http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php? Tuesday, 27 November 2007

The star-studded hue and cry to “Save Darfur” and “stop the genocide” has gained enormous traction in U.S. media along with bipartisan support in Congress and the White House. But the Congo, with ten to twenty times as many African dead over the same period is not called a “genocide” and passes almost unnoticed. Sudan sits atop lakes of oil. It has large supplies of uranium, and other minerals, significant water resources, and a strategic location near still more African oil and resources. The unasked question is whether the nation’s Republican and Democratic foreign policy elite are using claims of genocide, and appeals for “humanitarian intervention” to grease the way for the next oil and resource wars on the African continent. (Keep reading…)

 May 18, 2007  www.logosjournal.com   Revulsion has gripped the world over the continuing tragedy in Darfur.  Terrible civil wars between Northern and Southern Sudan have been taking place since independence was achieved more than fifty years ago.  Nearly 300,000 people have died due to illness, violence, and starvation while 2.5 million have been driven from their homes over the last four years, and the UN Integrated Regional Information Network reported on March 19, 2007 that 4.5 million are “conflict affected” and in need of humanitarian relief. The ongoing conflict ravaging the Sudan has produced more than 80,000 new refugees in the six months since February 2007 even while the government in Khartoum has shut down 52 humanitarian relief agencies that have been caring for the “internally displaced people” living in 153 camps. As the crisis of the Sudan spills over into Chad and the Central African Republic, where more than 450,000 hapless refugees linger without adequate sustenance or health care, international resolutions are greeted with indifference, and peace agreements already reached between the national government in Khartoum and the Southern rebels seem near collapse. Governments throughout the world led by Britain and the United States have inveighed against the Khartoum government led by Omar al-Bashir calling for various punitive measures including travel bans, freezing assets, economic sanctions, a “no-fly zone,” and perhaps even military intervention. Letters of protest have been signed by leading progressive intellectuals, celebrities have entered the fray, divestment campaigns have begun at various campuses and state legislatures in the United States, and progressive organizations like “Save Darfur” and “Enough” have sprung into existence.  Frustration has become ever more palpable and, everywhere, the cry is heard: “Let’s do something.” (Keep reading…)

THE NATION (March 19, 2007 issue)

When history repeats itself for a third time, it is beyond tragedy. Since its independence fifty-one years ago, Sudan has suffered two civil wars between North and South, each of them as bloody as–and much longer than–today’s crisis in the western region of Darfur. Quietly, Sudanese military planners are preparing for a third round of that war. Just two weeks before violent clashes erupted in the Southern city of Malakal at the end of November, Salva Kiir, the president of Southern Sudan–who is also first vice president in Sudan’s Government of National Unity–issued a stark warning: “The war will return to the South if peace is not achieved in Darfur, and that is really our fear.” He repeated the warnings in a speech January 9, the second anniversary of the agreement that brought peace to Southern Sudan. Kiir’s alarm is good reason to intensify international efforts over Darfur–but he is also putting us on notice to pay attention to a looming nationwide crisis. (Keep reading…)