may soon be so.

They are, instead, among the fifth of Africa's population embroiled in wars, families who until recently had cultivated land around the 300 villages razed by the Janjaweed, abetted by Sudan's military.

They are mostly women. Many have been raped, and branded to show their shame. There are children, probably destined to die, their fathers already dead. Their crime: that they might succour two rebel outfits, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), composed of their ethnic kin.

Note, too, the landscape's parched desolation. Human life has a tenuous grip in the Horn of Africa; it has here been violently loosened. Two harvests have already been missed. Recent months, which would normally have been devoted to sowing and cultivation, have instead been spent in fear and flight. Imminent rains, usually welcome, will massively complicate aid provision, swamping roads and low-lying shelters.

There is already a flood: of refugees, 200,000 of whom have washed across Sudan's porous 600-kilometre border with Chad, not only distancing many from help but reintroducing diseases to areas in which they had been expensively eradicated. US Secretary of State Colin Powell and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan last week remonstrated with Khartoum's rulers, but the disaster has essentially transpired. Only its scale is in doubt. The development agency USAID projects a death toll of 300,000 at best, a million at worst.

This dispute's classically African history is also instructive. Until recently, Darfur had been a muffled noise in the wings of a deafening north-south war raging more or less continuously since independence in 1956: this battle, pitting Khartoum against the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), has cost 2 million lives.

Skirmishes in Darfur between nomadic Arab herders and sedentary African farmers competing for water and pasture go back generations, especially since the Sahara began advancing. But it wasn't a war zone: there were traditions of trade, intermarriage, and rough and ready coexistenc

[craic]

I posted this on the Iraq War thread weeks ago. Not a whimper from anyone.

Beating the US around the ears will solve nothing. Africans, and particularly Arab Africans are past masters at slaughter, slavery and genocide. Muslims are up ther with the best of them when it comes to the big grab - of land property or anything else.

Will We Say 'Never Again' Yet Again?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

LONG THE CHAD-SUDAN BORDER — For decades, whenever the topic of genocide has come up, the refrain has been, "Never again."

Yet right now, the government of Sudan is engaging in genocide against three large African tribes in its Darfur region here. Some 1,000 people are being killed a week, tribeswomen are being systematically raped, 700,000 people have been driven from their homes, and Sudan's Army is even bombing the survivors.

And the world yawns.

So what do we tell refugees like Muhammad Yakob Hussein, who lives in the open desert here because his home was burned and his family members killed in Sudan? He now risks being shot whenever he goes to a well to fetch water. Do we advise such refugees that "never again" meant nothing more than that a Führer named Hitler will never again construct death camps in Germany?

Interviews with refugees like Mr. Hussein — as well as with aid workers and U.N. officials — leave no doubt that attacks in Darfur are not simply random atrocities. Rather, as a senior U.N. official, Mukesh Kapila, put it, "It is an organized attempt to do away with a group of people."

"All I have left is this jalabiya," or cloak, said Mr. Hussein, who claimed to be 70 but looked younger (ages here tend to be vague aspirations, and they usually emerge in multiples of 10). Mr. Hussein said he'd fled three days earlier after an attack in which his three brothers were killed and all his livestock stolen: "Everything is lost. They burned everything."

Another man, Khamis Muhammad Issa, a strapping 21-year-old, was left with something more than his clothes — a bullet in the back. He showed me the bulge of the bullet under the skin. The bullet wiggled under my touch.

"They came in the night and burned my village," he said. "I was running away and they fired. I fell, and they thought I was dead."

In my last column, I called these actions "ethnic cleansing." But let's be blunt: Sudan's behavior also easily meets the definition of genocide in Article 2 of the 1948 convention against genocide. That convention not only authorizes but also obligates the nations ratifying it — including the U.S. — to stand up to genocide.

The killings are being orchestrated by the Arab-dominated Sudanese government, partly through the Janjaweed militia, made up of Arab raiders armed by the government. The victims are non-Arabs: blacks in the Zaghawa, Massaliet and Fur tribes. "The Arabs want to get rid of anyone with black skin," Youssef Yakob Abdullah said. In the area of Darfur that he fled, "there are no blacks left," he said.

