Besides the UN,the US meets all of the things on your list. [..]
The UN has always had to depend on the US,so for you to say that the UN has done it all,while true,is misleading.
Develop plans to bring peace, agriculture, commerce, ... to our poorest countries.
I happen to wish they would innovate, and become the world's best problem solvers, and push for world issues, such as environmental issues,
I still hope the UN will change to reflect a changed world.
And, should the US and other countries stop independant humanitarian aid and just funnel it through the UN? (Making sure all contributions are first registered as dues?)
But yes, imho, more of their stuff - for example the basic food and shelter stuff - should be channeled through the coordinated UN efforts - that would save duplication.
It was a Serbian popular insurrection that in the end brought him down.
Nimh wrote:It was a Serbian popular insurrection that in the end brought him down.
Such an insurrection would never happen if the citizens were not made to suffer. Mr. Milosevic was a popular politician, and his nationalistic stance was shared by majority of Serbs. They were coerced to choose between ethnic pride and normal life. And they made their choice by bringing to power some regime that extradited Mr. Milosevic to the war winners' justice.
LONDON DISPATCH
Sound of Silence
by Robert Lane Greene
Only at The New Republic Online
Post date: 06.23.04
London
Recently I went to a launch event for the Arabic edition of a book called Crimes of War at a club for journalists here in London. Had a Martian attended the talks, he would have taken away the impression that the only "crimes of war" on earth are committed by Americans and Israelis. Of course, Abu Ghraib dominated the headlines at the time, so it stood to reason that the abuses by U.S. soldiers would be a major topic of discussion. But an hour and a half devoted solely to the transgressions of just two groups? Finally I raised my hand. What about the most enormous human rights and humanitarian crisis on Earth? In the Darfur region of western Sudan, government-backed Arab militias have waged a campaign of savagery for months against the region's black inhabitants. Half a million people have been uprooted, with their villages burned to the ground, and 100,000 (the lucky ones) have taken refuge across the border in Chad. Ten thousand, and perhaps far more, have been murdered outright. Rape is ubiquitous; victims are often scarred or branded to make their shame permanent. Wells are poisoned to make sure the survivors will not survive long. When those uprooted are unable to plant crops in the rainy season, which has recently begun, starvation will threaten the region's entire population of 5 million. And this is not, as the Sudanese government insists, the work of mere rogue militias; government jets have been seen strafing villages in support of the marauders.
Why, I wanted to know, had this not yet been brought up at a discussion of "crimes of war"? It's very hard for reporters to get into Darfur, explained the panel's moderator. We do have a piece on Darfur on our website, said the editor of CrimesOfWar.org. Perhaps it's the old racism at work, offered someone else; perhaps brown and black victims of war crimes count for less than white ones.
That last sentiment strikes me as only half the story. It's true that the deaths of tens of thousands of blacks in inaccessible regions of the world create far less urgency than one missing white girl in England or America. But a different kind of race-based relativism is also at work in the near-silence over Darfur. Dark-skinned victims count for less than whites, yes, but they count for less still if they are the victims of other dark-skinned people. It is often said that the reason we bombed Serbia but not Rwanda was because the victims in the Balkans were white, while the victims in Rwanda were black. But it is important to remember that the main perpetrators in the Balkans were also white (and, unlike their victims, Christian) and that the perpetrators in Rwanda were also black. You can be sure that if the Belgians or the Australians, or certainly the Americans or Israelis, were murdering, mutilating, and mass-raping tens of thousands of Africans, you wouldn't have the non-response we hear now over Darfur. Call it the "soft bigotry of low expectations."
When you compare the attention showered on various human rights problems today, it becomes clear that the world is once again judging the severity of abuses in large part by the ethnicity of their perpetrators. Not only has there been no call to arms over Sudan, there has barely been a call to anything--just 44 mentions of Darfur appeared in The New York Times' archive in the past year. It can't be simply because the victims are dark-skinned and poor, because the Times has featured 860 mentions of Abu Ghraib, where one or perhaps two people were killed and a number lightly tortured, beaten, and humiliated by Americans.
