Shame on us all ... Major Jill Rutaremara, a Rwandan military spokesman, condemned this week's devastating Janjaweed/government attack on UN peacekeepers. He also blamed the high level of causalities on the poor equipment of the forces. "Our peacekeepers are ill equipped in a situation where they come under attack from heavily armed people."
Though UNAMID force is supposed to have 26,000 members, only about 9,000 troops are on the ground now. The Sudanese government continues to block an effective deployment of the force and the international community has acquiesced . We have failed to support the peacekeeping mission in every essential way. If the peacekeepers had had appropriate intelligence capacity and equipment this tragedy almost certainly would have been avoided. The peacekeepers have been pleading for 26 helicopters. No nation has offered even a single helicopter. Mia Farrow, 7-12-08
Nicolas Kristof knows that place.
... there is a serious argument to be made that genocide is overrated as an international concern. The G-8 leaders implicitly accept that argument, which goes like this:
Genocide is regrettable, but don't lose perspective. It is simply one of many tragedies in the world today - and a fairly modest one in terms of lives lost.
All the genocides of the last 100 years have cost only 10 million to 12 million lives. In contrast, every year we lose almost 10 million children under the age of 5 from diseases and malnutrition attributable to poverty. Make that the priority, not Darfur. ...
I tilt obsessively at the windmills of Darfur because, quite simply, its people haunt me: the young woman who deliberately made a diversion of herself so the janjaweed would gang-rape her and miss her little sister running in the opposite direction; the man whose eyes were gouged out with a bayonet; the group of women beaten with their own babies until the children were dead.
Yes, genocide truly is "that bad." Nicholas D. Kristof, "Is genocide really that bad? The Pain of the G-8's Big Shrug," New York Times, 7-10-08
Thom Hartmann knows that place.
Offering tangible evidence that, as Shakespeare promised, "the rain of mercy is twice-blessed," Hartmann recently took his radio show to the threshing floor itself. (Click here.)
Those of us who have taken on the vigil for Darfur, who stand here day after night after day, holding open the door between this world and the next, understand what International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo is going to do in the Hague.
The prosecutor for the International Criminal Court announced his intent to ask for an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, which the United Nations worries may prompt a violent response by the Sudanese government against peacekeepers stationed there.
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