In Darfur, the fighting is not over religion, for the victims as well as the killers are Muslims. It is more ethnic and racial, reflecting some of the ancient tension between herdsmen (the Arabs in Darfur) and farmers (the black Africans, although they herd as well). The Arabs and non-Arabs compete for water and forage, made scarce by environmental degradation and the spread of the desert.

In her superb book on the history of genocide, "A Problem from Hell," Samantha Power focuses on the astonishing fact that U.S. leaders always denounce massacres in the abstract or after they are over — but, until Kosovo, never intervened in the 20th century to stop genocide and "rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred." The U.S. excuses now are the same ones we used when Armenians were killed in 1915 and Bosnians and Rwandans died in the 1990's: the bloodshed is in a remote area; we have other priorities; standing up for the victims may compromise other foreign policy interests.

I'm not arguing that we should invade Sudan. But one of the lessons of history is that very modest efforts

[Zacca]

Thankyou Minder a change from the usual selfish right wing ideology which trails across these pages.
If anyone wants to dip in their pockets World Vision is one avenue on 0800 90 10 10, and if you want your funds used in the Sudan stipulate it when you speak to the operater.

[Capitalist]

Nice article Craic. A cause worth supporting to be sure.

Freedom from oppression, freedom to live and pursue happiness is not a left/right, libertarian/statist or God knows what else issue Zacca.

[Scooter]

Charity begins at home, what about the poor in good old NZ...

[Zacca]

I agree with you Capitalist but unfortunatly solutions often are. Number of refugees in Australia one in over 1500, in Iran one in 90, in England one in over 500 apparently. Whose taking the burden? Is the free market working? Just a discussion point!

[stormrose]

Here's what we do:

Let the place go to hell all on its lonesome - for now.

- The aid $$ that have been thrown at those countries have not worked. Aid dependancy is on the increase.
- Our militaries (and tax $$ to support them) are otherwise engaged. We put the success of those operations at risk if we spread too thin
- We've got big problems at home. Our own are suffering too.

A stupid woodsman cuts down trees by taking a single hack at each tree in turn. The first tree has recovered by the time the woodsman gets back to it. The west has only so many axes and that jungle is mightily big.

So concentrate effort at the edge of the jungle. First the middle east and asia, then africa.

It's your $$ so do whatever you want. I'm putting my money in charities closer to home.

[Placebo]

Funnily enough Stormrose, the NZ government would agree with you. That's why our biggest military commitments, and foreign aid, is in the Pacific (and Pacific rim) region. Military in Solomons/Timor. Aid to Pacific nations.

And how do they repay us? They send their soccer teams to beat ours. Ungrateful swine![B)]

[miner]

All they need to do is find a heap of oil and George and Co would go in and solve all there problems,easy-ish?[:0][}:)].

[mikescott]

Amazing - not a wimper or a hint of a comment from those do-gooder anti-anything Western leftists loonies like Belgarion=Marcer, Aspex and Wonker with the little willy. And they had so much to say about war and Iraq.

Darfur bloodshed tests African union's peace plans

05.07.2004


ADDIS ABABA - War and looming famine in Sudan's Darfur region have given fresh urgency to an African summit this week that seeks to promote home-grown efforts to end the continent's many conflicts.

The two-year-old African Union, which vowed at its founding to abandon member nations' long aversion to intervening in each others' wars, finds itself on the spot at its annual summit as a result of violence involving attacks on black African civilians in Darfur.

"We cannot close our eyes to catastrophes," Ethiopian Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin told Reuters of Darfur, which the UN calls the world's worst humanitarian crisis. "Without peace Africa cannot pursue health, education and investment."

The AU wants heads of state of its 53 members at the July 6-8 gathering to agree innovative ways of keeping the peace on the continent -- but at the same time to kick the habit of taking far-reaching decisions without paying for their implementation, a failing of the AU's ineffectual predecessor, the Organisation of Africa Unity.

There is doubt about whether member governments struggling to pull themselves out of poverty can pay the steep bills peace efforts could entail -- not only in Darfur, but also potentially in other troubled countries such as Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast, Central African Republic and Somalia.