Abu Ghraib is a perfect storm for the media: Powerful Western soldiers abused and humiliated poor non-Westerners after invading their country for supposedly high-minded reasons. But when both the victims and the perpetrators are black or brown, you get the opposite: perfect calm. Thirty-four peasant farmers were massacred by left-wing guerrillas in Colombia last week. (In the distance, a cricket chirps.) And the quiet is never more deafening than when the violence is in Africa. Our low expectations of African perpetrators permits the world's worst horrors--a genocide in Rwanda (800,000 dead); a decade-long war in Congo (3 million dead); and genocide in Darfur (many thousands dead and the death toll climbing fast). Yet New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is practically the only prominent media voice to write repeatedly about Darfur. Where are the conservatives who should say that the rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are God-given and universal? Where are the liberals who should decry the racism that allows blacks to be killed with impunity?
They are not speaking up because ethnic murder in little-understood parts of the world is all too easy to describe with a sad shake of the head and something about "ancient hatreds." The United Nations defines genocide as killing "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." Bush administration lawyers are currently looking into whether to use the word to describe Darfur, but have so far demurred. Their failure to change policies has ugly echoes of the Clinton administration's ban on the word "genocide" during the Rwandan massacres of 1994. Both presidents understood that using the word would bind them morally to act.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are desperately trying to highlight Darfur. But they are trying to gain traction in a media market far more interested in stories of wrongdoing by American troops. This is not to downplay those abuses, or to change the subject. That tactic is often used by administration apologists, and it is shameful: Americans and all other Western governments should hold themselves to the highest possible standards, regardless of what anyone else does. But leaders in America, around the rest of the world, and perhaps most abhorrently in Africa itself, seem content not to hold the Sudanese to any standard of humanity at all. If we continue to ignore genocide because we don't think Africans are capable of any better, then it will be worse than a shame. It will be a crime.
Robert Lane Greene writes for The Economist's Global Agenda.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
JUNE 23, 2004
A Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) field team, recently back from the Chad/Sudan border where they took eyewitness accounts of systematic killings, rapes and destroyed villages, calls for an international intervention necessary to save lives and reverse injustices labeled by PHR as indicators of genocide. In his endorsement of PHR's report, Justice Richard Goldstone, former Chief Prosecutor of the Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia said,
"After all we know and have learned from the last decade's genocides and mass atrocitiesÂ… We owe it to the victims of Darfur and potential victims to do everything we can to prevent and account for what PHR's report establishes is genocide and reverse the intolerable acts of forcing entire populations from their land, destroying their livelihood and making it virtually impossible to return."
Through testimonies by victims and eyewitnesses in Chad and Darfur, PHR has developed a list of indicators of genocide outlined and supported with testimonies in the document that show an organized intent to affect group annihilation in Darfur, Sudan that include:
1) consistent pattern of attacks on villages,
2) consistent pattern of destruction of villages,
3) consistent pattern of destruction of livelihoods and means of survival,
4) consistent pattern of hot pursuit with intent to eradicate villagers,
5) consistent pattern of targeting non-Arabs and
6) consistent pattern of systematic rape of women.
In addition to calling for a UN-backed resolution that supports a robust intervention to prevent and punish the crime of genocide, the PHR report, which is attached, includes specific recommendations directed to the Government of Sudan, the United Nations, the European Union, the African Union, the Arab League, the Organization of Islamic Conference and the United States.
Photographs, audio and video footage of the PHR investigation can be found at http://www.phrusa.org/research/sudan/
To read full report, please see attached document.
Contact: John Heffernan, [..] [email protected]
Is Africa on someone's list as a geostrategical or economically appealing area for the US?
I see the charge from nimh, and others--that the US only helps where it is convenient to them.
I think it is a bit biased to submit that the US hasn't helped countries unless there is something in it for us.
Not that I can see, alas ... apart from the countries with oil, that is.
(Bush included two countries with harsh dictatorships, but also important oil reserves, on his recent trip through the continent - which, to his credit, was the first of a US President in a long time. Such a rare Presidential visit is considered something of a reward, and he selected, alongside better choices, Gabon and ... forgot. Complimented the governments and everything. Had an article about that ... dont know if I posted it).
Rigged
[..] Over the past several years, Bush and his foreign policy team have done something almost no one expected when they took office--they have made Africa a priority. It would be an uplifting story, the fulfillment of countless bleeding-heart dreams, except for one thing. Africa is a Bush priority for one reason: oil.
