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Joy Gordon discusses the alleg...,
2004-07-22 16:51:49
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bog...,
2004-07-23 11:35:56
note - sudan, darfur
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Jan Egeland, the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, "told IRIN that the UN's efforts to provide humanitarian aid to the region were hampered as much by a lack of donor support as by a lack of access":
Q: Reporters in Al-Fashir, Northern Darfur, were told that the humanitarian situation is getting better. Is this true?
A: It is definitely getting better. It is strange to see that there is still the notion in the world that nothing is happening and we're completely blocked from accessing Darfur. We are reaching some 800,000 people at the moment with some sort of assistance and food.
The number killed at the hands of government supported Arab militias, from what I understand, is 10-30,000 in the past year and a half - a rate of violent killing comparable to the US invasion of Iraq.
This means that when Nicholas Kristof says that the "World Health Organization estimates that 10,000 people are dying there each month, and again the response around the world has been abject moral failure" he is referring to estimates of casualties due to the war-induced humanitarian crisis, what a Chomsky might refer loosely to as a "silent genocide" that is utterly dwarfed by greater catastrophes to which our response has, likewise, been abject moral failure. Comparisons between Rwanda and Darfur don't seem very useful: the conflict is far more like the breakup of Yugoslavia - much like Kosovo the Darfur conflict was neglected in US-led peace negotiations and exploded violently when rebel groups attacked government installations - and the catastrophe requiring immediate global response the result of war-induced famine and disease, not machette-bearing butchers. Lobbying for government intervention isn't the only course of private action, since you can do something yourself.
:: posted by buermann @ 2004-07-23 01:14:07 CST |
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