"We have to dig deep in our pockets, according to capacity," Leonardo Simao, Foreign Minister of Mozambique, one of the world's poorest countries, told Reuters.

"The will is there, but not necessarily the ability."

War is a preoccupation of the cash-strapped AU because its ambitious plans for the continent's economic rebirth are dependent on stabilising a continent that has seen 186 coups d'etat and 26 major wars in the past half century.

Tongue in cheek, veteran AU-watcher Tajudeen Abdul Raheem asked how it is that African leaders who do not seem to have a problem finding the money to go to war ask foreign aid agencies to help feed and educate their people.

"I can neither believe nor accept a situation where our governments can fight unjust wars without going to donors or the IMF/World Bank, but cannot find the resources when it comes to building a peaceful and united Africa," the Uganda-based Nigerian said.

Fully implemented, the AU's proposed programmes, including an elaborate network of peace-making institutions, could eventually cost up to US$600 million ($948.01 million) a year, officials say, way above its current annual spending of about US$40 million.

The UN estimates Africa would have to double its average annual growth rate to seven per cent to halve extreme poverty on the continent by the year 2015, one of the UN Millennium Development Goals.

Darfur will loom large in an address UN Secretary General Kofi Annan will make at the meeting after visiting Sudan and neighbouring Chad last week to assess the situation.

Sudan pledged on Saturday to disarm Arab militias, known as Janjaweed, who have driven more than one million Africans from their homes in west Sudan's Darfur region and to accept human rights monitors in the area.

The United Nations says thousands could die of disease and hunger during the coming rainy season unless a massive aid operation is set up.

Long conflict between nomadic Arab tribes and African farmers over scarce resources in Darfur intensified when a revolt broke out last year. Rebels accuse Khartoum of arming the Arab Janjaweed, a charge the government denies.

The AU is deploying unarmed observers and says that if all parties agree it is necessary, it will send armed peacekeepers to protect the monitors.

[spector]

quote:Originally posted by minder



...Tongue in cheek, veteran AU-watcher Tajudeen Abdul Raheem asked how it is that African leaders who do not seem to have a problem finding the money to go to war ask foreign aid agencies to help feed and educate their people....




The universally overlooked paradox of 'struggling' African states. Plenty of guns to go around just never enough food. Poor bastards... and we all sit around complaining because The Warehouse isn't performing...

[spector]

quote:Originally posted by Zacca

If anyone wants to dip in their pockets World Vision is one avenue on 0800 90 10 10, and if you want your funds used in the Sudan stipulate it when you speak to the operater.


Nice one Zacca, I bit of World Vision ramping is OK with me, i'm sure we can all spare $50 for a good cause... coff up chaps! (that "thank you very much..." song from telethon plays loudly in the background... Judy Bailey wanders around with a bucket on her head etc...)

[mikescott]

Don't you all find it fascinating that the do-gooders who attempt to preach to us about war etc are conspiciously absent on this thread about the tragedy unfolding in Africa?

No comments from them about :

- Women being herded into camps for the pleasure of the corrupt rulers, warlords and their thugs.

- Children deprived of food and family.

- Men killed and families left destitute because they belong to the wrong tribe.


There's a word for such people and the word is - hypocrite.

[marcer]

Been away for a week on holiday.

Yep, read your post and a few others a while ago Craic.

Also agree that Sudan is a nasty situation that needs a UN agreed approach.

The way I read it is the dominantly Arab govt wants to ensure it controls the oil and gas resources of the country (along with a good ol' bit of racial and religious zealotry).

Here are a couple of links if anyone else is further interested.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=5148

http://www.zmag.org/Sustainers/Content/2004-04/24majavu.cfm

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=2&ItemID=5413

It's not surprising that the west turns away from problems in Africa with such wonderful pronouncements as (post WW2) "Europe may get a psychological lift out of exploiting Africa for it's reconstrucation" George Keenan, Head of State Dept planning in the late 1940's.

Regards all,
Marcer

[belgarion]

marcer, Im interested. whats your employ? your background? nothing sinister. just want know how you've 'kept up' in the last 30 years. Journo? Investor? Traveler? Importer? Exporter? ;)

[Lawso]

One school of thought has it that if the US Govt stopped pandering to the farm lobby with massive subsidies on wheat, corn etc, producing vast surpluses that are then dumped on world markets, the countries of Central Africa would be able to earn enough from exports of such products to raise living standards and spend more on health and education. Always assuming the leadership had the will to do so, of course.

