We Must Speak Up For The Dead and Dispossessed in An Epidemic of Rage
If not now, when? If not we, who? News of murder, rape, arson and dispossession in Darfur has been coming in for something like four years, stopping and starting and stuttering, scaling up into horrifying film footage that blanks out the political story, and also down into declarations, resolutions and soundbites that veil the horror of what’s really happening in a war so remote and so obscured that the numbers of dead arrive rounded to the nearest hundred thousand.
Is it 200,000 or 300,000?
Both figures keep popping up in the Darfur story in reproachable documentation and all you can think is that the sub-text “enough is enough” of Tony Blair’s reported message to Angela Merkel the other day had an even darker meaning than the phrase was intended to carry.
But, yes, enough is indeed enough. And one of the things you’d think the UN would have had enough of is being treated with casual disdain by the Sudanese regime, whose latest gesture was to use troops to deny the UN’s humanitarian delegation access to a refugee camp in the Darfur region.
A peacekeeping mission would be more to the point, and here again the UN is as helpless against its own vetoes as against President Omar al-Bashir’s soldiers.
If the United Nations could die of shame it would have been dead years ago.
How can the EU do better? Can it be effective at all? Yesterday, the British Prime Minister and the German Chancellor were making the right noises. Stringent sanctions. No-fly zones.
But the unpalatable truth is that sanctions require a degree of collective determination, of which the UN appears constitutionally incapable. A no-fly zone over that vast remote area represents an enormous challenge. And would freezing Sudanese assets abroad, one of the suggestions in the “writers’ letter”, in itself turn the situation around?
Bob Geldof, who orchestrated the letter, said yesterday: “It’s code to get the UN behind us.”
Well, maybe. But the point about Geldof is that he is a populist. What is needed is to make rage and shame contagious, an epidemic. The situation will be turned by numbers, vast numbers of the living outraged, to speak up for the 200,000, or was it 300,000, dead.
© 2007 Independent News and Media Limited
It is probably 600,000 dead which matches the 600,000 Iraqi dead and 600 Billion dollars spent on Iraq. Absolute waste of life and money. Is non-violent civil disobedience the answer though?
Outraged
The UN is a helpless creature without MASSIVE support from the countries that are the economic engines of the world. Currently those countries only put their shoulder to the wheel for the protection of their own economic interest. Sanctions and no-fly zones do not do anything to change the actions of the governments that they are intended to affect. These actions only tend to adversely affect the innocent peoples of the targeted country through death, disease, and starvation.
How about considering a worldwide military draft for a UN army of peacekeepers? How about the UN becoming relevant and meaningful in the fight for peace by sanctioning those countries that participate in preemptive war? How about sanctions and MASSIVE fines against corporations that committ or promote economic and environmental crimes against the peoples of the world?
I hate to rain on your interventionist parade but “liberal humanitarian” interventionism works no better than Bush’s disgusting debacle in Iraq. Somalia ring a bell? We ought to lead by providing an example of peaceful, sustainable, cooperative bio-regionally based localist society. Or to put it another way who would Ghandi bomb on behalf of? Answer no one. A draft for the U.N. is exactly no better than a draft for the Iraq war. It’s forced servitude for the purpose of murder:
“Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”
– Percy Bysshe Shelley
The fact that the uniform is blue makes not one bit of difference.
Hey! Let’s kill more people! Sanctions: death to the people who are already suffering. The gov’t doesn’t care anyway. Yeah. Victimize the victims. Continue the same old same old. What the hell are people thinking?!
I wasn’t suggesting a draft for UN military intervention! I was suggesting a draft for peacekeepers that could protect the innocent people who are the victims of military violence. So why is this “forced” servidtude for the purpose of murder? If peacekeepers are trying to stop the murder, how is wrong?
The UN “peacekeeping” missions are almost always just US/western imperial intervention by another name. Look at Haiti, where the blue helmets in have terrorized the peaceful Lavalas movement in Cite Soleil - orgainzing a propaganda campaign of outright lies and slander againse Aristide and Lavalas.
As far as Darfur, while it is indeed tragic, I see ulterior motives in those involved in Darfur activism. The whole Darfur movement in my home town is spearheaded by the synagogues - their “Save Darfur” banners alternating with the “Stand with Israel” ones. Shouldn’t US Jews be using their consideralble influence to resolve a much-longer running (59 year) injustice that is a bit “closer to home”?
Good point about Haiti I should have brought that up and forgot. For those not aware of what’s going on there, U.N. “peacekeeping” troops have sprayed civilian neighborhoods with gunfire from helicopter gunships on a couple of occasions for daring to demand the return of the rightfully elected Aristide. Far from the large meta government of U.N. control we should be evolving towards peaceful cooperative localist anarchist socities as a good example to the rest of the world.
Okay…I got your point.
So where is Aristide now after he was whisked away to Africa by our very own “beloved” State Department?
He was essentially kidnapped by the US and taken to the Central African Republic, the CAP released him where he flew (alongside Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman) to nearby Jamaica, where he hoped to be reinstated for the last months of his term. But the US/UN gave it’s full support behind teh ex-fraph thugs, so he is reluctantly residing in South Africa.
The Hatians, against efforts to keep Lavalas off the ballot, and admidst considerable electroal fraud, elected Lavalas member Rene Preval. But Preval his hands have been tied by the usual suspects (US, UN, WB IMF, etc..). The poor Hatians continue to clamor for the return of Aristide.