{"id":602,"date":"2004-08-25T15:51:36","date_gmt":"2004-08-25T19:51:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/wordpress\/?p=602"},"modified":"2008-02-04T15:58:53","modified_gmt":"2008-02-04T20:58:53","slug":"dying-in-darfur","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=602","title":{"rendered":"“Dying in Darfur”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Had I known FaithfulAmerica.org and TrueMajority.com were planning on filming an ad for military intervention in the Sudan I wouldn’t have contributed to their project<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Is the situation dire? Certainly. Is military intervention doable? I don’t think so. When will the United States stop picking fights it doesn’t have the will or ability to finish and apologise for the suffering they incite in its haphazard attempts to reorder the world in its interests?<\/p>\n

Samantha Power, while researching “Dying in Darfur” now appearing<\/a> in The New Yorker<\/em>, went to great lengths to investigate what is already known. The Sudanese gov’t is acting in collusion with the janjaweed who continue to commit grave atrocities. Sudanese official Salah Gosh is as believable as Donald Rumsfeld regarding Abu Ghraib when he insists these atrocities were committed by a few rotten apples.<\/p>\n

Power chides this official for deflecting criticism by drawing comparisons to the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Yet some should be made. She tells the story of Mustafa, (last name withheld), an eighteen-year-old African who has gone into hiding following a brief training period with Sheikh Musa Hilal’s militia. Hilal is a leader of the janjaweed, or the non-combatant leader of Arab tribes that disavows the janjaweed and their pillaging, depending on who is answering the question. Mustafa fled Halil’s camp when he was told he would be fighting the Sudanese Liberation Army. Power infers we should have sympathy for his plight yet aren’t Iraqis who refuse to kill their countrymen in the name of U.S. occupation called terrorists? It’s odd how these things are reasoned out.<\/p>\n

Ms. Power doesn’t offer an in-depth analysis of why the United States has<\/a> been actively supporting an opposition that will settle for nothing less<\/a> than a unified Sudan under their framework, and in their refusal to consider a secessionist South, have set the stage for an all or nothing ending to this civil war. U.S. policy has partly been driven by ideologues who never experience even a mild arrythmia in reaction to the apartheid of Palestinians yet cannot abide a separated Sudan. These same defenders of unchecked power for anyone not Arab are attempting to spin their unrealistic expectations into a fever-pitched demand for a military application to this situation, and in their stubborn ignorance of what that would entail, fully intend to push the Africans they claim to care about off the cliff should their war cry be heeded.<\/p>\n

Drop relief, not bombs. As Winston Churchill<\/a> preached if not practiced<\/a>, “Better to jaw-jaw than to war-war.” Or how about this. You can’t take the moral high ground when your self-serving hypocrisy has you sinking in quicksand<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On a related interventionist note:<\/p>\n

Margaret Thatcher’s son charged in South Africa over coup plot<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Had I known FaithfulAmerica.org and TrueMajority.com were planning on filming an ad for military intervention in the Sudan I wouldn’t have contributed to their project. Is the situation dire? Certainly. Is military intervention doable? I don’t think so. When will … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdXTf-9I","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}