"Darfur could spoil the party"

[sway2sway]

Check this from a bigwig business man in Sudan:

“The Americans are not a threat, but if the international community lines up against us, ahh, that is a different issue,” said Osama Daoud Abdellatif, chairman of the DAL Group, a conglomerate that owns the Coke factory, the Ozone Café and a number of other businesses. “Everything has been going so well, but Darfur could spoil the party.”


Darfur is getting lots of media attention these days. In my mind it sounded like Ethiopia and Rwanda squared, in terms of hunger and violence. But then I read this article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/24/world/africa/24sudan.html?ex=1319342400&en=9fa37c1bffd09db2&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

I pictured that this atrocious mess was par for the whole country, but not so. In fact, in some areas they are driving porches & beamers, eating ice cream, wearing shoes and clean clothes, listening to music- partying it up and living the dream (comparatively).

The USA govt imposed a trade embargo in 97 because of the human rights abuses. This didn't stop a lot of eastern countries from continuing to trade. Sudan is selling a wackamole lot of oil and getting rich. In the article it says their gross domestic product rose 8% this year and projected to rise another 12% next year- not much 'power to the people' sharing of wealth and resources though (average per capita income is $640).

So, this is why (i think) they don't want the 20,000 UN peacekeepers to come in and restore order. Shit ain't going to badly for those in power. They don't need the US if they have other markets.
I think it's a shame that so many foreign military interventions have gone so wrong. It makes it hard to want to support another, even when you know people need help. Once upon a time I thought when something was called a peacekeeping mission, that it was different than war. I mean it is different, but the line seems to have shifted many times, or maybe it was covered with sand, or maybe it got incinerated from oil lit ablaze, don't know.

oil is thicker than water
always risin' like the cream.
chasin' stealin' screwin'
corruption reigns supreme.

[tinkerlion]

i wonder what percent of the population is feeling the benefits of this increased cash flow.


Once upon a time I thought when something was called a peacekeeping mission, that it was different than war. I mean it is different, but the line seems to have shifted many times, or maybe it was covered with sand, or maybe it got incinerated from oil lit ablaze, don't know.


it's hard to know what any kind of military action really is today.

[sway2sway]

I couldn't really find much on the breakdown of income levels, but:
-the population is around 40 million
-displaced people that rely on food aid to survive is close to 7 million
- that's still a sucky ratio, in my mind. No matter what's going on in between the ice cream lickers and the foreign aid ration pickers

The paragraph below is taken from this site, not that it's interesting, but that's where it is.
http://www.fao.org/docrep/008/J7072e/J7072e00.htm
Increased export earnings from oil have continued to boost overall economic activity, rising to US$5.8 billion in 2005, nearly double the amount of 2004.
The overall food situation in Sudan, is therefore, expected to be favourable. At the aggregate level, the country is able to cover all of its cereal requirements through the above average cereal production coupled with the country’s enhanced ability to import commercially any domestic shortfalls.
However, the highly skewed income and food distribution system within the country, and the problems of physical and financial access to food due to war, displacement, poor infrastructure, weak marketing system and economic isolation render millions of vulnerable people dependent on food assistance for their survival.

[sway2sway]

pictures are worth a 1000 words huh?
Note: graphically disturbing, just so you know.
The story below the pictures is worth reading, it's the photographer's story, upon landing in Darfur.

http://www.ushmm.org/conscience/alert/darfur/steidle/

[tinkerlion]

my god. when are the atrocities horible enough that action besides a trade embargo will be taken?

[sway2sway]

My impression is something like this:
The UN has proposed peacekeepers go in, but Sudan has refused.
The situation needs to be classed 'genocide' for the UN to take stronger measures.
The USA says it is genocide, based on 1800 interview with refugees.
The african union and the european union don't call it genocide.
The UN was previously criticized for taking so long to call the situation in Rwanda a genocide.
The african government wants to downplay the seriousness so they can continue to make $.
The countries that are trading with Sudan want to do the same.

(This quote is taken from the first link I posted)
“The government knows it doesn’t need America,� said Abda Yahia el-Mahdi, a former finance minister, now in private consulting. “The only people who are being hurt by the sanctions are the Americans, who are missing out on this huge boom.�

It's all about the $ obviously. Americans aren't the ones being hurt. It's all the have-nots living in your own fucking country.