For critics who consider President Bush's talk of global democracy a sham, and suspect it conceals a hidden agenda to control the world's supply of oil, Africa is a kind of Rosetta stone. The continent's west coast--from Nigeria in the north to Angola in the south--is America's fastest-growing source of oil and gas. Over the next decade, according to the National Intelligence Council, Africa's share of the U.S. petroleum market will rise from 15 to 25 percent. As Kansteiner has put it, "African oil has become of national strategic interest to us."
For an administration worried about the stability of longtime oil cow Saudi Arabia, West Africa is a godsend. Its oil is high-quality, easy to refine, and largely offshore, which means political unrest is less likely to disrupt production. It's half the distance from the Persian Gulf. And, because most West African oil producers don't belong to OPEC, they can pump out as much crude as they want, potentially lowering prices.
That's the good news. The bad news is that many of the regimes that control this new oil make Saudi Arabia look like Sweden. In the Middle East, the president is supposedly renouncing the decades-long bargain in which America blesses Arab dictatorships in return for their hydrocarbons. But, in West Africa, his administration is building another, equally ugly arrangement to replace it.
Last month, President José Eduardo dos Santos of Angola--Africa's second-largest oil producer--met Bush for the second time. For the leader of a midsized African country, two Oval Office visits is unusual. It's even more unusual, given that President Bush has said he will reward only those African countries that "invest in the health and education of their people. ... Corrupt regimes that give nothing to their people deserve nothing from us." That statement probably elicited a chuckle at Human Rights Watch, which estimates that, between 1997 and 2002, 9 percent of Angola's gross domestic product simply disappeared. Dos Santos's government, in other words, stole roughly as much money as it spent on health and education combined. Luckily for the Angolan leader, he has other credentials that matter in Washington: The night before his first Oval Office meeting, he was feted at a dinner sponsored by ExxonMobil and Chevron-Texaco, both of which are planning major West African expansions.
Two weeks after his meeting with dos Santos, Bush received the leader of Africa's third-largest oil producer, Omar Bongo of Gabon. In power 37 years, Bongo is the elder statesman of African tyrants. He reportedly owns more real estate in Paris than any other foreign leader, and the State Department recently said the country's "human rights record remained poor." But that doesn't seem to bother the White House. Gabon's military now receives U.S. training, and soon after his meeting with Bush, Bongo's government received its first International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan since 2002. Asked about the meeting, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said he didn't know if the two men discussed oil. But Bongo told the BBC the president had urged him to increase production.
Then there is Teodoro Obiang Nguema, president of tiny, oil-rich Equatorial Guinea. Obiang, who has held power for 24 years, won his last election with 97 percent of the vote, while the country's main opposition leader languished in jail. In 1998, according to the IMF, his government received $130 million in oil revenue, and Obiang simply pocketed $96 million of it. Although three of every four Equatoguineans suffer malnutrition, between 1997 and 2002, Obiang spent just over 1 percent of his budget on health, by far the lowest of the nine African countries the IMF surveyed. According to a 2002 State Department report, there is "little evidence that the country's oil wealth is being devoted to the public good."
Just months before that State Department report, the White House decided to reopen America's embassy in the capital, Malabo. It had closed in 1995, after President Clinton's ambassador criticized Obiang's repression and then found himself the subject of government death threats. But oil executives--including CMS Energy executive William McCormick, who donated $100,000 to the Bush-Cheney inaugural committee--lobbied the Bush administration to reestablish an American presence. In February 2002, Obiang triumphantly visited Washington. According to an article by Ken Silverstein in Salon, six U.S. oil companies produced a booklet for the occasion, praising him as Equatorial Guinea's "first democratically elected president."
Realists might defend the Bush administration's decision to build in Africa the kind of unholy alliances it supposedly rejects in the Middle East. After all, in the Arab world, dictatorship produces Al Qaeda. In Gabon, Angola, and Equatorial Guinea, where the populations are mostly Christian and animist, Islamists can't exploit U.S.-sponsored oppression. But, even if it isn't channeled into fundamentalism, anti-government rage will sooner or later imperil U.S. oil investments in Africa, too. And it will further degrade America's reputation as a country genuinely committed to democracy and human rights. The Bush administration [now] seems set to extend America-hatred to a new frontier.