But I wouldn't know how much truth there is in this - just what I've read.

[mikescott]

Talking to yourself, Belgarion = Marcer? But at least you and Aspex answered the thread in your true selves as hypocrites.

Now, where's the UN? Where's the rest of the world?

All waiting again for the US to take a lead - hypocrites galore in this world led by those who oppose the liberation of Iraq from Saddam, his sons and their thugs.

[ananda77]

Minder:

Don't you all find it fascinating that the do-gooders who attempt to preach to us about war etc are conspiciously absent on this thread about the tragedy unfolding in Africa?

No comments from them about :

- Women being herded into camps for the pleasure of the corrupt rulers, warlords and their thugs.

- Children deprived of food and family.

- Men killed and families left destitute because they belong to the wrong tribe.

There's a word for such people and the word is - hypocrite

Dear Minder!

Loving Kindness to you.

Thank you very much for reminding me that I am a hypocrite = Charalatan, Fraudster[/b. I do not really understand how you have arrived at this conclusion,since you [b]do not know anyone personally on this thread. Ido nottake offence, but I am rather concerned about your own welfare.

It takes a lot of egocentredness to point fingers at anyone and lecture them about moral responsibilities. In my world, the only time one feels to point fingers is the time, when one points fingers at oneself.

People experience life through a self-centred filter and often self-righteous pride prevents us from seeing one's own errors.

The world is very complex and it is impossible to engage oneself in all actions everywhere at any one time. You have chosen to engage yourself for the plight of those people in Africa, but you can not expect that everyone will take up your course.

Remember,you do not know how many people on this thread are engaged in one or the other form of charity for others and it could very well be that they are doing a lot more then just posting newspaper articles. We are all intelligent enough to read what we want to read and can make our own choices.

Self-righteous pride is always follwed by a fall, since it corrodes our relations with one another, as in conflicts between partners, posters on a public forum, labor relations, or nations at war.

I think you need to apologise, not to satisfy me, but just as a reminder for you to think more about respectful human conduct.

[mikescott]

Apologise? What for?

For highlighting the extreme hypocrisy shown in this forum by some members like Belgarion=Marcer and Wonker with the little willy?

Notice how righteous they are about the situation in Iraq and the war which has liberated the Iraqis from Saddam, his sons and their thugs - but not a whisper from them on the war in Sudan?

You must live in a differrent planet not to notice hypocrisy at play ....

[stormrose]

[Self-righteous pride is always follwed by a fall,]
This is a negative (and untrue) statement that is limiting your progress. Eliminate it.

[since it corrodes our relations with one another]
Changing one's own situation means that others not changing in the same directions eventually get left behind.

Make the choice - is it worth keeping relationships with those not going where you are? What will you have in common with them?

Misery loves company.

[marcer]

quote:Originally posted by belgarion

marcer, Im interested. whats your employ? your background? nothing sinister. just want know how you've 'kept up' in the last 30 years. Journo? Investor? Traveler? Importer? Exporter? ;)


Belgarion:
I worked in tourism in the US on and off for 5 years. In that time I got to chat with 5-6 (mostly) US clients for 1 or 2 days, 6 days a week. This helped me appreciate what a diverse range of folks there are over there, as well as glimpse how competitive their society is, which I believe is great for business, but not so good for a cooperative, harmonious communities.

Reading books and articles by Noam Chomsky has interested me too. Mainly because all of his references are from the mainstream press, or more dammingly, US govt documents both publicly available ones and declassified.

A lot of mainstream critics write him off as anti-American/commie etc. I have read a few articles attempting to discredit his work, but they always seem to stick to personal attacks. I have yet to read any critic that presents referenced evidence to refute what Chomsky states.
Robert Fisk and a guy Edwards at MediaLens are always worth a read too.

I work part time in NZ and enjoy short to medium term (1-6 months) trading as a way to supplement my income.

Hope that answers your query.

Regards Marcer.