Wednesday, July 14, 2004
It's all a question of interpretation
The charitable view:
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"[UN] Sanctions fuse burns as Sudan fiddles."The uncharitable view:
"Sudan burns as UN fiddles."Read also this piece by Makau Mutua, professor of law and director of the Human Rights Center at the State University of New York at Buffalo:
"Darfur is not an accidental apocalypse of mass slaughters, enslavement, pillage, and ethnic cleansing. The Darfur pogrom is part of a historic continuum in which successive Arab governments have sought to entirely destroy black Africans in this biracial nation...I wouldn't hold my breath, though; after all, it's black people killing black people. The real outrage seems to be a very precious and easily exhausted commodity; hence it's reserved for special cases only; such as when the Americans or the Israelis are the perpetrators. Mutua writes that "[t]he tragedy of Darfur wouldn't be permitted if it were taking place in Europe." I'm not so sure; Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo came pretty close while the EU and the rest of the "international community" kept dragging their feet. The signs for Darfur aren't too good.
"What is required for peace in Sudan is either regime change, in which a democratic, inclusive state is born, or a partition, in which the black African south and west become an independent sovereign state free of Khartoum and the Arab north."
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