[sway2sway]

if the US does go in there at some point, do you think they'll use their handy dandy Iraq instruction/deconstruction/reconstruction manual in Sudan.
1. take all oil profits during the occupation
2. put them in a fund back in the USA in trust
3. waste all the money and leave the countries infrastructure, amongst other things, worse than when they started

[sway2sway]

So there is a tentative deal to allow peacekeepers into Darfur, to form a mixed alliance with the African Union (which is about 7000 peacekeepers). The UN plan is to add another 20,000 to the mix. tentative.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/africa/11/19/libya.darfur.reut/index.html

Al-Bashir (the prez) went to Libya this week to meet with Moammar Gadhafi for a meeting of representatives from surrounding countries, with respect to the Darfur situation. This was said about it by a spokesman from one the countries attending: "The talks tackled the main issue of the African mini-summit, which is how to widen the scope of the Abuja peace agreement to include all factions ... to achieve peace and prevent any international intervention," Awad said.

It doesn't sound like the deal is going to go through with the UN, my thought anyway.


Now, this next link is to an article in which Gadhafi urges Sudan to reject any US intervention. In it, Gadhafi says, "Western countries and America are not busying themselves out of sympathy for the Sudanese people or for Africa but for oil and for the return of colonialism to the African continent."

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/africa/11/19/libya.darfur.reut/index.html

I certainly can't blame the man for this perspective.

Lately, I've been reading about Haile Selassie 1, my interest was piqued when reading the Bob Marley biography. It has made more apparent to me, how badly Africa needs a dynamic leader, with vison, ability, and the skills to relate to the rest of the world. It seems kind of like when a house has been owned for a while, it receives care and is a source of pride. Then, for some reason, it gets sold, or turned into a rental property. There's the rapid turnover of players, no sense of personal investment in the structure, and no vison of a future. It all just goes to shit. The history of Africa though, is complex, to say the least, so that's just my grasp at the straws, with what I think I know today.

[sway2sway]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/world/africa/17nations.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin

well this sounds good in theory, Sudan is ready to let the UN PEACEKEEPERS IN. I JUST HOPE IT ISN'T THE SAME OLD STORY, THAT GETS ALL BOTCHED UP WITH COVERT PLOTS, MAKING IT EVEN WORSE FOR THE PEOPLE, APPROPRIATING THEIR OIL AND WASTING THE PROCEEDS.

(I SEEM TO HAVE TOAST CRUMBS STUCK IN THE KEYBOARD AND THE SHIFT LOCK IS STUCK DOWN, MAYBE A SPECK O' STRAWBERRY JAM IN THERE, BETTER SHAKE IT UPSIDE DOWN, HUH? OR MAYBE NOT EAT OVER TOP OF IT ANYMORE)

[sway2sway]

pool of water was once 12000 square miles in northern darfur
now it's beneath the desert(though the lake would have dried up a long time ago, it says the water would have percolated into the groundwater system) and they're planning to put in 1000 wells

************************************************** ***********
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19817168/
(from the above link : could ancient lake restore peace to darfur?)

Decades of scarce water and other resources have stoked low-intensity local conflicts that eventually led to a devastating civil war.

The four-year conflict has killed more than 200,000 people, displaced more than 2.5 million others and sparked a regional humanitarian crisis after feeding instability in neighboring Chad and Central African Republic.

"Much of the unrest in Darfur and the misery is due to water shortages," said geologist Farouk El-Baz, director of the Boston University Center for Remote Sensing, which led the effort that discovered the massive lake in northern Darfur using radar data from space.

"There have been two long episodes of drought during the past 20 years, each lasting for about seven years," the scientist said, adding that the drought aggravated tensions between Darfur's ethnic African tribesmen and nomadic Arabs.

Water pumped from the underground reservoir — measuring as large as the state of Massachusetts — could help ease tensions in Darfur, El-Baz said. The wells could enable Darfur's nomadic Arabs to maintain their lifestyle, sedentary communities to flourish and irrigation to kick-start agriculture activities that may feed trade and economic growth, he said during a telephone interview.
************************************************** *********

think link goes a bit more geo/logical/ographical, if you're interested
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18059416/

[sway2sway]

"eyes on darfur"

http://www.eyesondarfur.org/index.html

they have satellite pictures of villages and first hand accounts of what has happened to some of them. They have a section with info on high risk villages that they are trying to keep tabs on. an action section

it makes me think, phew, at least someone is staying on top of this shit, in some way.
what of these people, what of there lives? is anyone even recording this for the history books? just more millions of dead black people on the other side of the world.

