--- Lileks is en fuego.
How will he bring our allies back to us? By waving the magic
ally-reassembling wand? No: by doing what they want us to do, not by
doing the things they don’t. It’s almost as if Kerry believes that
the point of a war is to have allies first and victory second. But I
think I know what he’s doing. It’s an appeal to those who always
say – always - that we “squandered†the goodwill of the world
after 9/11. But in certain quarters that “goodwill†was equal parts
pity, schadenfreude and the belief that we would now realize the errors
of our ways. And note how no one ever talks about how the Palestinian
Authority squandered the goodwill it got from the Oslo Accords. The
Squander, it would seem, is a bird unique to our nation, and we alone
are responsible for its care and feeding.
I want to write like Lileks when I grow up.
--- Nicholas Kristof is worried about genocide in Sudan, and the west's overall inability to stop genocide anywhere in Africa when it happens.
One lesson of the last dozen years is that instead of being purely
reactive, helpfully bulldozing mass graves after massacres, African and
Western leaders should try much harder to stop civil wars as they
start. The world is now facing a critical test of that principle in the
Darfur region of Sudan, where Arab militias are killing and driving out
darker-skinned African tribespeople. While the world now marks the 10th
anniversary of the Rwandan genocide and solemnly asserts that this must
never happen again, it is.
Some 1,000 people are dying each week in Sudan, and 110,000 refugees,
like Mr. Yodi, have poured into Chad. Worse off are the 600,000
refugees within Sudan, who face hunger and disease after being driven
away from their villages by the Arab militias.
Now, I can't really disagree with that statement, because it's the
humane thing to do, but since he's the one who brought up Sudan as his
prima facie evidence for more African intervention on the part of the
International Community, I'm going to have to go after him. Kristof
conveniently ignores what's been going on in Sudan for twenty
years---that the northern---Muslim---government has been trying to kill
off all the southerners. There's a civil war already
going on in Sudan. Not like you'd know about it because media coverage
is decidedly poor when it comes covering that continent: as far as the
media is concerned, well, Africa still should be titled "The Dark
Continent," because there sure as hell aren't any TV lights
illuminating the place. Easily half the continent's countries are
engaged in some sort of armed conflict right now. But does CNN cover
it? Nope. Martha Steward and Michael Jackson are much more important. I
digress. They're still fighting in Southern Sudan.
Despite a cease fire and a power sharing agreement between the northern
and southern factions. But Kristof declares the west should get more
involved---the United States in particular--- despite the fact we got
the two parties to the negotiating table after 9/11. In fact, President
Bush announced he was sending forth John Danforth to do something about
the problem in Sudan on 9/10.
Remember that? I'm sure you probably don't, but it's one of the most
tangible pieces of evidence that the Bush administration was doing
something about terrorism---and the countries that harbor said
terrorists---before 9/11. Sudan was the former home of such terrorist
luminaries as Illyich Ramirez Sanchez---aka Carlos the Jackal---and
Osama bin Laden. Carlos was caught and thrown into a French jail; Osama
fled when the Taliban took control in Afghanistan and offered him a
happy cave-dwelling existence in their country. Why the sudden change
of heart? Sudan had their hand slapped when Clinton sent thirteen
Tomahawk Cruise missiles carreering into a Khartoum aspirin factory.
This apparently was enough of a wakeup call for the Sudanese, who
promptly started ejecting terrorists from their borders. For once, it
seems, someone took the message correctly. The civil war in Sudan is
such a shame, because I truly believe if there was ever a country in
Africa that could not only survive, but thrive, it's this country. The
natural resources held within its borders are amazing. More oil than in
Saudi Arabia, scientists have estimated. But therein lies the problem:
the oil's down south, and the southerners don't like the northerners
very much and don't want them to have it. Not that I can blame them:
they tried to institute Shari'a on people who don't believe in Islam.
That's bound to rankle. The north, for the most part, is desert. What
arable land there once was in northern Sudan is being swallowed up by a
Sahara that seems to be marching at quick time. They need those
resources, so the prevailing theory that has ruled since Sudan became
independent of Great Britain back in the 1950's was to overwhelm the
rural southerners by means of war and to beat them into submission. And
maybe, just maybe they could convert a few to the ways of Muhammed in
the meanwhile. Despite the factions taking a few years off here and
there, you could argue that the civil war has been raging for almost
fifty years. The Bush Administration's involvement in Sudan has two
origins. First---stopping the north from harboring terrorists. They
followed the very rational assessment that if they worked to stop the
civil war, Sudan would become a stable regime. Second, there are more
than a few Christians in southern Sudan. Fundamentalist
Christians. The born-agains and their ilk have been busy converting
through the carrot and stick of humanitaritian aid for quite some time.