Peter Beinart is the editor of TNR.
Do Something
by the Editors
Post date: 06.24.04
n March 2003, days before the United States overthrew Saddam Hussein, President Bush went on the radio to declare, "We have seen far too many instances in the past decade--from Bosnia to Rwanda to Kosovo--where the failure of the Security Council to act decisively has led to tragedy." But behind his statement lay a bitter irony. Because, even as the United States was resolving never again to stand by and allow genocide in Iraq, it was standing by and allowing genocide in Darfur, Sudan. Over the past year, as the national security rationale for the Iraq war has deteriorated, the Bush administration has turned increasingly to moral language to justify its invasion. Which makes it all the more remarkable that it has remained so passive in the face of the greatest moral emergency on earth today.
For more than a year now, in its western province of Darfur, Sudan's Arab government has been sending its bombers and arming a militia known as the Janjaweed to slaughter and ethnically cleanse black Africans from the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa tribes, which the government accuses of backing a rebellion. The International Crisis Group estimates the conflict has already claimed 30,000 lives and displaced 1.2 million people. And usaid Administrator Andrew S. Natsios predicts that as many as one million people could die from starvation and disease during the current rainy season if the Sudanese continue to deny relief agencies access.
So far, the United States and the world have done precious little in response. The Bush administration fears that, if it alienates the Khartoum government over Darfur, it will undermine one of its signature African achievements--the potential end to the 21-year civil war in southern Sudan. China and France have resisted a U.N. Security Council resolution demanding that Khartoum halt the violence and allow immediate humanitarian access because they have oil investments in Sudan. Russia and rotating Security Council member Pakistan, both of which are combating insurgencies, object that a resolution would infringe on Sudan's sovereignty. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan last week agreed to visit Darfur soon but made no further commitment.
This inaction is particularly tragic because there's so much that can be done. Khartoum has yet to make good on its promise to disarm the Janjaweed, but it clearly has influence over the militia; indeed, many Janjaweed members have close ties to the Sudanese military. And the world has influence over Sudan. In 1996, for instance, Khartoum bent to international demands and expelled Osama bin Laden. In 2001, foreign pressure helped launch new peace talks in the south.
In recent weeks, the Bush administration has taken modest steps in the right direction. It has conditioned the normalization of relations with Khartoum upon an end to violence in Darfur. And it may supplement America's current sanctions against Sudan with travel and financial restrictions that target individual government officials. To make such sanctions more effective, the United States should coordinate with its European allies, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank.
But economic pressure isn't enough. The African Union and European Union are currently assembling 120 soldiers to monitor the "cease-fire" in Darfur--a region the size of France. That force needs to be much larger and much more aggressive. Until the violence stops and the humanitarian crisis subsides, peacekeepers should establish safe havens for displaced persons--places where aid organizations can tend to the hungry and sick, safe from attacks by Khartoum's killers.
Given our commitment in Iraq, the U.S. military is stretched too thin to provide many troops in Darfur. (And, despite all its moralistic talk, few in the Bush administration have ever shown much enthusiasm for using the U.S. military to save African lives.) But we can offer logistical and airlift support. And, if even a fraction of the 2,000 American troops currently stationed in nearby Djibouti were transferred to Darfur, they would have a dramatic psychological impact, encouraging other countries to volunteer more troops and showing Khartoum that the world's only superpower will no longer stand idly by. Remember, some 200 American ground troops helped end the violence in Liberia last summer.
As we editorialized last week ("Were We Wrong?" June 28), one of the great moral dangers of America's intervention in Iraq is that it will undermine America's ability--and its will--to prevent ethnic cleansing and mass murder in other parts of the globe. We are now confronting that danger in Darfur. If President Bush wants to show the world that his moral rhetoric was sincere in Iraq, he now has his chance, in Sudan.
the Editors
The world is tired of US intervention.
This is a job for the UN. If they'll just cough up the billions they stole from the OFF program, they'll have enough...
Its tiring to be criticised for everything--and expected to do everything--so we can be criticised again.