'it's been going on so long, it just probably is supposed to be that way'- feels like that is the under current to indifference.

[Miss Shark]

I find it hard to believe that simply finding a water source will help much. I wonder how long they expect the drilling to take i didn't notice a time line.

[sway2sway]

"yeah well, it could be a lot of water, it was a mega-lake, afterall," she says with strained hopefullness.

And who is gonna make this a priority? I'm not sure...cause you can bet they weren't looking for water, even though they all be hotter, they really need an clean well, but still they look for oil to sell, it ain't about the boys&girls, it's about the sticky black pearl.

[lietuvaite]

i read somewhere that the main cast members of oceans 13 (clooney, pitt, etc.) have donated a few million of their own money for Darfur. i'm glad some celebrities who make obscene amounts of money not only promote causes, but also support the causes financially

[sway2sway]

Even as it receives a billion pounds of free food from international donors, Sudan is growing and selling vast quantities of its own crops to other countries, capitalizing on high global food prices at a time when millions of people in its war-riddled region of Darfur barely have enough to eat.

Here in the bone-dry desert, where desiccated donkey carcasses line the road, huge green fields suddenly materialize. Beans. Wheat. Sorghum. Melons. Peanuts. Pumpkins. Eggplant. It is all grown here, part of an ambitious government plan for Sudanese self-sufficiency, creating giant mechanized farms that rise out of the sand like mirages.

But how much of this bonanza is getting back to the hungry Sudanese, like the 2.5 million driven into camps in Darfur? And why is a country that exports so many of its own crops receiving more free food than anywhere else in the world, especially when the Sudanese government is blamed for creating the crisis in the first place?

African countries that rely on donated food usually cannot produce enough on their own. Somalia, Ethiopia, Niger and Zimbabwe are all recent examples of how war, natural disasters or gross mismanagement can cut deep into food production, pushing millions of people to the brink of starvation.

But here in Sudan, there seem to be plenty of calories to go around. The country is already growing wheat for Saudi Arabia, sorghum for camels in the United Arab Emirates and vine-ripened tomatoes for the Jordanian Army. Now the government is plowing $5 billion into new agribusiness projects, many of them to produce food for export.

...

The dark side of all this development is displacement. The conflict in Darfur, in western Sudan, is largely about grazing rights and watering holes — and the government’s brutal counterinsurgency policies in response to an armed rebellion. So far, the most ambitious agricultural projects have avoided the area altogether, and instead are concentrated in the central and northern parts of the country.

Even so, development in Sudan often means uprooting other rural subsistence farmers for large-scale commercial projects, said Alex de Waal, a Sudan scholar at the Social Science Research Council in New York.

“Smallholder food production goes down, commercial food production goes up, and food relief serves as a subsidy to this transformation, keeping the displaced alive,” he said.

The Sudanese government is widely blamed for running many of the displaced people in Darfur off their farms, making them reliant on handouts. Still, the government has been slow to feed them.



http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/world/africa/10sudan.html?ex=1376107200&en=eaec57cfe1f5f4ca&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

That word, 'displaced', really makes me cringe.
It didn't back in science class, when I learned how to measure the volume of an object by placing it in a calibrated tube and measuring the amount of water displaced.
But in the context of people running from violence or disaster- it makes me feel like if I just shrug it off as the language of the times, it makes me feel like I'm complicit-
anyway, the darfur government is so corrupt. I was wondering are they more corrupt than other african countries, I came to the conclusion, based upon no evidence at all, that likely their corruptness only seems more- or really is more, as a function of having more money than other african countries. more $ allows them to spread it around more.

same as the oil thing, they're selling it off, with only a sliver of the people seeing any improvement to their lives. Like the very first article in this thread mentioned, all of sudan is not impoverished, there are some parts which are living it up, driving cars, eating ice cream on their air conditioned asses. obviously ain't as simple as all that, but I just feel for what I imagine it is to be there, livin' it.