They wanted something done about the problem of slavery. Yep. You read
that right. Slavery. The capture of another human being and exploiting
them for free labor. This happens all the time in Sudan. Whether the
slaves be southern refugees who have fled to the relative safety of
Khartoum and are taken advantage of there, or if they were forcibly
removed from their homes and taken north makes no real distinguishable
difference in the matter: they're forced into slave labor. These
Christians were aligned with groups like Amnesty International (strange
bedfellows, eh?) to stop their brethren in southern Sudan from being
taken advantage of---and they lobbied for intervention on human rights
grounds. It's a non-starter to say which reasoning was stronger, but
either way it forced the two parties to get their collective asses to
the negotiating table to try and work it out. And all of it is due to
western intervention. So, for two years the northern government and the
SPLA---the Sudanese People's Liberation Army---have hashed their
differences out in Nairobi. They came to a power sharing agreement,
which went something like the south would have automomous rule over its
territories for six years, and then they could have a referendum if
they wanted to secede from the north. A cease fire was negotiated as
well, but, as you can see from the article above, it hasn't been really
successful in its implementation. People are still being forced into
slavery; people are still being killed. Where's the difference between
two years ago and now? There isn't much of one, unfortunately. But
Kristof wants to know when they'll stop the genocide being committed in
Darfur, which is in government held territory in western central Sudan.
Arab militias are killing black skinned people and are forcing them to
flee for the relative safe haven of Chad. It's genocide. Something
needs to be done. Admittedly, Kristof doesn't throw the blame at the
former colonial rulers for creating the situation in the first place
but he stops a hairsbreadth before reaching that conclusion. He speaks
of the International Community's hand-sitting experience in Rwanda, yet
he expects intervention when the parties involved aren't willing to do
anything other than allow for the slaughter their people. This is not a case when we can claim, as the world did after the
Armenian, Jewish and Cambodian genocides, that we didn't know how bad
it was. Sudan's refugees tell of mass killings and rapes, of women
branded, of children killed, of villages burned — yet Sudan's
government just stiffed new peace talks that began last night in Chad.
It's horrible, isn't it? People are being murdered left and right and
all we can do is sit on our hands and hope it works out. Every instinct
we have as human beings declares that this should be stopped. That it should never happen again.
But how can we do this? Do we send in peacekeepers? A military force
strong enough that it will stop the hostilities---until they pull out,
that is, and the flames are lit anew? This is the pattern. Look at
Kosovo, for example. Just a few weeks ago, three Armenian children
drowned, the locals blamed it on the minority Serb population and
rioting ensued. This was with peacekeepers present, mind you.
It happens over and over again. All over the world. It's sad to note
that this seems to be one of the uniting factors of the human race.
Hatred is as old as the Earth. People will hate. It's a part of human
nature. It seems illogical to me that we---here in the west---should
try to dampen that hate with our soft words and diplomatic actions and
think that this will do the trick. That we'll be able to stop Hutus and
Tustsis from despising one another simply because it suits our world
plans better than outright slaughter. It's arrogant---in the extreme.
Hate is illogical in itself, but that we would try to dampen the hate
with our highly educated views is even more illogical. I have no idea
what the average Muslim, Khartoum resident believes. Nor do I have any
idea as to what the average southern Sudanese goes through, either. I
can't get to that space they occupy with their thought processes
because I
haven't lived through what they've lived through. I haven't had
propaganda spouted at me about the source of their plight. I don't have
the common experience necessary to stop the violence. I am from the
West. I am from North America, not Africa. Why should some jerkoff at
the UN or the EU think that they've got the answers, either? I don't
know what to do about the problem in Sudan, but I simply cannot think
that more intervention in a place where they already despise intervention
would stop the violence. It's cruel and it slays me to say it---because
we all know how fond I am of international organizations---but perhaps
the international community has the right idea here when they stay out
of it.