Hello my friend How are you ? I get your messages. Thank you all of you for your best efforts you doing towards margins in Darfur. Really we appreciate the great role of SGN organization and others beside them. Refugees are very happy when they heard you are going to make July 22/23 an international day for peace in Darfur. We request you go on pressing till all the criminals be arrested and punished in front of the I C C. Really, refugees can not go back to their home land because the genocide still going on in Darfur, and there is no disarmament of Janjaweet militias. Really, we need your support. Stay well, your friend.
(From a refugee camp close to Chad-Darfur border.)
2 replies on “Message from Darfur Refugee Leader, Urging Continuous Pressure”
No great conspiracy (and no we won’t go to war with Iran, which in any case is aerlady at war with us and has been since 1979). Instead GWB who is fundamentally lazy will kick the can (along with Pakistan) down the road as Clinton did with Osama for the next President. We’ll hear from Iran or Pakistan or both when several US cities are in ashes, some “deniable” group makes demands. And we have to get to serious killing to forestall more attacks by others.Darfur is a confluence of various factors. Christian groups agitated in the 1990’s about slavery of Christians in the South by the Jihadi regime in the North. Darfur allows facile and cost-free moralizing by the liberal media and press, since there is no chance for anyone to do anything about it — Blackwater has offered to stop the killing for 1.5 billion — but no one is likely to take them up on it.The liberal fantasy that “talk” can solve any problem allows that to take place wrt Darfur with endless rallies, conferences, etc. Bonus: demonstration of superior morality and spirituality which is key for wealth liberals.NGOs like HRW and Amnesty trumpet it to raise money and continue their existence.The Anon commenter talking about the Military Industrial complex does not know what he’s talking about. Rumsfeld made himself the enemy of the “Big Army” military contractors when he cancelled the Crusader Artillery program on the grounds that it could never be moved to places it was needed like the ME (too big and heavy). Moreover Iraq and Afghanistan have led to within both the Army and Marines a push for more, cheaper, and smaller UAVs for surveillance, and more close-air support UAVs taking “Big Air Force” military procurement programs out of the loop.Army and Marine forces want their own Predators with Hellfires for close-air-support rather than the Air Force “maybe” having an F-22 on station (or not). If anything the ubiquity and rapid development of UAVs, new small arms, and anti-IED measures are oriented to small, politically ineffective vendors. Not “big Army” vendors or the guys responsible for the F-22. Military spending will likely go up, under any administration, but it’s like to go for: lots of UAVs, better small arms, better armor, something better than the useless in combat Humvee, Camelbak hydration systems, etc. Not a whole lot of markup there folks.If ANYONE has been paying attention instead of putting the tinfoil hats on during the Ron Paulnut rallies, say reading Defense Weekly, the Navy-Airforce response to Iraq (where they’ve largely sat it out) and the threat from Iran and Pakistan has been “let us handle it — now give us more ships/F-22s” and argue that the US can “win” a combination of Desert Fox (Clinton’s 98-99 Iraq bombing campaign) and Kosovo-Serbia. Presumably with 100% fewer Chinese Embassies bombed! But the services are careful to note they don’t have the “capacity” now and need a whole lot more stuff to get it done (which is likely true).If there was money to be made in getting rid of the Iran-Pakistan nuke problem it would have bipartisan support and would have been aerlady done. Instead both are a threat, a big one (due to factionalism-tribalism in both nations) but no money to be made only saved. And generally people will exert themselves to make a penny but not get off the couch to save a buck.
I think the NGO angle is the strongest. Wherever you have ruefgee camps you are going to have hundreds of bleeding hearts all with a piece of the action, including the security companies, the reporters and cameramen, the bush pilots to fly to and fro, the water suppliers, the food suppliers, those who set up clinics, those who set up schools, and those who ship all the people out and replant them from Minneapolis to Maine and Dublin to the banlieus of Marseilles.A fundamental requirement is someplace SAFE. That place is the internationally managed ruefgee camp. At the camp they have a concentrated group of pathetic souls, each guaranteed to have a sound bite story, mouths to feed, Western food and medicine nearby (for them), a pool of pathetic humanity they can gather and pimp to the world, international flights relatively close to bring in celebrities and politicians, and , in general, a place where they meet up and mingle like it was old home week.If you don’t have a camp, if you don’t have a safe place for westerners and their contractors to gather, you will not have the critical mass of bleeding hearts and bleeding heart industries form and coordinate. And the camp guarantees that they are victims and not perpetrators. Filled with starving women and chidren, you never see the camp-dwellers toyi-toyi with calls for blood, you never see them necklace a captured janjaweed or cut up their attackers for muti. They are presented as defenceless martyrs.