[sway2sway]

so I'm stuck on the darfur thing again. Once I read a new article on it, I usually immerse myself in it for a few days, a week. I don't know what that does, but...I do it. This morning, I'll sum it up to an alternative form of church.

so today's service comprises of :

-sharing what brought a tear to my eye this morning.
Childrens drawings.
How can you not mourn for their loss when you see this? And I don't just mean for their families or security or freedom; but of their childhood- framework, context, pretext to life. It's not right. Think of your own child, or a lil' sibling, or a niece, nephew, a friend's kid.
Can you imagine if these images were in their heads?

The Art of War
Children's drawings illustrate Darfur atrocities.
By Dr. Annie Sparrow and Olivier Bercault

In February 2005, we traveled to camps along the Chad-Sudan border that are home to more than 200,000 refugees from the genocidal conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan. During interviews with refugees, we gave paper and crayons to children, so they could draw whatever they wished while we talked with their parents and caretakers.

The first child, a 12-year-old shepherd, had never held a crayon or pencil before, so he gave the paper to his brothers, who drew, without any instruction, pictures of mounted Janjaweed shooting civilians, Antonov planes dropping bombs on civilians and their homes, and a tank firing on fleeing villagers.

Over the following weeks, these violent scenes were repeated in hundreds of drawings we collected from children aged 8 to 17 who had fled from many areas across Darfur. Children drew Janjaweed assaults on villages and Sudanese forces attacking from Antonov planes, MiG planes, military helicopters, and tanks. They also pictured the attacks as they had seen them in action: huts and villages burning; the shooting of men, women, and children; and the rape of women and girls.

The children's drawings construct a compelling case against the government of Sudan as the architects of the Darfur crisis and explicitly show violations of the laws of war. To hear and read the testimony of victims of atrocities is very powerful; it is even more horrifying to see such mayhem through the eyes of children, uncoached and often uneducated but clearly exposed to brutal ethnic cleansing.


you can see the pictures here, click on each to read the child's explanation
http://www.hrw.org/photos/2005/darfur/drawings/index.htm

Now you can have intermission, drink wine & eat wafers, swill beer & eat yesterdays potato chips, whatever you like.

We reconvene to this:

a photographers journal of the peacekeepers in darfur-
what I am most thankful for in seeing these images is that I now have a point of reference to what a burned down village looks like and what it looks like when one person is left amidst it. Imagine if you could feel the heat and smell the burnt earth and life.

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/world/20080325_DARFUR_FEATURE/index.html

And to conclude, instead of passing around a collection plate, perhaps we could pass on what we might have learned or been affected by- pass some information, some concern, some something.

hallelujah!

[Miss Shark]

http://i151.photobucket.com/albums/s127/RebeccaLB/11.jpg

Ala‘, Age 13
Like many other children, Ala‘ witnessed conflict between rebel groups and the Janjaweed. This drawing depicts a rebel soldier first shot in the arm, then executed by gunshots to the groin. Ali, a teacher in a refugee camp, said the rebels are killed this way to emasculate them. “They [the Janjaweed] know what they are doing,” he said. “They are doing it with purpose.”

Maybe you should be passing around something that settles the stomach cause I feeling awfully queasy right now.

[sway2sway]

here's a couple others, I found quite unsettling. They were from a different link than the one I posted above.

http://inlinethumb35.webshots.com/42338/2533224290103858289S600x600Q85.jpg (http://good-times.webshots.com/photo/2533224290103858289TTjazd)


Rape and sexual violence against women and girls have been a prominent feature of the ethnic cleansing campaign carried out by government forces and militias.

Human Rights Watch: What's happening here?
13-year-old artist: These men in green are taking the women and the girls.
Human Rights Watch: What are they doing?
Boy: They are forcing them to be wife. The houses are on fire.
Human Rights Watch: What's happening here?
Boy: This is an Antonov. This is a helicopter. These here, at the bottom of the page, these are dead people



http://inlinethumb34.webshots.com/33633/2311728030103858289S600x600Q85.jpg (http://good-times.webshots.com/photo/2311728030103858289GGJIni)


Some of the drawings are less representational, but once explained, this piece by a 9-year-old girl is devestating.

"We were running from the burning houses. Janjaweed and soldiers with guns and planes and bombs came, all together, quickly. They were shooting. … My aunt was shot. I saw them taking women and girls away. All of us—my family—we were screaming and running from the Janjaweed … holding each other by the arms to keep together. Here in camp we are safe, but my father … was lost."

[sway2sway]

http://www.motherjones.com/media/2009/03/cops-darfur

it's amusing, really, cartoons always make mass murder more appealing, cute even