Bombshell

I am a bit late to this item from today’s New York Times (please understand, where I work it has been Virginia Tech massacre around the clock) , but Warren Hoge dropped a bombshell with a leaked confidential UN report – (I wonder if the US leaked it?) – that contains visual evidence that the [...]

Mr. Ban Goes to Cairo

Darfur is tragic and Darfur is very complex. So complex that I do not even begin to grasp the multi-faceted nuance of the conflict. That said, it seems to me that when you shave away all the (admittedly important) details, you are left with a basic, unavoidable story line: The government in Khartoum implemented a [...]

A “Balanced” Perspective

A United Nations Human Rights mission to Darfur is pressing the Human Rights Council to take a break from its ceaseless denunciations of Israel to place on the record what is completely obvious: that the Sudanese government has organized and taken part in human rights crimes against its own population, and that international action to [...]

My Italics

From the New York Times:
The Human Rights Council has been widely criticized for being no more effective than the discredited Human Rights Commission it replaced this year, and whether it takes action on Darfur or not is being seen as a measure of whether it can start to build credibility during its formal session, the [...]

About That Curious Line

Over the course of its short, too often dormant existence, small-d has not been shy about criticizing the editorial position of The Nation. (Caveat: more accurately, I have not been shy about lambasting the editorial position of The Nation – while always taking care to note the very significant exceptions. As a professional courtesy, I [...]

Sudan: The Crimes and the Heroism

The current issue of Newsweek brings word that charity workers operating in Darfur are being systematically assaulted, raped, and otherwise harassed in an effort to drive them from the war-torn Western region of Sudan. These attacks – on such venerable outfits as Medecins sans Frontieres, Oxfam, and Action Contre la Faim – are taking [...]

Some Good News

Maybe.
Nice to see that the suggestion of Nicholas Kristoff and others – that the least we can do is provide a protection force for the refugees in Chad, hopefully creating some kind of safe haven – is being taken somewhat seriously in policy circles. Chadian President Idriss Deby is a corrupt autocratic disaster, but that [...]

Cower Before the Might of Annan!

sTremble, oh puny Sudanese genocidaires! oDid you think the mighty United Nations udiplomatariat would let your brutal junta get naway with mass murder forever, just because dit has done so for the past three years? Did +you think it would simply go on needling you Fwith weak imploration to stop massacring uyour own citizens? Did [...]

The New Killing Fields

In what can only, sadly, be called a taste of what is to come, the United Nations reported Thursday that militia attacks on refugee camps in Sudan’s Darfur region this week killed scores of civilians, including 27 children under the age of 12. Unless we take concrete steps to prevent the tragedy that is unfolding [...]

Diplomacy as an Excuse for Inaction

Kudos to The New Republic for keeping on the Darfur issue. If only words mattered more. In the editorial gracing the forthcoming issue, TNR hammers home a point that is not so much new as it is undeniably true.
Money quote: The question now before the West, and Americans in particular, is simple: When will we [...]